My life has been incredibly busy lately, I sometimes feel like I don't have room to breathe.

I finished up an investment banking M&A project and now I'm working at a large insurance company. The hours are long, the commute royally sucks, and my only consolation is that I get to keep a car in NYC paid for by the company of course.

I have also been lightly looking for new opportunities because I'm getting bored of consulting. I have second round interviews with a hedge fund coming up, I'm pretty apathetic to it all, but if the pay is really good, I just might go for it. I've realized that no matter what corporate job I take, in the end, it's all the same. The long hours, the corporate BS, none of it interests me anymore.

With that said, I've incorporated my new business with my two partners. We're a real legal entity now, and I get to bring home some equity, of course our equity is worthless at the moment, but I'm hoping that will change in the future.

Lastly, working on so many things at once has left me very far removed from the outside world. I forgot what it feels like to just relax without worries. Reaching for the top is indeed a long and lonely road.


Gimme moaaarrrrr

What is real and how do you define it? Just because we can see something, and touch something, does that truly mean it exists? One of my favorite existentialist questions involves the concept of the human consciousness. Basically, how does a person know that he or she is not the only person with consciousness? What if everyone else was just a robot pretending to display human characteristics?

Our understanding of the world, is only as sophisticated as our brain allows

In psychology, we learn a lot about mental disorders and what they reveal about how our mind works. In one study on Anosognosia, a person who recently had her left arm paralyzed due to an accident denied the existence of that arm. When the doctors asked her to move the arm, she witnessed the arm not moving and claimed that the arm wasn't hers, but instead belonged to her daughter.

Doctors conducted more tests and concluded that the reason why this patient was unable to identify her arm as being hers was because there was some sort of damage in the part of her brain that connected the left and right hemispheres, particularly around the region concerned with logic. Thus, instead of logically viewing the unmoving arm as damaged, she used another part of her brain to compensate and make up excuses as to why the arm wasn't moving, mainly that it didn't belong to her.

The implication of this study is that we, as humans, only understand the world as much as our brain allows us to. We can only understand what we can gather from our 5 senses, and even then, our understanding is only half complete. With that said, it is incredibly easy to alter our understanding of reality. Optical illusions are a wonderful example of how our sense of sight can be tricked, other examples include taking pills to change acidic flavors into sweet ones or using mind altering drugs to change how we perceive the world.

What is real?

This brings us back to my original question of what is real and how do we define it? Is something real if everyone agrees it's real? If you've seen the Matrix, you'll know that the idea of "real" can be a very complicated thing. I hate using the Matrix as an example, but I'm going to do it anyway... what's to say we're not just all part of some big computer program and some AI isn't controlling our mind and using our brains as a power source?

The answer is that it is impossible to know for sure. There is no such thing as definitive truth, only a high probability of what we believe to be true. If I told you that the Earth was flat, you'd probably laugh at me, but what if I told you that we were incapable of viewing the Earth as round, because there was some fundamental flaw in how our brains perceived three dimensions. And to compensate, we made up an extraordinary number of excuses as to why it was flat. I guess that's a far fetched idea... but not really, especially when you consider that a woman can also mistake her own arm as belonging to someone else.

further reading http://lesswrong.com/lw/20/the_apologist_and_the_revolutionary/


blood rushing away from head... cannot think anymore...