Join 📚 Christian Champ's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Christian's read, .
The ‘doorman fallacy’, as I call it, is what happens when your strategy becomes synonymous with cost-saving and efficiency; first you define a hotel doorman’s role as ‘opening the door’, then you replace his role with an automatic door-opening mechanism. The problem arises because opening the door is only the notional role of a doorman; his other, less definable sources of value lie in a multiplicity of other functions, in addition to door-opening: taxi-hailing, security, vagrant discouragement, customer recognition, as well as in signalling the status of the hotel. The doorman may actually increase what you can charge for a night’s stay in your hotel.
For a brief moment he was “above time” and could look down upon life from a height. He had glimpsed some of mankind’s evolutionary possibilities. Sheer concentration, an effort of will, he believed, had induced the “timeless moment,” and indicated that the relentless flow of time, from life to death, could be halted.
Beyond the Robot
Gary Lachman
This hypothesis—that feelings are, among other things, the mind’s way of assigning priority labels to thoughts—is consistent with a broad trend in psychology over the past several decades: to quit talking about “affective” and “cognitive” processes as if they were in separate compartments of the mind and recognize how finely intertwined they are. And this trend is yet another case where modern psychology was anticipated by ancient Buddhism. In a famous sutra called The Greater Discourse on the Destruction of Craving, the Buddha says that a “mind object”—a category that includes thoughts—is just like a taste or a smell: whether a person is “tasting a flavor with the tongue” or “smelling an odor with the nose” or “cognizing a mind object with the mind,” the person “lusts after it if it is pleasing” and “dislikes it if it is unpleasing.”
Why Buddhism Is True
Robert Wright
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise