The Note was last night's host. Whether we (the audience) were the guests to
Mike Stern and his band's musical universe or whether they were guests in our town is a tough one for me. Technically it's both, but I know nothing of their time in Timisoara so I have to stick to us being their guests...
I took just one picture, you can see it here, using my phone which can't take great pictures in dark environments. Images aren't the appropriate medium for these guys anyway, they're so much about music.
Last night took me further down the path I feel I need to go on; it was a life lesson. Mike and his band--the wonderful bass player who tells stories with his face while he's playing, the sax man who plays with that thing as if it were a toy, the drummer who dives in at just the perfect millisecond--taught me my lesson, perfectly. The lesson that if you truly enjoy something, it gives your life meaning and it's precisely what you want to do. And it feels like it's going to be that way forever!
They really looked that way, as if playing that music is all they wanted to do and that it's simply their meaning in life. Joyful, reserved, enthusiastic, playful and meditative--all combined to speak out for
their love of
their music.
Beautiful, guys. Thanks for giving us a glimpse into your universe. I've certainly learned something, along with the sheer enjoyment.
Oh, and btw, I love the CD, too (thanks for the autographs). ;-)
Overly Busy (?)
Today I woke up, emailed out a schedule I'd forgotten about yesterday, took my grandfather to the hospital, outsourced some typing work to be done for the department at university, did some shopping (food and the like), talked to Flo about her job and looked over a document she was sending out to a prestigious prospective employer, answered email and sent out a contract, did translation work and sent out my monthly invoice, answered more email on everything from the new Consortium's logo to writing articles, worked on finalising the presentation for tomorrow's training session, discussed some international licensing options for HR services, set appointments with students for the diploma papers I'm supervising, did a little more super-urgent translation work, answered even more email, took part in a business dinner, furthered plans regarding setting up a(nother) company and talked to my father a little in the evening.
Then I realised that my second workday of the day is starting now, that I have more work on tomorrow's presentation and that... all this carries an important message. There must be meaning to all this, otherwise why the hell am I doing it?
Meaning is in us. We make meaning. All this toil has no point, no purpose without the meaning
I assign to it. Otherwise it's silly, ridiculous even. Nothing has meaning in and of itself, nor does there seem to be a general, objective meaning to anything. Somewhere in the depth of our current understanding of life and the universe lies an explanation that I expect resembles what I just wrote.
The fact that things, events and outer reality seems to provide us with a sense meaning is helpful, because we're "outer-oriented". We project meaning onto external reality, we give meaning to physical rules, to objects, to events. But they don't need it, do they? Objects in physical reality don't need to mean something in order to exist. Meaning is something only the mind requires, because that's the way it is built.
Were it not for that, we wouldn't have the struggle to find meaning. We wouldn't worry about the fact that actually--we're not going to find it. We're going to find intermediate goals (meanings) and they will be useful, primarily because they'll keep us from self-destruction.
My aim in saying all this isn't to clarify meaning or purpose. That's up to you, for yourself and to me, for myself. The point is to reflect what I'm feeling ever-more strongly: that there is no general purpose, that I can choose any meaning in life (or have one imposed on me--actually a combination of the two, personal history/experience plays a role in its totality here, I'm sure, among many other things). I need to have a purpose in order for my life to have meaning, that's for sure. As for what that purpose should be...
An interesting problem arises here: the interaction between my purpose and others', between my meaning and others'. This is something that takes place all the time, we meet and greet, and feel kinship sometimes. And not other times. Basic meanings "clicking" or not,
thoughts vibrating on the same wavelength and frequency, or not. I've italicised that because I'm becoming fascinated by the fact that thoughts are necessarily material things, albeit quite subtle (the electrical activity in the brain and all that, Bohm talks about it some in
Wholeness and the Implicate Order, which I'm
trying to read through). At their most subtle, brain cells are supposedly like quantum computing machines, we have discovered in science now.
Part of what I feel is meaningful includes adding to this blog, and I've been missing it. (Emotions to be looked from a quantum computing perspective is for another day, please!) I tend to prioritise to the advantage of business and work, which is kind of natural in the Western mindset--but we tend to miss what we sacrifice, don't we.
Such a question (regarding meaning/meaningful things and the meaning of life), if asked correctly, arouses strong emotions in the listener. Often, those emotions aren't positive and it's precisely for that reason that we tend not to ask... those who are ready and able, though, should not shy away from them.
Go Explore Meaning (for Yourself).
It's been a long time. I'm getting married.
It's been a long time since my last post here, and much has happened. I hope I won't forget anything I wanted to write about, but anyway there's
so little time to tell any stories now that I better just give the briefest briefing: I've been super-busy providing language services (highest-quality-possible translation and transcreation services, mainly from Romanian into English); we (at
EBIG, site always under construction) have been working on developing our marketing research business, aimed (mainly) at EU clients requiring in-depth market information on Romania and the region; as part of this, we've been working on setting up a business consortium with a number of reputable partners we're enthusiastic about working with, providing professional market entry and development services to companies interested in Romania and the region; and I took part in the JCI European Conference 2006 in Tallinn, where "
Everything is [was] possible"!
And last but not least,
I got married!
That was about three weeks ago when Flo and I were in Antwerp, Belgium. Now we're working on the finishing touches of a party here in Timisoara with a few friends and relatives.
Is all this a reasonable excuse for not having written anything here on the blog in such a long time? If not, let me get back to you with more of what's been going on--but give me time. :-)
The personality of people who are bilingual changes depending on which language they use, lending credence to the Czech proverb “Learn a new language and get a new soul”.
Is this for real? Looking at my own experience, I am reminded of how I used to sense myself as though I were a different person according to the language I spoke, English or Romanian. Over time, an integrating effort took place and now this 'split' is no longer there.
I put it down to culture, though, not so much language. Going to the shrink must have helped, too. :-)
Here's the
link of interest.
You only need get burnt once to learn
Andrei Plesu is a pretty cool guy. He writes nonchalantly, elegantly and sometimes incisively about current affairs, but is fundamentally a man of culture. One story that sprung to mind today while reading about European funding coming to Romania over the next few years was a reflection of his on recent Romanian politicians' names. While old-timer Communist-era politicians had pretty grim names (such as Pacoste, loosely translated as
Ill-Fated), we moved on after 1989 to non-descript names the likes of Iliescu and Roman. Sometimes we'd get a finance minister called Ciumara (a word related to the plague) or a prime minister called Vacaroiu (
Large Cow, more or less). Examples abound.
Today's story comes from yesterday's
Curierul National. It talks about how European funding coming to Romania will have to be used up at a rate of roughly 5.2 million Euros per day. That's OK, I think we should manage if we get the clever people on it but this isn't my point. My point relates to the General Manager of the Ministry for European Integration: it's about his name, to be precise.
The name Gabriel Friptu for this GM is, to me, a wonderful and positive message. It means
Gabriel The Burnt One, literally. Now, what does that suggest to you?! A reference to St. Gabriel, whose responsiblities include (is this right?) testing mortals' faith? Or perhaps more simply, this is a model of tomorrow's typical Romanian politician and businessperson: we got burnt. (Expectedly, we'll be more careful next time.)
The question is--how did he get burnt? Because he did something wrong and got caught, or because he tried to do right and they 'burned' him? :-)
A few weeks back while walking around in the Departures lounge at Brussels Airport, I passed one of those car exhibits that manufacturers put up. A car in a funny position with displays and information around it, actually. I was intrigued by the whole 'hybrid' thing that was coming up on the displays, so I stood and watched. Became interested. Left there 25 minutes later convinced to look into this further.
Suffice it to say I'm hell-bent on one of them hybrids, not even so much for the fuel efficiency thing as for the gadget factor! It's all electronic, everything computer-controlled and it's really, really quiet. Given the fact that my previous car fetish would have been the Mini Cooper S (some 200 horse-power in a small package, fuel consumption irrelevant)... well, I don't know what that says about me but this is it.
Links:
A South Park episode about smug hybrid drivers;
A brief presentation of the Prius from Toyota.
Some time ago I finished 'reading' (listening to while walking would be more appropriate) Ray Kurzweil's
The Age of Spiritual Machines. Today I came across a story called
Turing's Cathedral by George Dyson who visited Google in October this year and felt like he was
entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. "We are not scanning all those books to be read by people," explained one of my hosts after my talk. "We are scanning them to be read by an AI."
He continues with a beautiful story of intelligent machine evolution and puts forward a speculative argument, ending by saying:
the real sign [of the existence of true AI], I suspect, would be a circle of cheerful, contented, intellectually and physically well-nourished people surrounding the AI. There wouldn't be any need for True Believers, or the downloading of human brains or anything sinister like that: just a gradual, gentle, pervasive and mutually beneficial contact between us and a growing something else. This remains a non-testable hypothesis, for now. The best description comes from science fiction writer Simon Ings: "When our machines overtook us, too complex and efficient for us to control, they did it so fast and so smoothly and so usefully, only a fool or a prophet would have dared complain."
Kurzweil adds one more ingredient to this mix: our organic connection to the AI (through implants?), or its creation as an extension and expansion of our own intelligence. Not as (a) different entity(/ies), but joined together. "You will be assimilated" by the Borg, to paraphrase a popular sci-fi series, might or might not be an option. Indeed, it might or might not be an attractive prospect... hopefully we'll work that one out in time! As this evolution takes place, however, resistance will certainly be ultimately futile. Pointless. Wouldn't you
want to be able to do more, know more, feel more simply by plugging something into the back of your head?
In the meantime, here's a nearer-future (though not necessarily more likely) scenario that caught my eye:
Bruno Giussani's
ESE (Evil Search Engine) movies post, referencing a
John Battelle story in his blog,
Lunch over IP. It's essentially about private information being harvested and then, at some point in the future, made public on a mass scale--all with very interesting results. Not the same thing as the scenario above, no AI included, but scaaary. There's no way I'm installing the new Google local drive indexing thingie now! :-)
