Check Kahneman, Gilovich, Medvec on old people and regret.
One aspect of this is similar to what Murname is getting at in the Plains, where the sameness of the landscape prompts greater sensitivity to the differences that are there.
Different attitudes to risk somehow makes what they didnt do more salient? In what ways are the nearly dead similar to us and what ways are they different? The young but terminally ill vs the old?
I think cases where knowing what to do vs. actually doing the right thing being the bottleneck may come apart somewhat.
Psychedelic users getting persistent personal benefits but little ability to create social change or maybe even get social benefits for themselves or predict more accurately suggests simply removing a barrier to accuracy - e.g. over active dmn, isn’t enough to get benefits. Something similar may be the case with immortality and wellbeing, plausibly the ability to relate to mortals or coordinate with them. So the idea is that shared limitations of mortality, linear thought, etc. actually grant us a kind of social knowledge?
Unusual lacks of experience, like not having sex, could be just as informative and exploratory as experiences.
This is a particular application of the fact that the normal mind will always have an object if its allowed to, so quietness and loneliness are no more empty from the inside than crowds and fame.
Trying to empty the mind is like trying to empty a cup submerged in water.
- Sounds lovely, but what about jhanas?
Hazlitt - A sage philosopher, who was not a very wise man, said, that he should like very well to be young again, if he could take his experience along with him. This ingenious person did not seem to be aware, by the gravity of his remark, that the great advantage of being young is to be without the weight of experience, which he would fain place upon the shoulders of youth, and which never comes too late with years.
Is there a connection to Keat’s negative capability somehow?
- I had not a dispute but a disquisition with Dilke, upon various subjects; several things dove-tailed in my mind, and at once it struck me what quality went to form a Man of Achievement, especially in Literature, and which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason—Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge.
- Does negative capability link to Weilian/Murdochian attention too? Korsgaard and Weil on connecting internalist and externalist virtue