Zero Innovation

Of late, a contentious issue is being debated vociferously. Human innovations, the very foundation of which our civilization rest upon, are dwindling in numbers. This is substantiated by the statistics of patent applications submitted in the past decade, which show dismal innovations.

Recalling the mid 19th century, it was indeed a progressive era of innovations and inventions. Combustion engines, telegram, telephone, radio, camera, vinyl records, video recorder, cathode ray tubes, synchrotron, particle accelerator, wireless transmitter and countless number of other devices were just some of the creative inventions that our forefathers had created. Advancement in medicine and surgery had also been helped by such life-saving inventions as vaccines and heart defibrillators. This diverse array of inventions that were so radically different from each other, with each one representing one of its kind in terms of creativity and breakthrough, signified an unprecedented milestone in the history of sciences and mankind. It reminds us of the distinctive characteristic that set us apart from other species, that is the ability to create and utilize tools with our bare hands.

When we have progressed so far and arrive at the dawn of 21st century, despite the rapid advancements we had gone through for the past centuries, it is rather disheartening to see how dismal and abject the human’s innovation has come to. One cardinal instance that exemplifies this would be the ‘One Click Purchase System’ patented by the biggest online book retailer, Amazon Inc. It entails no sophistication nor complexity. To put it simply, it is nothing state of the art, apart from the rather dubious notion of “You can buy anything by merely tapping your finger on the mouse instead of driving your car all the way to the bookstore” that Amazon is trying to tell its customers. Clicking the mouse is just a generic method of accomplishing something, and it’s certainly no genius in this ever-connected computing era. Impractical solutions are also being patented without control. Some good (or bad, depending on your personal viewpoint) examples are a swing that swings sideways (patented by a lawyer under his child’s name and a burglar capturing device that entails massive modification to a yard (that it becomes impractical, not to mention that it is also too conspicuous for the burglars).

Ironically, the incompetence in innovation is a result of competence in this dog-eat-dog commercialism macro-sphere. In order to stay ahead of the rest, companies must have a list of patents under their belt, just to give them an extra edge over the others. In a world where time is more precious than gold, companies have a predisposition to turn out both incomprehensible and impractical innovations, sometimes just to shun out their rivals. Conspicuously, they are taking advantage of ignorant consumers. They will be easily impressed by long list of abstruse features that makes no sense to them. This is evident in the ‘One Click Purchase System’ patent by Amazon Inc. aforementioned (so the others have to resort to two or three clicks Purchase System). If this trend continues on into the distant future, we will reach a point of zero innovation.

It is argued that the present world advances evolutionally and not revolutionarily, as the mid 19th century world did. Nevertheless, the statistics manifest such lack of innovation and are alarming enough. We must continuously produce practical innovations with out-of-the-box thinking as these were the very thing that fuels mankind’s progress.

Withered Age

快马奔杨州
路见枯萎林
惊觉如我鬓
叹问为谁辛？

with swift horse I head to the Yang state
across the vast forest, that is withered and dead
surprise I am, for it's like the beard on my face
for whom I had worked so hard till I'm hackneyed?

8 lives left...

It sure was an unfortunate day today. Right after ethics class, I went straight to the bus. I laid my bottom on one of the few remaining seats and flipped 'Cognition', a nice book I borrowed from the library. People were exchanging meanderings and jokes, totally unaware of my presence. The bus started to move. I longed to stretch my body like a cat on my lovely bed back at the hostel after a day long's class.

ONE MAN SEARCH PARTY
After I dumped my ever-heavy bag on the hard concrete floor, I was about to go out for dinner when I suddenly realized my handphone was gone! My mind didn't go blank, as you may not have expected. I remained very calm and scrutinized every square femto meter of the room. No. No sign of it. Asking my friend to miss call me didn't help either. It must have wondered else where. My cerebral cortex surmised it must have dropped either in the class room or in the bus. My prefrontal cortex engaged in a 3 miliseconds long conation process, which at the same time actively searched through the hippocampus for any short-term visual memory register of my phone falling off from my pocket, which was probably too brief for my conscious mind to notice. No. No sign of it. A walk down my memory lane didn't return any useful clues. Then my kidneys' cortex secrete voluminous amount of adrenaline hormone. Pulmonary activities and respiratory rate increased in exponential manner. Muscles become overly active and agile. Eye pupils become dilated. I began to transform.

TRANSFORMATION
My mind must have shut down during that brief transmogrification. I didn't realize that the bus couldn't get in today because of the night market. I ran with celerity and got a bus outside of this small neighborhood. My perception of time slowed down. The engine roared like a lionish tiger, but it moved at paramecium's pace. I got to campus anyway. I searched through the classroom and all the buses. Nope. No sign of my handphone. There's one bus gone. I have to wait for that one. I then sat on the bench at the campus bus stand. I perspired profusely as I reverted back to my meek self.

NICE KITTEN
A small bus was idling infront of me. Some students boarded it and the bus driver stepped on the accelerator. The bus whisked off. But as the rear tyre rotates around its shaft's axis, I saw something fell off from it. Then a bone crushing noise was heard. Not loud, but crisp and clear. After the trailing exhaust of the bus diffused away, a filthy but nice-looking kitten was lying in front of me, eagle-sprawled. The head faced down, but its ventral burst open and all the brain matter and innard visceral and entrails came out. They all meshed together. The eyeballs were squeezed out of the crushed eye socket and looking straight at me. My, what a nice glass crystal-esque meatball. Whoa. the tiny blob of blood and flesh was still pumping. Was it the lung? No. Was it the tongue? No. Seemed like its heart. I went forward and squat down. Pandemonium arose amongst firing neurons in my gray matter. Hmm. The heart had its own VA signal trigger, but it also receive electroimpulse from the brain. Might it not be that part of the brain still functions? But it's all meshed up, like the dressed meat I poke with my barbeque stick in a party years ago.

PHILOSOPHICAL
Well, just what if the brain still functioned? It still retained some primitive cognitive abilities? What the kitten was thinking? Unable to move, its head faced down, but the eyes can see up above and my face. All it knew was that it must keep on breathing. The heart must keep on pumping. All the pain no longer mattered. It wasn't a kitten anymore. It was a bunch of convoluted meat. Hmm. Should I administer CPR? But I couldn't find the mouth. Should I flipped it over so the heart can pump better? Uh...no stick in my vicinity. Sorry little kitten, looks like you've used up one life. 8 more to go.

CONCLUSION
So what's the moral of this story? Kittens, you must not play on vehicles' tyres. Cats, you must look after your kitties. Someone ought to run an awareness campaign to remind these ignorant cats of the perils on the tyre. When the engine starts, get off! You won't get a free ride with that!

When the winter comes...

昏黄染山红
大雁群飞散
落叶如飘雪
冬季何时来？

dusk covers the mighty mountain in red
as flock of geese flies in unison and then fade
withering leaves flutter and drop like snow flakes
o when will the winter come before it's too late?

The Ultimate Cause

When we identify ourselves with a faction, a cult, a guild, an organization, or any group for that matter, we commit ourselves to that group. As a constituent of that group, we conform to that group. Ideologies are converted. Practices are transmuted. We comply with a normative set of rules. Ultimately, we avow trenchantly to work towards the group’s loftiest aspiration, and work it as part of a personal goal.

Like a symbiotic relationship between lichens and mycorrhizae, the group as a whole promise something in return to its members. A mega-corporation, for instance, grows strong when its fellow members work hard to bring its vision to realization. The members, in return, acquire financial stability and security from the organization. Gradually, members grow dependant on that organization, and vice-versa. And to secure the constituents, which are an invaluable component of the organization, the organization or its leader drafts up normative laws and regulations which circumscribe its constituents’ behaviors.

Not surprisingly, it happens to cults and religions, too. As a religion expands and reaches out to the masses, there are bound to be chaos and disorders amidst multifarious members. The need to shackle its members grows to such a magnitude that its original visions no longer pertain. Trammeled members believe that they are committing a good cause which contributes to the religion’s visions, where unbeknownst to them, they are incarcerated in a prison mind by those normative laws aforementioned. But the real world is pluralistic in nature, harboring many cults, faiths and beliefs under one roof. Such a mind incarceration creates a thick wall amongst disparate groups. Without tolerance, discrimination transpires. Each group attempts to impose their beliefs upon the others, and interpret the world in their own context. They vow to bring their own groups’ ideologies and visions to realization, while subjugating the others who dissent.

But to me, the ultimate cause, the highest cause of it all, is neither my religion, nor my beliefs, but world peace. My inspiration comes from a story set in ancient China that depicts the horrendous wars between several nations which brought nothing but blood and losses. China was split into multiple nations at that time, and the strongest country of them all, the Qin nation, battled ferociously to unite all nations under a single ruler. The protagonist, an avid sword and calligraphy lover, was determined to take the despotic Qin ruler’s life to avenge his countrymen who lost their lives to the Qin army. As he sought for the highest realization in calligraphy, a revelation came to him. He then abandoned his assassination plan, even after he had arduously fought through the thick walls of army and finally stood right in front of the Qin ruler. “All under heaven”. If the Qin ruler succeed in uniting all nations, there would not be wars in the future. The Qin ruler was surprised to realize that the person who understood his aspiration most was the person he feared most. In order to pacify the enraging ministers, the Qin ruler had no choice but to take the assassin’s life. The assassin willingly accepted his imminent death, all in the name of world peace. Soon, the Qin nation succeeded in uniting all nations, and peace prevailed for as long as it could be.

Perhaps, if we are not too attached to a group, but instead identify humanity as the uniting factor that braces us all, war would not have happened, and peace shall flourish.

Humanity vs Mankind

Since last year, NASA has been berated rather acrimoniously for their shifting of focus to manned space programs from the unmanned ones. The harangue NASA is facing is not without grounds: its action can bring about many ramifications.

With financial constraints, NASA has been trying very hard to cut down on expenditures. Unfortunately, this entails the withdrawal of many present and future pivotal space programs that otherwise will have contributed significantly to science. In line with President Bush’s policy and objective of sending humans back to the moon since Neil Armstrong last stepped on the moon’s soil, and eventually, colonizing Mars, NASA has put unmanned space programs on hold, some indefinitely, just to pave way for manned space programs. Many of the promising unmanned space programs have thus never make it through the drawing board.

With tight budget, it is utterly inconceivable as to why NASA do so. After all, manned space programs are costlier than the unmanned ones. They have so many shortcomings that their sole raison d'être is the pride of sending humans to space. NASA justifies it by saying humans have the cognitive abilities necessary to facilitate space exploration which in many ways are much better than remote control. In other words, it would have been better to have a human on Mars making decisions on the spot rather than relaying instructions to and fro between Mars and Earth, which could take twenty minutes altogether, even at the speed of light. Competition is also one of the factor, notably China’s success in its Shen Jou rockets and numerous other space programs. China has thus exerted an invisible pressure on NASA to keep up with the space race. NASA can not afford to lose out as it was the pioneer in sending humans to the moon.

Manned space programs have numerous severe circumscriptions. Like fish being constricted to living in water, humans could not live nor move freely in space. Such physical limitation means only a limited number of research and experiments can be done. To overcome those circumscriptions, voluminous funds have to be allocated to design new life support systems, space suits (new fabrics and materials), and not to mention space food and waste recycling systems. At the cost of 100,000 pounds per kg, the fuel also entails a gargantuan bill. Contrary to manned space programs, unmanned space programs are not bound by such constrictions. The Viking satellite, which has been in space for 26 years, has just wended its way out of the boundary of our solar system. Traveling at velocity close to 100,000 kilometers per hour, the satellite is currently the farthest any man-made object has ever been to. Despite having completed its primary tasks and objectives, it could provide valuable information pertaining to the Oort Cloud structure and system as well as the macrocosm outside of our solar system. As no humans are involved, the satellite can continue to run for as long as its plutonium power source can allow. Funds for creating human support system can thus be channeled to create better space instruments.

To sum it up, it is impolitic for NASA to withdraw the many unmanned space programs that promise valuable results for the sake of glorifying humans’ endeavor through such unproductive manned space programs. Even using the funds to buy each and every starving African child a cup of instant noodle would have been way better than to imprint a boot print on Mars soil.

Soliloquy Part 1

Blanketed in solitude?
Yes, I love it.
Tsk tsk tsk. Good. You ask for it. So love it.
Spare your circumlocution. What is your point?
Are you blissfully happy?
Yes, I am. More than euphoric!
Do you have friends?
I do not h…need friends. I can very well take care of myself.
Do you feel lonely then?
I… No! Who are you to question me?
I speak for you and I, for you and I are only I and no one else. I would like to help you, inasmuch as you are me and I am you.
Help yourself then. I am through with your mindless meanderings.
I am here to help you.
I am more than capable to help myself and a thousand others. Now leave me alone!
If only you would stop.
Stop what!?
Secluding yourself.
Utterly farcical!
Stop your egregiously pompous tone.
Preposterously ludicrous!
I shall not condone your supercilious conduct.
Asinine! I am indeed more superior than you all! I am peerless!
You are asphyxiating me with your ignorant rants.
You envy me!
Yes I might have, but you are nothing more than meretricious.
I refute!
You leave me no choice.
I have neither give nor deprive you of any choice!
Then be altruistic. Allow me to change you.
I am immaculate! I am flawless! I need no change for as long as eternal endures!
Then I shall destroy you.
Ha! Ha! Ha! Nay! You can’t do that! You are me and I am you!
Then I shall abnegate myself.
What?

There is no spoon...

Underneath my Buddhist veneer is an agnostic. For as far back in time as I can recall, I was made to worship the venerable Buddha and was taught the Buddhist metaphysics. Like Buddha said, I should not believe blindly, not least utterly succumbing to any particular ideology, which includes Buddhism itself. The more I read, the more I doubt the existence of God. But I can never be sure, and thus shall never be bias. Instead of turning atheistic, I take the position of an agnostic instead.

When I was still small, I was afraid of darkness. At night, in my comforter, I could listen to repeating tapping sounds coming from the dark corner. I could see the big dark swaying figure outside the window, and as the lightning brightened up the sky for split-seconds, the silhouette became even more apparent and sharply defined. Thought of ghosts came to my mind and frightened the daylights out of me. Apparently that tapping sound came from the malfunctioned washing machine, and the swaying figure was a big coat hanging outside my window. I then realized the ghosts and all had existed only in my mind. I can imagine the same thing happening to the ignorant people of the past. Gradually, such fear of supernatural beings evolved into religions.

For my entire life, I grow to doubt even more the existence of God, but never entirely, for the reason mentioned earlier: there is no absolute truth. One of my reasoning is as follows. Every religion claims that there is one and only one God in this universe, yet that God differs vastly from one religion to another. If the former premise is true, then there can never be different Gods, and vice-versa. Either way, the very foundation where these religions are built upon has collapsed by this simple reasoning. Despite their moralistic principles, the entire faith construct is mere myth and nothing more.

Saying that God does not necessarily exist may cause fundamentalists to take umbrage. They believe in their religion so firmly that it becomes their own comfortable cocoon. They will do anything and everything to protect their belief, and even coerce others to follow suit. Such a belief, in its extremities, could overwhelm reasoning and override logic. But as a freethinker I have an equal right to believe the opposite, not least when there is no absolute truth.

I say there is no absolute truth because no matter what a religion says about the creator of the universe, it cannot be corroborated. Ergo, unless God appears before our eyes (and not mere fantasy), every notion of a God remains a fallacious claim. There are instances where people claim they have seen Demons and Angels. The public believe it even more when the media propagates it. We have not experienced it ourselves, and yet we blindly concede its veracity. It is possible that under stressful conditions or psychotic medication, the brain hallucinates. As a line from one movie aptly puts it, it (drug) is the only way to fly. We do not know the complete picture (of what happened to that person that made that claim), and thus should not jump abruptly into the conclusion that God exists.

A quote from a famous French philosopher, Rene Descartes, have convinced me even more (though I still take a neutral stand) that absolute truth can not be found, and thus we can never be sure of the existence of God. “Cogito Ergo Sum”, meaning “I think, therefore I am”, simply states that the veracity of every thing in this world can not be determined with certitude (there is a possibility that they are made to deceive us), except for our thoughts. The Matrix trilogy has expressed this viewpoint with utmost clarity. In this trilogy, humans were incarcerated in a prison for their mind while their bodies are exploited as machines’ power source. Blissfully living in a computer simulated world, the humans had no idea that they were being exploited.

Under the mathematical framework that scientists had fastidiously constructed, we came to the conclusion that the universe came into existence after an ultra-massive explosion from a point of singularity that released inconceivable amount of energy. The laws of physics were kick-started, and the space-time continuum came into being. Yet, we have not the slightest idea of what happened before that (because the space-time continuum did not exist before that) and subsequently what started the explosion. As logical and scientific as one person could be, he or she will be tempted to conclude that a superior being was behind of it all. Allow me to present a scenario to counter such uncorroborated conclusion. Assuming that we could travel back time, we give a pre-historic human an electronic board. For the rest of his life, he would never figure out how it worked. Like-wise, we will never understand things of such immense complexity, not least when we do not even have the foundation necessary to comprehend it.

I doubt religion could provide us with the truth, for two reasons. Firstly, like I mentioned, there is no absolute truth (because it cannot be determined with certitude). Secondly, history had taught us of all the blunders that religious people made. The most famous of it all would be the Orthodox Church. Galileo Galilei, the astronomer who discovered that the earth revolved around the Sun, was punished for dissenting from the Orthodoxy. While such ignorance seemed to pose no danger (if only you did not publicly express your heresies), it became alarming when they use science to corroborate their stance. Fundamentalists often misconstrue the contents of the holy manuscripts to reflect its concordance with scientific evidence. It does not come across to me as serendipitous discoveries, but rather as misguided interpretation which is heavily biased.

Ultimately, the point of it all is not that God does not exist, but that there is no absolute truth. The fact that people clinging on to pluralistic view of this world, either consciously or unconsciously, is evident enough that religion is not the ultimate truth; but rather a belief that comforts our fragile heart amidst seas of uncertainties.

Thy pulchritude and panache art 1.618...

I can’t say all, but quite a largish number of species in the Animalia kingdom select their mates based on a single distinct feature. Such traits include strength, color, sound and many other easily identifiable characteristics. But homo sapiens seem more sophisticated in their taste. Humans are attracted to beautiful-looking individuals.

Whether such partiality for facial pulchritude evolves out of civilization or is pre-wired in our brain, I honestly can’t say with certitude. People say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. While I do not repudiate this age-old adage, I certainly notice that such a statement is uttered only when a not-too-pretty person is concerned. Ugly people aside, we all have common opinion when it comes to really charming and gorgeous looking people. No one would deny that Angelina Jolie or Orlando Blooms is charming, though we have varying judgments on how pulchritudinous a person is.

That brings us to query what is beauty. Why do we know a person is beautiful when that person is beautiful? Unlike those easily discernible qualities mentioned above, beauty cannot be judged quantitatively, or so it seems. There exists many kinds of beauty, spanning the entire gamut of cultures and origins, with each having very distinct facial features. Yet, Hispanics or Orientals, Whites or Blacks, if one is pretty, we all agree that he or she is pretty. Intuitively, it suggests to us that there must be something in common amongst all these pretty people, even if they have vastly different facial characteristics.

Surprisingly, the answer to that question lies in the field of mathematics. The answer is 1.618. 1.618 is an approximate ratio of two successive numbers in a Fibonacci series. It is commonly referred to as the Golden number. But what does this Golden number has in relation with human’s facial beauty? Apparently, it does not matter what facial attributes a person possesses. The salient factor is that the ratio of size or distance between facial features must be approximately 1.618. This number also applies to the size ratio between body parts. People with facial feature proportions of this number are therefore good-looking, theoretically. The beauty of a person is effectively encapsulated in this golden number.

Reproduction is the pivotal key to survival. Therefore we can logically deduce that individuals of a species are attracted to those with features most suited for survival. Yet it does not make sense when humans are attracted to each other based upon physical beauty. This is one of the reasons why we suspect that attraction to facial beauty evolves out of the progression of civilization. Civilization is the cardinal manifestation that humans have begun to acquire reasoning, which then gradually overrides their natural instincts and tendencies. For instance, apart from facial features, certain tribes in Africa actually take corpulence as beauty. This seems to corroborate the fact that beauty is subjective, and therefore our attraction to facial beauty can’t possibly be pre-wired as natural tendencies.

Then, is beauty an objective or subjective matter? The golden number seems to support the former, but the African tribes mentioned above bolster the latter. Notwithstanding that, they actually do not contradict with each other. Golden number remains the universal beauty constant; but the other standards are complementary to it. Beauty is thus both objective and subjective.

Please Christine, just drag me to the recycle bin!

“If there can be love between a human and her pet, why can’t I have mine for my father?!”
“Because, my dear, your father is not real.”

As a person who’s intrigued by the conundrum behind the human cognition, I can’t help but envisage the many repercussions effected by the development in this field. Computational cognitive science, an area of scientific knowledge that attempts to replicate the human cognition in algorithmic form, is paving the way to the first digital mind. Mentally and spiritually, it is no more different than a man in the form of a dog or a cat. In effect, it is a real human. The only demarcation lies in the form which it takes. Yet the thing that intrigues me even more is the interaction between an artificial human and a real human. What happens when a human is emotionally attached to another human who was considered as a non-living object? The brief fictitious story below will serve to delineate my point clearly.

In a quiet neighborhood in a suburb, there lived a brilliant scientist together with his only daughter, a cheerful teenager. A serendipitous discovery led to his creation - a human mind replicating machine. In order to test it, he transcribed his mind into digital form. While the device was performing a long post-processing on his replicated mind, he received a call and went out of his home. He never came back to home ever since, for he had suddenly died in a mysterious accident. His daughter, knowing that she would never be able to see her father anymore, broke down into tears and turned into an eccentric introvert. One day, the daughter accidentally discovered the mind replicating machine along with her father’s replicated mind, which was stored in it. A sense of hope kindled in her as she attempted to bring her father’s mind back to life. The digital replica was identical to her father down to the minutest detail. It was, in effect, her father, but in a digital form. For the first time after her father’s death, she smiled. She was glad to be with her father again. Her resurrected father consciously knew that he was dead, and that he was residing in a machine. Yet there was not the slightest melancholy in his countenance, for he knew nothing was more important than being with his only daughter.

Such a wonderful time lasted for three years, when suddenly, the daughter found out that her real father was still alive. Yet, for that entire three years, she was deeply attached to her digital father and was bonded with him emotionally. There came the ironic feeling. She could not have both her fathers. She was forced to choose only one. Paradoxically, there had always been only one father (to emphasize the fact that the real father and the replicated father were totally the same), which was why she found it hard to decide. She had almost collapsed emotionally, yet her digital father was more than understanding. He was willing to delete himself away from her life. But she would not allow. To complicate matters even further, her real-life father, ever since that accident, had fallen into persistent vegetative state (alive, but no sign of brain activity). Metaphorically, his mind was in a state of emptiness, and what was left of him was only an empty shell. On one hand, she had a blood-and-flesh real father, but without cognitive abilities. On the other hand, she had a perfectly conscious father which was not corporeal. They were both her father. She could commit herself to only one, and who would it be?

I love you...

I gaze into the void without a focal point and smirk stupidly as sweet memories overwhelm my mind. I can almost see her running around me, while beaming with the gayest smile. Back then, we used to play hide-and-seek, and often it’s I who started it first. I just liked to observe her scuttling and hoping around, and how jubilantly she stuck her tongue out at me when she found me.

But the others didn’t like her. They hated her just as much as I loved her. The sight of her would raise the inner anger in them, exasperate the composure in them. Yet they would not speak out; they would just walk away. She could not have comprehended what had happened, or why they had treated her that way. As much as I felt upset over their hostility towards her, I tried to keep it in my heart and calmed her little ruffled heart.

Later, there came the day when I had to leave her and my hometown. I had a dream of mine to catch. I had to further my studies in a place far away. She was oblivious of it, and there was no way I could tell her about it. I felt very sorry that I had to leave her, and I could not imagine how I would go through the long period without her beaming smile. And what about the others who hold grudges against her? As I looked into her eyes, bitterness twisted my heart. A song, barely inaudible at first, slowly reverberated within my mind:

May it be, an evening star shines down upon you…
May it be, when darkness comes, your heart will be true…
You walk a lonely road, oh how far you are from home…

I reminded myself, from time to time, that the wait would be as fleeting as the twilight dusk, and that I would come back very soon. I would miss her as much as I miss my family: to me, she had become part of my family. Yet, fate, it seemed, was not without a sense of ironic. Hectic life and passage of time had changed the inner me. Whatever memory I had of her, they were tuck far away in the corner of my memory lane. Alas, I did not feel the bond anymore. She was as distant as the farthest constellation that the naked eye could see.

I have finally come back, and tonight is as dark as it was before. Chilling breeze waggled the dim orange lamps above my head, causing the fuzzy shadows to sway in a playful manner. I stood beside the kennel, staring into her eyes. She sits in front of me, staring into my eyes, too, but in genuflection. I gently stroke her head, and suddenly, that familiar warmth gradually infuses my body. That special bond, once lost, is now reconnected once more. She can’t say anything, but already I can tell how much she misses me.

I stop my stroke. Her tail wags with vigor. I kneel down and put my arms around her thickly furred brownish neck. I hold on to her tightly, as though I’d lose her. As I pat her, I whisper to her: Mimi, you are the best friend that I can ever wish for!

Be aware that we are aware of what we are aware of!

Egoistic we had become, when after centuries upon centuries of accruement of human cognizance, we realized the dichotomy that set us apart from the beasts. We can think: the single most important quality that bestowed upon us the privilege and prerogative to rule over the others. As we utilize our psyche, we can’t help but think how our thinking comes into existence. We are a synthesis of corporeal particles, but intangibly we display such spiritual characteristics. From the brain, the cerebrum, the gray matter, the neurons, the synapses, down to the molecules, each and every one of them is incapable of thinking on its own, but collectively they display intelligent behavior. But what is even more astounding is that they, as a single entity, are aware of their own existence.

We are aware of ourselves. We are aware of our environment. We are mindfully aware that we are aware of what we are aware of. And such meta-thinking shall go on ad infinitum. If we are our own awareness, then what constitutes that awareness? That awareness, uniquely our own, had not existed before we were born, but germinated progressively thereafter. ‘I’ popped into existence, just like that. We began to question what ‘I’ is. If we probe into the earliest juncture of our lives that we can recall, it seems that our awareness started at that point (we are not aware of what happened before that). If our awareness is circumscribed by our memory or knowledge of what occurs around us, does that mean awareness is knowledge and vice-versa?

Nay. Computers can store mountainous amount of data, but that doesn’t make them any more enlightened. Apropos, a brain that can store voluminous amount of knowledge doesn’t make it any more intelligent. To be enlightened, some thing has to be able to make sense of that knowledge. Some thing has to be able to observe. That is the ‘I’ in me. And ‘I’ am my own awareness, and vice-versa. Ultimately, that still hasn’t answered our question of what constitutes awareness. If we try to dissect the process we go through as we realize something, we will still not be able to find the thing that realizes the information. We still come back to ‘I’, yet not knowing what ‘I’ consists of.

Then, can machines think? Ostensibly the answer is no. But as we scrutinize our body anatomically, we find that many of its mechanisms can be emulated by its mechanical counter-parts. Obviously, our nanotechnology is still in its infancy; and even if that isn’t the case, it’s hard to orchestrate billions of miniature artificial devices fit together, not to mention to prognosticate their unpredictable collective behavior. Thus, the only viable method is by means of computational simulation. But even a simulation requires profound comprehension of the modus operandi of a human psyche, which is still too unfathomable an enigma.

Such fastidious introspection as mentioned earlier had not paved much a road as an insight into transcribing our mind computationally. The more we question what constitutes ‘I’, the more we get entangled in this circular catechism. Abjectly desperate, we may resort to panpsychism: every thing in this universe has a mind of its own. The fact that a rock can’t move on its own or that it has too simple a structure doesn’t entitle us to assume that it is not aware of its existence. Incidentally, it suggests to me that there are shades of awareness. We are on the extreme right, fully aware of the demarcation between the macrocosm and our inner microcosm. Animals may have their level of awareness somewhere in the middle, while rocks are on the extreme left, virtually unaware of itself. If this is the case, then there is no definite mechanism for self-awareness. Everything is self-aware, but at different levels.

Modern Regression

We envision a world of digital paradise, a direct consequence of modernity and secularism, which germinated from the Age of Enlightenment that came after the Dark ages in the western European continent. While we actively seek to remove religion’s influence over our lives through secularization, the advancement of the digital age in the dawn of the third millennium has, ironically, created a cult of faith towards modernity. It is ironic in a sense that, while secularism disapproves faith without base, secularism has gradually turned into faith itself.

We may or may not realize that, through thousands of years of perfection of every facet of our civilization, we have deliberately and completely redefined, if not altered, some of human’s natural characteristics and cultural perception. Yet, we are still bound by the genetic sequence that defines both our anatomy and existence. Soon enough, we would revert back to simplicity that is originally part of our characteristics. Thousands of years of civilization would collapse in the face of millions of years of evolution. Thus, such transmogrification into modernity has created an imbalance that will ultimately topple such faith of modernism, eventually resulting in regression. Apropos, this becomes more pertinent in a world where identities are shifting and collapsing, resulting in uncertainties.

Amidst flood of modernization that threatens our values and faith, we have the predisposition to retreat into fundamentalism. Vis-à-vis of the uncertainties and the tendency to revert to simplicity mentioned earlier, men are psychologically pre-wired to fulfill their need for certainties and reassurance. Such uncertainties are characteristics of a pluralistic view of the world brought about by modernity, and faith provides the certainty they need. People are confused and scared of a materialistic world without God, without divinity. Complexity and sophistication of modernism had not dwindled the importance of religions, as most early scholars had suggested, but had taken a toll on secularism itself and thus fueled the expansion of fundamentalist religion, some even the extremities.

Secularism is bolstered by empiricism, which explicates its conspicuously stark dichotomy with religion, which is based solely on faith. Yet, of late, proponents of fundamentalism, in order to gain an upper hand, have resorted to empiricist methods. In the U.S, some of the fundamentalist Christians, which prefer the label ‘Evangelical’ instead, supported Intelligent Design in lieu of Darwinism and Evolution. Intelligent Design, which is creationism in disguise, simply stated that the complexity of all living things could not possibly be the result of seemingly random interaction of amino acids. It based its view on a weak postulate that the probabilities of such interactions leading to conspicuously sophisticated biological anatomies are simply too small, if not zero. Such a trend of using science to corroborate fundamentalism is alarming as it is harming science itself.

As one proponent of secularism aptly puts it, we must not oppose to publicly held view; the more we attack it, the more defensive it becomes. Thus secularists, in facing fundamentalism, should cling onto the Enlightenment values – reason, pluralism, democracy and freedom of thought, yet must comprehend the fundamentalists psyche at the same time. Only then will they reciprocate, and thus co-exist peacefully with secularism.