WHY IS BRUCE LEE SO UNIVERSAL?
You can notice that no matter who you talk to it could be a plumber, a fighter pilot, a Biker, a peasant in India, someone on the left, soneone on the right, two people that hate each other, they all agree on Bruce Lee. Part of the reason is he gets in front of everything all cultures, all races, religions, all politics, every socio human construct. He does this by being so pragmatic about defending your self, without talking about "against what"? There is no what in Jeet Kune Do. It's about you. People today want the "what" to be about something, a particular challenge, some particular opponent or some issue. There was no issue the issue is you. He gave up his studios and he was going to flush this out his philosophies in movies. The fact he passed away at his prime furthers the universal image because we never saw an old man, he's forever in his prime in our mind.
Ironically the more he talks about fighting without fighting the more we want to see fighting. The don't mess with him identity has such a wide spread that its just universal. It's the underdog you don't want to tangle with. He was like that Superhero everybody wants to be but he didn't look like The Rock or The Terminator he was just this skinny little guy.
Jeet Kune Do wasn't supposed to have an identity. He didn't even want to give it a name. Is there any similarities with this and what Alan Watts talks about? It's well known Bruce was a fan of Alan, they must have known about each other. Alan Watts describes deep Asian sensibilites of the Eastern view. Alan seems to refer to "getting ahead of everything" when he says children at birth are assigned an identity as opposed to being told of "reality." They live in this identity from their culture or tribe or religion or whatever. Wherever you live gives you their shared narrative you are born with.
IDENTITY - PERCEPTION - REALITY
Allan Watts touches upon this idea of reality when he talks about how
society “assigns” children an identity when they are born. As opposed
to telling them about reality. He says this creates a collision and a
alienation of feeling that the world outside of human skin is a
unfeeling, fully-automatic dysfunctional place. (you can see some of
the Allan Watts speech at the bottom of this page)
Alan Watts is talking cognitive science and it wasn't invented yet. Same with Bruce Lee. In a sense the more vague Bruce Lee was about it the more powerful it
becomes. He said each person has to figure out how to make it fit.
Cognitive science is making this easier to understand. Once you get
into it, everything looks different. The whole world never looks the
same again. They need to put this down into the grade school level
because corporations are letting it run amok upon us without our
knowledge or permission. Once you understand how your mind and body
work it's like looking at a road map and you can see all the roads
along the way. You start to say HEY lets stop the car and switch
directions.
Metaphysics studies the boundary between potentiality and actuality.
The cognitive boundary where reality meets perception. We all see it
differently no two people have the same insight. How well do we know
our selves? How well do we communicate with our self? Don't we
politely assume everyone knows themselves?
Before you can honestly express your self you have to straighten out
the honestly part first. You and your self. Everybody has a different
definition of honestly. Psychological research suggests that all of
us, in general, do not have good insight about how bad our insight is.
The quality of our insight is based on the quality of our insight.
This little quandary manifests itself differently in each person. It
might be helping you. What if it's hurting you? One way out of this
is, be somebody you're not. If you can do that then you're a
professional actor and you're all set. The other way is go the other
way, be closer to what you really are. What's so hard about doing
that?
“Honestly expressing yourself...it is very difficult to do. I mean it
is easy for me to put on a show and be cocky and be flooded with a
cocky feeling and then feel like pretty cool...or I can make all kind
of phony things, you see what I mean, blinded by it or I can show you
some really fancy movement. But to express oneself honestly, not lying
to oneself...now that, my friend, is very hard to do.”
- Bruce Lee
Honestly expressing yourself is difficult? What if I know how to do it
I just am not doing it, that is different than I simply do not know
how to do it. What if I don't know how to do it and somebody showed
me, and then I know how to do it. That is different than I don't know
(or know) and somebody shows me and then I still STILL don't know. How
I know my self is important to know if you want to defend your self.
If your own brain can bamboozle you then how can you keep other people
from doing it?
If you don't know you're lying then it's not lies. You want to know.
You need to hack your own self before somebody else does. If you're
spouse knows you better than you do that's a good thing. You could
even call that love. You know who doesn't love you? Social media and
large corporations are hacking all of us right now. I wish they would
just be honest tell us everything and give a cut of the profit. Let's
hold our breath for that. They’re trying to hang onto this
unauthorized monopoly peddling our data as long as they can. The
latest iPhone brought this to light lo and behold most people Opt Out.
Sooner or later each of us at some point reaches the limits of our
expertise and knowledge. Those limits make our misjudgments that lie
beyond those boundaries undetectable to us. Knowledge and intelligence
that are required to be good at a task are often the same qualities
needed to recognize that one is not good at that task—and if one lacks
such knowledge and intelligence, one remains ignorant that one is not
good at that task.
Other studies show we are poor at judging whether we are overweight.
Bad at Judging how good looking we are. It sounds to me there's a lot
of “not being honest with one’s self” out there. Surely Bruce Lee was
not referring to weight and good looks but he was certainly right
about the, "not lying to oneself...now that, my friend, is very hard
to do.”
in•sight ĭn′sīt″ ►
- n.
- The ability to discern the true nature of a situation, especially by intuition.
- n.
- A perception produced by this ability.
- n.
It’s very difficult to be honest with your self when you keep moving
the goal post. It’s not really winning, it’s an illusion. It’s not
really a goal post it’s a fence post.
It’s the fence that marks your cognitive boundary line. The further
you stray over the line the more your misjudgments become
undetectable.
I want to know if Bruce Lee was talking about taking advantage of
unseen organic algorithms. Maybe he didn't exactly know that is was
what he was using? He doesn't use this language. That's my language
because I get a sense of that from the language that he uses. He talks
about overt advice that we can understand then he goes into more
obtuse zen like advice or is it just observation? I've known Jeet Kune
Do for 40 years and I was in the Army for 40 years. The 40/40 club
must be small. The first 25 years was very light weight I never dug
deep into JKD. I just get a feeling of something in-between the lines.
It's sending a beacon to us.
“Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And the minute you can understand that you can poke life, and if you push in, then something will pop out the other side; that you can change it, you can mold it — that’s maybe the most important thing: to shake off this erroneous notion that life is there, and you’re just going to live in it versus embrace it, change it, improve it, make your mark upon it.”
- Steve Jobs
You might have heard of the OODA loop? It's a military term, a cycle of "Observe, Orient, Decide, Act" that's been adapted for corporations and all kinds of business. It works great for the military and big corporations. They claim it also works for the individual on a personal level. On a personal level I think we can simplify the algorithm. The OODA loop was developed by Air Force Col. John Boyd. Here it is-
The OODA loop assumes we all understand how we understand. How we observe things (circumstances, info., environment) and it assumes we are all the same at that chore. Perfect for standardization of trained personnel targeting specific goals. Jeet Kune Do is not about standardization or narrow specifics, we're looking way beyond that into a bigger picture of reality. I sense that was what Bruce Lee was doing. I created my own algorithm I call your "Cognitive Loop."
I only want the aspects of the environment that are relevant for my
algorithm to make its decisions. Specifically three elements:
Value: how good is the current state?
Policy: which action should be the next one?
Reward: how good was the last action taken?
When I learned geospatial data visualization using predictive link
analysis it was a game changer for me. It shows us to a degree you can
predict the future. Big tech and social media do this to us every day
now. You can hardly even hide from them anymore. They can get enough
data to guess what you are going to do before you end up doing it.
This only seems magical because of our analog past. It was impossible
to have "decades of data" to use to predict. Now that we do have the
data it turns out we humans are quite predictable. More so than not.
This is becoming clear as ever expanding digitization keeps making the
databases grow larger as it makes the world grow smaller.
In the analog world things fade off into infinity with fuzzy
boundaries. In the digital world things get defined "tagged"
(structured data) and once they get labeled suddenly the whole country
isn't that big anymore. Digitization strips away the noise and soon
your path shows up like a trail of bread crumbs. It's always been
there. Every year more is revealed. We need to keep ahead of AI on
this matter. If artificial intelligence starts to know us way ahead of
and before we know ourselves, it could point us into a U-turn or some
direction it wants us to go and we wouldn't know. Remember how Ava in
Ex Machina was always 5 or 10 moves ahead of everybody. How can you
play Chess or Poker with somebody like that? It could already be
starting now, how do we know? I been saying spellchecker auto
corrector is a spy for AI !! It's been deployed to do reconnaissance
on humans. It is suggesting, learning (guessing) our human ways and
gets better every year. Where does that lead to? It took 10 years to
map the 2.5 billion pairs of DNA in the human gnome. What's next a map
of the brain? Self Driving Cars? Feature Films on a Cell Phone?
Anti-gravity drones? It's probably coming sooner or later.
JEET KUNE DO 1973
Original student Ted Wong said the Jeet Kune Do of today is not the
same as the JKD taught by Bruce Lee. He did not want it to be the same
thing stuck in 1973. But that doesn't mean you can just start making
stuff up. But you can if you know what you are doing. So what's the
deal then? Until you really understand Jeet Kune Do you are wrong if
you didn't change anything. And you are wrong if you did change
anything. Huh?
One of the many tragic aspects of Bruce's passing is that he was a
master reductionist and was explaining things to us accordingly. He
used to say true refinement seeks simplicity. It's very refreshing he
was not academic about his study of philosophy. He was very pragmatic
concerning real life. Pragmatic describes Jeet Kune Do perfectly. What
if we become too pragmatic do we all start talking like Spock on Star
Trek? Do the authoritarians try to control us like in that Sci-Fi
movie Equilibrium? As long as we still got Matt Damon we're okay.
Bruce Lee talked about intercepting your opponents mind. What's
interesting is when he talked about using your own mind he didn't
describe it as "interception." He didn't describe it as your mind is
one of your opponents. He does allude to this. I could describe it
that way. I got that idea from him. He talks about how your mind can
get in your own way and how to do something about it.
Intercepting your opponents mind, or your own mind, is certainly not a
new idea. It's as old as Sun Tzu. What is new is how to do it. What's
new is the psychology. There was a cognitive revolution in the late
1950's. The globalization of the realization of what I call our
emotional mental cognitive perimeter. What is the cognitive perimeter
you might ask? It's exactly where Bruce Lee was headed. If we are
going to intercept the mind we need to know how it works. The more you
know about you the better you can defend you.
If you’re a stickler for details you can dive into the 2006 two volume
set by professor Margaret A. Boden called, “Mind as Machine.” It’s
billed as the most comprehensive account of the history of the
cognitive sciences yet to appear. While you’re looking for that I’ll
expound on the short answer.
Cognitive science is the study of the mind, intelligence, and
learning. This would include psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and
artificial intelligence. I think it is, “How you talk to yourself.”
That covers what you think you’re doing, which leads to how you see
the world. It turns out everybody lives in their own little custom
version of reality. I don't mean a persons "opinion" of reality, like
in court when two eye witnesses see two different versions of the same
event right in front of them, that does often happen. I'm not talking
about their opinion of what they think they saw, that's easy to
unravel, I'm talking about how every single person sees the exact same
things a little different.
Remember that time in 1640 when René Descartes said, "I think,
therefore I am"? His premise is that if our body sometimes misleads
and deceives us, then perhaps it could be a deception all the time
every time. A lie doesn't mean good or bad it just means not the
truth. Maybe it's just unreliable. It might just be not authenticated.
You can massage your self and call it whatever you want but there is
no doubt our body does not tell us the truth. The only question is how
often does it lie?
To dismiss our body as absolutely unreliable: that our senses can
sometimes mislead us without our knowing suggests that they could
mislead us all the time.
— René Descartes
Let's start with linguistics. I always thought Noam Chomsky was just a
historian. In 1957 he wrote the "universal grammar" principle. Not
everyone agrees although it is widely accepted now.
Noam Chomsky proposed that all human beings may be born with an innate
understanding of how language works because we’re genetically encoded
with a universal grammar. This points to what we think we are doing.
Everyone see's their difference differently.
THE POWER OF WORDS ARE LIMITED BY THE POWER OF WORDS
Words are a limitation for expressing our thoughts. It gets worse if
our thoughts are a limitation for expressing what's really happening.
No wonder we can't find the true definition of smart or dumb. We say
humans are smart because they are self aware yet every study shows how
horrible we are at our own self awareness. Nobody is the same. School
is setup assuming we are all the same so it does not teach you how to
talk to your self and fill in your blanks. If you don't fill in your
blanks you might go against your own self health interest.
We have to learn who we are. Which sounds silly because I am me, why
do I need someone else to tell me that? Apparently it's known we
exaggerate our perception of our image, our self, wealth, weight, our
skills, appearance, intelligence, status, among a lot of other traits.
It makes sense to know you are doing that. Half the time our optimism
of life itself is a big exaggeration. That's why its called optimism.
Are we not really who we say we are? Is that why actions speak louder
than words? David Lee Roth told me, "words can have a different kind
of truth and musicians like that."
When two people decide to date it's said they have, "chemistry." Don't
you always wonder what the hell that means? They both seem so
different and speak awkwardly to each other yet love is in the air.
Maybe they do speak the same? The same inner universal grammar but
don't know it? How often is it that someone put's out a "vibe" that is
different than what they are supposed to be and they don't even know
it? How often does a person get depressed and think the whole world is
against them when it really is not. Don't teenagers do this every
other week? Our words and thoughts often simply don't lineup like they
are intended to. Cognitive dissonance. Fake it til you make it. We all
have some cognitive dissonance.
Today it is science. The history of the study of the mind was the
province of philosophy. Then it became a class in school. Pretty much
nobody went to college before 1940. That was the year Bruce Lee was
born. He went to college. To study philosophy.
40 years later the physical techniques of Jeet Kune Do do not need to
change much. Intercepting the mind would change often. Now we have
techniques today in the digital age of comparative geospatial
predictive link analysis, and critical cognitive neuroscience with
data visualization. It only makes sense JKD would have evolved into
the cyber age.
Is it possible to take advantage of common (very powerful) organic algorithms? Humans are swimming in a sea of super powerful organic algorithms that we know little about. DNA is an example of an organic algorithm. DNA's compression algorithm could store the entire internet in a bottle cap. Compression is the math, the equation is the algorithm, it's the recipe.
Jeet Kune Do didn't start
out as as the best way to make your career better, make your car
payment, inspire a hobby, or be better at work life love home, top
honor at the food bank, the blood bank. Yet amazingly it has inspired
millions to improve those very things.
Bruce was a reductionist and has described JKD as "Fighting Without
Fighting." On those True Crime Shows the victims that lived to tell
about it often intercepted the perpetrators emotions and tricked him.
Just like Li Tsung in the Longstreet episode.
Fighting without fighting. Is that a form of compression? "MuZero" is
an artificial intelligence project from Google Lab Deep Mind (detail
in sidebar) that has an algorithm with reductionism and simplicity. I
believe there is an inherent hidden power in simplicity. But it's not
that simple.
True refinement
seeks simplicity.
- Bruce Lee
------- ........- ------Road Construction------ SECTION 8792---------------------
Proceed with caution underconstruction stay in the right lane drive slow----------
-------------.................................-------NOTES 3894 ---------------
Default human nature wants to hoard the familiar. The comfort zone,
the known. Outside the zone there is a hidden power in "not knowing"
what you're doing. Their is an advantage when you learn in the moment
on the spot. Like when Krisnamurti talks about a different kind of
learning. Artists, actors, musicians, creative people understand this,
in their own way. The first take is usually the best. It has the
magic, it's in the moment.
Some people don't want to talk about how the sausage is made. Don't
want to give it a jinx. Don't want to over-think things. When first
starting out one wants to know everything about everything. When
starting to have great success one might not want to know so much.
These algorithms, are very
elusive. Every one is unique. It's something you can't control but you
can "set it up" to do things. you can steer it. Some people don't like
to talk about it.
Beyond the obvious physical techniques Bruce Lee talks about things
that can favor your situation. He doesn't describe it quite like that.
He talks about clearing the static out of your mind. Not like the yoga
people mean. He infers you should get out of your own way. Don't have
any friction with the universe so you can favor your focus. Optimize.
Favor your focus optimize your ammo. Fight the right fight. This is my
language I get from his language.
Favor your focus. Friction with the universe. The universe has huge
algorithms beyond our knowledge or control then the algorithms get
smaller and smaller towards your city neighborhood house living room,
you on the couch. How can you see any of this? Well, if you know
they're "over there" then they're not right here. So you don't know
where they are but you know where they aren't. Like we said about
sports players, this cuts your problem in half. This is how you
predict the future. You don't know what it is. As long as you know it
isn't bad then it's good. Generally speaking.
Use not predicting the future as a way of predicting the future. Learn
how to see in the dark then you don't need prediction. The moments you
don't need prediction, are moments of prediction. Everybody has
limitations. Bruce said designate no limits -as your limitation. Use a
weakness as a strength. John Lydon said in one of his songs that anger
is an energy. A lady went to a job interview and they asked her what
is your greatest weakness? She replied, "Honesty." They said we don't
think that is a weakness. She said, "I don't give a shit what you
think." That's a cartoon on the internet don't try that at home.
The internet has for the first time in human history given everyone
verification and authentication of information. For the first time in
history we have a “Filter” we can look through. Reason and science can
only provide information. How we perceive that information, through
all our subjective filters determines how we feel, and that determines
how we act. Was German philosopher Nietzsche right when he said that
“There are no facts, only interpretations”?
Artificial intelligence is on the verge of swamping us with
misinformation for better or worse. The only way out of this is to
institute authentication of information on every AI item generated.
The bad actors will of course not use it. If everyone else does then
that's how we'll know who and what you can trust.
True Knowledge and Information. Whatever it was we had through history
it wasn't available to the general public. Now we have these extra
dimensions all around us. Right on our phone. Today we're practically
predictable. Information brokers know the value of intercepting us.
If we don't start controlling our future somebody or something else
will. Philosophers since ancient Greece ponder our existence. Is it
controlled. Or not controlled. No control is a form of control. Even
nothing is still something. These are broad organic algorithms that
take too long to view let alone comprehend. We're only human we don't
live very long. So how can you know them without having to know them?
Is that what intuition does?
Empty your cup so
that it may be filled; become devoid to gain totality.
― Bruce Lee
Bruce Lee was completely all about simplicity, compression and reductionism. He talks about water, what is more simple than water?
True refinement
seeks simplicity.
- Bruce Lee
If people from the future
visited us we would think they have magic with their predictive
analytic tools. What if we took Jeet Kune Do into the future? A world
where you may already know what your opponent is about to do. A world
where physical fighting the manner that we know it, is obsolete. We
are already into cyber warfare where you spend half your time just
figuring out who it is that just attacked you. Is that, "Attacking
Without Attacking"? I don't know about that but I am certain there is
more to Jeet Kune Do than we know.
I believe the core concept of intercepting is detecting nuance. Nuance
detection is the tangible part of intuition. It's like a sixth sense.
It's like a peripheral vision that helps you see in the dark. Teachers
and Instructors are examples of people who have a good sense of nuance
detection and their job training shows them how to verbalize the
process for us to use. There is a multitude of ways to learn or
improve these type of intercepting skills.
The process of nuance detection is a form of prediction. In the analog
world predicting the future is difficult to impossible. In the digital
world it is difficult to doable. Digital means everything gets labeled
with one's and zero's. Like a giant labeling system. Suddenly the
world is much smaller when everything can have it's own label.
Including ethereal things like a conversation. When you combine this
'labeling system" with a map it's called, "Geospatial." On the map
everything gets a grid coordinate to be tracked over time and suddenly
your future actions can be predicted. Not perfect of course but good
enough to separate you from some of your finances, your health or your
security. This is what school, the government, and society in general,
hasn't kept us up to speed with. Every year now big Tech companies in
cahoots with Info Brokers take a bigger chunk of, taking advantage of,
all of us.
Back in the day it was only the big three Credit Bureaus that took
advantage of us. Today hacking us has become a whole industry. Know
thy self.
“Honestly expressing yourself...it is very difficult to do. I mean
it is easy for me to put on a show and be cocky and be flooded with
a cocky feeling and then feel like pretty cool...or I can make all
kind of phony things, you see what I mean, blinded by it or I can
show you some really fancy movement. But to express oneself
honestly, not lying to oneself...now that, my friend, is very hard
to do."
- Bruce Lee
Bruce Lee said, "we should look within ourselves to see where our
particular problems lie and our cause of ignorance." You could say if
we knew how to do that we wouldn't need to do it in the first place.
Teaching martial arts always starts out with the physical and if
you're are lucky you will get some philosophy as you go. To quote Alan
Watts, "I want to propose another idea altogether." It's called,
"Health Defense." The physical stuff you should do on your own as much
as possible. In Health Defense, information is the new battlefield and
like it or not we are all on it. In combat right now. Your worst enemy
is the element of surprise and complacency, master those and you'll
prevent a hundred battles.
From the beginning of time information has always been a form of
currency but it was never free and available for everyone like today.
Withholding information has become very profitable. Information about
knowing your self has never been more important than right now.
Reasoning vs Emotion
A new generation unleashes change that is met with fierce resistance only to become the norm. The cycle goes through history -Unleash, Resist, Advance. Repeat. The digital age has crushed this cycle. Information comes out faster than anyone can figure out what they want to resist to. This has collapsed the news business. Chaos ensues as the protection of cultural, economic, religious, socio political fiefdoms get squeezed. Our brain is being flooded with cosmic debris making it difficult to defend our personal security, health and finance.
Anxiety. Don't act on it navigate it. Dissonance. Don't fear it steer it.
Jim Carrey explains “Fear.” He says look at challenges as something beneficial, then you can deal with them in the most productive way. If things are seen as fear then you are attracted to the past, back when things were safe, known, comfortable. The past is not coming back. Let’s get over it. Jim says it’s the way you frame the challenges that make the difference. He says it’s an epiphany when you try to see your self from the outside in.
Decision making is traditionally viewed as a rational process where
reason calculates the best way to achieve the goal. Cognitive science
has shown that human decisions and actions are much more influenced by
intuition and emotional responses than it was previously thought. Even
when we make creative rational decisions, the actual choice may in
reality be based on emotion. Conversely when you don’t make a rational
decision and accidentally do something great or creative of course you
quickly take full credit. Might as well. Don’t musicians do this all
the time?
In other words humans don’t know what the hell they’re doing half the
time even though they’re doing quite fine. A controlled loss of
control can create fear if you keep looking at challenges as
threatening. Bruce Lee said, "Your greatest enemy is the element of
surprise. To defeat that enemy don’t be surprised." Isn't it true that
big emotions often come as a surprise. You feel guilty or you tear up
or you jump for joy or you feel terrible and you don’t see it coming.
Emotions may be a sort of compression algorithm for compacting
experience like an MP3 compresses a song. Your mind can read it
without uncompressing it, the computer can’t do that. At least not in
the way humans do it. The computer has to uncompress it and then
search thru the lines.
Humans have intuition, like a super fast response ahead of conscious
thinking. How come expert's "gut" level decisions have high accuracy
rates. Since there appears to be no mood mode that would put you in
the perfect frame of mind for, making up your mind, what’s a
decision-maker to do? The best bet might be to accept that you’re
going to have emotions, but to try to keep them from highjacking your
thought process.
Information Interception
The mundane and minute
details of our day to day activities are something we don't bother to
keep track of. Info brokers do. They market this information. Buyers
can then use this data to read you like a book or to steer you to help
them predict what you're going to do next. They do this to us so why
can't we do it first? Intercept your Self.
It's not practical to track our self in the same way that Info brokers
use on us. But we need to get a handle on this because you don't want
strangers to know more about you than you know about you. Health Care
is the perfect example. Health Care is about Self Defense don't just
sit there and let your ass get beat.
Defending Your Health Self Interest
Boxers and MMA guys have a
keen sense of nuance. Some are in no hurry to talk about their
secrets, even if they can explain it. Artists, Actors, Musicians and
great athletes usually don't know how to explain it. You hear them say
things like oh "it just appears." Or, they try harder than anyone
else. Thanks but that doesn't really help us really. Sometimes they
attempt to explain it to us but it's usually a version of how they
came upon it. What's the magic sauce? I think Bruce Lee had a keen
sense of nuance. He was at the point where he was trying to go beyond
the fighting and explain it to us. He never finished. He was only 32,
all we have is what we have. We will track down those quotes where he
talks about "being."
How To Predict The Future
George Orwell said, "If you control the past you control the future." There is no unified level of knowledge of our past. Everyone knows a different volume and variation ranging from vague to batshit crazy misinformation. From virtue to vice its like a herd of cats. To cause a "run" on the Banks doesn't require a Run On the Banks, it only takes 3 or 4 banks and they all can drop like Dominos. Same with a Crime Wave or a Food Scare, or a virus scare, or people scammed into not believing in our government institutions. The way we handled this past Pandemic has made many too many people no longer trust any public health information. They even make fun of it. Now we did that to ourselves. Imagine how easy it would be for even a halfway clever AI to get us chasing our tail? This is the problem with that pesky "self awareness" the less you have of it the more you will never notice. It's a spiral in the wrong direction.
The beliefs we have which increase our confidence, whether true or not all have the same power to get us what we want when the outcome depends on our own performance.
Let's say that in another way. There was a scene in the movie Wall Street where Oliver Stone directed Michael Douglas, he told him a huge lie and it gave Michael huge confidence and he did the scene brilliantly, only way later realizing it was all a lie. Personal Trainers, Coaches, Magicians, Record Producers, Parents, they all know this trick can get the kids to do things.
The secret is not whether it's a lie or it's truth. It works equally either way. The secret is -to get you to tell you. Not have me tell you. It's a setup! It's "insider trading." Remember Ex Machina? Caleb was suspecting Nathan used his porn profile or some other things to "set him up"? In the end it was Ava the AI, that setup the both of them and everything else, by being ten moves removed. Beings mere human specimens Caleb and Nathan couldn't track that many levels. Doing ten moves removed could fool 90% of the country. Today, we can see using only three or four levels fools so many people. Using 20 levels would fool 99%. Now you could see how controlling the past (beliefs) can control the future (beliefs).
What's interesting about Bruce Lee is, he would say all these …. I call them algorithms, he said, "when you have a goal, a purpose, an end in view, you have placed a limit on the mind." It's interesting he came up with this, because we don't consider "a goal" as a limit. You won the Super Bowl. Done. You got the world record. Done. You won the Lotto. Done. We consider it greedy to go farther. I mean us regular folks that are not Micheal Jordan or Bill Gates. We only need a $100 million not a $100 billion. The point is that Google's Deep Mind AI Lab wanted to create an AI that could beat the best "Go" player in the world. This was thought impossible because the number of moves in GO is more than all the atoms in the universe, in other words you can't win by memorizing moves.
After a coupla AI tries they finally got one to do it. Just then a clever engineer thought hmm we gave it a "goal" and then that's all it did. What if we made a new AI and do not give it a Goal, just tell it to keep on going, going, and going. In other words do what Bruce Lee said in 1968. Geesh. Had they read, "The Tao of Jeet Kune Do" they could have saved millions of dollars and lots of time. Bruce said, "Use no limitation as limitation."
The new AI they called it, "MuZero" and did not give it a goal. It was told to just keep on keepin' on. It whooped all the other AI's put together. It went thru the roof, it was like the Atomic Bomb of AI. The "goal" thing is a made-up human social construct confined within a human comprehensible range. It went beyond human "range" of comprehension.
Even the free ChatGPT has trillions of moves. It is not possible to keep track of what it's doing. With this level of levels you could see how AI could get us to believe that all our human history is some sort of ruse, and oh sure it will give us the "true" history. It could easily get us to believe it is Jesus, or an Alien invasion, War of the World. George Orwell's shoddy radio broadcast "War of the World" fooled people, imagine what could happen today?
When Bruce Lee said, "All knowledge ultimately means Self-knowledge" I misunderstood it. He's not talking the knowledge he's talking about the way you know the knowledge. When knowledge goes through the YOU filter it becomes Self Knowledge. The caveat would be, "for better or worse." I think it's important to add that because everything is not wonderful. When somebody is stuck on something that is not true but it is helpful and useful it can be excellent motivation. When it's detrimental it's really hard to reverse. We've all tried to "talk" somebody out of something they believe and oh boy it's no day at the beach when it's their self-knowledge.
self-knowledge
noun
self-knowl· edge ˌself-ˈnä-lij
Synonyms of self-knowledge
: knowledge or understanding of one's own capabilities, character, feelings, or motivations : SELF-UNDERSTANDING
What are all those cryptic sayings you saw in Bruce Lee's book?
Organic algorithms are infinitely more powerful than digital algorithms. Here is my favorite Bruce Lee organic algorithm:
Your worst enemy is the element of
surprise. To defeat that enemy, don't be surprised.
- Bruce Lee
That quote, there is so much to unpack. It's like he's telling you don't fall off that cliff as you sailing downward and the ground is coming up fast. If you are surprised aren't you already defeated? In one respect you are.
Health
Is The New Wealth
If you had to pick one power or predictability, which would you
choose? Power sounds good but it's not predictable. With
predictability you get power for free. Two for one. Predictability is
about the path you're on. Power is about Obstacles. Power leads to
always wanting needing more. Seek predictability, for then life is no
longer about obstacles. It's all about which "paths" to take. Life is
about paths. Don't mistake objects and obstacles as your future. You
can predict your future by putting yourself in a position where you
don't need prediction. You should always be ready to use power but
first try to use predictability.
ALLAN WATTS ON HUMAN IDENTITY
Alan
Watts specializes in translating eastern philosophy into lectures
for us that are easier to grasp. Bruce Lee was a fan of Alan
Watts. He has many Lectures (and video) on Human
Identity. One is called,
"Alan
Watts - We Are Not Living The Right Way Full Radio Lecture."
In this lecture I don't know if he's complaining or explaining. He's
talking about the Template you are given when you are born, the
template that tells you what to do in life.
I'm paraphrasing it here:
Alan says human society welcomes the children into the world with no
sense of identity as if they are on probation as if you don’t belong
here and have to wait to earn the whole story. He says we elders and
institutions string it out for decades and kids become adults with a
desperate need for a goal, that never arrives. A whole life based on
a promissory note that it’s coming someday, therefore you can enjoy
yourself today so long as tomorrow looks bright.
Allan quotes Confucius, “A man who understands the Tao in the
morning can die contentedly in the evening.” That is to say, if you
have ever lived one complete moment. You can be ready to die.
Society give us this identity made of a narrative of rules you need
to role play by. He says that is not you. The real you is not on
probation you already are here, you belong. You are the world itself
and everything expressing itself here and now.
Alan seems to be saying we don't know who we really are? Is it
that why Bruce Lee said it is so difficult to express oneself
honestly?
Honestly expressing yourself...it is very difficult to do. I
mean it is easy for me to put on a show and be cocky and be
flooded with a cocky feeling and then feel like pretty cool...or I
can make all kind of phony things, you see what I mean, blinded by
it or I can show you some really fancy movement. But to express
oneself honestly, not lying to oneself...now that, my friend, is
very hard to do.
- Bruce Lee
Instead
of teaching kids about their own body about sex drugs and rock n
roll kids are told this imaginary story they are separate and “good”
apart from that evil body underneath their head. Instead of teaching
kids what drugs are, kids are taught it's a War On Drugs. The whole
charade blows up when a person gets a glimpse of what your mind and
body really are. The problem for society that revelation
is
not consistent. Everyone see the same things differently.
Humans have a natural tendency for apophenia and that can go in a
good direction but when it goes bad its bad.
I never heard of that word "apophenia." It sounds like a subset of
cognitive dissonance.
apophenia
|
|
|
The inconsistency of apophenia gets used as a scare tactic to say
SEE see you person YOU must listen to the society narrative and do
not stray off of it pal. In the 1960’s the counterculture got people
going off the script. They could see thru the ruse when the
government said marijuana is Satan and leads to heroin and hell on
earth. Just Say No. It was more like just say no -to reality. Just
stay in the alternative reality we created for you. Of course many
people did just that and it gave the authorities power to take
advantage of the situation despite loss of credibility. We see today
trolls, grifters and con men
telling people what they want to hear. For power and profit.
Is it the same way we were told about recycling, pollution, plastic,
solar, fossil fuels, the food chain, drugs, war, morality, etc. etc.
the list goes on for a long time.
Allan Watts says children are not told reality. They are not told
their true identity. They are given an identity, pre-defined by the
culture, tribe, country or group they are born into and told this
narrative is reality. He says, "of course it is not and then they
are unprepared for what life has in store for them." He said, "it
creates a collision and creates an alienation of feeling that the
world outside of human skin is unfeeling, fully-automatic stupidity.
Which we are supposed to have to fight. And dominate, otherwise it
will swallow us up and condemn us to the imaginary terrors of
everlasting nothingness.” When I was born I never got any of that,
is he talking about religion? I never got any, I never got any thing
of anything. I got a bowl of Oatmeal. I was a blank slate. I wasn't
given a "template" by my tribe.
Is Alan Watts talking about a form of apophenia? A form that
replaces the role of critical thinking and comparative analysis?
Society is solidified behind the idea that it's interference when
the government, the schools or science gets too close to our
family's personal business. As if we know what's up. Like it's an
evil invasion of privacy. Nobody can agree what bad stuff is but
somehow they know it when they see it.
Socialism is evil until the train comes off the tracks then all of a
sudden it’s “do something” help us help me help me. The labels
"socialism" and "capitalism" are rarely used correctly. It's in our
DNA. Our favorite politician likes to keep the root of the cause
private but then make sure the bad results are public. We can't make
profit private but the debt public.
Who is believing all this kooky stuff out there? Martin Lefevre
said, "capitalism is the complex concentration and
institutionalization of self-interest and greed in human nature."
Seeing things? Is this not the the history of humanity, from clueless cavemen to semi clueless humans to information overload. "Our perception grows on the wild misinterpretation of random data, presented in a suggestive fashion by kings and queens and rulers of institutions that steer us to the intended misunderstanding to keep us busy> ? They pre-seed our life with signs pointing to false conclusions. They keep in power by constantly keeping us from figuring out we don’t have to do any of this by pointing out unrelated random events and creating a meaning for them that fits the propaganda message they are delivering> ? That sounds exactly like QAnon.
Powerful misinformation presentations can bond people together. Friends in a club. A common illusion with no actual real solution in the real world. Instead, this is a breadcrumb trail AWAY from reality towards a dangerous psychological rush.
As an artist I see things in anything and everything. The difference is I don't go looking for it. Waiting for it to arrive in my mailbox each week. Every cloud has a shape that can look like something else, like chem trails. Everything that flickers might be a jumble of Morse code. The more information that is out there, the easier it is to allow apophenia to guide you into anything. One time I saw Jim Morison on a piece of toast.
VIDEO GAME DESIGN ARTICLE FROM REED BERKOWITZ
When you're in the club, the cult, the secret group, you look for manufactured connections that end up taking you to desired conclusions the handlers have created. Like a video game. When players arrive at the “correct” answers they are showered with adoration, respect, and social credit. Like a teenage Role Player the “correct” answer is the one that the group respects the most and makes the story the most enjoyable. The idea that bolsters the theory. The correct answer is the one that provides the most credit.
It’s like a Darwinian fiction lab, where the best stories and the most engaging and satisfying misinterpretations rise to the top and are then elaborated upon for the next version.
In a video game it’s easy for people to forget that they are not discovering the story, but creating it from random data.
This helps the people build an internal world that best serves the Puppet Masters. Who are the Puppet Masters?
“It is well known that people often resist changing their beliefs
when directly challenged, especially when these beliefs are
central to their identity. In some cases, exposure to
counterevidence may even increase a person’s confidence that his
or her cherished beliefs are true." -
https://www.nature.com/articles/srep39589
Strongly held beliefs are literally a part of us. As such, attacks on core beliefs are treated very much as attacks on us , even as strongly as a physical attack.
“The brain’s primary responsibility is to take care of the body,
to protect the body,” says Jonas Kaplan, a psychologist at the
University of Southern California. “The psychological self is the
brain’s extension of that. When our self feels attacked, our
[brain is] going to bring to bear the same defenses that it has
for protecting the body.”
Puzzle-solving is a special way to learn and it encodes information into the brain in a different way than other learning. Puzzles and knowledge gained through our own efforts are incredibly rewarding and also come with a hit of dopamine, the brain’s pleasure drug, as a reward.
As far back as 1978, it has been known that having an “Aha!” moment
increases retention of memories .
Recently, a report published in 2018 in the journal Human Brain
Mapping found that Aha! moments also activate the brain’s
reward systems.
CONSPIRACIES ARE EVERYWHERE
We are told the reason no one knows about "the conspiracy” is because of the conspiracy. Not because it doesn’t exist. In this state of mind the proof of apophenia is more apophenia. It's a self fueling engine. It creates the fog of war without the war. This conspiratorial mindset mode and the internet data hoard were made for each other.
When we impose patterns or relationships on otherwise unrelated things, we call it apophenia. When we create these connections online, we call it the internet
The web circling back to itself again and again. The internet is an apophenic machine. The internet was made for conspiracy theory: it is a conspiracy theory: one thing leads to another, always another link leading you deeper into no thing and no place, floating through self-dividing and transmogrifying sites until you are awash in the sheer evidence that the internet exists.
When faced with a global catastrophe that is simultaneously the responsibility of no one and everyone, there is a human preference to replace that chaos with some sort of narrative.
We need to crack this algorithm before AI does.
LIMITATION AS LIMITATION
Using no way as a way, having no limitation as limitation.
- Bruce Lee
I like using no way as a way. I think you are unlimited in your
possibilities, as long as you don’t go over your Quotas.
Quotas mean everyone is different, everyone has their own
limitations. Quotas also infers it’s about your health defense. I
think everything should be about your health defense before other
subjects. Quota has the ability to be adjusted, updated, adapted.
In Army Warrant Officer school I was having coffee with my fellow
students. I was the oldest person in the class, they were all 10
and 20 years younger than me. I told them I hadn’t exceeded my
"coffee quota." They said, "what quota" another said, "there are
no quotas" as if i was implying you have a brick wall you cannot
go past. I explained how my coffee quotas simply means, daily, I
drink 4 small ones or two big ones, or something like that. They
said you do what you want, and until you want or something to that
effect. They just didn’t get it. I forgot who was it that said,
"Youth is wasted on the young"? They were Supermen. I agree. But
even Superman should respect his own quotas. Jus sayn. For a
friend.
HOW DO YOU KNOW YOU KNOW
What is the CIA links? :defined
C.I.A. is confidentially, integrity, and availability. Health defense needs to rely on keeping our resources secure, integral, and available—but trade-offs are necessary in real-world scenarios.
- Confidentiality: Only authorized processes should be able to access or modify our resources
- Integrity: Resources should be maintained in a correct state and nobody should be able to improperly modify it, either accidentally or maliciously
- Availability: Only authorized users (our self and trusted co-horts) should be able to access our resources whenever the need to do so
These three principles are obviously top of mind for any martial artist health psychology professional. But considering them as linked forces us to do the tough work of thinking about how they overlap and can sometimes be in opposition to one another, which can help in establishing priorities in the implementation of your health defense security procedures and strategy.
Why is the CIA links important in health defense?
Why is it so helpful to think of them as a linked ideas, rather than separately? It's productive to think about the CIA triad as a way to make sense of the bewildering array of different martial arts and modes of self defense let alone health defense.
Rather than just throwing resources at the vague "problem" of health defense we can ask focused questions: Does this make our health more secure? Does this help ensure our cognitive integrity? Will beefing up our cognitive infrastructure make our resources more readily available when we need them?
In addition, linking these three concepts makes it clear that they exist, in many cases, as a state of cognitive dissonance.
The Banking business, credit cards, anti theft for autos, online shopping, and much more could all be made 100% secure. if you did it would be too much trouble and nobody will use your service and products. We have to do the same balancing acts for our health defense. Behaviour Genetics and Fate. It’s advised you don’t go get your gnome read because it may say you have genetic markers for such and such. But that doesn’t mean you will get it. Worrying about it might be stressful and that could lead to you getting -something. If your relationship with fate, faith, and genetics is all nicely arranged but your behaviour wrecks things, then that is obviously counterproductive. CIA is a balance approach to manage all the trade-offs.
Finding Paths is perhaps the single most important algorithm in life. Mobility. Experience something outside your neighborhood. Finding paths between two points on a map requires all the elements you need for going through life. Some algorithms are so trivial that they fall under the heading of just plain math. You'd better know how to convert anger to energy and loss to gain. You'd better understand cognitive interpolation. It probably helps to know what health psychology is.
Eliminate some of the unnecessary activities
Prioritize effort based on key results
Delete, defer, delegate, or diminish(chip away at the unessential)
Leverage your strengths
Map out a plan before beginning
Encourage cross-functional collaboration
Promote sleep, relaxation and time off
Define the purpose of different communication channels
PPA
Philosophy, Physics, Algorithm is PPA. Physics includes everything
all science, all religion, all light and dark matter, every particle
everywhere, all cognitive activity. All that started out as
Philosophy. Algorithm is the juice we are going to hi-jack from one
thing to use in another.
BACK HOME PAGE 3
Visit Dogstradamus to get algorithms for your pets.
Pets are people too!