The efficiency of fish as a multi-faceted lesson

How can I be more efficient, both at work and elsewhere? How can I focus my efforts to be one of those people who gives annoying cliche, "110% effort?" I was recently reminded of a book that provides a metaphor for my personal quest to be efficient, but it also provides a powerful lesson on the topic of artificial boundaries. First, a bit of background. About 12 years ago, I had the opportunity to audit several graduate-level seminars taught by philosopher Andy Clark while he was on the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis. Andy often stressed that cognition should not be conceptualized as merely the firing of neurons within a human skull. This idea is central to his writings. In a book Andy wrote in 1997, Being There: Putting Brain, Body, and World Together Again, he tells a fish story. It is the scientific story of the astounding swimming efficiency of fish, and it is also a caveat that we humans are so utterly interconnected with our environments that we need to stop characterizing those things outside of our bodies and brains as obstacles to our accomplishments. The following excerpt is from page 219-220, the beginning of the chapter titled "Minds, Brains, and Tuna: a Summary and Brine."

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Faith in secular sacred things

Ever since I was a teenager, it has been my quest to not rest until I figured out everything I could about why I existed and what it meant to live a moral life. This made loads of sense to me, since I couldn't know how to live my life until I knew the rules of the game. But now I'm 56, and I need to admit that it doesn't look likely that I'll have everything figured out before I die. In fact it looks like I'll be lucky to scratch the surface before I die. In writing this, I'm not demeaning the work of thousands of scientists. We've learned an incredible amount about human animals. It's just that each answer to each question seems to raise another question or two. Part of my strategy has been to take a close look at the things people deem to be sacred. These things have always been the head-scratchers for me (e.g. the claim that a virgin could have a baby or the claim that a country that is so politically dysfunction could be deemed "the world's greatest democracy." I’m not certain whether it is helpful in the long run to directly question others' non-questionable beliefs, but that is my faith--I believe that more knowledge is better for all of us, and that exploring these enigmas will help us to understand the kinds of animals we are. Attempting to understand human animals is one of my own sacred endeavors. The saying of Socrates constantly resonates with me: "The unexamined life is not worth living."

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Bill Moyers: On Memorial Day we should honor our soldiers by honoring the rule of law

We send our soldiers out to fight and die for principles we ignore and disparage. Bill Moyer and Michael Winship suggest that we take time this Memorial day to acknowledge that our government engaged in ruthless and perverse torture in our names. Unless we do this, we will forever be locked to our immoral past:

Facing the truth is hard to do, especially the truth about ourselves. So Americans have been sorely pressed to come to terms with the fact that after 9/11 our government began to torture people, and did so in defiance of domestic and international law. Most of us haven’t come to terms with what that meant, or means today, but we must reckon with torture, the torture done in our name, allegedly for our safety. In this photo of a sketch by courtroom artist Janet Hamlin and reviewed by the U.S. Department of Defense, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed reads a document during his military hearing at the Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base in Cuba, Saturday, May 5, 2012. (AP Photo/Janet Hamlin) It’s no secret such cruelty occurred; it’s just the truth we’d rather not think about. But Memorial Day is a good time to make the effort. Because if we really want to honor the Americans in uniform who gave their lives fighting for their country, we’ll redouble our efforts to make sure we’re worthy of their sacrifice; we’ll renew our commitment to the rule of law, for the rule of law is essential to any civilization worth dying for.

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Cosmic toast

I was briefly enjoying the company of several friends yesterday when I decided to make a spontaneous toast. The reason for my spontaneity was this: it occurred to me that we were each extraordinary organisms in that we were each a modern day survivor of a long long line of ancestors. Each of of our ancestors somehow sidestepped numerous dangers (including predators), surviving long enough to launch the next generation. If one went back a few hundred years, the odds that any of the four of us would have been born, much less that we would be friends enjoying each others' company in the same room, were remote. If you went back thousands (or better yet) millions of years (when our ancestors of other species), the likelihood that any of us would ever exist today would be closer to zero than one could imagine. It would be so close to zero that the fact that any of us actually exists (much less all of us) is best conceived of as a statistical miracle. So there we were yesterday, all of us impossible-people sharing a place and a moment, as well as sharing stories and more than a few laughs. It seemed to be a good time to recognize that moment. My words were brief; I recognized the grotesque unlikelihood that the four of us would have ever shared a conversation in the same room. As I write tonight, it occurs to me that most amazing thing yesterday was that our journeys had been for more momentous that I suggested. Each of us traveled more miles to get to Earth than the human mind is able to comprehend, except through great effort, wild metaphors and clever thought experiments. The problem is that we came from different stars, and it gets even crazier than this. I should have included the words of Lawrence Krauss in my toast. I'm waiting to see whether anyone ever in my lifetime tells me any story of the origin of human animals, no matter how fantastic, no matter how detached from reality, no matter how dependent on supernatural beings, that is more spell-binding than the truth. The upshot is this: If you want to tell an amazing story, you only need to stick to the facts. If you want to make an incredibly memorable cosmic toast, there's no need to exaggerate or pretend. There's no need to express one's thoughts in vague poetry. And nowadays, thanks to the Internet, there is no need to invest much time to learn or understand these overwhelming and disorienting truths. A cosmic toast is the intersection of well-established facts with the courage to embrace these facts. May we all consider giving cosmic toasts more often, to keep each other humble . . . .

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