Being Someone Else

By Norman L. Gilbreath

Being Someone Else

If you've ever wondered what it would be like to be someone else, only better,

then this book is for you. It will increase your chances to improve your life by

presenting better options.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Norman L. Gilbreath
• Release date: Aug 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201801007

Norman L. Gilbreath

Norman Gilbreath is a member of the RAND alumni association, and is featured in diverse publications and journals such as: Solutions, a business magazine, as a contributor and advisor Scientific American (articles by Martin Gardner) The Art of Computer Programming: Volume 3 (by Knuth) The Math Book (by Pickover) Journal of Number Theory (article by Gilbreath) A Selection of Problems in the Theory of Numbers (by Sierpinski) in Polish Gilbreath’s Principles (by Muller) in German and Spanish Le Principe De Gilbreath (by Vollmer) in French Magnets and Butterflies (by Yanagawa) in Japanese Magic on Order (by Gilbreath) Second Hand Magic (by Gilbreath) Not A Sleight in Sight (by Gilbreath) Beyond Imagination (by Gilbreath) Further Beyond Imagination (by Gilbreath)

Book preview

Preface: LIVING IN CAPTIVITY

It has been said The truth will set you free. Krishnamurti said Truth is a pathless land. It seems there is no path that will set you free — you must live in captivity. But keep in mind the possibilities of life are infinite. So not limiting your life will set you free. Since being able to comprehend more worthwhile options will reduce limits on your life; there is great value in choosing a life of more worthwhile options. How can this be done?

This topic is very confrontational, since after all you are being confronted with your life. But remember any confrontation can be viewed as either a problem or as an opportunity. When the problem is you, you may wonder why other people have been able to take advantage of opportunities that you can't. Everyone cannot be exactly like everyone else, but anyone can learn many things of real value from others. Here is an example of how one person turned his problem into a very successful life. I once knew a man who wanted to do magic with playing cards, and so he practiced very hard for many years until, by the time I saw him perform, he was extremely dexterous. However, there was one strange thing about his performance, that was he spoke in a continuous monotone. This should have made the performance very boring and not that interesting to an audience — but everyone at any performance was completely entranced! I was quite amazed at his magic, and even more amazed at the strong reaction of the audience! He continued for many years as a very successful magician! After I knew him better, I realized the secret to his very powerful performances. He was bipolar! How could a great handicap like that possibly become an opportunity? Being bipolar he had to concentrate very hard on everything he did. An audience sensed his extreme concentration and concluded that what he was doing must be extremely important. The audiences were not wrong, since each performance was to live for.

I will now focus on limitations we all have, so do take it personal — these topics contain real opportunities. All our sources of information — radio, TV, magazines, and the internet — are only covering the symptoms, not the mental illness we all have. The meaning of mental illness is to have an unhealthy condition of mind. Since people falsely believe they at least consider investments seriously, let's start with a couple of examples of mental illness that investment advisors must deal with:

1) A typical investor is considering an investment offered by a very knowledgeable investment advisor when the investor finds out the fee to deal with this advisor. This fee is more than what was expected, and so the investor declines to do business with the advisor, and invests in something else. This just makes sense — right? Well, now let us get real and consider some other information the investor knew. For the last several decades the advisor's investment has made a much larger profit than the something else investment, and there is no reason to expect this comparison to change. This difference in profit far exceeds the advisor's fee! Assuming there are no other relevant conditions to be considered, clearly this decision is not an example of a healthy condition of mind.  

2) Here is another example of a competition between an advisor and a potential investor. The advisor who is very knowledgeable about investing in oil exploration has just shown to the potential investor a short excellent movie designed to promote oil exploration investing. From a vast amount of experience, the advisor knows that what happens next will make all the difference. The advisor knows: Whoever speaks first after the movie will lose. This means the advisor knows the potential investor's main concern is their fear of making a mistake, and they want any excuse not to make a decision. If the advisor speaks first the investor can use this to not make any decision, that is win! If the investor speaks first then the investor must decide what to say, and then the investor might lose! Assuming there are no other relevant conditions to be considered, clearly this decision is not an example of a healthy condition of mind.

3) Now let's consider a situation where one person must make a decision as to how much success they and some other people will have in some important endeavor. Also assume the more success this person gives themselves the less anyone else will have. In other words, the person making the decisions can be either more or less concerned with the wellbeing of the other people. While many different conditions can make a difference to the outcome, there is one factor that an extremely large number of experiments has shown to always have an impact on the outcome — the amount of concern the decision-making person has with the wellbeing of the other people will mainly depend upon whether or not a briefcase is in the room in full view of the decision-making person! In that situation the decision-making person will always give themselves much more (perhaps all) success than they give to the other persons! Clearly, this decision is not an example of a healthy condition of mind.

And these examples of mental illness are when people are making serious considerations! At least we are sometimes serious when we form important organizations, such as making sure there is no king at the top, only a President or CEO, or someone with an important title — right? And of course, these rulers always share the responsibility with adequately developed and unbiased other important people — right? If you never doubted any decision that affected other people, then sorry to have wasted your time — please return to your cave. However, if you care about having a meaningful life then the insights in Being Someone Else will set you free.

Part 1: INVENTING YOUR LIFE

... there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.

Shakespeare

I have always preferred to tell the truth, but when a person greets me with the question How are you doing? I know they do not want to hear my complete life story. So, I have never felt quite right about how to give a truthful response — until I came up with the following: With a selective memory, I am doing great. That is a very satisfying answer — unless you are asking the question to yourself! Then you need to give serious consideration to what your place in the world is — and what it could be. Life is a series of choices, and only those choices which you are aware of and understand can be chosen. If many of your apparent choices are in error, you can't seriously explore how to have choices you can’t see — right? Someone else must make that exploration — right? How about finding out what is involved in being someone else.

Here is your chance. Your life has greatly misled you — you need to escape the mind that has resulted from the very misleading experiences to which everyone is subjected. You need a mind that has a real grasp of reality. You can make your life far more meaningful by increasing your ability to comprehend more of reality, since we do not exist separate from reality but as a more or less chaotic part of it. When you wake up in the morning are you excited by what may happen next in your life? Some people are — would you like to be one of them? Never believe you cannot have a crucial role in determining your life; by far the most important understanding of any life is not what it is, but what it can become. So how can one increase their comprehension of what they can become?

This book will help you to become someone you can be really glad you are. While everything in this book is of great value, there are many situations where excellent results have been obtained without developing the awareness and understanding taught in this book. For example, in the movie Never on Sunday when a musician is considering giving up music because he can't read sheet music the heroine of the story reminds him that birds make beautiful music without reading sheet music. Serious failures are usually not the result of what we do, but what we do not do — such as not improving our ability to make better choices. Choose much better, or live much worse — this is your most important choice. You have the potential, but do you have the likelihood? That is what this book can lead you towards — a path to a life of better options.

A place in the world

Most people find a place in the world by satisfying certain wants and needs – of other people! If these wants and needs match your own you are among the lucky few. For the rest of us there is a difficult search necessary. When Krishnamurti said Truth is a pathless land he was concerned with the observation that any path restricts you from everywhere off the path, and complete truth is meant to encompass everything. And since Good is the enemy of better., a truer path will lead to somewhere better than just a good place. The real obstacle to finding truer paths can be found in unquestioned answers.

Where your mind goes, you will follow.

The reason we make so many avoidable mistakes is we prize comfort over correctness.

While prizing comfort over correctness, your life is going by.

Take a real look at your life. When you look at your life, do you see many images of creativity at work, or would such views seem too imaginary? When I was much younger, I thought that being a creative person was an optional thing: some people tend to be creative and others are more down to earth, solving their problems as they come along. But to be creative is to be imaginative, and without imagination you cannot be fully aware of your options: you will miss out on most opportunities that come your way and be much less prepared to deal with your problems. It is hard to imagine what living with increased imagination would be like.

Whenever you form a picture of something in your mind, you place that picture in a frame: the context of your past experience.

Since the purpose of imagination is to go beyond your past experience, there must be a bridge to take you from where you are to where you could be. But even if you found such a bridge, would you cross it? Probably not, as that decision to move on to a really new place would require an act of free will, and having the conditioned minds that we have will give us little actual free will in our own lives.

We live accidental lives, caught in the frame of the past, with a fear of change.

Our defense mechanisms have so restricted our options that we can no longer afford free will. But lacking a real free will keeps us locked in the frame of ourselves, looking out at bridges to what we could be, and thinking it's too bad that we can never see for ourselves what is on the other side of those bridges – and that is a self-unfulfilling prophesy. Clearly you need a better life – and that is what this book Being Someone Else offers.

The world is changing faster and faster - are you? Consider that you can't even consider choices of which you are not aware or do not really understand. This book is the only comprehensive book on how to develop the combined abilities of awareness and understanding. This is not just a collection of techniques to help you think better; it is how all people actually think whenever they use their minds intelligently. Not learning how to be more intelligent is not an intelligent option. We seldom regret what we have done so much as we regret what we have not done. Improving how you think is something you will never regret.

Mind in Transition

A Work in Progress

Your life is a work in progress — how is that working out for you?

If you have an absolutely great life then you probably don't need help, unless you have a run of bad luck. For those of us who are not counting on good luck to make our lives great, let's look at life as a journey, and you are about to be given a map for your journey. But first you must learn how to read the map. Since it is your journey, you must know yourself and the terrains you will travel. This material is all about where we came from, what we are, and where we are going — with this knowledge we can better prepare for our future.

A crucial part of any preparation is to know your enemy — and the enemy of your future self is certain aspects of your current self — those tendencies to accept conditions as they seem, without serious considerations of how things actually are and how things could be. But also, the best friend of your future self is certain aspect of your current self, aspects of potential evolutions. And so, we will be looking at meanings of life, chance, evolution, and thinking — all the basics of our existence. Let's get to know ourselves, and our place in reality — then our lives will be much more meaningful.

The Meaning of Life

The next three sentences will explain the meaning of life — and the rest of our lives will be our attempt to explain those next three sentences.

Life is only found on the edge of chaos. With too much control, life will stagnate; with too little, it will fall apart. And so, a continuing growth process seems to be one where conditions are constantly generating exploration and conserving structure.

Life is a process of change, and the kinds of change that gives purpose to the life process have been characterized as change, which adapts to shifting goals. The terms adapt and goals suggest an analogy to the working of the human mind. However, life can occur without the influence of the human mind, but not without the influence of what possibilities exist. And so, to include the effects of cumulative probabilities, and remove the need for mental awareness of goals, we can replace the phase adapts to shifting goals with the phase accumulates tendencies for new involvements.

Now life can be characterized as change, which accumulates tendencies for new involvements.

And change means when things are one way and then become another way.

But things are no more or less than all their relationships to all other things.

(This insight is over three thousand years old, by the way.) And so, change is when relationships become different. Often this creates a new type of relationship that is more than a combination of old relationships. These new types of relationships are new types of involvement. When these changes are a continuing growth process then it is called evolution.

We are about to consider both natural and artificial evolution. But first, to prevent our understanding of evolution being too much a matter of chance, we best take a closer look at chance.

Chance

To Be or Not to Be

Since we have a basic need to predict what will happen under various circumstances, we want to rule out chance whenever possible. But what is chance? Chance has been defined as the intersection of independent causal sequences. But there are good reasons to believe there are no independent causal sequences. Remember, things are no more or less than all their relationships to all other things. It seems it is easier to define the concept of not chance. Not chance is when there is a continuing pattern to what happens.

The problem with the concept of chance is that chance can sometimes be excluded (by a continuing pattern of events), but never proven; maybe there is an unknown pattern. This leaves us with a need to discover all the continuing patterns we can. In our search for continuing patterns, we use the techniques of statistics.

Statistics

Whenever we are concerned with what is happening and what might be happening, we gather data and analyze the data. Although this is done with the assumption of no relevant changes in circumstances, given sufficient time (number of events) there is bound to be relevant changes in circumstances. In the meantime, let's consider the Central Limit theorem. The Central Limit theorem is one of the basic reasons that statistics is useful. In many situations data will eventually center around a specific value.

Two important consequences of this theorem are:

1) Precision increases as the square root of the number of samples.

2) Total number of scenarios with a given result forms a bell-shaped curve. This is called a Gauss curve, after the great mathematician Carl Gauss. Any process with independent increments will eventually come to a balance in a Gauss curve.

If we explore pure mathematics, we encounter many occurrences of the Gauss curve. Any integer that has no divisors, except for itself and one, is called a prime. All non-prime integers are the product of multiplying primes together. To consider the distribution of prime factors of integers we can plot the number of prime factors for all the integers up to any given integer. The resulting plot will be a Gauss curve.

If we explore natural phenomenon, we also often encounter many occurrences of the Gauss curve. Perhaps the best-known application of the Central Limit theorem is to the phenomenon of Brownian motion. Brownian motion is the name given to erratic movement of microscopic particles suspended in a liquid. This motion is due to random impacts of the liquid molecules on the particles. A plot of the trajectories of the particles will be a Gauss curve. These trajectories are continuous but have no tangent at any point.

Mathematical functions with no tangents have no rate of change at any point — and in the past have been considered anomalies. They have turned out to occur very frequently in nature.

When a system over time (or a series of iterations) approaches a locus of possible states, which is a subset of all possible states, this locus is called an attractor. A transformation that expands the possible states in some dimensions and contracts the possible states