arête RunGnosis

Sebastian Junger's Tribe: On Homecoming & Belonging is a little gem of a book. In this episode, Jason & Steve dive in & pull on various threads related to community, trauma, the myth of separation, culture & more. We intended for this discussion to be the first in a series that explores what constitutes running culture & how a warrior ethos can deepen & expand our experience of running & life.

On this episode Jason & Steve wade into the deep end as they reflect on how we are all full of shit & what we can do about it.

Your hosts reflect on the concept of groundedness & how important this concept is to all our life pursuits, especially running.

Reflections on Episode 3, The Map Is Not The Territory
Jason : I reflected mostly on the map of “career”. All the beliefs that go into this map and how profoundly and insidiously it has affected my own life. Maybe we can talk about this in this fourth episode???

About a myopic focus on outcomes and mistaking the map for the territory…I need to clean this up. It is kind of a brain dump.

We talked about how humans like to be predictive. More specifically, we like to think we can control and manipulate variables in our environment in order to achieve certain outcomes. This may be true, to an extent, under certain conditions–such as a low variable set–or when one only considers limited influence over outcomes. For example, trying to manipulate or control general or specific physiological outcomes through the structure of workouts in a training plan focuses on a (relatively) narrow variable set and yields limited control.

Where we get in trouble with problematic thinking around outcomes and control is when we think we can predict and control multi-variate outcomes like races.  In fact, I believe we over-invest our energy in focusing on things we can’t really control. Too many things are outside of our control on race day. Our outcome expectations often subsume so many of these variables that are out of our control and this sets us up for disappointment. We’d do better to focus on the variables we can control and then construct our outcome goals around those variables.

Steve: I concur whole-heartedly. 
I feel like we covered the basics pretty well.
If you want we can add the following:
One of my athletes, Alex Brenner, added a comment to the new community space dedicated to this podcast. If you want to access that site, just subscribe at rungnosis.com & we’ll add you to the community.
Alex:
Great episode! I thought it was funny when you guys started talking about consciousness and riffing on the fact that it's hard to define what is "conscious" let alone what consciousness itself is or how it's produced by the human brain. Steve says something about how the different theories of consciousness would "blow your mind," and how we shouldn't trust anybody who claims to know anything about it with certainty.That all hit close to home for me because it's the reason why I quit neuroscience! 🙃 After four years of undergraduate study and two years working in a research lab, I personally felt that the consciousness question ("The Hard Problem") is sort of a dead end as far as scientific research goes, and it serves as a pretty good launching pad for someone (me) to start exploring philosophy instead. There's no real consensus about what consciousness even is, or whether it's something that's even exclusively possessed by living organisms (well-respected figures in the field believe that all matter may possess "consciousness" and that it's not a question of *whether* something is conscious but *the degree* to which that thing is conscious). The human brain is limited by the fact that it is a piece of hardware trying to make sense of the software that comes pre-loaded on it, and I think that if we ever do make a breakthrough in terms of The Hard Problem, it'll come from an AI black-box rather than a team of neuroscientists. So now I'm in law school.
One other thing that I wanted to tack onto a was the mention of the simulation argument, because I think it's really interesting and useful in this convo. Steve mentions that Elon Musk had brought it up recently - if you're interested in digging deeper I would read Nick Bostrum and David Chalmers' ideas about it instead.
The barebones version boils down to the question "do you believe humans will ever be capable of creating highly realistic computer simulations of reality?" If you do, then the possibilities are that we 1) we do make those simulations, or 2) humanity collectively decides never to actually go ahead and create a reality simulator. If you think 1 is more lik

Your hosts discuss how maps & models need to be thoroughly examined & loosely held lest they lead us to all kinds of trouble. We unpack the concept, "the map is not the territory", for its practical utility.

One of the critically overlooked concepts for humans in general, but runners in particular, is the position we take on reality, sometimes called A Worldview. This impacts so much of what a runner deals with in training, racing & life…yet is so rarely brought forward to examine.