Author Archives: danijel

Lessons

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I had one instance of good fortune with the butterflies today and tried to take the best of it; almost came home empty handed, but then two butterflies started their dance above the road and…

I took those with the 135mm, because the 100-400mm was too much for me to carry, considering what kind of an astral shitstorm I have to deal with; hiking up hill is hard enough, and doing it with a big setup was too much for today.

The lesson from this as well as the previous hike is that all it takes is one. One scene, one butterfly, a few seconds of opportunity, and if you have the equipment with you, failure turns into success. Just a few seconds of a window of opportunity. If that didn’t intersect with me, I’d come home empty handed after carrying heavy gear up hill.

I wonder what lesson I would have learned had I climbed that hill twice with multiple kilos of equipment on me, and in both cases that one lucky opportunity didn’t arise. Would the lesson have been “fuck this, I’m not carrying this stuff here again”? I’ve seen this in business; occasionally, some people just get lucky and end up with money, and then they think they are competent and successful; they try again, and they fail, again and again, because they learned the wrong lesson. They didn’t understand how lucky they were, and how rare and improbable success was, and how little it depended on their own competence. People seem to learn wrong lessons from success, and, quite likely, also from failure. They might think there’s something wrong with them, but maybe they did everything right and those butterflies didn’t perform for them at just the right time when they walked that road, and they came home with an empty card. All those “spiritual teachers” in the 1990s talked about how this world is a school and we are here to learn lessons, but they don’t actually seem to be the good and useful lessons, when I think about it. We learn that certain things don’t work, and others do, but what we actually learn seems to be more degrading than helpful, because receiving spiritual feedback from a place designed by Satan and inhabited by morally flawed beings works exactly as you might expect it to. For instance, I learned early on that I will be beaten up, insulted, humiliated, ignored, ridiculed and degraded regardless of what I do. The feedback will always be negative, so I might as well do whatever. It took me a while to un-learn that lesson, because I almost became human garbage and a criminal, resulting from my parents’ stellar upbringing. 🙂 My brother, on the other hand, learned that the path to getting what he wanted is to play victim and whine loudly, blaming me, and then I will be beaten up and he will get to play with my toys. Since he never actually practised yoga, he never unlearned that lesson, and he’s still thinking in terms of blaming me for his misery in order for the fundamental law of the Universe to be triggered, where I will be beaten up and he will get my toys.

Do you know how I un-learned that harmful lesson from my childhood? The one that I’m doomed regardless and feedback will always be negative, so I might as well do whatever? I decided that the first part is indeed correct: the feedback I receive is probably always flawed and I can’t rely on it in order to correct my actions. However, I also decided that the second part, where I might as well do whatever, will result in utter doom. It would harm me terribly. So, I needed to think of a way of correcting my actions without taking human feedback into account. I learned to judge my actions against an ideal – good people that I know, good characters from literature or film, holy scriptures. Darshan of God, ultimately. I understood that my life is not a performance for others, because others will not be able to save me if I fail. There was no use in emotional signalling; just understanding what was wrong, and fixing it. Repeat ad nauseam. No audience. No use in whining, or feeling bad or depressed about mistakes. Just fix them, and align with the template of perfection, that is of course constantly updated. Fuck up, fix, repeat. No audience. No useful feedback. Just deception and false information from the outside, stuff that’s meant to discourage, harm and degrade, stuff that will praise me when I’m doing poorly and ridicule me when I’m doing everything right, with just enough randomness to make it completely useless. Do what God would do in my place, not what gets me praise from humans, because humans are sinful, deluded, ignorant, evil or just fucked up. They will criticise what they admire because it hurts them, or they will praise what they find pathetic, because it makes them feel good.

Being able to stand in the presence of God and feel like I belong there. That was the motivation.

Also, I assume that I’m probably doing everything right, and the lack of results is merely a normal thing if butterflies haven’t crossed my path by chance. Thinking that you’re doing something wrong just because there are no results is like thinking your camera choice or photographic skill need to be improved if you came home with an empty card that day. Were there any butterflies around? No? If so, how is the absence of butterfly pictures surprising? Correcting your course too often, and based on unreliable feedback, is not helpful. For instance, Biljana was with me today and she came home without any good pictures. Why? Because we were both very tired on the way down, under terrible astral pressure, and when those butterflies appeared I went after them, fiddled with autofocus modes until I found something that managed to lock and track, and kept them under rapid fire for half a minute or so. Biljana was just too tired to give a fuck about butterflies at that point and left them to me. 🙂 What conclusion should she draw from this? None at all. She did everything right. Doing everything right, however, doesn’t mean that you’ll have good results on any given day. Another day, she might have excellent pictures and I will have nothing. What conclusions should I draw from this? Absolutely none. Learning lessons from everything is highly overrated.

 

Quantum immorality

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People will think of all kinds of things in order to anesthetise their conscience; basically, convince themselves that it doesn’t matter what they do, so they are fine. I think I’ve heard it all, talking to all kinds of amoral and godless people over the decades, but probably the most brain-dead thing I’ve heard is using the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory to justify amorality.

Many-worlds interpretation is very popular in Hollywood, but it’s otherwise sheer nonsense. Basically, it solves the Schroedinger’s cat paradox in a non-probabilistic manner, by stating that in every quantum function collapse junction the universe forks into versions where every possible outcome is the reality. Essentially, you get a universe where the cat is alive, and the universe where the cat is dead.

Ignoring the fact that the quantum function doesn’t extend past the microscopic realm and translates very poorly into the macroscopic world of Einsteinian gravity, the amoral pieces of human garbage who want to be perceived as cool, scientific and educated, extend this principle into the sphere of moral choice, so at every moral junction the universe forks into various versions, each containing a version of you that made one possible choice. So, as you made every possible choice by the obligatory nature of the many-worlds split, a question of morality doesn’t even present itself. In every choice where you could do this or that, you did both, so there’s no actual choice involved.

So, let me deal with this very quickly. First of all, collapse of probabilities into certainty doesn’t actually have anything to do with reality; it only deals with our ignorance, that collapses into certainty at the point of revelation. Schroedinger’s cat is never 50% alive; it’s always either completely dead or completely alive, and it’s just our ignorance of its condition that collapses into certainty; basically, all probabilities collapse into either 1 or 0, at the point of revelation. Opening the box with the cat doesn’t fork universes, it reveals the actual reality so that we can stop playing with probabilities, which are merely quantification of our ignorance.

Second, quantum anything doesn’t really work on a macroscopic scale, or there would be a quantum theory of gravity, or a great unified theory of everything, that would combine the two. From what I can tell, quantum indeterminism looks very much like what happens when you try to play at the limits of resolution, according to the Nyquist-Shannon theorem of sampling. You get aliasing, or indeterminate result. No, when you try to photograph high-frequency detail of fabric with a photographic sensor, the aliasing you’re getting isn’t a sign that universes are forking. It’s just that your sensor is being “outresolved”, which is usually solved by introducing a low-pass filter in front of it, which will slightly blur the detail right at the Nyquist-Shannon limit. This stuff is a common bane of digital photography, and some manufacturers are making versions of their cameras with or without the low-pass filter, so depending on what you photograph you may choose between the sensor that will not create moire patterns on textile, or the sensor that will resolve more high-frequency detail in nature, and you don’t care that the detail at the Nyquist-Shannon limit will be “false”, because in most cases errors will statistically disperse and not be obvious.

Third, let’s assume, against all reason and evidence, that the universe actually does fork at every decision point. So, there’s a universe where you died at every point where you had a close call. There’s a universe where you bought bitcoin when its price was in cents. There’s a universe where that girl you had sex with got pregnant. There’s a universe where you died from covid. There’s a universe where you did all the right things at the right points, made all the right choices, aligned yourself with God to such perfection that you attained apotheosis.

So, my question is, why are you not that person? If the best version of you is in some other universe where it forked out due to you making different choices, how is this interpretation of your situation different from just saying that you fucked up, or that the best version of you dripped down your mom’s leg?

Rather than the many-worlds nonsense, I would say that you are constantly pruning the tree of your options and choices. With every fork in the road, you lose the version of you that would have happened had you taken the other road. Since you can’t go back in time, that possible version of yourself is lost; it collapsed into non-reality at the time of choice. If you didn’t buy Bitcoin at $1, that’s not coming back, and you can’t swap places with some alternative you in a parallel universe where you did.

Which brings us to my next point: if you can’t swap places with the version of you that didn’t fuck up, pretending that there’s a version of you that did everything well, which neutralises the version of you that fucked up everything, has no practical utility. You are not a sum of all your parallel selves that made all possible choices; you are a result of pruning the tree of choices into a specific outcome that is you. This is what it actually is, and pretending otherwise is as useful as pretending that you did actually get into bitcoin early, or that you bought gold at 1000 EUR per oz. If you didn’t, you didn’t. Possibility collapsed into reality at the moment of choice, and now you are the sum total of your choices. If you pruned your tree of choices wrong, and ended up with a bonsai shrub of utter doom, it is what it is.

In other words, no theory will get you out of the quagmire of wrong choices, and you are free to prove me wrong by swapping places with the version of you that did everything right. Otherwise, you might as well have put in the effort to become the best possible version of yourself, rather than try to theorise a way out of your loserdom.

Sage and swallowtail

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Yesterday we went up our local hill carrying telephoto setups, basically our heaviest gear; it was the first time for me to carry the A7RV with the FE 100-400mm GM lens up there, because the damn thing is so heavy and awkward to carry when hiking. Biljana took the R5 with the RF 70-200 f/4L. The only things worth taking pictures of there at the moment, unfortunately, require either a telephoto or a macro lens. It seemed to have been for nought, because the butterflies were too active and not landing; they just flew chaotically above us, and when I got a good series of a hummingbird moth, the background was too close and the compositions were therefore chaotic and disorderly and I couldn’t use them.

On the way back from the top, however, we lucked out – a perfect swallowtail was feeding on a sage blossom, and kept doing it for long enough for both of us to get several series.

Here are Biljana’s whole album, and mine.

Brainwashing in America

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America has more in common with totalitarian countries like North Korea, than it does with the rest of the world, and it’s because they are so immersed in propaganda, and so ignorant of the actual world around them, that they are unique in the sense that they don’t notice their propaganda as such – to them, it’s just truth and facts. Here’s a good explanation of it:

I’m no stranger to propaganda, having grown up in communist Yugoslavia where you just knew what you had to say in public and what never to say in public, lest you end up on the Naked Island. The problem with propaganda is that sometimes you don’t know it’s propaganda, and I had to systematically deconstruct it for decades in order to even understand some of the more pervasive aspects of it, and of course it’s easier to notice the other people’s brainwashing, because it’s alien and sounds completely foolish. However, understanding things such as human rights, democracy and feminism as brainwashing and historical forgery is quite a bit harder. Even here in Europe, most of what we were taught from history is merely a narrative constructed to present a certain picture of reality that will support the currently ruling regime. For instance, I was shocked to learn, much later, how everything I was taught in school is a political narrative carefully constructed by omissions, selection of sources, and bombardment with insignificant and irrelevant dates and numbers that serve to dumb you down and block your critical faculties. It is extremely easy to keep someone completely brainwashed by merely selecting the sources, and the additional bonus is that the brainwashed person will think they are an independent well educated critical thinker. That’s how you get college educated morons.