Self Improvement

This has been playing around in my mind quite a while now, why do I have such a low readership on my blog? I mean, I’m very happy that I’ve got a couple of regulars that come in and read my ramblings, but what can I do to turn a couple into a couple more? I doesn’t need to be a torrent, but the current trickle is a little below what I would like.

Is it that I’m not as good of a writer as I’d like to believe? Are my sentences too convoluted and complicated? Am I being too wordy in how I write? Are my topics inaccessible? Are my ideas just too theoretical and just not interesting? Do I dictate too much and ask too little? Is reading my work more of a chore than something people do for fun? Is my layout too basic and not eye catching enough? Do I not try hard enough to redirect traffic from other websites to my own? Do I take myself too seriously? Or is it that what I talk about just not interesting?

For that matter, why do of the few readers I get only so few decide to comment? I’m very happy to both Pyrrhus and Banana for their comments, but it seems like for the most part anybody else that stumbles across my blog, even repeatedly, chooses to remain only an observer. Is that just the nature of most readers, or is there another underlying reason for that?

Do people think their comments would not be appreciated? Are people afraid of my reaction, or that of others? Do I not respond frequently and suitably enough to the comments I do get? Or are people just too busy to comment?

I don’t ask all these things because I want your pity, or because I am upset at the low readership and commenting, I do it only to find out how other people believe I could improve my blog. I will take any ideas you might have under consideration, how ever outlandish or critical.

Right now I feel I’m writing largely into a vacuum and though I really enjoy maintaining this blog, I imagine it might be even better if people provoke me through their own thoughts and ideas. I have always really appreciated those people that have taken the time to read and respond, even if I might not have shown it or argued against what ever they have said. The fact that I argue against your opinion means that you’ve provoked me and I’m immensely grateful for that.

So, if you have any suggestions please shout them out and if you don’t, well thank you for reading what I have to say.

The Penny Drops

I’ve spent today running around looking for a cheap ticket to Colombo, Sri Lanka. Why? Well, because a mate of mine has convinced me to first come visit him there, before I move on to India. It seemed like a great idea at the time, but of course all great ideas have drawbacks. The biggest draw back of this plan is that all the flights to Colombo are more expensive than the ones to India. Add to that the fact that I’ll still need to go from Sri Lanka to India, somehow, and it all adds to the cost.

It’s all worth it in the end, of course, but now I’ve got to start watching the pennies. I’m going to have to stop throwing money around (as I’ve kind of been doing for the last few months) and instead go back on the cheap-cheap. The only real problem is that it’s hard to go back to that style of living, once you’re used to a slightly more upscale style.

I’ve started working in beer quotients. I think to myself, ‘how many jugs of beer would this be?’ and then, generally, find that it really isn’t that bad. A lonely planet for India? Two jugs of beer. A visa? Four jugs. One week stop over in Sri Lanka? 10. That may sound like a lot, but I’ve paid for that many jugs in one night, before. It seems so ridiculous to have thrown money away like that on those nights and to not do something probably more enjoyable now.

Still, the lesson must be learned, otherwise the trip will be a great deal shorter than I mean it to be. I must reign in my spending. To start with I think it might be a good idea to buy less jugs of beer. That might be a challenge, thought. With all the people that suddenly want to say good bye. Let’s just hope they take pity on this soon to be unemployed, penny pinching traveller.

Also, of course, I’m shopping around for cheaper tickets. Such website as Zuji and Airfares.com.sg are being ransacked for the cheapest possible alternative. If I’ve read it all correctly, then it’s possible I might have found a ticket that goes for just under 700. That’s a great deal better than the 800 that I’ve been quoted in most other places. Of course, that too might be too good to be true. Heck, so far I’ve only spent a few hours looking. I’ve got a few weeks more. I’m sure it will all work out and, more importantly, that it will be a great deal of fun working it out.

The next six months will confront me with far more difficult problems than this one and, truth be told, that’s part of the reason I’m doing it. A trial by fire will ultimately harden iron into steel (yes, or crack it beyond repair, but let’s try to be positive, shall we?)

Post Rationalisation

Post rationalisation is the act of applying logic to a choice or action that wasn’t rational to begin with. It’s where we try to make ourselves believe that an act was well thought out and based on intellect, when in truth the action was purely emotional and instinctual. What often happens is that we get more information and time to think, after the fact, but then slot that in before the choice we made. We do this rather more frequently than we realise.

The reason we don’t realise is because our memories are so untrustworthy. The fact is that every time you remember something you bring it out from your memory, flip it around in your mind, analyse it, possibly change it, and then put it back. The next time you bring back up that same memory you actually bring back up this new memory, with all the alterations and modifications that you made last time. Basically, you remember remembering, rather than the original memory.

So every time you sit there and think about what happened, you’re actually – in all likelihood – changing the memory ever so slightly; which is in many ways exactly what post rationalisation is.

In the BBC show ‘Child of Our Times’ there is an extreme example of this: Some parents are seated and shown pictures. All except one are directly taken form their past, the last one is a doctored picture, showing them as children standing by a hot air balloon. They are all asked to tell what they remember when they see each picture. The first time they see this picture, they are all dumbfounded, as they have no memory of a hot air balloon. When they are asked to repeat the experiment a few weeks later, however, suddenly many of them have memories of their air balloon adventures and not just any memory, but very specific memories. One remembers the sound of the burner, another remembers looking through the cracks, and so forth. They’ve created new memories.

So what does this mean?

Well, basically it means that we’re not half as clever as we give ourselves credit for. We believe we’re logical, reasonable and rational, while in truth we are emotional, instinctual and unreasonable. The reason we can fool ourselves so well is because we sit around and change our memories afterwards.

What’s more, our memories often can’t really be trusted. We’ve often enough remembered with friends, only to find that we all remember it completely differently. At the time, you were certain you were right, as were they. Chances are that all of you were wrong and the original incident has been lost to history. That certainly gives a new definition to changing your mind, doesn’t it?

I’m not saying all this to make you despair, however. Most of your memories will probably still be pretty close to the original incident. You should just always be aware that they might not be and act accordingly. Be careful, after all, only an absolute fool is absolutely confident.

In Logic We Trust?

How far can we trust logic? It’s held up by many a philosopher as the ultimate tool to discern the nature of the universe, but I’m starting to have my doubts about how far we can take this belief. We base the logical model that we use on the visible universe around us and thereby assume that the rest of the universe must operate in a similar way.

For example, logic is built on the premise that B leads to C. This is, in many ways, one of the big problems we currently have in a lot of our reasoning. We say ‘Since B leads to C and B must have something that led to it, let’s say A, then what came before A? And, while we’re at it, what came before that which came before A, ad infinitum?’

This is a paradox. If there was always something that moved what we’re looking at, then time is infinite, but time can’t be infinite (or so we think) because then we would never arrive at the point in time that we’re at right now (as that would take infinitely long).

This, in many people’s books, is one of the strongest arguments for God. After all, since everything needs to be pushed by something, then something must be the Prime Mover and we should call that God. Of course, that is just as paradoxical, as the next necessary question then becomes ‘well, who moved God?’

Obviously, the moment we descend into these kinds of paradoxes something has gone wrong. Now there are two things that can have gone wrong, either the universe is wrong, or our model for predicting how the universe works is wrong. Now I’m willing to put my neck out on this one and say that it is our model and not the universe that has it wrong.

Simply put, I believe our model is three dimensional in a four dimensional world, (or is that four dimensional in a 13 dimensional world?). The entire model is based on direct experience from the world around us, which for the longest time we thought was the truth. Now, however, we have to come to grips with the realisation that it is only a very small part of the truth and that we haven’t taken the rest of reality into account.

For example, on the subatomic scale, many of the laws of logic as we understand them fall apart. Such basic premises as ‘a thing exists in one place only’ (essential for such arguments as ‘he can’t have done it, as he was with me the whole time’) and ‘every action as an equal but opposite reaction’ (essential for such arguments as ‘So you’re saying he shot the bullet that killed him?’) don’t hold true anymore. Subatomic particles can exist in multiple places, in fact they can exist in an infinite number of places simultaneously (while still being one particle). Some of them can also jump, for no apparent reason, from one place to another without passing through the intervening space between.

There is even talk of particles being able to influence things in the past. Let me say that again, because it’s pretty big: a particle from this moment in time might be able to influence particles from a few moments ago. If that’s true, that turns B to C on its head. Hell, even if these jumps were microscopic, as long as there were enough of them in a straight line back through time, it might mean that the original event that causes the Big Bang, for instance, hasn’t even happened yet.

Obviously, our current logical model has not yet figured out how to take these things into account and, for a large part, tries its best to ignore them. That’s understandable, as otherwise it’s very possible that the entire logical model falls apart and then where will we be?

Well, for one thing we might no longer be enslaved to a model that isn’t, in fact, half as accurate as we’re led to believe.

Waking Dream

For the last couple of weeks I’ve been trying to train myself to sleep less. It has actually worked out pretty well. I now manage to go on an average of five to six hours a night, rather than the former eight I needed. The trick, I realised, is to reduce the amount you sleep gradually.

What I’ve been doing is just staying up a little later at night. I began with an extra half hour, when I had adjusted to that, I added another half hour to my waking world time. This works the best if you’ve got a time you have to get up, as then you can’t compensate for the extra time you stay up at night be sleeping in during the morning.

The thing is, that pretty quickly you notice that you’re only slightly more sleepy on five or six hours than you were on eight. I’m willing to accept a little bit of sleepiness for an extra two to three hours a day. That means you get an extra day every week and a half! Furthermore, I’m of the opinion that soon enough that sleepiness too will fade and while it’s still around I’ll compensate it with coffee (Sweet, sweet coffee…) and micro naps.

The only big drawback I’m noticing, at this point, is that it’s a little harder for me to both concentrate and remember. It is far easier for me to get distracted than before, which is probably the reason why I’m having trouble remembering things (as I’m just not paying attention when I’m first told them). This is very unfortunate, especially if you’re trying to absorb new information from your students, books or dates (I’ve found dates get quite annoyed when you ask the same question more than five times.)

What use is more time if you’re going to remember less of it?

Maybe it’s that we can only remember so much stuff per day and if you take extra time, then the amount of memory you have gets spread thinner over the hours you’re awake. That would fit in nicely with the once proposed theory that sleep is the time during which you process all the things you’ve experienced during the day. Only so much can be processed during one REM cycle, right?

I guess it’s just a matter of waiting and seeing. Hopefully this side effect will also fade and I’ll be back to my good old self, plus two extra hours a day. If they don’t, well then I’ll have to consider the entire situation very carefully, once again.

My experiment continues.

Choosing my future

I think what I’m really interested in is the human condition. For a while now I’ve been trying to figure out what it was that I was going to study when I went back to university. I mean, I knew I was going back to learn more, I just hadn’t decided what it was that I was going to learn. Now, slowly, I’m starting to figure out what it is.

The books I enjoy reading most, it seems, are those that talk about the human mind, with all its virtues and foibles. It doesn’t matter whether I’m reading philosophy, politics, economics, psychology or seduction, what I always take away and enjoy most from those books is lessons about how we operate and function.

That is what I want to study. I want to study us. Of course, in a roundabout way everything in the social sciences is about us (some would even argue that everything we study is indirectly about us in some way or another), but that’s not what I mean; what I mean is that I want to cut out all the crap and go right to the heart of the matter, the study of us.

That would be psychology. Which is kind of funny, because of the three directions I studied during university (Sociology, Psychology and Political Science) it was psychology that I enjoyed the least. It was too science oriented for me, at the time. I preferred the theory of sociology and political science. Of course, that’s now changed. My mind has become far more analytical and appreciative of scientific research. I’ve come to realise that armchair based thought is great for finding the questions, but isn’t that well suited for doing anything more than philosophising about the answers.

What’s more, many of the questions that we formerly thought were firmly in the field of the theoretical and the philosophical are now being shown to be in the field of the medical and the scientific. The human brain, it turns out, can be subjected to experimentation, just like everything else.

I think the area I would like to focus on is the area of social psychology, as in what is it that happens to us individually when we are in groups. I think, as things stand, that we haven’t thought enough about how we operate on a group level (though recently a great deal of research is being done in that direction), while ultimately we are very much social creatures. I’d even go so far as to say that our ability to socially interact as well as we do has given us our one true advantage over the other animals on this little mud ball.

So that is what it looks like I will go back to Holland to study. That is unless, of course, I get an opportunity to go somewhere else. I’d love to study elsewhere; somewhere, where I haven’t lived before.

But Holland should be alright. It is still, in some strange and bizarre way, the place I call home, even if I haven’t been back in five years.

Paradigm Shift

I’m standing at the edge of the light. Behind me is the known, the safe, the well lit and the well explored. In front of me is darkness, with shadows outnumbering the light and fantasies outnumbering the facts. The street lights end here. They don’t go any further than this. Beyond this point I have not yet trod.

I think it is slowly starting to settle in that I’m leaving. Something of especial significance since the chance that I’ll come back has dropped quite significantly since last week Thursday. These might well be the last few weeks in Singapore, if not ever, then at least for a long time.

I’m noticing that I’m changing. I’m altering into something new again. The cocoon is tearing and something is emerging. Not everything that grows inside chrysalises is always good, however.

We will have to wait and see.

Of course, when I’m running around in India that change will accelerate, though, in fact, the trip is already acting like a catalyst; as my behaviour is certainly already being influenced by the fast approaching end. I don’t care half as much as I used to. A great deal of the stuff going on around me just doesn’t really mean that much to me anymore.

‘Is it worth the effort?’ has been a question much on my mind. Should I really spend my time trying to fix this/ be nice about this/ be considerate/ go out of my way/ smooth out the rough patches/ resolve this, or should I just occupy my time with something more important or enjoyable, instead?

It is this thing, inside, where I just can’t be bothered. It is kind of nice way of going through life, though admittedly it is a bit cruel to the people around me.

But how nice do I really need to be?

I mean, how many of these people will I stay in touch with? How many will I still get letters from a year from now? Who will still matter a decade down the line?

Of course, the weird thing is that you’ll never know. You never know who you’re still talking to ten years from now. There are always these stories of people that end up being best mates despite everything. Everybody else has left, or died, or changed; but that unlikeliest of friends still remains.

Anyways, that shouldn’t be a motivational force.

But then, what should be?

‘When you’re feeling guilty there is nothing to worry about, it is when you stop feeling guilty that you should start worrying’

White Crow

The second idea I’d like to talk about, based on the book ‘Black Swan’, is that of the non-scalable and the scalable, better known as ‘Mediocristan’ and ‘Extremistan’ in the book.

I’m going to describe it the same way Mr. Taleb did because, after all, ‘why say something badly when somebody else has already said it better’?

The best way to understand these two concepts is to consider two groups of average people of about a thousand each. In the first group we add up all the weight of the entire group. Then we add another person to the group, but this person is the absolute fattest person in the world. How much of the total weight of the group will be captured by the fat man? Probably no more than ½ a percent. This is something, but far from everything.

Now take the second group of people and say that all their money has been added together, after which we add the richest person in the world. How large a percentage of the money in the group will belong to Bill Gates? In all likelihood it will be more 95% of the total wealth.

The first example above is of that which is non-scalable (in that there is an upper limit that one person can have or control), while the second example is scalable (in that there is no such upper limit).

In a non-scalable world you can draw conclusions from a general set of people, but this is a great deal harder in a scalable world, as you never know when the next person (or event) that comes along will throw all your former predictions completely out of whack.

In terms of work it also means that a small percentage of people can control a large percentage of the wealth. This is all fine and dandy, except if you’re not one of those people. Scalable work (like writing, acting, singing and portfolio management) is great if you’re successful, but it’s pretty terrible if you’re not. Non-scalable work, on the other hand (like accounting, dentistry, teaching and cooking), might not make you as rich overall, but gives you a much greater chance of at least being well off. After all, how ever good you are, you can only do so much work in a day and must leave the rest for the others in your industry.

What’s more, most of the world works in this scalable fashion (like the stock market, for instance). It normally gravitates towards a certain average, but then sometimes these disproportionately large outliers hit and completely screw up all possible predictions. You don’t want to be at the wrong end of one of those, as it might well be the last time you’re at the wrong end of anything.

Ugly Duckling

I’ve been incredibly lucky with the books I’ve picked up recently. Though I did it largely on luck (and based on the reviews written on the back) I think that about one in two books so far has turned out to be enjoyable and enlightening.

Now I’m reading the book ‘Black Swan’ by Nasim Nicholas Taleb and it has been both highly original and highly entertaining. I haven’t encountered his way of looking at the world before, which wouldn’t be that terrific by itself, but what he has to say also seems relevant and at least in part believable.

Today I only want to talk about one thing he talks about, namely his idea of ‘Invisible Evidence’, which is best understood through the following thought experiment.

Imagine there is a group of 10,000 people, who are all courageous, risk takers, intelligent, socially capable and motivated. They all try to start their own business and make themselves at least well off, if not rich. Now, imagine that over the next year about 50% ends up being lucky and another 50% ends up unlucky. The unlucky people drop away (in this simplified world picture), while the 5,000 keep going. They work for another year and yet again about 50% is unlucky, while the other 50%’s lucky streak keeps going.

Now there is 2,500 left, the same again, 1,250, the same again, 625, and so forth. After about 10 years, or so, there will be only about 10 of these guys left. These guys will have been wildly successful for the last 10 years and, by all accounts, will probably have saved up a pretty penny. These guys are sitting very pretty.

They then sit down and write (and more importantly publish) books about how pretty they are sitting and what they did to get there. In the mean time, those guys that weren’t successful are forgotten, with no publisher interested in publishing their work, if they are even willing to write it. People then go out and buy these books, thinking that this is the way to be successful. After all, these ten guys went and made it this way! But they forget that the chance to be successful using this method is only 0.1%!

In other words, the odds of being making it in this way are extremely small, yet thousands of people, unaware of how things work, follow these ways avidly, for years at a time.

People look at the positive evidence (i.e. that which proves their belief right), but don’t look for the negative (as in that evidence that proves their beliefs wrong). As a result they believe something is highly likely that, in fact, is highly unlikely.

Fascinating, isn’t it? But wait, there is more! I’m just not going to write about it today. I’ll write about it soon, so check back often; or, better yet, go buy the book.

On creativity

It seems like creativity is the process of making a leap from one idea to another, without being able to explain the leap that just took place. Creativity is about originality, which is the act of doing something new. Creativity springs from the subconscious. I therefore wonder if we are capable of something new when we are fully aware of our own mind.

The unknown aspect of creativity is what makes it such an important facet of our psyche. We can’t explain creativity, nor can we fully understand it, so the logical question that follows is: if we truly understand ourselves, can we still be creative?

For that matter, would an AI be capable of the creative process? I mean, ultimately an AI might very well come up with some very original connections between things, which we ourselves never realised. Is that, then, creative or is it just because an AI is alien?

But what if the mind of the creative only comes to these leaps of creativity because their way of thinking is different from our own? Isn’t that, in many ways, exactly what creativity is? The process of making a leap to the left, where everybody before has made a leap to the right?

For that matter, if I make a creative leap in a direction that is completely new for me, but others in another place have already made that leap (unbeknownst to me), am I then still creative? You might answer yes, but the problem is that creativity is defined as doing something original, while my idea can no longer be seen as truly original, at least by other’s standards.

Is there a need for creativity to be aesthetically pleasing, or can it be disturbing instead? In a way recent art has already answered that question, but I still feel it is worth asking again. Is the psychopath creative?

Can creativity occur everywhere? Most people would answer yes, so then is it necessary for a group of people that are trying to promote creativity to pursue creativity everywhere, from accounting to astrology?

Is creativity always, by definition, a positive force? Can it ever be bad for people to display creativity? Do we really want our accountants to engage in ‘creative accounting’ or the judge to engage in ‘creative judgement’? Should we demand that everybody try to be creative?

Isn’t it ultimately our insistent need to ask questions that ends up making so many of us unhappy?

I recently read that creativity starts with asking the question ‘why?'

But is asking ‘why’ just the prelude to being creative, is it the provoker of creativity, or is it the very act of being creative?

For that matter, why are so many of us so hung up on creativity?

Unpoltical

The book ‘Unspeak’, by Steven Poole, is well written, intelligent and thought out. Unfortunately, it is also annoyingly political, which really grinds my gears. The book is concerned with how people from around the world have twisted the English language and euphemisms so that they impart a specific political message or ideological belief without the listener even being aware of it.

He discusses such words as ‘Pro-life’ (which implies that anybody on the other side must automatically be ‘Anti-life’, thereby demonising them and making any proper argument impossible) and ‘Terrorist Suspect’ (By putting terrorist first the need to prove anything has been removed, as the person is a terrorist first and suspect second). What he has to say about these topics is definitely well thought out, the problem is that he then tries to use similar tactics on you as he’s attacking in his book.

Steven Poole is obviously left wing in his beliefs, but he never comes out and says that directly. Instead, he makes certain that it is mainly the Unspeak of the Right that he attacks, bringing forward very few examples of Unspeak as they happen on the Left. Now, it is highly possible that the Right uses more Unspeak than the Left, I’m not arguing that, but by his reckoning the Left uses barely any. That just isn’t true.

Argument through omission is just another method of twisting language and ideas to convince an audience. What’s more, by pushing his book as a treatise on euphemisms, rather than as a politically motivated book, he tries to sneak in his politics under the radar.

Politics by stealth.

As a person who is so concerned with the message people impart in what language they use and what they say, he seems to be blind to his own leanings.

I believe that this type of book should be apolitical. It should serve to arm us with the tools to see how language is being twisted around us and then allow us to use that skill to make up our own minds about the political arena.

To give kudos where kudos is due, Unspeak did do that to some extent. I just wish I didn’t have to use the tools I’m learning on the very book that is trying to teach them to me.

Photosynth

A few days ago a friend sat me down and made me watch this video. In it, Microsoft shows us some software they’ve recently acquired. The software is called ‘Photosynth’ and it is absolutely amazing.

First the demonstration shows how the software can be used to zoom in, indefinitely, on an object. Objects are no longer restrained by the dimensions of the eye (which can only go down so far and out so far). Instead, a page of a hundred photos can be shown and we can zoom in on one detail and go down so far that was a dot before, now fills the whole screen and is revealed to contain, say, an entire book in digital form.

I really can’t do it a great deal of justice in words and instead suggest you watch it.

The second part of the demonstration shows something equally amazing. Apparently, with new software, it is now possible to trawl the internet and have this software recognise images and then put together a compilation of images that are related to a specific object. In the case of the demonstration they use the Notre Dame, but it can obviously be used for a great deal more than that.

Astonishingly, the computer on its own can find images related to the Notre Dame and then calculate in a three dimensional framework where those pictures would have been taken around the actual object. That is absolutely stunningly amazing and it has huge repercussions for image linking and the internet’s interconnectivity, with any picture you take being automatically linked to other people’s pictures of the same area.

The thing is, though I realised that this software was very important in a positive sense, I also understood that there is a far more sinister way to use this software. Namely, it can be used to invade our privacy in a way so far unimagined.

Right now, around the world, governments and companies are putting up ever more cameras to watch the going ons of citizens and employees. Fortunately for us, even though they might put up ever more cameras, the people that watched those cameras could only process so much information. If you wanted to process more information about an area, you needed more people, which then would cause a breakdown in communication and cost a great deal more money. This protected the individual to at least a certain extent. Big activities would be noticed, but us small fries could still do what we liked in relative security.

Now (or very soon) that will no longer be the case. Give the computer enough computational power (something that’s much easier to do than to hire more people and have them watch screens) and it can find whatever you want it to find. Looking for somebody? Just give the computer a couple of pictures of that person and it will scan all cameras, internet pictures and even sketches to find that person. You would never be anonymous again.

Some would then argue that that’s for the better, seeing as it could be used to find criminals and other dangerous individuals, but what happens when that kind of software gets in the hands of oppressive dictatorships? What happens if a group uses this software for political ends?

It would mean the end of any possible opposition. I don’t know about you, but that worries me slightly.

Afresh: (adverb) anew; once more; again: to start afresh.

It used to be that every time I moved I was running away from something. I left Holland, those many years ago, as much to get away as to go somewhere. Every time we moved as a child, I was allowed to try again and, believe me, at that time I needed as many new starts as I could get.

Every time I moved I was able to reinvent myself. I was no longer saddled with any preconceptions except for the ones that already existed in my own head. So I did. In the beginning, because I wasn’t that experienced in the reinventing game, I made small changes, but as I grew older the changes grew bigger and more pronounced.

Moving from Holland to Thailand and then from Thailand to Singapore produced some big changes, as did my move from Singers to Australia and back again (though admittedly, because I wasn't alone the changes were more gradual).

If people from my ancient past saw me today, they might have some trouble recognising me. Growth is change and every time I’ve changed places I’ve grown a great deal.

But that isn’t the reason that I’m moving this time. I’m not so much moving to reinvent myself, but more to confirm who I am.

The only reason we reinvent ourselves is because we are unhappy with who we are.

You see, we’ve created this interesting idea that growth, in all shapes and forms, is good. Economic growth, personal growth, spiritual growth, emotional growth, physical growth, intellectual growth, etc. There are very few incidents where the word ‘growth’ is associated with anything bad.

People forget, though, that cancer is a growth.

Uncontrolled growth is undesirable. We need to guide our growth and, in some ways more importantly, come to understand what we have become before we change further into what we want to be. After all, the harder we concentrate on growing, the less satisfied we will be with who we are right now.

So I’m moving to spend some time being satisfied with who I am and where I am in my life.

And I immediately imagine some of you asking ‘so why can’t I do that in Singapore?’ Well, the easy answer to that is that I don’t have to and I don’t want to. The difficult answer is a bit more involved, but starts with one word: Perspective.

As I mentioned a couple of posts ago, it is very hard to understand a condition while being right in the middle of it. At that time I was talking about sanity, but it applies to everything else, as well. It is hard to understand work while you’re employed, it is hard to understand a country while you’re still living there and it is hard to understand your own views without trying to understand the ideas that oppose your own. This idea is more commonly captured in the idiom ‘You don’t know what you’ve got, until you’ve lost it.’

So I’m going to lose Singapore, lose the life I’ve built up, lose my friends and lose my rhythm. At the same time, I’ll be immersed in an ‘alien’ landscape, with different beliefs, different values and different traditions.

I’m starting afresh to lose myself. I’m going away to find out what this place means. I’m going to extremes to understand the norms. I’m physically moving to find spiritual equilibrium. I’m going exploring to understand better what I already have.

And lastly, unmentioned so far but just as important, I’m going because it might well be the last time I can.

Nervous

I’ve just finished typing out my resignation letter. I will hand it in tomorrow, if all goes well. After that I’ll just have a month left at my current place of employment, a few weeks after that I’ll be off to India.

Before I go I’ll have to pack all my things here and put them in boxes, as it is very possible that I won’t actually come back here in the foreseeable future. Fortunately, I don’t have that much.

I will have no home, no next destination, no clear goal and no safe haven. I will be, for all intended purposes, homeless and adrift. I will be going, alone, to a continent where I’ve never been, among a people whose language I don’t speak and into a society whose culture I don’t understand. This, as you might suspect, makes me just a little bit nervous.

But that’s okay.

If you’re not frequently a little bit nervous and uneasy, you’re not really living. If you’re not constantly a little bit worried and a little bit out of your depth, you’re not trying hard enough.

There’s a great deal more to life than being comfortable.

If you’re constantly comfortable, you’ll never make a difference.

Of course, whether you want to make a difference is up to you. I’ve come to realise that many people are content being comfortable. Good on them.

If you ask me, comfort is overrated.

But then, if you ask them excitement is overrated.

That’s cool. That way, there will at least be some places in the world left for people like me to explore.

Some reasons for us to feel nervous.

Freedom in Retreat

A great deal of what I’ve heard and read recently have mixed together to form a rather disturbing realisation: globally, individual freedom is in retreat. I don’t think it’s actually a new realisation for me; it’s just that it’s one that I had forgotten about for quite a while. It was a shock to realise, once again, that this is actually the way it is. What is more, the last time I argued this position it was based more on extremist rhetoric, while now I believe my understanding is more nuanced.

Still, where ever my starting point, I find I cannot avoid the conclusion that individual freedom has been badly mauled in the last half-decade. Democracy, for example, has been seriously undermined on the global stage. In Asia democracy is obviously not doing half as well as was originally thought. The economist recently published a beautiful little map that showed what countries could be considered truly democratic in South East Asia. There was only one country, Indonesia, and Indonesia is a mess.

In the Middle East democracy has also been seriously undermined, especially by the actions of foreign democracies. Many Iraqis, for instance, now no longer care what kind of government system they get, as long as they get peace. In other countries, including Egypt, Syria, Turkey and Lebanon, democratic process has been weakened by alterations to the constitution or just simple power grabs.

Eastern Europe’s governmental reforms have also stalled, with incompetent, ignorant and nationalistic governments doing as little as possible to make their countries more free and more open.

And then, of course, there is the resurgent Russia; which is about as democratic as your average crime family, but then with nuclear bombs. Democracy hasn’t just stalled there, but actually been remade in Russia’s image: ‘Yes, of course you can vote, you can either vote for my man A or my man B!’

And this is, of course, ignoring such things as the steady but gradual decline of international law. The Geneva Convention has been unilaterally attacked from multiple directions (in terms of protection from torture, access to representation, protection from oppression and once assumed innocence till proven guilty).

Why is this happening? And if individual citizens are no longer able to make these decision, then who is making those now? Is it governments? International business? The elite?

Does this all mean that the individual matters less in this modern world? Or is it that through chicanery and trickery the few have taken the power away from the many? If those few are so good at tricking the many, are they also better at making decisions than the many, or is this a bad trend?

If it is a bad trend, then why aren’t the masses speaking out against it?

And one of the most important questions on everybody's minds right now, should we be pursuing freedom or prosperity?

Beyond Reason

I’ve always been fascinated by the mind and memory, especially in terms the two no longer functioning correctly; a concept often better known as insanity (though not necessarily always). As a result, movies about the mind – such as ‘A Beautiful Mind’, ‘Memento’, ‘Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind’ and ‘Fight Club’ – have always struck a cord with me.

This became doubly true through my own brush with insanity, about a year ago. For a few hours I, unfortunately, went almost completely out of my skull. In hindsight it was probably a panic attack and I was actually told as much at the time, but all I knew was that I was absolutely and completely losing it. I felt that, for all intended purposes, I was no longer in control of myself except for a teeny, tiny corner at the back of my mind.

The fear of loosing that tiny little corner was actually the entire force that was feeding back into the insanity that was trying to overwhelm me (yes, that is a convoluted sentence). The panic attack I had was basically a self replicating cycle. My fear of what was happening made what was happening worse and last longer, which, in turn, made me more afraid and in that way things just kept going around and around.

Those around me tried their best to help me, but ultimately they were (and felt) powerless. It was probably in many ways almost as fearful an experience for them as it was for me.

Since that time I’ve become far more appreciative of what it means to be insane and, though occasionally I still scare myself witless with the fear that it might come back, I still think that the experience was worth it. You see, insanity is not something that you can describe, it is only something you can experience.

I can appreciate how horrible it must be to be permanently and completely out of your mind. The thing is, when you hit that stage, logic no longer works. The only time that common sense is in anyway useful is when we’re of a sound enough mind to actually implement it.

For any reasoning to occur, you must be in control of your mental faculties.

We trust so greatly in logical deduction, argumentation and reasoning – as of course we must – but they all fall away the moment sanity does. It makes you wonder how true any of it really is.

I think there is a great deal we can learn from insanity, because – as many psychologists have already concluded – the second best way to study the norm is to consider those that are outside it. The best way, of course, is to step outside norm ourselves. Unfortunately, the few ways we have found to do that have been declared illegal.

Nice People Finish Last?

I finished the book ‘The Art of Seduction’ by Robert Greene yesterday. It was a bit of a dry read, but interesting nonetheless. The book tries to look at seduction by way of literature and historical figures, examining the different kinds of seducers and how they seduce and, in the process, trying to get at the underlying theory of seducing (so no ‘do this and then do this’ guide, unfortunately).

Though it does look at how to get a person of the opposite sex into bed, the book is about a great deal more than that. It tries to examine how we can make a person fall for us, completely and utterly. It tries to show how a person can be manipulated into almost any position. The book doesn’t pull its punches, either. Throughout the entire book the person being seduced is always referred to as the victim, for example, and on numerous occasions Mr. Greene advices us to leave all morality at the door.

Seducers, he explains, have to be amoral. They have to purposefully lie, inflict pain, provoke negative emotions and stir the pot. If they don’t, then they will never be true seducers, as they will always end up being plain and boring. Nice people, according to Mr. Greene, finish last in the game of seduction (and he does, indeed, refer to it as a game).

I guess that’s understandable. Seduction does, at its base, have a direct and necessary link to manipulation and manipulation, by its very nature, is unethical. I guess you could theoretically argue about the means serving the ends, but the means on its own are always questionable.

This has put me in a quandary. You see, I don’t want to stop being nice. I actually like people and have serious problem with purposefully doing them harm. Though I admit freely that I am no saint, making the step from not being a saint to being an active and willing villain seems a bit too big.

So does that mean I’m doomed to finishing last? Does that mean I’m going to be stuck behind those people that actively set out to manipulate people into the position they want them in? Does that mean it actually pays to be, if you’ll excuse my French, an asshole?

Is this secretly actually what we want? If Mr. Greene is to be believed the answer would be a resounding yes. He basically says that people of all stripes and sorts miss emotional, intellectual and, of course, sexual excitement; be it positive or negative. They want to be whisked away from their mundane life and give into fantasy; it doesn’t actually matter if that fantasy is largely built on deception.

The problem is, that a lot of the things he says ring true. People do seem to want to be tempted and corrupted. People do want to give into reckless abandon and escape from the restrictions of their own conscience and the social codes. The reason they don’t is largely because of fear and a lack of opportunity.

So where does that leave morality? Where does that leave ethics? Where does that leave me?

Wireless

A few weeks ago I read an article that discussed the possibility of wireless electricity. Apparently, it is theoretically possible for electricity to be sent over lengths of several meters without any need for wires, or any adverse effects on the human body. This is done by transforming the electricity into another form of energy, such as heat, light or sound.

The energy that they’re considering is resonance, much like the resonance of a musical instrument, but in the electromagnetic scale, rather than through sound. Objects up to five meters away could be charged via this effect, with both objects needing antennas that can broadcast and receive this power.

I speculated with a couple of friends about what this would mean for us. We started with the obvious, in that this form of electricity would spread across the cities, allowing us to use our gadgets anywhere for as long as we wanted. Cafés would be equipped with these resonators, as would public transport, no doubt. It would be fantastic never to have to worry about charging your phone again.

But we realised it wouldn’t stop there. Once an object is a receiver of electricity, it would no doubt also quickly be able to function as a transmitter. In this way power could easily be spread around the house and, what is more, to places where it hasn’t gone yet. It would no longer be necessary to put a wire under the ground (or above it) but rather, you could simply put catchers and projectors into the surface of the road, for instance, or into lantern poles.

That would become especially noteworthy, once the range increases. If you hit about ten meters, then it would be easy to imagine them going up anywhere and everywhere. Once these projectors hit the hundreds of meters (which might seem fantastic now, but will probably not be too far away) it becomes possible with simple transmitters to project power over long distances to places that have never had anything of the like before. What is more, it would probably only cost a fraction of what it does now.

Power could become truly fluid, easily moving to where it is most needed. Excess capacity in one place could be projected to a place where there are constant brown outs.

What is more, the idea of an electricity bill as it exists now would begin to disappear, much like phone numbers are less and less coupled to addresses, and more and more coupled to individuals. People would need individual electricity accounts that are automatically tracked, where ever they are. Each object would need to be set to your own electricity account (or would automatically be set to whoever is handling it at the time).

Our entire understand of power would change, especially because once energy is being projected to individual objects it would not be too hard to get an itemised bill about what is consuming how much. When that starts to become possible, people will probably suddenly become a great deal more energy conscious (‘what! My DVD player consumes /that/ much?!’) which, in turn, would push a drive for more energy efficient machines.

Wires would disappear from the house, as lights run wherever you put them, speakers catch not just the audio feed but the electricity they need to run from the air and computers (or just keyboards) could be carried around everywhere, without needing their stupid batteries charged or replaced.

And these were things we came up with in only about an hour. No, this wireless technology would truly revolutionise our world, yet again.

Dialogue

-What do you believe in?

-I don’t believe in anything.

-What do you mean?

-I’m an Atheist.

-You don’t believe in God?

-That’s right.

-How can you live that way?

-What do you mean?

-Well, if you don’t believe in God then you don’t believe in anything after death.

-That’s right.

-How can you live that way?

-Again, what do you mean?

-I mean that it must all seem so hopeless and so pointless.

-What makes you say that?

-If you believe that everything ends when you die, then how can you have a purpose in life?

-It isn’t that hard, really. You just concentrate on the journey, rather than the destination.

-Huh?

-Look, when you go read a good book, do you read it to finish it? When you go out to dinner, do you do it for the feeling afterwards?

-But that’s different!

-Why is that different?

-Because there is still a next book, there is still an afterwards!

-You mean you wouldn’t go to dinner on the last day of your life? You wouldn’t read a book if it was the last book left to read?

-Okay, think of this. If it was the last dinner of your life and you knew it, wouldn’t you be tempted to splash out?

-Yes, of course.

-Then what stops you from doing that with your life, seeing as nothing else comes afterwards? Why not be amoral, evil and cruel? Without God how can you ever stay moral?

-You don’t really believe that it is fear that keeps us moral, do you? I happen to be moral because I can’t live with myself when I’m not.

-But doesn’t it all just feel futile? Don’t you just end up feeling that everything is pointless?

-No, not really.

-Why not?

-Simply because there is no overarching point to it, doesn’t mean I can’t set my own goals. I’m sure that being good and getting into heaven isn’t the only point to your life.

-You don’t need anything bigger?

-Hey, don’t you think it’s rather presumptive to say that simply because somebody else sets your goals and I set my own, your goal is bigger than mine?

-But if I do it right, I get to go to heaven!

-Not according to me, you don’t.

-This is going nowhere.

-Again, does it have to for it to have a point?

-So what was the point of this discussion?

-I don’t know about you, but for me the point was to have an interesting interaction with another person.

-And did you have that?

-Even better, I’m still having it.

-That’s a good point.

Roads

Sitting in a little café, waiting for the coffee to kick in I wonder. I ponder and think, I consider and weigh, debate and relate about everything that plays a role. A gigantic ticking machine of swinging parts, brass tubes and venting steam that ultimately does nothing more than go round and round. What does it do, the little man asked, but the purpose has been forgotten. It doesn’t matter, the old man answers, just as long as it does it.

The master debater ejaculated, spouting white noise and seeds of contention, staining thought and ruining innocent minds.

“No,” she yelled, “It is me you must worship!” not realising that we already did. The jail of our dogma making repression essential. Depression through repression, I explained, will make the world a darker place. Then we can all play in the shadows of our own reflections.

Do not, I repeat, do not press this button again. If you do the consequences will be disastrous. Press this button, press this button, press this button. Scream your displeasure! Scream your anger! Scream the rage that builds up in your chest at the fairness of it all! Why did this happen to me? Why did they throw me in this hole to rot? All I did was destroy lives.

They were barely alive. At least, as they died, they finally realised what they were losing. They were losing what they had never had.

It doesn’t really matter, anyway, even in here I can reach out and snuff out a life. Open my mouth and taste of my own flesh, as God demands that we eat of his.

What is wrong with this picture? Ah, I see, man has no shadow. Staining the painting, I prepare to propose that all our problems in life will be resolved by the simple process of death. The pain will fizzle out as our empty shells deflate, devoid of life and soul.

As I die, the world turns two dimensional. My eyes, it seems, have lost their depth.

The Nature of Creativity

Yesterday I got into a discussion with somebody about teaching creativity. She supposed, as most people do, that creativity cannot be taught. I decided to play devil’s advocate (surprise, surprise) and argue that it might well be teachable. The thing was, as we were arguing, I got to seriously thinking about it and realised that that might actually be true.

Conventional wisdom has us believe that creativity is something that is innate and inborn. Some people have it, others don’t and that’s all there is too it. To try and teach somebody creativity is a little like trying to teach them to have blond hair.

But is that true? I mean, I’ll immediately accept that creativity does seem to run in families. Often children (or grand children) of creatives often demonstrate creative traits themselves. My own family is the perfect example, with playwrights, composers, musicians, actors, chefs and painters galore in the last three generations alone. Since I haven’t done any research into this, I assume that part of this is hereditary and part of this is a history of creativity within the family (with exposure provoking creativity).

Still, that said, though I accept that some families are more creative and others less so, I don’t feel that some races (i.e. Asians) are more creative than others. Yet almost everybody will accept that some places seem to produce more artists than other places. Some places have had a great deal of art come out of them (like Italy during the renaissance), while other areas seem to have less creativity (like Singapore since its independence).

If that isn’t because of race, then that must be because of culture and culture, as we all know, is taught.

Now I’m not suggesting that creativity can be memorised like mathematics, or grammar, but I do think people can have their creativity stoked. A class that exposes people to creative endeavours and helps inspire them to do creative work might well improve the creative output and quality of the students that take the class.

So, in that sense, creativity can be taught.

More Free Will

I read back my last post and realised that I barely understood it. Since that’s the case, I thought to myself, how can I expect anybody else to understand it? So, for that reason, I’ve decided to expand on my previous post a little, in the hopes of enlightening (corrupting?) a few more souls.

First, let me reiterate why classical physics suggests that there is no Free Will. Classical physics suggests that every single particle in this universe has a set place, direction and velocity. Many classical physicists argued that, despite Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, this was still the case. Heisenberg’s principle just meant that we could never know everything.

If a particle has a set speed, direction and location then that means that its path is set. At this point it will hit this particle and bounce off in this direction, with that much velocity. This can be extrapolated for each and every particle in the universe.

Since particles are dumb and have no will of their own (I hope we all accept this?) that means that if we knew every particles vectors we would then be able to predict the future. What is more, there could only be one future, since everything was set exactly as it is.

If there is only one possible route that the universe can follow, then there can be no such thing as Free Will. Everything and everywhen, though not preordained (as that would require an intelligence to decide what will happen) is certainly going to follow the path set before it.

Quantum physics, on the other hand, helps refute this. According to quantum physics no particle has a preset location, velocity or direction. On that scale, things don’t work that way. Rather than having one set place, particles instead have a probability – or a likelihood – of being somewhere. This is not just because we don’t have the tools to find out exactly where a particle is, but it’s actually because particles are somehow capable of having a probability of existing simultaneously in multiple locations.

No, you’re not supposed to understand it, nobody does. The world of the very small just doesn’t work in the same way as the world of what we consider normal. This means that our natural intuition just isn’t applicable and, in fact, gets in the way.

When particles have many possible places they can exist (and, in fact, do partially exist) then that makes it possible for two situations that are exactly identical, in all ways, to still have two different outcomes. From there it isn’t such a big leap (though admittedly still a leap) to suppose that we might be able to influence those probabilities and thereby alter the path before us. That, for all intended purposes, is Free Will.

Reviving Free Will

If I understand Quantum Mechanics correctly (which, I immediately admit, is highly unlikely) then there is hope for Free Will yet. A few weeks ago I argued that both science and religion lead irrevocably to no Free Will. Now, it turns out, that at least in the case of science this might not be the case.

According to classical physics, ever particle had a place and a velocity, with Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle just saying that it was impossible for us to know this place and velocity simultaneously, due to the nature of observation (with everything that is observed being affected by the act of observation). This is what Einstein believed until the day he died.

But, apparently, this is wrong. According to a great deal of research that has been done into the smallest possible particles we can still observe, it is not necessarily the case that any particle absolutely occupies one point in space. Instead, it seems, that it can simultaneously exist in multiple spaces at the same time.

There is no absolute, there is only probability.

What is more, as a quick aside, these particles can somehow ‘borrow’ and ‘return’ energy to the universe at large, thereby making the amount of energy they have at any one particular time both immeasurable and highly erratic. Interestingly enough, this means that a particle can actually leap through other particles (something that is called tunnelling). What is more, many particles can apparently do this simultaneously (though it is highly unlikely) allowing you to theoretically walk through walls. I wouldn’t suggest trying it though, as the likelihood of success if you tried it once every second since the beginning of the big bang it would still be negligible.

Now, let’s go back to the no absolute, only probability statement. What this means is that the future is, in no way, fixed. Each future simply has a probability of existing. In fact, objects that we see around us, actually are ‘blurred’ across space/time, with the object we see just being the remaining probability after all other probabilities have cancelled each other out.

This gives a great boost to the existence of Free Will, as it may mean that what we possess is the ability to choose the probabilities that we prefer. If we can constantly adjust the future, by way of choice, then that would constitute Free Will in every sense of the phrase.

The moment we can accept there are multiple futures that can (and possibly do) exist, we’ve escaped from the trap of determinism. Free Will doesn’t demand that the future isn’t written, it just demands that there are alternative endings.

Freakenomics inspired thoughts

Sat down and finished ‘Freakenomics’, by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, yesterday. Somebody talked about it on Saturday night, so I was interested to see what it was about. It wasn’t bad, but I was expecting more. It had been pumped up a great deal by the different writers I’d come across. I guess you can’t expect too much, though. After all, the book is quite short.

The case studies are definitely quite interesting and the book does make some good observations, above all about such things as conventional wisdom and a lack of rigorous thinking. It shows how some things that we think are correlated, aren’t really. While things that we didn’t realise had anything to do with each other, do.

Basically, it asks you to reassess your held beliefs and not just take things that others say at face value. They, too, are human and they, too, have vested interests in the things they say.

If you don’t sound confident when you say something, nobody will listen to you. That means that often people try to sound confident, even when they really aren’t. People use speech that sounds definite, while really they should be hedging their bets. That’s the way society has developed, with nobody really wanting to deal with probabilities, just absolutes.

It is difficult, though. Since we can’t learn and understand everything individually anymore (there is just too much information), we need to rely on experts for certain information. Yet it is really easy to say you’re an expert and, if you’re convincing enough, other people will often believe it. It’s also really valuable to call yourself an expert. After all, people are willing to pay experts a great deal of money to make decisions for them that they don’t feel they know enough to make themselves.

I can see why it would be inviting to pretend you understand a great deal more than you do. Only other experts (or wannabes) are really likely to call you on it and by then you might have already made your millions.

The only way to counteract that, is by establishing institutions that can vet and verify experts, based on their actual knowledge and ability. We used to have those institutions, they were called universities. Unfortunately, recently their reputation has taken a bit of a nose dive. Everybody can get a university to give them a degree now. They can even buy them over the internet.

We basically need another vet and verifying group to judge the universities. Of course, such groups actually exist, but their purpose is largely defeated because so few people actually listen to them (or know where to find them in the first place).