Category: Short Reads

Trelograms #22 — Why Travel?

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My first source of inspiration to leave on a long-term cycle tour was easily Dave Conroy, whom i hosted in 2011 when i was still attending graduate school at Rutgers University and living in Central Jersey. Dave was the fist long-term cycle traveler i ever met in person, and might have also been my first source of intimidation — he had essentially checked out of his “previous life,” and been cycling for a couple of years already! That was something i couldn’t even remotely imagine myself doing at that time.

Fortunately, he was not the only cycle traveler i got to meet back then — in the course of the following couple of Summers i hosted many more, and was positively struck by how different their motivations were — for Steve and Taylor, cycle touring was part of their gap year adventures, while Greg had used his bike as a tool to connect with people and places around his country, and i understood it to be part of a mourning practice for Odin. Although it took me another four years to finally get on the road myself, i eventually felt duly validated to ride on account of the underlying process and technical challenge — in other words, whatever it was about it that interested me the most at the moment.

Along my way over the past two or three years, there came yet another big surprise — while space for self-discovery and adventure were what first put me on the road, i gradually discovered and gladly assimilated other dimensions into my process. Most notably, i could have never anticipated how inspiring, energizing and fruitful my encounters with people along my path would have been! That’s why i’ve emphasized people in my writing.

So, you already have a reason to travel also — but you might not find out what it is until you surrender to the journey 😉

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Featured photo: photomontage of just a few of my countless encounters on the road

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‘Trelograms’ is a wordplay between ‘telegram’ and ‘trélos’ (Greek for ‘mad’)

Trelograms: inspiration; cycle touring; worldwide

Trelograms #21 — Why Is Doing the Dishes so Troublesome?

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Soon after moving to Ukraine, i had the opportunity to meet and eat lunch with Folknery, a couple of Ukrainian musicians cycle touring around the world with their baby, who was born on the road — “but isn’t it troublesome?” — “it’s actually much easier than being at home with one,” replied Yaryna.

I can totally believe that, as i’ve been myself telling everybody who asks that cycle touring feels less troublesome across the board — it’s much easier dealing with the dishes after a meal, or finding a place to sleep, so why wouldn’t that be the case with a baby as well?

At this point many of you will dismiss my point by saying that the cycle touring process comes with its own burdensome routine, which is so true! But if that’s where you are, then you’ve completely missed my point — we all have our own dishes to wash, there’s no doubt about it — my point is simply that our choice of metaphorical dishes is much broader than we might be first led to believe.

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Featured photo: typical pile of dishes to wash after a single meal at home versus my entire minimalist hitchhiking kitchen

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‘Trelograms’ is a wordplay between ‘telegram’ and ‘trélos’ (Greek for ‘mad’)

Trelograms: inspiration; cycle touring, hitchhiking, hiking; worldwide

Trelograms #20 — Does My Cat Experience Me as a Person?

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Yeva is my first pet. Every now and then i wonder whether we have a mutual relationship, and what that actually means — am i seeking subjective experiences external to my own, which in turn acknowledge mine as external to their own, and also mutually intelligible communication between the two?

Sometimes Yeva will meow from the balcony, looking into my eyes through the glass door, and come back inside as soon as i open the door — other times it feels a bit more like she just experiences me as a much desired radiator whose position in space she catastrophically bad at predicting.

Do i have a relationship with the ocean?

A few might suggest the ocean is in fact as conscious as we are. I wonder whether it might not be the other way around — as Daniel Dennett remarked in Consciousness Explained, “[perhaps w]e’re all zombies” — quoted here slightly out of context not as much as an “act of desperate intellectual dishonesty” as a sincere expression of confusion — are we as conscious as the ocean?

The only alternatives to that i find plausible are panpsychism or solipsism — has my mathematical training led me to disproportionately converge to either 0, 1 or infinity as the most likely answers to any question i ask?

What’s the weather like where you are right now?

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Featured photo: Yeva and i stimulating each other’s oxytocin release ( Fall ’17 )

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‘Trelograms’ is a wordplay between ‘telegram’ and ‘trélos’ (Greek for ‘mad’)

Trelograms: inspiration; home

Trelograms #19 — Moments, Moments . . .

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This photo was taken somewhere in the German countryside between Berlin and Dresden, in the first few days of my Copenhagen–Istanbul tour back in Fall ’16. It was the first time i remember noticing a pumpkin field.

Not too far to the right of the frame, a woman crouched in between some bushes, presumably to attend to immediate necessities — i only noticed her after my uncontrollable laughter at the pumpkin field had already settled — that was what had prompted me to stop!

Why am i even remembering the woman? This is the first time i remember remembering this peripheral scene to my moment with the pumpkin field.

I pictured a time lapse of the pumpkins coming randomly about, like popcorn — someone ought to have worked that out — damned be YouTube!

So has life on the road been so far to an increasingly large extent — a succession of present moments, not always permeated with amusement, without any apparent cosmic or metaphysical significance, and yet complete — i could have spent eternity right then — in my next cycle journey, it was red vans and traffic signs that stood out.

No matter how hard i try, i can’t seem to be able to put my finger on what about life not on the road makes such experiences so rare though — i’m often pathologically and stably dissatisfied with the most trivial banalities of my routine in Lviv — “how might we possibly arrange for your brother to recover his backpack from us today, given that we will be in the same relatively small and functional city, equipped with effective means of communication, and sharing a common language!?”

If the road/not-the-road dichotomy is an illusion, i have repeatedly failed to notice it.

How about you? Have you found peace? How?

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Featured photo: a “hilarious” pumpkin field in German countryside ( Fall ’16 )

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‘Trelograms’ is a wordplay between ‘telegram’ and ‘trélos’ (Greek for ‘mad’)

Trelograms: inspiration; cycle touring

Trelograms #18 — What Do You Worry About?

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I just finished listening to Life 3.0: Being Human in The Age of Artificial Intelligence, by Max Tegmark. The book argues that we badly underestimate the existential risk posed by the imminent onset of artificial, superhuman intelligence, and calls for a global and collaborative safety research program.

From the book:

“Not only can non-living matter have goals, at least in [the sense that it was designed to accomplish a goal], but it increasingly does. If you’d been observing Earth’s atoms since our planet formed, you’d have noticed three stages of goal-oriented behavior:

    1. All matter seemed focused on dissipation [of energy].
    2. Some of the matter came alive and instead focused on replication and subgoals of that.
    3. A rapidly growing fraction of matter was rearranged by living organisms to help accomplish their goals.

(…) not only do we now contain more matter than all other mammals except cows (which are so numerous because they serve our goals of consuming beef and dairy products), but the matter in our machines, roads, buildings and other engineering projects appears on track to soon overtake [in weight] all living matter on Earth.” (pp. 257–258)

So, if we overcome our anthropocentric bias and understand human intelligence as simply one of the many possible instantiations of intelligence in our Universe, then all it takes for superintelligent machines to be a serious concern is for them to have goals misaligned with our own, and we might end up being treated by those machines much like we treat ants today — we largely don’t care about whatever might be their goals.

Importantly, those machines need not at all be rebellious — in fact, they don’t even need to be aware of what they’re doing, especially not subjectively so, or how that conflicts with the pursuits of other sentient beings.

That worries me.

How about you — what do you worry about?

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Featured photo: a pig head at a market in Lviv ( January ’18 )

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‘Trelograms’ is a wordplay between ‘telegram’ and ‘trélos’ (Greek for ‘mad’)

Trelograms: inspiration