Whats your story morning glory?

Question: You get to choose a vacation anywhere, wherever in the world you would like to go and doing whatever floats your boat. Got it?  OK, now you are told that at the end of it, all of your photos will be destroyed and your memory of it wiped. What? Now think about this, would you choose the same vacation?
Take a millisecond to ponder that one.

If you would choose a different vacation or wonder what would be the point of going at all then you have some reconciling to do between yourselves. That's right, the both of you. This is what is currently blowing my mind.

You see your holidaying self is the 'experiencing self'.  The part of you doing it all right now... and now... and... ok the one living your life in the moment. This one will notice if the holiday is one week or two because it is right there lapping up the margaritas and getting a tan. The one that chooses the holiday to go on as well as most of your rational decisions is the other one- the "remembering" self. This one is constructing the narrative of your life through storytelling, and is apparently remarkably indifferent to the feelings of the experiencing self. Hence the extreme hiking holiday that will be a "growth experience" later, when you fondly look back on it.

The idea comes from Daniel Kahneman. The only psychologist ever to win a Nobel Prize in Economics and is known for his studies of the psychology of judgment and decision-making.

Thanks to DK we know if someone asks if you are happy, one self can tell you if you are happy in your life and the other will tell you if you are happy about your life and they aren't highly correlated. Seriously, what are we like?

I know that when I am having an experience I am already re-presenting it to myself in words. I am trying to pin it down before it squirms away into the vagaries of memory. I look for good words, beautiful words, words with specificity that distinguish this experience from similar ones or group them together. Rich words. Visceral words. Fuck it, a haiku if necessary. It is very hard to accurately recall a feeling later.

I am constructing the story as the story is unfolding as if being close to the source will somehow leave less room for the corrupting influence of time. My experiencing self wants to shake me and say "Be here now. Be a witness. Don't judge... perceive". But I know that we are our remembering selves and all we get out of living this life is the memory of living it.  Even that is temporary so, goddamit, I will try and etch all of this in my neural pathways with words. Oh and the odd photograph.

Any spare change?

Arrrgh I cant bear the bickering. I've had to tune out of news and political rhetoric for a little break from what feels like an exercise in futility.

We like to think we will get shit done and change things by debating the crap out of everything.  Everything is an argument. This is how we have always done things so lets keep doing it right? We love a good dichotomy. It's always us vs them, Left vs Right, Art vs Science, Godzilla vs King Kong (2020 apparently) It isn't useful or constructive and I'd like to thank Socrates for this- cue Bill and Ted...

Bill: So-cratz - "The only true wisdom consists in knowing that you know nothing".

Ted: That's us, dude.

So yes,  the basis of Socratic Method is debate to stimulate critical thinking, defend a point of view, weaken your opponents position by getting them to contradict themselves and generally it is some adversarial posturing. Thats nice. You can watch the monkeys you vote for do this on a daily basis.

And that is the problem. Argument is inadequate as a tool of thinking and of change because it has no ability to design and create. Change comes slowly if at all. Is is highly inefficient.

De Bono put forward Parallel Thinking as an alternative to the dialectic approach. It encourages a full exploration of the possibilities. Throw a bunch of ideas out there and explore them all. One (that's you) is free to contribute with knowledge, facts and feelings. Squee! That's the freaking trifecta right there. That's the beginning of building amazing and world changing things. And we really do need to change the world right now.

You can bet that Elon Musk and the kids at Tesla don't bother playing mental ping pong when they come up with the next cool thing that will rock your world.  No, they use "first principles" whereby they boil things down to the most fundamental truths and build from there. They use a variety of different perspectives to build from assuming that complex tasks require multiple representations of knowledge. Then they make stuff. Change things. Blow our minds.
Thank goodness because quite frankly Tesla et al are the only light at the end of the tunnel that isn't just a train coming the other way right now.

In my heart my hope is that Art and Science will fall in love with each other now that they are on both on the bad side of the prevalent "Right Wing" fence. They will run away together, have late night collaborative discussions over red wine and lead the revolution whereby they invent the sustainable, glorious future and sell it to us in every little consumer decision we make. I'd buy that. Take my money.

Oh stop arguing, there is no Us and Them. Hold hands and make this shit work or we all go down together. Seriously.
Mwah.