petervm

I'm in similar circumstances. Same age, a lot of intellectual interests, physically very active, don't feel old at all. And yet, that feeling of "been there, done that" is very recurring. When I think "I'm too old for XYZ", I take it as a sign that I've learned all I can from that type of experience and that I should move on to other pursuits.

>How do you maintain your excitement for something that you've done a bazillion times?

For me it's two things: 1) With a few special people, it doesn't matter if I've done something a million times, the interaction is always extremely rewarding and we always get new insights about what we're doing and the world; the activity is not novel in itself but there's a sense of progress in either skill or understanding; 2) Very obvious in theory: try something you've never tried before.

The hardest in my experience is to find friends who want to keep up with this. I crave novelty and progress of some sort, the feeling that I am a better person today than I was yesterday. I don't have a hard time meeting people, but it's getting harder and harder to find (and keep) my tribe. I suspect a lot of us feel something similar – this craving for a community of people you can relate to, spending time together, learning together, working together towards some shared goal. It's hard to make this happen at work and I haven't found it in hobbies either. The closest I've been to fulfilling this itch is with occasional side projects with others, retreats of different kinds, slow travelling, etc. I'd love to figure this out and make it happen more often with more people.

Haha :) This is exactly where I'm stuck with guitar and also exactly where I left PHP a lifetime ago. Having moved on to other programming languages and other paradigms outside web dev, I totally understand the analogy.

This looks great! Thanks

Thank you so much for this. You may have derailed my Sunday :)

A physics teacher would probably make for a great music teacher indeed. Understanding things from first principles is so powerful. Compressed knowledge. I always try to move towards that but it has eluded me so far when it comes to music. Granted, I haven't put much effort in. I would totally buy that book of yours.

Or anything "for programmers" really :) Not that we're especially dumb that we need our own custom teaching materials but I do think we are more qualified than most to identify systems, decompose them, and explain the relations between their parts. And do it in a gradual way with progressive disclosure, until we're satisfied with our new lego pieces.

This is great! Any resource you'd recommend for someone who learned to play the guitar but has no idea what he's doing?

I'd love to learn more about music theory and stop relying so much on memorization. I know there are a ton of resources out there but most of them seem to fall on the extremes – either too big a commitment or too superficial.

Don't know what's their native tongue but at least in Portuguese we have a saying that would translate literally to "jumped to my neck". I also love these language things :)

But it's pretty satisfying when details are still relevant but simply misleading or difficult to put together. In my opinion, that's the ideal scenario. It's ok for superfluous details to be there for the sake of texture but depending on how it's done, it may cause the script to lose its "tightness".

Westworld is one of my favorite shows because I think it accomplishes this very well (S01 and S02, not S03). There are a myriad of details, you get the feeling they'll be important but there's simply so much to keep track of that it's very difficult for it to become predictable and boring.

Will do, thanks!

After posting my comment yesterday, I read some of your other comments and I don't think we actually disagree.

The problem is probably the definition of "real".

I'm not arguing that consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe when I say it is real. The jury is still out but that's not what interests me the most. When I say "real" I'm talking about my subjective experience. It is real in the sense that it is something that I know I experience, regardless of the mechanisms involved.

Ultimately, what I'm interested in is finding out how it arises. Explaining it. Reducing it to its "third-party objective facts" if possible. Being able to look at a machine that mimics us and tell if that machine is experiencing something comparable to what we experience.

I believe in Portuguese, at least, that boy is also named Peter.

And yet most people call it a car, consider it real, and at the same time don't see a problem in reducing it to its physical properties.

"is the qualitative experience of consciousness actually real, or is it reducible to third-party objective facts"

Why not both?

The "real" refers to our subjective experience. That there is something that is like to be me. Something that is like to be a bat. And at least under certain definitions, that's what we call conscience. That something I know I experience and that I doubt a computer is experiencing too.

Why would this be incompatible with reducing this experience to third party objective facts? We simply don't know but I don't see why we couldn't.

Reminded me of this book I very much enjoyed about Stuxnet - "Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon". Stuxnet was a targeted attack directed at Iran's nuclear program. Quality, not quantity indeed. Super interesting to learn about these things!

Here's some advice from a fellow beginner. After many failed attempts to make it stick, what worked for me was a combination of two things:

- Reading about meditation in general just to learn more about it out of curiosity, not necessarily looking for instructions. This helped create a mental model of what it entailed, what to expect, what to look for. I read different books over the years, but I really like how Sam Harris describes his experience with it in his podcast.

- This app: https://insighttimer.com/ I've tried multiple apps but this one really made the difference for me. There are thousands of meditations to choose from, you can filter by duration, and there's a bit of gamification too. Another important thing, there's no "meditation course" to follow - you just search a meditation session that looks right for your mood and the time you have and that's it. These features combined removed all the friction I always found as a beginner. At first I started with only 5 to 10 minutes every morning, guided meditation with breathing exercises. As time went by, I felt I was improving in gaining control of the experience and started doing longer sessions with just soft music as background. Make it a daily routine, start small, do your best but don't be too hard on yourself.