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Category Archives: Philosophy

Dead man's switch

A few years ago, I started toying with the idea of leaving behind contingency letters in case I died an early and unexpected death. I usually like being fairly well-prepared for all kinds of data disasters, financial disasters, and natural disasters, so death seemed like a sensible thing to prepare for too. It sounded kind of shocking and morbid at the time, and I didn’t want anybody worrying I was some depressed teenager, so I didn’t tell anybody about it1. These things usually work better when nobody knows anyway. I got the idea from this animated TV show where a scientist leaves behind computer programs that activate automatically when he dies, so that he can get messages across to people and manipulate events from beyond the grave. If anybody ever tried that in real life, I doubt it would work… more →

Gender roles

I hate talking about gender roles. I won’t even listen to other people talk about gender roles. Within the realm of all progressive fronts of social change, cultural movements regarding gender are the most immediate. The history of nontraditional women is frustratingly short and our cultural education is exceedingly androcentric. I think it’s already a small miracle that young people today don’t think like clones of their parents. Whereas we can comfortably throw around ideas about poverty and human rights from a distance, ideas about gender roles apply universally. And above all, I feel that nobody has yet produced the right answer to the question of gender roles so far. I’ll show you what I mean. A lot of people like to throw around condescending rhetorical questions that go something like: why do you you think (foo) can’t (bar) just because… more →

Mobile technology in the modern age

In our modern age, people usually associate cellphones with introversion and isolation. At my cousin’s home in Tokyo, businessmen and students alike keep to their flip phones and novellas on the subway. Nobody is allowed to talk1, save for the foreigners and newcomers who haven’t yet learned to respect the silence. How fortunate it is, then, that we have phones to keep us busy, without which we would have to stare uncomfortably at our feet or out the window—heaven forbid you accidentally make eye contact with somebody. To some lesser extent, this self-inflicted alienation is present in urban cultures all over the world, and for good reason too. The subway is hardly an ideal place to meet new people, and loud talking is rude to those who prefer to sleep or read. With the proliferation of inexpensive smartphones and mobile… more →

Theory of Everything

I remember pausing the first time I read those words. They were in an astronomy book or magazine or something, and it initially struck me as a bit conceited that a bit of cosmological discussion could suddenly lay claim to an word that literally referred to everything. Might not musicians or archaeologists or some other unfamiliar professional discipline have already taken the “everything” name and applied it to one of their own big ideas? Perhaps an idea that was pervasive through their own fields but hardly relevant in others? Before I got to understanding what a ToE really embodied or even attempting the cut-down version that the text presented, I conjectured my own theory of the phrase’s meaning and came up with something that I feel, to the non-physicist, applies to everything even more than the Theory of Everything does. Watching… more →

Crime and affliction

Who is responsible for poverty? Whose fault is disease? All but the most skeptical of people agree that there is unpleasantness in the world whose persistent endurance is beyond the wicked capacity of any one person, but instead is the result of simple things that we understand but cannot control. Searching for the answers to these questions quickly reduces your humanitarian contemplation to rehashes of the physical properties of matter. At their essence, there is no cause for sickness and death beyond antagonistic configurations of elementary blocks and flaws in our quaternary information storage system1. Consequently, we have to introduce abstract entities before we can really plunge into these philosophical problems: humans, their affiliations, and their relationships among one another. Whom do we blame for heartbreak? Whose sin is mass deception? And whose is envy? To understand a human being,… more →

Manifesto

A great number of people publish from positions of power, after experience has granted them a gift of wisdom along with the responsibility of spreading it throughout the world. They then find their task very clear and simple. They command authority over some particular subject in which other seek insight and validation. In short, people write about what they know best. However, the great majority of people are not experts nor leading researchers on anything at all, other than themselves. It falls upon them to identify subjects using which they can write assured of their own competence. Many choose the circuitous solution and become the expert they need to be, but even more will shirk the duty and end up abandoning their honest efforts or redirecting them to wasteful self-entertaining ends. Likewise, I disclaim and despair to know little outside… more →

Flowering random

As human beings, we have misconceptions of the nature of randomness. Try it and write down a sequence of random digits. You’ll notice that certain numbers tend to be repeated, or that no two consecutive digits are the same. Maybe your numbers tend to go up and then down and then up again, or that you’ll use all the digits before repeating any. It’s simply our natural tendency to look for patterns where there may not be any. All cell phone numbers appear, to the human mind, to exhibit patterns. Some follow a circular path around the keypad and the digits of others are contained within an unnaturally small subset of the ten possible digits. It is the same reason why we cannot at first understand how a group of only twenty-three people have a 50% probability of containing two… more →

Functional unity

It seems like the next big thing is always trying to combine the knobs and buttons of your life into a single revolutionary new paradigm of luxury. Especially exemplary are the new developments in heads-up display devices1 and the various misnomers for cloud computing. At a primitive level, we understand the advantages. It’s integrated. All of it is, like a strict building code in a top-dog neighborhood. As human beings, we’re predisposed to patterns because it’s part of our innate behavior. The predictability and uniformity of life comes from the hunter-gatherer era when fewer things to worry about meant an easier life. But, humans, as usual, make bad choices for themselves. Think about every invention in the world that has stood the test of time. Each does only one thing and it does it well. From the resistors and capacitors of integrated… more →

Epiphany highs

Epiphany highs are those times when you feel awakened and renewed after supposedly having a breakthrough. They are very common as adolescents in the course of character development. You find a clever bit of wisdom—change comes from within—and you think it’ll solve all of your personal problems if only one thing were different. For a few weeks, you feel pumped up and excited to live with a renewed philosophy. You might experience temporary successes thinking this is what I’ve been doing wrong all this time1 But the effects always wear off in the end. That’s when you start looking for another life-changing realization to kick-off the cycle again. In retrospect, all of these profound sayings will end up sounding trite and absurd. No philosophical outlook can satisfy you forever. Perhaps on another day, you might hear don’t fix it if it ain’t… more →

Trumpeting charity

One of our most bizarre social stigmas is against the trumpeting of good deeds. We are taught from birth that real charity shouldn’t bring attention to itself, that selflessness is somehow better when it passes undiscovered to all but oneself. But in a society of open-minded individuals, this paradigm may honestly be one thing holding back progress. This ideal which is taught across cultures and religions1 did apply at one time in the past when the world was not as connected as it is now. The advent of globalization has done wonders to the standards of the First World, primarily that an individual need no longer live walled in by the limitations of social and governmental precedents. The communities we build online transcend these historical boundaries and cultivate a generation of people in which Indians and Pakistanis can laugh and play together.… more →

On living among humans

Human beings are so bizarre. It took many years before I could grasp adequately the combinations of relations that can exist among numbers of sentiment-ridden friends. In my head, it’s all graph theory: vertices, formations in a ‘Z’, bridges and nodes with adjacency matrices and relational costs manifested in humans as motivation and want. I get the feeling that typical people come to the conclusions I have by experience alone, meaning trial and error in frequency, or perhaps it’s by upbringing. Thinking it out mathematically does take me a while longer, but I need more evidence than just the empirical. I’m convinced that the best of us enjoy living for amusement. The things that we as a species can plausibly endeavor to do, above any contempt, they are life’s profoundly cruel jokes on whatever existence we hope to find important. That… more →

On responsibility and context

I think we’re a pretty responsible group. You and I, I mean. The audacity to dive into such a lengthy body of text, is it habitual or a shot at betterment? Perhaps we’re into displeasure. Things like drinking tea, and reading novels or persisting through thirty minutes of better nate than lever, they require a degree of enlightened perspective or philosophy that generally coincides with responsibility. So I say, we are a pretty responsible group. How much effort does it take? I’d say a whole damn lot. Effort, if the universe can be said to exert such a thing, in its relentless irony poking into our lives1. Responsibility is a rather abstracted term when you examine it. When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to haul ass, such presumptuous words as responsibility come into use. In… more →