Friday, April 27, 2007

Does the universe have AADD?

I have been considering whether I am AADD and might benefit from Ritalin or something like it. I know Erdos swore by his speed. I certainly qualify: I have a hard time finishing things, I'm not very focused, I seem to go from one thing to the next and have a hard time hitting deadlines. This can be very frustrating at times.
But I kept having this nagging feeling that some of what I add in the world and at work is because of this. I know a big part of what I enjoy about being conscious is seeing the big patterns and ingenious ways reality seems to work. Let's just take the signs I listed.

I have a hard time finishing things.
But I do deliver things. They're just not finished. They work, they do what they are supposed to, but they can't be finished, because nothing is ever really finished.
I am always working on the same thing: to (in the Zen sense) do nothing. When you start working on something, you realize it's connected to other things, not superficially, truly connected. The economy of a country is connected to its laws, it's connected to other countries' laws and and other economies, and so on. Adjusting an economy without looking at tariffs and so on is not losing focus, it's not seeing the whole problem. We don't just systematically ignore all of the higher order terms in the Taylor series expansion of something do we?
Yes, there are seperable systems, and we love them because they are easy to solve. But the real problems we face are not separable, reducable. It's inevitable, once the easy problems have been solved, then you have to solve the harder problems, and so on.
Everything is connected, and the more important of interesting it is, the more connected it is.

I lack focus.
But it's not because I'm distracted by moving objects or flashy colors. I am very focused on learning the different ways complex phenomena are described, concepturalized, and so on.
If the universe has a focus, that will be my focus. But what is the universe focused on? What people call focus, most of the time, seems like studying the font something is written in rather than what it says. I can be focused enough to see that category theory talks about coordination one way and chemistry in a sligthly different way, and of course, relativistically speaking, what does it even mean, and in computer science, you have the Byzantine general. If you understand the little picture how can you understand the big picture? How can you really understand the little picture if you don't know what the big picture is? How do little pictures become the mosaic of the bigger picture?
Is the bigger picture inside every smaller picture?

I have a hard time hitting deadlines
True, but sometimes I deliver things before anyone even knows they need them. That makes up for it. Knowing the future is very powerful in the right hands. You don't have to know exactly when things will happen, just a time span, then you (implicitly) buy an option on it.
How do you know the future? If you see the right patterns, it's just like now - only more complex. You just have to get far enough away from it to see it all happening.
Plus, plenty of creative people have a hard time hitting deadlines. I don't think I need a cure for creativity.

So - I'm going to pass for the time being on this AADD thing, at least until I'm convinced the universe doesn't have it too.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Fascinating blog. Keep it coming.