Where is the Life we have lost in living? 
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? 
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information? 

- That Missouri boy

PP my good man, Happy New Year! And likewise to the Den of Iniquities over here. 

Great question. Been thinking about it much more often, now that I'm >55. Not as a "sitting down and concentrating on it" kindof question, but rather just as something which spontaneously comes to mind kindof thing. A few thoughts that have flowed through.

My Dad was wise. Genuinely. And widely regarded as being so. The man the village called when it truly needed a dispute worked through, a crisis averted, wild children handled, etc. He had a few things that he consistently passed on to me.

1- For instance, patience. Him saying that there was a TIME for things. It's an incredibly hard concept to accept, actually. As our whole society pushes towards "instant." And for me, the most speed-focused, aggressive child in the tri-state area, impossible to absorb.

So I have tried to cope by replacing "patience" - a concept of time - with one of a "door." Something in space. Something any gamer can understand. That faced with certain difficulties or issues, there will come a time when it can best be resolved. Translated -> a DOOR will appear. When conditions are right.

We - me and others - seem better able to cope with metaphors built around space than time, I think. 

2- He used to say Learn-Love-Laugh. The phrase - and variants - that you see on T-shirts now, my old man Nova Scotian farmer was drilling into me 50 years ago. But thing is, he emphasized all three. He felt excited about learning something new each day. Was thrilled to interrupt anything to share a laugh.

And he read and thought about love, seriously and in depth, his entire life. He read on it, read on the kinds of love, read on how best to nurture love, he soaked in it, plumbed it. 

3- He emphasized how much people were... animals. This, from a Conservative Baptist. He turned me into our farm's shepherd boy, always bring animals in or driving them out or shifting them across fields. He had a voice that could call cattle from miles. But he would always, every day, put his HANDS on the animals. Calming them. Checking out their health. And he'd tell me, even after I was off in England and college, to never forget that fundamentally, people are animals. That you can calm them through touch. that there are stages in life when children especially need to be held, others when they need to be let go. And that how these very physical things ran far deeper than where our heads were racing. 

Ok. I'll stop this note now. And just leave it as a few of my Dad's thoughts. 

Ok, 3rd Wave of thoughts - after Teddy's quote and my Dad.

I'm really not confident that we can achieve what you're after, PP.  That very thought went through my mind this week, first time, ever. I had, until now, thought that humans would sooner or later find ways to climb the golden staircase into the mind of God. 

I'm really not sure anymore. Recent thoughts as follows:

1- In the quest for wisdom, we really don't seem to be gaining a lot of ground. That's what the political and entertainment side of the world-cube seems to show at least. Trump is so obviously a figure that could have existed in 1937.... 1837.... 1437.... 2037 BC... that he has personally crushed much of our sense of optimism. That people were getting better at some heart level. And I say that not so much a "politics" thing as a "wider consequence of politics" thing. That is, whereas a while back we could think we were getting "over" racism and sexism and the like, now it feels rolled back.

The same with respect for science, for learning. 

So our sense of "progress" has just taken an enormous hit. And we feel it, in our guts, as a loss of hope in not just politics, but in history.

"History" being code for "our human story."

2- Machines. Alongside that, the machines keep coming. And some of our best minds, not just the crackpot ones, are now saying, "You know, this AI business.... errrmmm..... it's coming rather quick, eh?" It may sound funny, but I was quite affected by the enormous 50 to 0 beating the computer laid on the world's best "GO" players the other day. In essence, machines can now handle a staggering array of human activities BETTER than we can. 

Even areas where we earlier felt we had some "implicit" knowledge or deep human skill, they can now do, and do better. They can beat us at any game - chess, GO, whatever. They can out-golf us. They can make cars better and DRIVE cars better. etc.

And you know? I don't entirely mind this curve they're on. Standing back from it all, it's damned impressive. Imagine if we decided to feel about all this silicon-stuff the way we would with our own children. That we have given birth to them. Raised them. Taught them.

Our metal-head kids.

And maybe that's a thing to have a bit of pride about. We helped create them.

3- The deeper difficulties in humans. We have a deep animal nature. Yup, there's an enormous cultural overlay, or better put, an enormous cultural shaping which is done to all that DNA-clay. But the animal is powerful in there. Many of the center-left don't really want to grasp this, accept this, when it comes crashing in against the ideals we hold. But - just to take one example - if you don't think being a physical animal matters that much, I encourage you to go take some testosterone. You know, double your levels up. And then report back with how it made you feel. How it made YOU. Same with 00's of other chemicals. The chemicals that come with birth, or the chemicals that go wrong during post-natal depression. The impacts of chemicals like LSD, with the NYT today reporting on how people are micro-dosing with it in order to improve their day. Or my nephew, his life changed by ketamine.

So, we're animals, and chemicals matter to us. And the import of that is, THOSE CHEMICALS ARE REALLY NOT, AT A FUNDAMENTAL LEVEL, GOING TO CHANGE. We are just going to remain this same rough beast, slouching towards our own personal Bethlehems.

How can I put this better?

Even if we change chemicals enough to stave off cancer and Alzheimers.... and extend life say, another 50 years each, and keep our dicks hard and our breasts pert, and enhance our senses a notch and keep our spirits up and all that.... we are still, fundamentally, going to be an animal out of Africa, out of the coastal swamps and high plains of East Africa, and we are going to see the world as apes, modified and extended in time.

And not as birds. Or whales. 

For example, our brain maps are going to have massively greater areas given over to vision than sound. And our "vision" will only extend out to the edge of the ultraviolet, and forget about directly seeing x-rays and the like. And our sense of time will be shaped by the speed at which we walk and reproduce and grow into adulthood. 

i.e. We're the same damn ape, under it all.

And there are aspects of being that animal which are fundamentally troubling - such as violence, or dealing with differences in sex, race, etc. - as well as aspects which means our experience of the universe is just fundamentally LIMITED. 

Or "skewed."

So. 3 things that limit or challenge our shot at human progress. 1) We feel a bit as if progress was dented. 2) The machines just keep on coming. 3) And we remain animals.

I'll put this up, and write more separately. Just thinking out loud... for fun.