Alan Watts and the Trouble with Symbols

Alan Watts: "Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was a British philosopher, writer, and speaker, best known as an interpreter and populariser of Eastern philosophy for a Western audience."

Most civilized people today are out of touch with reality because they confuse the world as it is with the world as they think about it, talk about it, and describe it. For on the one hand there is the real world and on the other the whole system of symbols about this world that we have in our minds. They are all very, very useful symbols, all our civilization depends on it but like all good things they have their disadvantages And the principal disadvantage of symbols is that we confuse them with reality. Like we confuse money with actual wealth and our names about ourselves, our ideas of ourselves, our images of ourselves with ourselves. Of course reality from the philosopher’s point of view is a dangerous word. A philosopher will ask me what do I mean by reality. Am I talking about the physical world of nature or am I talking about the spiritual world or what? And to that I have a very simple answer: When we talk about the material world it is actually a philosophical concept. And if I say that reality is spiritual it is also a philosophical concept.And reality itself is not a concept, reality is …

….and we won’t give it a name.

Litany Against Fear

I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing.
Only I will remain.

- order of the Bene Gesserit - from Frank Herbert's Dune novel

Nassim Nicolas Taleb

Lebanese-American, trained as a statistician, traded for various high-profile financial houses, became independently wealthy due to profits made on trades during the 1987 crash, has subsequently written a number of books on the tendency of modern quantitative finance to underestimate the frequency of rare events, with disastrous consequences.

Library of Economics & Freedom, interview by Russ Roberts

another podcast

NYTimes article by Malcolm Gladwell on Taleb and Victor Niederhoffer.