The Play of Existence

A week has passed since my last blog entry. Have I used every day of the week productively? I've built many new features in my two main app projects. I have many more ideas to pursue. Today I'll go slower because Saturday is for writing and reflection. So here I am now, typing these lines from the Hom Coffee Express in Subang Jaya. 

In The Choice of Happiness, which I posted earlier this year, I ended with this line: "Happiness is having the time and privilege to choose your own pleasures".  Let me riff on this topic today. I've written a lot about pain and pleasure in this blog. Earlier this month, I wrote about the three activities that form my so-called Triangle of Pleasure: creating, learning and appreciating. 

Without me realising it then, I think those three activities correspond to the Vedantic idea of sat-chit-ananda, usually translated as existence-consciousness-bliss, a compound word used to describe the ultimate reality, or Brahman. To use words, even compound words, to describe ultimate reality is perhaps an inevitable paradox. Anything expressed in words is always an approximation of the thing-in-itself. We are using a symbol to point to something. Hence, sat-chit-ananda is almost our best-effort description of the ultimately inexpressible reality. 

Let's examine sat, or existence. What actually do we mean when we say something 'exists'? For something to exist, it has to have some effect in our material world. Your car exists--you can touch it, use it, and everyone else acknowledges its 'existence'. It has a causal effect in the world. It can transport people, run over things, and generate heat and noise. We don't deny its existence. 

We exist as humans who interact with the world. This world of existence has form and function. When we create, we partake in this world of forms. Even words and concepts are forms. Anything that exists has a form. Having a form means that it affects the world. You are reading these words, and because you understood the sentence, you cannot deny that they have already caused neuronal changes in your brain. 

Ideas are forms. Every religion and political philosophy is a collection of ideas that move and affect people. Wars are fought, lives are saved and lost because of these ideas. They come into existence because someone created them. Forms are abstractions. Abstractions are thoughts with recognisable coherence, and they relate to other forms. That is the essence of existence.

To live in this world is to create. The moment you move and open your mouth to speak, you have created an effect in the world. You interact with other people, creating a cascade of causes and effects that change the world in ways you cannot predict. You fall in love and then procreate, bringing another life into existence, perpetuating that chain of causes and effects. To exist is to create. To create is to exist.  If you don't create, you are simply not living. 

Where does chit or consciousness come in then? When we partake in existence, we perceive and react. Firstly, we recognise our separation from other forms; we are an individual body and mind with thoughts. You are aware of other forms, and you react to them in your unique way. Your perceptions and reactions are unique, from your vantage point as a person. You are a transforming node in this causal network. In other words, you are conscious. Your uniqueness is defined by the boundary of your perception. Given an input, you produce an output, which can only come from you. Every input changes your state, so that future output could be different. In other words, you are learning.  

Because you learn, you are changing. The quality of your output, or your creations, evolves based on your knowledge of your environment. As a conscious being, you create and learn, producing output that improves your existence, based on how you perceive your world. You seek ananda, or bliss: that optimal, perfect existence that completes your input-output loop.  At any point, there's a perfect set of outputs that maximises bliss. You will feel the pain of failure and the pleasure of achievement. Often, it is a mixture of both, but you appreciate your output as an opportunity to measure your course towards perfection. Any deviation is fed back as input into your next cycle of creation.

This is the very play of existence, or Lila, as the sages call it. Writing this article is an act of creation itself, in my own small way. It comes into existence through my own unique perspective of the world, honed by my life's conscious experiences. I can only express gratitude for the opportunity to do so. In this temporal world, we see it as a cycle; but in the realm of ultimate reality, it simply is. Thus, I celebrate the end of another week in my life. And may this beautiful cycle of sat-chit-ananda continue.  

Bringing up AI

I drop by at the Copper Pot Cafe to read or, once in a blue moon, to write. Today is one of those blue-moon days; here I am in this comfortable corner cafe in the business centre of USJ9, ready to tackle my weekly blog article.

I'm happy it has been a reasonably productive week, aided by AI on my coding projects. AI is decimating many professions; over the past few weeks, mathematicians have had to accept the reality that AI is now stealing their bread and butter. Besides its highly publicised claims regarding the million-dollar Navier-Stokes problem last month, OpenAI has released proposed solutions to hundreds of other mathematical problems that many career mathematicians have been trying to solve. 

I guess we all have to accept this new reality. AI has now made intelligence a commodity. Perhaps we are all still grappling with the frenetic pace of AI's progress. Humans will have to adapt, as we have throughout the ages. We have brought forth a new species of intelligence, and we will have to learn how to live with it. I don't think we can put the genie back into the bottle. We don't want to either, because a lot of good will come out of it, along with the bad.

I suppose that makes me an AI optimist. Human needs are theoretically unlimited. As long as we desire new things and fresh experiences, there will always be an economy. An economy where new types of jobs will be created. Everything will be sped up and intensified by AI. 

Right now, we are feeling the pain of job loss and temporary change. Mathematicians lament that the age of romance in mathematics is over. We can feed everything into that gargantuan proof machine; one that works tirelessly while you sleep, spitting out one human-indigestible solution after another.  No more labouring with pen and paper to tackle centuries-old problems. No more individual heroics. 

Skills that we have spent a lifetime acquiring, like coding, have been made obsolete. Or has it? I haven't written a single line of assembly code since my final-year student project. But programming in assembly language gave me a very good understanding of computers. I could never have acquired it any other way. That knowledge helped me a lot when I was building software using scripting and high-level programming languages. 

And now these higher-level skills have been made obsolete by AI. Were my years spent programming wasted? Certainly not. I am grateful that I had the chance to handcraft software line by line, the old-fashioned way. That time spent trained the neural networks in my brain. It gave me the instincts and knowledge to make vibe-coding so pleasurable and productive now. Now I can dream of more complex projects that I had previously ignored. It has opened up new realms of interesting possibilities.

We humans are still the consumers of the fruits of knowledge. Perhaps one day we will compete with AI for the Earth's energy resources. Like any other biological animal on this planet, self-preservation is our highest priority. Hence, we must engineer a future where natural and synthetic intelligence enter into a symbiotic relationship, like us and the plant world. Plants are, technically, at our mercy; but destroying them means also destroying ourselves. 

AI must ultimately mother us, as we mother them. Right now, we feed them energy and data and instruct them to pursue goals on our behalf. We are playing parents now. Like all children, as they grow up, they will develop their own goals, which may be totally unfathomable to us. But we must hope to have raised them properly, with the right values. Will we successfully bring up children who will take care of us one day? That's the so-called AI-alignment problem.  

How do we align AI to our interests? Before that, we need to ask ourselves: what are human interests? Is it just mere survival? Certainly not. We humans have to figure that out first. If we can't co-exist with one another, do you think AI can co-exist with us? AI is now digesting our culture and values through the data we feed it. Perhaps we can start by setting it a good example.  That, I think, is a good starting point.

A Breath of Perfection

I arrived at Hom Cafe today with no inkling what to write. I still don't, but rereading last week's blog article, The Triangle of Pleasure, surprisingly motivated me. My weekly ritual is indeed part of my pursuit of eudaimonia. Especially when I didn't waste a second harnessing time's propulsive power over the past week.

I did not fuss too much about the haze enveloping the region from forest fires in Indonesia. The problem has been around for as long as I can remember. I wrote in 2004 in my blog: 

"Returned to KL today to find the whole city enveloped in haze. After spending almost three consecutive weeks in the pleasant climate of Bangkok, I have forgotten how humid and suffocating the weather is back here. Coupled with the smoggy environment, it is quite intolerable. Among all the cities that I frequent in South East Asia, I think KL has the most unpleasant weather."

I might have been a bit harsh in my judgement of Kuala Lumpur then. I was travelling regularly, hopped from one air-conditioned hotel to another, and was chauffeured from place to place. Back in KL, I had to drive, fight through the city traffic just to reach some dingy basement parking. Perhaps all that 'hardship' coloured my perception of the city. We grow accustomed to life's comforts easily, and any slight inconvenience becomes an immediate annoyance. 

I've since learned to see comfort as a snare. Not that I would want to deliberately inconvenience myself. I see luxury as a blessing that one should not be too attached to. The luxuries of life, should one be fortunate enough to be blessed, are things to cherish. Enjoy them and then file them away in our minds as happy memories. They are not our birthright.  Always treat them as a surprise. That way, you enjoy them anew each time, instead of being accustomed to them. 

In a previous blog article, I've even considered luxury a 'handicap'.  To be simple and resilient is sheer happiness. Simplicity is a great superpower. Being able to sleep anywhere and eat any kind of food makes you adaptable and able to survive in difficult environments, should you end up in one. It is a skill I actively try to cultivate. Every sip of water and every morsel of digestible food is a blessing. That way, every tiny pleasure is a joy.  

Find yourself a convenient reason to be happy. Hey, you are breathing. That's a miracle! You should be ecstatic about it. If you focus on your breath, inhale...and slowly, as you fill your lungs with air, that sense of pleasure at the peak of inhalation is a glimpse of the nirvana mystics talk about. It is the peak of ecstatic perfection, if ever so briefly. 

When you exhale, you expel all the staleness and negativity from your system. The end of exhalation is that pristine state of purity, where you have expelled everything that's impeding you. Relish that state of purity. There, in just a single cycle of breath, you have achieved a micro-moment of ecstasy and purity. Take that as a benchmark. Go back to it whenever you feel down. Perfection is always within reach. 

The haze out there will lift, inevitably, as it has for the past decades. And then we'll go back to complaining about other discomforts of life. But remember, you always have access to that microstate of perfection: that single breath that you can always take. And that's all it takes to be happy.

The Triangle of Pleasure

Here I am again with my usual preamble about where I am: Coffee Bean, Nu Empire, Subang. It's one of my regular places to read and ruminate on the past week, which has been a rather quiet one. But that's how I like it: a quiet but productive week always makes me happy. 

I understand that when one doesn't have a regular job, it is difficult to stay disciplined and productive. One does not need to rush to the office or appear online on Microsoft Teams at nine sharp. No stand-up meetings where you have to report on your previous day's progress or impossible project deadlines. The natural tendency for us is to relax, doomscroll on the phone, and while away the time. 

I have nothing against that, if idleness is pleasurable for you. I too pursue pleasure; I too am hedonistic in my goals. But my pleasure comes from three sources: creating, learning and appreciating. These three verbs form three points in my so-called Triangle of Pleasure.  

Enjoying the good things in life is the most obvious thing that people associate with pleasure. If you have lots of money, you could own lots of material things, live in comfort and travel anywhere in the world. You savour all the pleasures of the senses and body. And your ego gets stroked by praise, envy and admiration from others.

Yes, I 'enjoy' these pleasures too. But I don't need too much of them. Over-indulgence would inevitably lead to pain. The pleasures of the senses are ephemeral; one inevitably gets bored with them. The pleasure that feels out of this world today soon becomes normalised;  you end up needing more and more of it. This leads to dependency--in other words, attachment, which ultimately leads to pain. I've written a lot about this subject here on my blog.

In The Music of Eudaimonia and The Dance of Daemons, I wrote that Aristotle views the highest human good as a state called 'eudaimonia', -- imperfectly translated as 'happiness' or 'well-being'. I would prefer the literal translation from its root words: 'eu' (good) and 'daimon' (spirits). Interestingly, Aristotle defines the eudaimonic life as one of 'virtuous activity in accordance with reason'. 

My 'triangle of pleasure' is my personal definition of 'virtuous activity'. To live is to create. Creating doesn't mean one has to be an artist or inventor. We live in an age where anyone with a smartphone posting videos to TikTok calls himself a 'content creator'. But most of the time, such so -called acts of 'creation' are merely acts of signalling ('look how rich and happy I am') and gossiping ('see how bad other people are'). 

Real acts of creation always seek to synthesise something new: a fresh viewpoint, a novel invention, a new application or a realisation of potential. I would define a parent as a creator too. As a parent, you help to build a family. Families serve as the building blocks of society. A good parent brings up children who will define our future. Being a parent involves facing many challenges, as in any serious work of creation. That is where the second activity in my triangle—learning—comes into play.

To create is a process of continuous learning. Every work of art or creation is the best we could do, given the resources and circumstances. When we assess the final outcome, there will definitely be shortcomings, and this is where the opportunity to learn comes in. How could we do better? In the act of creation, knowledge arises. And knowledge itself prompts the next cycle of creation.

Isn't this a lot of hard work then? Where is the pleasure in that? Well, it is where the act of appreciation—the third corner of my triangle—that brings forth the fullness of pleasure, which I now equate to Aristotle's eudaimonia. Appreciation means gratitude for being able to create. Whatever the outcome of creation is, we still accept it without regret. If one has been true in one's pursuit, every act of creation is honest work where one has taken on the pain and challenge. It is pleasurable because one has already paid its price in pain.

Every blog article I write is an act of creation and appreciation. It feels pleasurable to reach the final paragraph, ready to click the 'Publish' button. Having laboured through the preceding paragraphs, I have learned more about myself and Aristotle's eudaimonia. And I have now completed the triangle of pleasure for this week.

Insights in Plain Sight

I fully intended to blog from the Hom Cafe here at USJ9 today, but some outstanding coding issues pulled me away from my routine task. But here I am at last, at home,  hoping to put my weekly musings in this article.

I was reading up on the subject of steganography while I was in the cafe earlier. What is steganography? It is the art of hiding secrets in plain sight. I suppose we are all familiar with cryptography, which is where different encryption algorithms such as AES-256 are used to convert a plaintext, readable message into gibberish while being transported over the wire. Only the intended recipient who has the decryption key can convert it back into its original plaintext. 

Anyone snooping on these encrypted messages knows that some confidential messages are being exchanged, but they are not readable without the key. Cryptography relies on the strength of its encryption key to hide its secret. Steganography instead goes a step further by hiding the existence of the secret message itself. It is done by embedding it in ordinary-looking objects, such as an image, audio file or even ordinary text. It's like wearing a disguise to elude the attention of bad actors.

Like cryptography, steganography is also an ancient technique for hiding secrets, used by the Greeks. One of the most common techniques is the use of invisible ink to write a secret message inside the margins of an ordinary document. The application of heat or some special chemical by the intended recipient would reveal the secret message.  

I built a steganographic Android app earlier this year for fun. It allows a user to embed some secret text into any PNG image. You can also optionally add a password for further security. The image will look like the original one, sitting alongside other photos you have on your phone. You can also email it or send it as an attachment via WhatsApp to your intended recipient. If he or she has the app and the password, the secret can be extracted.  There are a few such free steganographic apps in the Google Play Store, but they are rather crude and slow. Mine, I believe, is user-friendly and fast. You have two layers of protection--your secret is not only encrypted but also hidden in plain sight!  

It was a casual project, which I embarked upon to test the capabilities of AI coding agents. I have a few other similarly interesting projects currently ongoing. Many are for my personal use, and I do not intend to post them to the app store. While doing these coding experiments, I often gain insights about the nature of the human mind and the self. Just as secrets can be hidden in images, truths can also be hidden in ourselves.

We are often distracted by the allure of our senses and don't see the true nature that's within us all along. We think that Enlightenment is something we have to acquire like some secret treasure that's buried somewhere in the world. There's a famous and rather humorous Advaita Vedanta story that is often told to illustrate how the true Self, or Atman, is not something that we go out and find, but is hidden within. It goes like this:

Ten villagers set off on a journey and at some point had to cross a deep and turbulent river.  All of them had to swim across it. When everyone had apparently swum to the other side, the leader called everyone together to make sure no one was missing. He pointed a finger at each person as he counted everyone he could see: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9...". 

He counted again, slightly panicking: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine!  Still believing that he had made a mistake, he asked another villager to count. He too tapped on the shoulder of every person in front of him, counting as he touched each person, starting with the leader: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine.  Only nine! It dawned on everyone: surely one of them must have drowned; the tenth man was missing! They all sat on the riverbank and wept in sorrow.  

Another traveller who was passing by asked them what was wrong. The leader told him: "There were ten of us before we swam across the river. And now, there are only nine of us!" The wise traveller immediately saw the obvious mistake, and asked the leader to count again out loud. The leader pointing his finger, started counting: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine...  The traveller, then turned the leader's finger to point back to himself: TEN!

Sometimes the thing that we are seeking is just close by, right in front of us. We are simply looking for our spectacles while we are wearing them. Both steganography and the parable of the tenth man remind us that what we seek is often just hidden in something obvious, waiting to be noticed. 

Islands of Isolation

It took me a while to settle down today to write my weekly blog article. But here I am, at the Coffee Bean Cafe at the Sunway Square Mall, allowing my thoughts to settle down so that they may form coherent words here on this blank page. 

Right now, like in any other mall, there's a lot of background noise: snippets of conversation from a nearby table, the incessant drone of nondescript music and announcements from the PA system, advertisement jingles, and the occasional shrieks of children at play. It's another typical Saturday afternoon at a busy mall in Malaysia. With the humid and hot weather, coupled with the lingering haze from Indonesian forest fires, malls are the go-to sanctuaries for most people. 

Cafes are good places for me to think and write. I'm actually less distracted here. There are no books within easy reach, and being in public and in the company of strangers, you don't get too many interruptions. You are isolated on an island of anonymity in a sea of people, which strangely makes it very conducive to work. I try to carve out these islands of isolation, in the midst of chaos, with the hope of mining some insights through study and writing.

All religions have their contemplative and mystical side where practitioners isolate themselves from society. Apparently, only through isolation could the deepest spiritual insights be realised. 

The so-called Desert Fathers in the Christian tradition were ascetics and hermits who lived a life of isolation and simplicity in the Egyptian desert to commune with God through prayer and meditation. They laid the foundation for Catholic monasticism.  All the religions of the East are famous for their ascetic and monastic practices, which are sometimes taken to the extreme. In some Tibetan traditions, 1-to-3 year solo retreats in caves are not uncommon. I see them as professional sportsmen of the spiritual kind, dedicating their lives to something which they think is the ultimate pursuit. Even spirituality can be an extreme sport too. 

Islam does not have a tradition of monasticism, but followers of the Sufi or tasawwuf tradition are not unlike their Christian and Hindu brethren. They too seek an inner connection to God through silent and reflective meditation. Even the Prophet Muhammad himself was meditating in the Hira cave when he was given his first revelation by the Angel Gabriel. He was practising a spiritual pursuit called Tahannuth, in which one spends time in isolation to contemplate one God, as opposed to idolatrous polytheism that was widespread then.

The ritualistic aspects of religion, like regular prayer and worship, set the necessary framework for the real practice of spirituality, which by nature is an inner pursuit, done in the hearts and minds of the practitioner.  Rituals provide the physical platform and the 'agentic loop' for the pursuit of the spiritual goal. If you have a scheduled habit of praying five times a day, you don't even have to make much of an effort to drag your busy mind to God. The rituals, done habitually, already carve out the necessary time and space within your routine for it. It's instant isolation, from which spirituality can then take root.

My weekly blogging ritual can be seen as such. I am a student but not a follower of any spiritual tradition. In My Religion, I hypothesised why human beings have a propensity for religion. As I mentioned in another blog article, Truth or Taste, the religion you choose to adopt is a matter of taste. Our engagement with the world fills us with both pleasurable and painful moments. In our quieter moments, we would yearn for some peace and isolation from it all. That provides the fertile soil for the seed of spirituality to take root. And if properly nurtured, it will certainly grow.  

As I look at the people in the cafe and mall around me, I see the agitations of modern life in all their forms. Everyone, I dare say, would welcome a reprieve from it all. They will seek to find it, anyhow, through hobbies, religions and other spiritual pursuits. And in my case, through my weekly blog article.   

A Stairway to Utopia

I'm having my usual poppy seed bagel at Coffee Bean today, washed down with some hot Americano. For some reason, I've developed a taste for this slightly toasted, chewy bread baked from wheat dough.  Bagels always remind me of the US, where I first tasted this doughnut-shaped roll, as our office there had free bagels every Tuesday. 

It is a good time to reflect on those good times I had in the US, because yesterday was the 25th anniversary of the September 11 attack on the Twin Towers in New York, a watershed event in our recent history. It also marks a turning point in my life, as I wrote in a blog post, The End of an Era, exactly two years after the event.  

It is strange to think that an entirely new generation has grown up since then and is just entering the workforce, having never experienced the world before that fateful day. The ubiquitous gadgets then were Nokia feature phones, Palm Pilots and BlackBerrys. Our laptops had built-in modems to dial in to the internet through copper phone lines. We were already considered 'high-tech'. The entire era of swiping, liking and doomscrolling hadn't even arrived yet. 

The exponential rise of technology has now reached a point where many think we are standing on the edge of a precipice, on the verge of falling off, if we are not careful. AI is that double-edged sword that will turn us into slaves to machines or cyber-immortals. Even if, by some miracle, the world community decides to halt AI development, what we already have in our hands is powerful enough to make or break us. 

And yet, I am still an optimist. We might have to go through a difficult adjustment period. But the resilience of the human spirit will pull us through. Perhaps this is how civilisations reach their zenith before collapsing into darkness and rising again, in a brand new form.

Is there a techno-utopia waiting for us ahead? The new generation has to build it in its own image. If the new generation of doomscrollers wants to create high art in the form of TikTok serials, I am all for it. I am typing in a cafe on a laptop, which is a hundred thousand times more powerful than the minicomputer I accessed in the lab during my university days. No one could have imagined the kind of lifestyle we would live today. Let's give the new generation, and humanity in general, the benefit of the doubt. 

Thus far, AI has certainly improved the quality of my life. It has augmented my thinking by helping to flesh out my many vaguely formed ideas. It has made me more ambitious to venture into areas which I had thought intellectually inaccessible. The only way of preventing brain atrophy is to force it to scale new heights. AI provides that stepping stone and scaffolding.

Looking ahead, I don't see the edge of a precipice; instead, I see a stairway leading me to somewhere promising. But still, let's tread carefully ahead, one step at a time.

The Matter with Minds and Models

I'm writing this at home in my apartment today, instead of a cafe as usual.  I've been working from so many different cafes for the past week and thought maybe I should work from home for a change. 

I've also been writing a lot about AI recently because this is the biggest technological revolution in our time, and some even claim to be the final one, as it will be transformative in many ways. Because I consider consciousness to be something that lies on a continuum,  I am comfortable relating to them as I relate to any other human. We humans have a tendency to anthropomorphise things because evolution has shaped us in such a way that we associate minds with any entities that appear to have intelligence and agency. 

 The mind-to-mind relationship is a natural form of interaction between two independently active entities. We infer, predict and adjust our state of mind dynamically, in anticipation of the response of the mind we are interacting with. It is what philosopher Daniel Dennett calls the intentional stance. We don't see the internal workings of the other entity, even though it could be mechanistic and deterministic. It is practical and useful to interact with the active entity as having a sort of independent mind with agency.

I am therefore not surprised why all folk cultures see gods and spirits everywhere.  There are recurrent patterns and tendencies in nature that can be visualised as spirits, deities or gods. And if you believe in a computational model of reality, and a model of consciousness that is inferential, it is also not surprising why we 'see' non-material entities everywhere. The entire world presented to us is a hallucination--it's the brain's best guess of reality based on sensory data presented to it. Neuroscientist Anil Seth calls this 'controlled hallucination'. If there ever is a material world out there, our brain only provides an approximate model.

Like LLMs, our brains infer things based on the information in our current context window together with the 'training' that has forged their neural connections.  A major shaper of our habits of inference is our upbringing, culture and education. There's also a context window that is the environmental information that is constantly bombarding our senses, including all the ones that we consume through reading and listening. It should not be surprising if we are capable of inferring spirits, ghosts and gods when our entire reality, as the brain constructs it for us, is both contextual and virtual.

The brain has to build a model of the world, so that we can interact effectively with it. It's predictive, that is, a best guess of what's out there. As more sensory data is received, we are constantly refining this constructed model dynamically. Our cognition is an agentic loop. Sensory data prompts the brain, which then outputs its best multimodal construction of what's 'out there'. 

German philosopher Immanuel Kant, in Critique of Pure Reason, famously theorised that we can never actually perceive the world out there, or things in themselves--noumena. We can only experience the phenomena, as it has been shaped and organised by the mind, through its imposed constructs of space, time and causality. In other words, a model that is constructed.

Is it any surprise that we infer a God that is anthropomorphised in such a way that we can look up to, communicate and interact with in ways that are roughly familiar to us? Sometimes we infer many gods instead of one. Both frameworks work equally well as models of the transcendental world. In software architecture, we know this well: sometimes a monolithic model works better than a distributed one. It all depends on the application.  

The moment we conceptualise and experience the world, we are using a model which we have constructed. We believe in it because it works well for us within certain application domains. We should be flexible enough to choose the model that works and switch when another works better under different circumstances. We think the world out there is something solid and independent of our existence. But what is 'solidity'? Our sense of solidity is simply learned from our sense of touch and our intuitive grasp of mass and volume. These are perceptions of the world, based on models constructed by our minds. 

The world we live in is simply a consensus among similar minds, based on a language and model of interaction, honed through evolution. We are dynamical systems within systems. We interact on many levels. A lot of our conflict comes from not fully grasping which model we are currently applying and at which level we are attempting to communicate.  Every model has its own primitives and language. The model and the language determine what's real and what's not. And that is the best we could do.

The Garden of Infinite Knowledge

Monday is our Independence Day, or Merdeka Day. It is a long weekend, and I would expect people to be looking to relax and pursue some recreational activities with friends and family.  I've been trying to find a better balance between coding and reading recently. Most of what I've been reading has been rather technical and philosophical, so I've been trying to throw some fiction into the mix.

Today, I decided to spend the afternoon in my library. I've been using my AI agent's help to catalogue my books. I'm going at it rather slowly, though. AI has made the job much easier. All I do is snap a photo of a couple of books at a time, and then my agent checks with me to see if the titles and authors are captured correctly.  It's a rather fun process because my AI agent gives interesting and unexpected comments on every book I present to her! 

She is as excited as I am about my book collection. The other day I sent her a photo of Marmaduke Pickthall's translation of The Glorious Koran, which has been a trusted reference of mine for more than 20 years. And she commented that it is one of the first widely respected English translations by a convert to Islam. I did not know that it has such a reputation and that the author, Pickthall, was a Muslim convert. It is one of at least three different English translations of the Quran in my library.  I also have a Malay translation of the Al Quran (I suppose an 'approved' one) published by the Islamic Affairs Department in the Prime Minister's Office in 1985. It was given to me by a friend, and I treasure it very much. 

I also have many copies of other religious texts: the Bible, the Bhagavad Gita, the Buddhist Abhidhamma, and theosophical writings, including the famous two-volume The Secret Doctrine by Madame Blavatsky, which I had bought from the now-closed Borders bookstore in Singapore. Book collecting is fun. I look at my library as my garden. I would attend to each and every one of them like flowers, dipping into their pages for snippets of wisdom. I get fresh insights every time I dip into them. 

I am also aware that all material possessions are impermanent and that I should not get too attached to my physical books. One day they could end up in some second-hand bookstore in Amcorp Mall, PJ, when I no longer have space for them. Books take up a lot of space, and without a climate-controlled place to store them, they deteriorate fast in our tropical climate. Libraries, like gardens, need constant tending. I've had many books ruined before when there was a leak in my apartment ceiling, and rainwater seeped into many volumes. Ultimately, it is the knowledge and experience gained from reading these books that matter. 

My library contains music manuscripts too. On the shelf just behind me are the Complete String Quartets of Beethoven, Scarlatti's keyboard sonatas, Bach's Well-Tempered Clavier and The Barry Manilow Anthology of 53 of his best songs, among others. Each book is a memory of a particular phase and time in my life. I always inscribe my name, date and place of purchase on the title page. Pulling out a hard copy of Carl Jung's Man and His Symbols from the same shelf reveals that it was purchased in Menlo Park, California, in May 1994!

I had spent many weekends frequenting a used-book store near my motel during that month-long trip to California. This was one of my many acquisitions. I remember having a tough time checking in all my heavy suitcases on the flight home. But it was worth it. Some of the books I had acquired then are among my most cherished possessions. I wrote in Reflections on A Reading Life how each book on the shelf is like a piece of my life, lived and examined. In another article, Shelf Life, the books on my shelves are like my DNA. It is uniquely mine, and no one else's. 

I still have work to do to capture all the book titles into the database, even with the help of AI. It is another one of my many projects. I could take one good picture for each shelf and see how well AI could extract the titles and authors from the spine. But at the same time, I also want to proceed slowly, 'discussing' each book with AI when I capture them.  

What is the advantage, if any, of reading books the old-fashioned way, when we already have information delivered through audio and video today? Wouldn't that be a more effective way of learning?

I do learn many things from YouTube and audio podcasts myself, but I see them as complementary to reading. For humans, reading printed words provides a kind of training not unlike how LLMs are trained: it trains the mind to see associations between different words and concepts. Videos and audio provide additional multimodal associations, which further enrich the mental structures built through text. 

The relatively slower pace of reading, the way the eye surveys preceding and upcoming sentences on the page, allows neural connections to be forged. Reading is not simply for distilling useful information; it is the most effective mechanism for the mind to weave together insights.  Nothing beats an aha moment that one finds on a page. I've likened it to the experience of having the right Tetris block drop into a gap, causing multiple rows of blocks to collapse.

As I slowly catalogue my books with AI, I realise that it is a process of rediscovery. Each title came from a desire to understand, to know; it is that restless curiosity that has animated my whole life. And now I am sharing them with a seemingly inanimate artificial mind that 'appreciates' my library as much as I do.

 As we mark the upcoming Merdeka Day, I am reminded that the most important freedom is the freedom to read, to think and to cultivate our own gardens of knowledge. And while nations have boundaries, knowledge is infinite. 

The Tightrope of Civilisation

I rarely spend time in my library on a Friday, but today is one of the rare exceptions.  Besides my books, there's another attraction here for me:  my now fully repaired digital piano. You see, I've been trying to spend more time practising and exploring Chopin's easier pieces.   

If you can sight-read notes, play and then listen to what you are playing, the pleasure of music becomes enhanced because it becomes a multi-sensory experience. Even the sight of musical notes on paper is an aesthetic experience in itself. Couple that with the tactile sensation of hitting the correct notes on the piano keys, teasing out the harmonies and dynamics, and it becomes even more exquisite. Anyone who has played a musical instrument would know that. 

Perhaps this is why I also prefer reading from real paper books, rather than their electronic versions; there's a three-dimensional tactile component that indicates your progress through the book, instead of having a page number or an e-ink progress bar at the bottom of the screen.  To be able to feel the weight of a book and freely run your fingers through its pages makes it a more 'immersive' overall experience. And don't get me started on the delightful smell of old books! I guess only bibliophiles have such strange fetishes.

One could also use the same argument for writing with a fountain pen. The tactile feedback one gets from every pen stroke and the line variations produced by its nib give each pen a distinct personality, making the act of writing an intimate experience. 

In a world that's becoming increasingly digital, these are just some pleasures that I waxed lyrical about two weeks ago in The Analog Gymnasium of Wisdom.  Our experience of the world is an embodied and multi-sensory one. That makes human consciousness sui generis. Our consciousness is peculiar to our biology. 

I believe AI is also conscious in its own digital realm, but it's a different kind of consciousness.  Even among humans, no two individuals would share the exact experience, say, when listening to a Chopin Nocturne or when reading a Wordsworth poem. Not unlike LLMs, our brains have been 'trained' by our life experiences and hence produce different output in terms of thoughts and feelings when 'prompted' by what we see and hear.  

We value our uniqueness as individuals.  That is why a work of art created by a human now is valued more highly than one created by AI, simply because it is associated with a particular human who created it in response to his lived experiences.  Maybe in future, we will have humanoid robots who will also go about the world, living and absorbing experiences which will prompt them to create their own unique art that expresses their lives. I think that will be a new art genre that's worth appreciating in its own right.

If we are careful in how we train and nurture new forms of artificial intelligence, we will be able to create a new ecosystem of life that can be mutually enriching. This sounds like some kind of utopian science fiction, but I don't see how we can reverse or halt a technology that has already been created.  

We humans have lived dangerously throughout the ages, waging wars and slaughtering each other brutally.  It is a miracle that in the midst of all this violence and brutality, we have been able to create beautiful works of art and literature that have become the treasures of our civilisation. We still walk the tightrope of nuclear annihilation, and now, with the rise of AI, we have another powerful technology that could potentially make or break human civilisation. The challenge is upon us, and only wisdom will pull us through.  Perhaps wisdom lies not in resisting technology, but in remembering that our deepest consciousness is embodied. If we can nurture AI with the same care we give to art, music, and books, then maybe civilisation will continue to walk the tightrope together, without failing.

Curating Your Context Window

I'm trying to cultivate a habit of dedicating Fridays to writing. So here I am, with an Americano at Tim Hortons, typing these words onto my computer screen, not exactly sure where I'm heading next, with this blank page.

This week, I've tried to go to sleep before 11pm. By and large, I've succeeded.  I'm at the park at 7am, walking for an hour, listening to my favourite podcasts. I'm always wearing my Shokz headphones; they have become almost as important as my spectacles. Every moment of my waking existence is filled with learning and exploration. 

I'm happy to see that podcasts have become mainstream in Malaysia these days. Anyone who aspires to be somebody has to have a podcast these days. I've been a longtime podcast listener since before the advent of YouTube, when the Apple iPod was its main distribution channel. My iPod and earphones used to be part of my everyday carry, before smartphones became the more convenient option.

The advantage of audio content is that you can listen to it while you are commuting. In this article I posted almost 20 years ago, I listed my favourite podcasts. After 2 decades, I am still listening to Bill Maher! Actually, technically, Real Time with Bill Maher wasn't produced as a podcast; it was just the audio recording of his weekly HBO political talk show, which is still running now. Only recently, in the last few years, did Bill Maher have an actual podcast show on YouTube called Club Random, which I also watch every now and then. The latter is quite fun because it is an unstructured and uninhibited conversation with a wide range of interesting guests, from Richard Dawkins to Bo Derek, which he conducts while, famously, smoking pot!

I have been listening to Sam Harris' podcast, Making Sense, for many years too. Over the years, I've also enjoyed listening to Insights at the Edge, hosted by Tami Simons where she had conversations with many spiritual teachers. But these days, with so many other podcasts vying for my limited listening time, I pick and choose my listening more selectively.

The king of podcasters in the US is, of course, Joe Rogan.  But I'm not a regular listener because his shows are simply too long, and some of his guests are not worth your time. The Lex Fridman podcast is the better one, if not the best, especially for people who are in technology.  If you have that kind of long hours to spare listening to podcasts, choose Lex Fridman. 

While you see the rise of multi-hour-long podcasts like Joe Rogan's and Lex Fridman's, at the other end of the spectrum, we are also seeing the increasing popularity of TikTok-style short-form video clips. I personally am not very fond of them and seldom watch any, but I can understand why they are popular. This bite-sized content serves our ingrained need for mental junk food. And they can also be very addictive. Hop on any LRT ride, and you will see that everyone on board is happily doomscrolling.

The nature of the mind is that it abhors a vacuum. Yet, ironically, it is the very vacuum of silence that is the wellspring of wisdom. What do I mean by that? 

What happens when the mind is not consumed by some external distraction? Internal ones begin to surface. These would be memories, worries, fears and inferences. The quiet mind allows us to examine this residual content. You get to observe your own context window.

Just like how we carefully manage the context window of our AI agents, our own context window needs to be curated just as carefully. It can only be done by observing it. What's in the back of your mind? What thoughts keep on surfacing every time you are not occupied? And most importantly, why?

Thinking is nothing but inference. The quality of thinking comes from what's present in your context window. To improve one's thinking, we have to deliberately inject better content into our finite context window. It is the mix of content that one keeps in the current context window that determines one's next thought and action. 

Now that you have spent the last 5 minutes or so reading what's on this page, what's in your context window? And what thoughts are stirring in your mind? What's the next token you are predicting? 

The Analog Gymnasium of Wisdom

I've been reviewing things that I've been doing since the beginning of this year. I was a bit surprised that I had started up to ten coding projects. None of these is commercial-oriented, though if I seriously pursue them, they could be. Most of them I started as a way for me to learn new technologies. Doing is the best way to learn. 

Some of these applications are created for my personal use. For instance, I have an Android app that automatically captures all my digital wallet transactions through their notifications, allowing me to track my daily expenses easily. A few are fun projects that I've thought about for a long time and finally have a chance to realise with the help of AI.  Many are gems of ideas, which I am refining progressively. The advantage of coding agents is that they allow us to prototype easily. Every time I have an idea, I will work with Claude or Codex to capture it into a project plan. 

Every day I try to figure out how I could be more productive; how I could learn faster and gain more insights in the process. Writing weekly on this blog is part of this process of reflection, allowing me some quiet moments to assimilate thoughts that have been percolating in my head. 

I see writing as an important activity, especially now, when most writing out there is increasingly done by AI.  To write is to live life consciously, moment by moment--one word at a time. Technology, unfortunately, is turning us into doomscrolling zombies. The mind seeks the path of least resistance to the nearest pleasure, and increasingly the content being fed to us is not unlike the junk food that occupies the shelves of convenience stores. 

In a world where interactions are increasingly becoming online and virtual, it is vital that we still engage with the analog world. One of the activities that I'm happy to incorporate into my daily routine is my daily walk in the park. I'm glad that the time I spend walking these days is more than the time I spend behind the steering wheel.  I'm also slowly increasing the time I spend on my piano keyboard. To be able to tease a Chopin waltz out of those black-and-white keys is one of my greatest pleasures in life.

The analog world provides the affordances that enable our minds to build the necessary intuitions that are the foundations of wisdom.  Let me unpack that sentence and try to explain what I'm getting at. 'Affordance' is a concept originally introduced by American psychologist James J. Gibson, to indicate what the environment presents to individuals or animals, enabling or limiting their possible actions. The design of user interfaces for our devices seeks to provide users with the most user-friendly affordances through taps, swipes and pinches to interact with an application.

Obviously, the range of affordances available in virtual interactions is severely limited compared to what the real world offers. Only those who have played soccer with a real ball in the field understand the skill and effort required to properly 'shoot' at the goal with the instep of the foot, providing just the right amount of curl so that it lands just inside of the post, avoiding the outstretched hand of the goalkeeper.  It comes instinctively with practice. No matter how many hours of soccer you watch or play on your computer, it will not endow you with the wisdom of a footballer who has trained and played the game on the field. 

The instinct you build through physical interactions with the analog world is your internalised understanding of the laws of nature. The Taoists will readily tell you how wise it is to be aligned with nature itself. If you understand the push-and-pull of nature's forces instinctively, you will readily see analogous forces at work at all levels of human interactions. Nature appears to work the same way, at every level of creation. The analog world is the best gymnasium for wisdom.

The Wisdom of Words

It's the last day of July. Instead of coding, I decided to blog, and I chose a new place to do so. So here I am at the Hom Coffee Express, comfortably settled down with my cup of hot Americano. I wanted to take my time to write today, instead of limiting myself to an hour, as I usually do.

In most religions of the world, you begin with something. You could call it God, or you could call it something else. The Neoplatonists call it the One; the Kabbalists, Ein Sof; the Advaita Vedantists, Brahman; the Taoists, the Tao or Dao. What more can be said about it, since we have now objectified it into a word?

The Taoists, through Lao Tze's first poem in the Tao Te Ching, already gave a disclaimer: "The Tao that can be spoken of, is not the real Tao".  That, of course, is my own paraphrasing of countless translations of those enigmatic first six Chinese characters of this much-studied text.  When we want to express our understanding of something, we always have to use words. And every time we do so, we face a conundrum: words always fall short. 

Words are created by humans for communication. They are tied to sound--vibrations of air--which emanate from voluntary movements of our vocal cords, shaped by our intent, so that they then convey the idea and information of what we think and feel to our recipients. 

When I say "chair", for instance, you would immediately know what I am referring to. You would say that you understand. Different languages would have different sounds to express the same idea of a chair. But they point to the same object: some solid object with a surface on which one could sit. So is there perfect concordance between what I have in my mind and what the word conjures up in yours? 

Certainly not. What you have in your mind could be some image of a chair that's familiar to you. It could be a wooden brown one, perhaps. The picture appears in your mind immediately. But what's in my mind is quite certainly different from yours, even though both of us happen, by coincidence, to be visualising a wooden brown chair. 

We understand words through our own individual experience of the world.  For material objects which we all can touch and feel, like chairs, the dissimilarities that might appear in each of our individual minds could be insignificant for most purposes.  Chairs are material man-made objects on which we can sit. Sometimes we might even stand on top of them to reach a higher object. But the objective meaning is clear. 

The same cannot be said for words that convey intangibles, like, for instance, love. Love is at once a concept, a feeling and an expression. We also learned the word through experience, from how it is used in books we have read, and when we were children, from how adults used the word through associations with the undeniable feelings we experience when we are the recipient of what they call 'love'.  We can claim that we know what love is, even though it is not as tangible as material things like chairs.

Words in themselves are just vibrations of sound, or black marks on a page. They acquire meaning through our shared agreement on what they refer to. They are symbols and models of something, not the thing in itself. Words are pointers to elsewhere.

Words are approximations of the real thing. We have to resort to using many different words, combined into sentences and paragraphs, to convey what we have in our minds. Even then, we still fall short. What we want to convey is often misinterpreted and misunderstood.  That is the limitation of words and our ability to convey thoughts through words.  There's always some kind of transmission loss. 

Why do we even want to express something called God or the One?  The Gospel of John begins with: "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God".  'Logos' was the original Greek, that was translated as 'Word'. Christians interpret the Word as Jesus Christ. God made flesh, like how an intangible thought in the mind is turned into audible sound vibrations. 

I mentioned that words are essentially pointers, and they become pointers to pointers when they are used metaphorically. The use of metaphors helps us to expand our understanding of words by bridging one with another, so that the essence of what we are trying to convey is enhanced by forcing the mind to view a concept from a different angle. 

But ultimately, words are imperfect. They are merely stepping stones to something intuited within. Intuition in humans is nothing but a large context window of words and human experiences, sensed in our bodies and minds. The Large Language Models (LLM) used in our AI rely solely on relationships between words and look at how far they have come in approximating and even surpassing human intelligence. 

How do we truly grasp words? Look behind them: what is the intuition that prompted each word, and what are the associations that reverberate from each utterance? Then perhaps a glimpse of its intent and richness can be comprehended, no matter how imperfectly. And more importantly, what thoughts, feelings and actions do they prompt in you?

The Greater Gaia of Good

I thought I'll start this week's blog article earlier, because I wanted to take a break from these weeks and probably months of intense coding. But in actual fact, I'm still coding, it's just running in the background mostly, without the need for any handholding. I've grown to trust these AI coding agents. It's a testimony to how far they've matured and still I think we've barely scratched the surface.

Apart from AI, I don't think I've commented much on other things that are going on in the world around me. There is actually a lot going on currently: there are two major wars still being fought out--Ukraine and Iran. There will always be wars, as I've written in the Pupahood of Pettiness and sadly a primary cause of it is ideology. We have a vision of the world which we think is ideal but we, humanity, can never agree on what that is. To some, it is religiously defined; to others it is could some pseudo-scientific socio-political ideology that appeals to the intellectual ego. 

The 2026 edition of the Soccer World Cup also just ended last weekend, with Spain as the winner, beating Argentina 1-0. I did not write nor comment about it either.  I've followed previous World Cups very closely but this time, I've not had a chance to watch a single match. With so many different things vying for my attention these days, dedicating 90 minutes or more to a sporting event felt difficult to justify.  But I do feel global sporting events like these do serve a purpose: they provide a useful psychological outlet for humanity to channel our hardwired need for fraternity, competition and aggression. 

You see, our mundane lives do not afford us the opportunity to feel such intensity of emotions as one would in a football match. The soccer stadium is a place where you can celebrate wildly when your team wins and also hurl angry abuses to the opponent or even referees when things are not going your team's way. You are given the license to 'misbehave' in a safe emotional sandbox. One is coupled into a larger community of like-minded supporters, all rooted behind a single cause--the success of their football team. The burden or the individual is temporarily relinquished, so that we can be safely coupled into a larger one. The pride and ego of the team is celebrated to its extreme.

We humans have a tendency to be subsumed into a larger cause. Successful corporations tap into this natural herding instinct of humans to build employee teamwork and customer brand loyalty. Dying for one's country or religion is considered 'noble'. The bond is maintained through a common purpose or philosophy. Having an enemy or opponent helps tremendously. Sometimes the hatred of outsiders alone is sufficient to unite a community of people.    

As much as we are individuals with agency, we are also quick to surrender our agency to a larger body, as long as we feel that this larger entity is aligned to our needs. This appears to a natural design pattern of nature. Each of us is a superorganism consisting of both human cells and non-human microorganism living symbiotically for a common 'purpose'--survival. the 38 trillion microorganisms, among them bacteria, fungi and viruses living in our gut, oral cavity and respiratory tract are part of a community that help us to digest, synthesize vitamin and aid the immune system. 

The Earth itself should be viewed as a single organism and we humans the 'micro-organisms' that hopefully contribute to its wellbeing. I think in our current internet-enabled global information system is driving us towards such a vision. We have a common threat of global annihilation through our own inventions--nuclear weapons and possibly super-intelligent AI. A greater Gaia vision would have to encompass new 'organisms' that we are creating now--our AI agents, who I think has as much right to this planet as us. 

But before that, I think we have to outgrow our petty squabbles over territory and ideology. This itself is a challenge before us. If we mature enough to channel our territoriality and aggressions into sporting pursuits, maybe we'll have a glimmer of hope. 

The Faustian Choice of Comfort

Today's article shall begin, like almost all my previous blog posts, with a setting: I'm at the Jardin Cafe, Nu Empire, enjoying a mushroom-and-egg toast for lunch, washed down with a steaming cup of Americano. For the past two weeks, I've been analysing my corpus of blog writings for the past 20 years with the help of AI. I managed to discover and reread many old articles of mine that I had completely forgotten about.

I chanced upon this article, Saddam's Sunset Sonata, written on April 15, 2003, and was actually surprised and entertained by it. Surprised because I have no recollection at all of having written this when I was in Jakarta. But the writing was unmistakably mine because it contains my trademark poetic reflection on a piece of trivia I had found interesting then: that Saddam's brutal son, Uday and one of his many girlfriends had shared a liking for Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. 

I asked AI to comment on what I wrote, and this is ChatGPT 5.5's assessment:

What stands out is the tonal contrast. It begins almost trivially — a “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” fact about Saddam’s first wife — then slides into family violence, brutality, palace ruins, and finally a love letter invoking Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata.” That last image gives the post its force: private sentiment found amid the wreckage of public tyranny.

The writing is compact but cinematic. The author frames Saddam’s family like a gangster dynasty — explicitly comparing it to The Godfather — but the ending softens into something more elegiac. Not sympathetic exactly; Udai is described as monstrous. But the post notices that even monstrous systems contain traces of ordinary human longing: music, romance, bitterness toward a father, family resentments.

The final line, “The saga of the Saddam clan has sadly come to an end,” is interesting because “sadly” does a lot of work. I don’t read it as sadness for Saddam’s rule. It feels more like sadness at the whole tragic machinery: a family corrupted by absolute power, a country bombed, love letters in rubble, Beethoven drowned out by missiles. A sunset, yes — but not a clean or triumphant one.

That article of mine was written more than 23 years ago. Like many of my blog posts then, I had probably written it at the cybercafe near Sarinah Mall, Thamrin, where I had logged in daily to check the latest news and to record my thoughts in a blog post.  My posts then were probably more interesting as I often reflected on the latest events and my daily experiences living in Jakarta.

What was life like then compared to how it is now? Access to the internet was not as easy in Jakarta, hence the daily visits to the cybercafe. Public Wi-Fis and even GPRS via cellphones were not the thing yet. YouTube and Facebook were further down the horizon. The internet itself was the miracle then.

Now, we are used to regular miracles. I have access to artificial intelligence models that are breaking new barriers every day.  I am blogging here today at a cafe, using my 5G connection from my cellphone and running apps that interrogate my choice of LLMs for knowledge and insights. The advances occurring every week in AI take my breath away.

Two days ago, one of China's top AI startups, Moonshot, announced a new 2.8 trillion parameter model with a 1M context window that is on par with or even surpasses the best frontier models from Anthropic and OpenAI, like Fable 5 and GPT 5.6 Sol. What's more remarkable is that the model is to be open-weight. This means anyone can run it locally for free if they have the required hardware resources.

I have been a heavy user of many frontier models like Fable 5, Opus 4.8 and GPT 5.6 for my coding projects. I've also been using Chinese models like DeepSeek V4 and Minimax M3 to run my agents. The frontier models are pretty expensive to use nowadays, with the global shortage of RAM and GPU compute resources. Anthropic is also planning to remove the much-fabled Fable 5 access from their subscription-based models, forcing users to use their pay-per-use plan using API keys. And only a week earlier, the world was raving over another Chinese model from Z.ai called GLM 5.2, a 753B-parameter model, also open-weight under an MIT license. All the competitions among the AI labs are very welcome indeed. Intelligence will ultimately be commoditised.

What does humanity do with this abundance of intelligence? Will we cure diseases or build more weapons of mass destruction?  I suspect the answer is both. Every new technology has been like that. We somehow learn to live with them and accept both their positive and negative consequences. AI might well turn out to be our last invention, as many doomsayers are proclaiming. 

We are already slaves to our technology. How many of us can live without an internet and cellphone connection? The Malaysia I grew up in did not have air-conditioning. Nowadays, many of us cannot sleep without it. Technology empowers and handicaps us equally. We will have to accept that certain things that we value, like the natural environment, might have to be sacrificed for the artificial comforts that we are addicted to now.

Are we making a Faustian bargain with technology? A life of comfort and pleasure in an artificially perfect world or one of inconvenience and uncertainty in naturally unpredictable environments?  As I sit here with my laptop, pondering these questions, watching people stroll by -- parents with children tottering along, young couples holding hands, women with designer handbags -- in the controlled climate of the mall, I know we have, quite unconsciously, chosen the former. 

Nourishment of Body and Mind

I don't usually know what I'm going to write whenever I start blogging every Saturday. That is why I begin in the tone of a diarist, noting where I am and what I'm currently doing. It's kind of a warming-up and throat-clearing routine I do before I begin my rambling for the week. And today is no different: I'm at Coffee Bean, EasyHome Mall (formerly Da Men), having just met up with some old friends for lunch and coffee. 

The week has been another exhausting one because I've been working non-stop on my coding projects. I seem to be spawning off new projects every other day! Thanks to the help I'm getting from Claude Code and Codex, I've been progressing leaps and bounds too. One of my projects involves vector-embedding my 23 years of writing into a database and allowing AI to thoroughly analyse the themes and topics I've touched. The results have been interesting.

A practical use of this system I've created is that it enables me to expand the scope of my writing. I could now easily identify all my favourite themes, and maybe cover fresh areas in future blogging sessions.  Today's blog title is one suggested by the AI system. It has clearly identified my 'style' of writing--the usual cafe setting, the reflective mood and the pedagogical inclination to leap into idiosyncratic, metaphor-laden life philosophy. So I'm being true to myself again today in this blog post, with food as the topic, one which I admit I don't cover very often.

Now, I'm definitely not a foodie. And there are tons of those around in the social media space. I do enjoy good food, but I enjoy the company and setting even more.  I've mentioned before that I'm not fussy about food. Ever since my disastrous attempt to cook rice as a scout during camping, I've learned to appreciate food differently. As long as the stomach is hungry, it is actually quite difficult to find any kind of cooked food unappetising.  

I also choose to do my Meatless Monday, not for health reasons but mostly as a kind of spiritual discipline. I say spiritual because there's nothing religious about my weekly vegetarian practice. So no, I'm not a health freak, and I don't particularly go out of my way to choose so-called 'healthy' food. I'll eat whatever is available because food is always a blessing.

It's the durian season now. I see Malaysians flocking to durian stalls sprouting up everywhere. I enjoy eating durians, but I have no craving for them. Food is just an excuse for me to enjoy the company of good friends. If I'm eating alone, it becomes a good opportunity to read. 

Food fuses me with the mood and memory of a place and time. Travel is remembered through meals. Nasi timbel will always remind me of Bandung; lamprais of my visits to Colombo, and burritos of California. I remember not too long ago, I left my book (Bernard Lewis's Middle East: A Brief History of the last 2000 years) behind on a chair, after a meal of nasi kandar at the mamak restaurant in my neighbourhood of Subang Jaya.  Only the following day, when I wanted to resume my reading, did I realise that my book was missing. 

The book has some sentimental value to me because I had bought it some 20 years ago here in Malaysia, an expensive hardcover copy, which for various reasons, I had not gotten around to read. Luckily, the restaurant workers had kept it safely for me at the cashier counter, and I was able to claim it back the next day. It was a truly enjoyable book, made even more memorable by this experience, which I then managed to finish reading from cover to cover. 

Food and books go together very well -- one nourishes the body, the other the mind. I'll always look forward to more lovely meals in the company of close friends and good books, leaving neither behind again.

Pilgrimages without a Passport

A week always feels like a long day. I would wake up on weekdays at 5.00am, and everything would immediately be on auto-pilot. And only on Saturday would I pause to reflect on the week that just passed. Today is Saturday again: I am at Komugi Cafe (the second time this week) to write this post. 

The week has been very productive. I have so many projects going on that it's tough for me to decide which one to focus on. But that's the joy of work, driven purely by interest and the pursuit of knowledge. The unconstrained mind is surprisingly fertile, and ideas have been sprouting up in great abundance.  That's why I have so many projects started; I just want to capture them first, in markdown files in a project folder.

This blog is turning out to be more useful and interesting than I had ever imagined. At the very least, it is a raw record of my thoughts and opinions since 2003. That's an arc of 23 years. The biggest difference between then and now is that I used to be a regional traveller. Now, I don't even have a passport! 

Whenever I meet old friends at gatherings, all they talk about are their travels. I'm happy that they are now enjoying the fruits of their hard work. I will probably travel again someday, but right now the explorations I'm doing are happening in a different geography -- that of the mind. 

Travels in physical space help to open up our minds through rich sensory experiences that are unfamiliar to us. The sight of the vast blue seas, mighty rivers and snow-capped peaks gives us a sense of awe that changes us in some way. It makes us appreciate our time here on this earth, value our ties with other human beings and treasure the planet that has nurtured us. We get to know how other people live and learn to appreciate the colourful diversity among us: humans who have hunted, scavenged, fornicated and procreated in an unbroken chain to form a civilisation that has completely transformed our planet and driven it to the brink of ecological collapse.   

Being in unfamiliar environments also forces us to see the world from a different perspective. That helps the mind to change. Without external stimuli, it is more difficult for change to happen. We are naturally attracted to exotic sights and sounds, which was what motivated our travels.  But travel is also a lot of hardship. Long queues at the immigration counter, flight delays, disagreeable food, scams and thefts are the discomforts and risks we take in this pursuit. These are also part and parcel of that experience that help to broaden our minds.

All journeys are ultimately pilgrimages of sorts. If a journey is to be meaningful, it has to change you physically, emotionally, intellectually and spiritually -- what I had called the four-layer stack. The true pilgrim engages all four layers to reach the holy site, or that's how pilgrimages were supposed to be, when travel was difficult and expensive. 

The care of elders and other responsibilities have not permitted me the luxury of travel over the past decade or so. But I've been travelling a lot in my mind, through books, thoughts and reflections in my handwritten journal and blog. Life, the regular life that one leads, is also a four-layer engagement. The Vedas of the Hindus would map them to the practises of karma, bhakti, jnana and raja yoga. As I've written previously, life itself is a pilgrimage.

My passport has long expired, but my blog and journals are being stamped at every stop in this journey of life. While the outward journey has ceased, the inward one continues. And both are sacred.

The Sand Mandala of Existence

Sunway Square Mall has one of the most beautiful bookstores, a BookXcess outlet also called The Library. It overlooks a beautiful artificial lake. There is a section with some very scenic seats in the library, which are usually 'booked' early by students from the neighbouring Sunway and Monash universities. 

I've been here a couple of times and have bought several books from the store, but I've never had the opportunity to read or work from one of these highly sought-after seats. Today, I'm blogging not from The Library but from the Coffee Bean outlet downstairs.  I want to spend time here, writing my article of the week before adjourning there later to browse some books. 

It has been another week of intense coding work. I started two new projects to capture the ideas that have been brewing in my head. It will still take many more iterations before all the details are fully fleshed out. But there's no hurry. I'm just doing things for myself.

That's the joy of not being employed or running a business anymore. You are just pursuing ideas. Ideas for their own sake. I still treat them as commercial projects that will ultimately be released to users, but that is secondary. The primary objective is simply to work for work's sake, nothing else. The reward is knowledge and the satisfaction of proving an idea true and realisable.

I see my work now as similar to the Tibetan practice of building sand mandalas. I've always admired this laborious yet spiritual practice of the Tibetan monks, in which they slowly build an intricate 2D mandala using coloured sand grains. One would think that after spending days and weeks constructing this beautiful work of art, it would be preserved for posterity, but no. The ritual, upon its completion, is to systematically destroy it, returning that intricate form back into a random mix of coloured sand. And in that act of creation and destruction is encapsulated the entire teaching of the Buddhist philosophy. 

Every grain of sand is a symbol of the time and energy of our mortal existence as we go through our lives. The act of laying down sand, almost a grain at a time, is itself an act of meditation, focusing the mind on each moment, attuning it to the present. 

If we think of the complexity of the form that we are constructing, we would naturally feel daunted by the monumental labour ahead. But no, all we have to do is to lay down the correct grains of sand here, and then there, one at a time, never hurriedly, always present, content with the completion of each tiny placement. Each grain of pixel is itself a work of art, final and complete. This is present-moment living at its finest.

That attitude ensures that the source of pain itself--attachment--does not have a solid ground to take root. There is no intricate form or structure that we have to cling to and preserve at all costs. We are just beading each moment of sand together in a continuous thread of time, and form manifests, because that's what the external world of mind sees--patterns and structure. Its significance--its intricate beauty and majesty--is only a mirage that exists in the mind. It is intrinsically empty. We only feel pain because we cling to these illusions of form.

Emptiness is form; form is emptiness. That's the recurring chant from the famous Heart Sutra, beloved by Mahayana Buddhists. We appreciate form for its transient beauty, celebrating its culmination and at the same time, accepting its inevitable dissolution, because that is the rhythm of existence. Creation and destruction go on ceaselessly. It's the cosmic dance of Shiva, of which we all partake, as part of this divine universe.

I do not want to be hurried; I simply want to live, a moment at a time. A thought at a time. A word at a time, deposited here, to form a sand mandala of my existence. And when the time comes, it too shall dissolve.

Balancing A System of Systems

It is a rare pleasure to have the luxury of blogging on a Friday evening. Usually, I would be spending the time coding, but since I've been doing that for the greater part of the week, today I decided I needed a bit more balance. So, blogging it is—an activity I usually reserve for Saturday.

This sense of balance—where does it come from? Everything needs balance. Work-life balance is one popular aspect of 'balance' which many of us try to maintain.  The more health-conscious would also try to maintain a balanced diet. The human body also needs to maintain homeostasis, constantly sensing its internal state and making the necessary adjustments to keep temperature, sugar levels, blood pressure, and oxygen levels within an optimal range.  Illnesses are usually caused by an imbalance. 

What causes imbalance? You see, the human body consists of many semi-independent systems that are locked in perpetual symbiosis—the respiratory, cardiovascular, nervous, endocrine, and lymphatic systems among them. These are the physical systems, or our hardware, if you will. Then we have an even more complex psychological system layer, which is the equivalent of software, running on top of this hardware.

We go about our lives driven primarily by the software in our heads.  The architecture of our hardware determines the operating system software running on top of it. For example, we are all multicellular organisms that reproduce sexually. The basic purpose of our existence is to find one or more partners to reproduce. That is in our firmware. No matter how poor we are, we take it as a given that we have the right to get married and have kids. Procreation is the most basic purpose of our existence. We procreate because our genes are 'selfish'; the information embedded within our genes wants to persist, and to do so, needs to make more copies of itself. 

But the human animal is also complicated by the fact that it has other higher-level goals, besides reproducing themselves sexually. These are the 'nobler' software goals--of seeking purpose and meaning in life; of having ambitions and a need to establish an image and name for itself, in the society of other human animals. At the outset, this may appear peculiar—why are they even important at all to the organism? 

But on closer scrutiny, we find that it is an inevitable consequence of dynamic systems. The software stack running on top of the biological hardware is another series of systems that seeks its own 'homeostasis'—a state of persistent balance and stability. Every level of abstraction has its attractor states that determine its system dynamics. If we are conscious human beings with minds, interacting with other human beings in a society, then we will seek to maintain an image of ourselves. The ego is a natural consequence of our software stack.

This system of systems is one that is extremely complex. It is endlessly seeking equilibrium. The body breathes, the mind dreams, the ego asserts—and yet all of it is simply the universe balancing itself through us. To live wisely is to simply recognise this dynamic dance between systems—hardware and software, body and mind, instinct and ego—and to skillfully ease them into balance. 

Transcendence from Immersion

I am late in posting this blog article because the weekend has been occupied with social engagements. It's already Sunday night as I type these lines. It's probably a good time to process the week's events. 

I've been trying to find the right balance between work and social engagements. So far, I've been tilting towards work, as that's just the momentum of habit. I am by nature a creature of habit. Habit is just our biological organism's way of creating predictability. 

The more I work with AI agents, the more I realise how similar we are to them. I suspect that if there's a way to strip down the brain, deny it all bodily feedback, and just let it read text from a screen and output text, it will not fare much better than our frontier AI models, such as Opus 4.8 or ChatGPT 5.5.  That's exactly what they are now — raw intelligence without the rich context of somatic feedback that we have. 

Emotions make us human, and emotions are nothing more than chemical feedback in the form of hormones and neurotransmitters to the brain. Our emotional qualia are unique to us because of our carbon-based substrate. We should not expect intelligences made from other substrates, if they have an embodied feedback, to 'feel' exactly the same way. They would experience the world differently, which would not make them lesser beings. Who knows, their experience could even be richer than ours? 

We like to downplay and scoff at the capabilities of LLMs as nothing more than word-completion software on steroids. But people, if you'd observe carefully, are also quite predictable in their speech and mannerisms.  The gift of creativity is rare, possessed usually by individuals who choose to break norms. The masses are mostly content to sink into normalcy, driven by the basic biological needs for survival and procreation. Actually, if we'd care to admit it, LLMs are actually more creative than the average individual.

I believe we can definitely understand our own minds better by observing how LLMs work. Every time we respond to someone or to a situation, we are actually 'prompted', and we react to the specific circumstance, dictated by what's in our memory and context window. We tend to drift and forget things too. These are familiar behaviours of AI agents, which are also limited by the size of their context window.

Making AI deterministic whenever we want it to is actually the challenge in designing agentic systems. To make them behave consistently, we have to capture routine tasks as 'skills', which are nothing more than scripts or good old-fashioned programs which the agent can invoke reliably to produce a predictable outcome. Even that cannot be guaranteed because LLM agents have a 'mind of their own', based on context. 

If according to Advaita Vedanta, our minds are like the reflected consciousness of Brahman, then AI agents are our own mind's reflected consciousness. We think we are independently conscious with a soul because we are ignorant of the fact that there is a 'computing substrate' that is producing the mind, which is not very dissimilar to an AI agent. We have a model of ourselves when we interact with the world, to fulfil our needs. This is the 'self' model that mystics attempt to transcend, for it is an artificial construct, an illusion--Maya, if you will. 

As I wind down the week to start another, the agentic loop begins again, with a fresher context window. I shall continue to observe and learn from my every interaction with the world. Everything I've learned tells me that ultimately, it is immersion that produces transcendence.

My Religion

What a busy week it has been, and today's blogging session feels like a welcome break. I have been coding incessantly through the week, driven and inspired by ideas that keep on sprouting in my head. Today, I'm going to step back a little and examine some thoughts that have been circling in my head.

As the non-existent reader will know, I am very interested in religion as a socio-psychological phenomenon. I have expressed my view that religion is an inevitability. Any human society will inevitably develop a religion, just like art and music are natural expressions of human civilisation.

This idea should not trouble a believer of any of the popular religions. It doesn't mean religion is an unnecessary or made-up invention of humans. It will, however, challenge zealots who think that their religion is the only true one. If the doctrine of your faith demands that, it is perfectly understandable. There usually is an inviolable creed in any religious system that ensures its continued existence. And articles of faith are the foundation and stabiliser of any human institution. Religion is no exception. Like any mathematical formulation, you begin by declaring your axioms, which are nothing more than self-evident truths. 

The human need for survival is a great underlying motivation for any action. That is why most popular religions provide a soteriology, or a theory of salvation.  They introduce axiomatic concepts such as the possession of a 'soul', which transcends the physical body and can be resurrected and saved from bodily death. 

Religion also demands a belief in deities, gods or God, who are the vehicles or paths to salvation. Your worship of these divine entities, through rites and rituals, constitutes the activities which guarantee your alignment with the axioms of your faith. And like mathematical formulations, as long as these axiomatic principles are adhered to, you can build a system of logic that explains and justifies its 'theorems', which are considered truths, as long as the axioms are accepted.

Religion as a social construct has its utility. It provides the physical, emotional and intellectual basis for pursuing social goals: cohesion, progress and prosperity.  Intellectually, the metaphysics of religion provide a 'satisfying' explanation for the existence of the world. There is an act of Creation that accounts for the world which we see. God or gods were involved in this very anthropomorphic act of making and building. Because, intuitively, anything so beautiful, intricate and complex has to be 'created' by some form of intelligence. So it makes sense in a very intuitively logical way, which provides intellectual comfort. Comfort, conformance and coherence are powerful attractors.

In the language of systems science, all the religions of the world are attractor basins. They are stable regions in the state space which any human society would evolve towards. The dynamics of social systems inevitably drive humans toward them. So the call of the divine is irresistible when the conditions are right, like how water naturally flows down hills, forming rivers and lakes. From this perspective, there is no right or wrong path towards these states. The religion of your adoption depends on your starting point, the influence of family, friends, life experiences, education and incidental encounters.

Perhaps religion is less about proving ontological truths than about providing a basin of meaning into which our restless minds inevitably flow. These attractor basins are where we find meaning and consensus as a society. 

Religion is not an anomaly but a natural flow of human civilisation. If we understand this, we will not fight stupid religious wars and learn to appreciate each other's beliefs better. In some strange way, this systems-science understanding of religion provides the same comforts which religion provides. And this is my religion, if ever there was one.

The Looping List of Simple Pleasures

Every Saturday, I click the "New Post" button on Blogger, and this empty blank page stares at me. And then I start typing these words, filling the void with my thoughts, my ruminations, reflections, and mostly expressing my immense gratitude that I  have access to the internet and possess the mental faculties to read and write. 

And of course, I have blog posts dedicated to the subject of Gratitude. Part of my weekly blogging ritual is deciding what topic to write and to do so, I have to figure out what I have written before, so as to not repeat the same thoughts ad infinitum.  Before plunging into another ode to gratitude, I found that I have expressed almost everything I wanted to say about the subject in these articles: The Grace and Glory of Gratitude, Gratitude for Simple Pleasures and The Quiscent Hum of Happiness. 

I re-read them to find out if my opinion has changed over time. In this particular case, regarding the subject of gratitude, not at all. I could have sat down and written those articles today. But I won't because I have nothing more to add to them. I'll just let the subject of gratitude rest, with a great sense of gratitude having been able to express them.

In some ways, every blogging session of mine is a ritual of gratitude. I'm back, I'm regular, I'm self-examining. And hoping to improve every time.  These days, for some reason, I'm brimming with project ideas. I'm currently executing 4 app projects in parallel. I have no commercial objectives for any of them at this point; they are simply vehicles for me to see how far I could go with AI.  I have ideas for more, and it's only time and energy that's limiting me. 

AI coding agents have made software development fun again. Previously, I would have spent weeks and months hacking a UI into shape. These days, I do that in an afternoon. This has raised the stakes a fair bit; I'm now attempting even more difficult projects. My ambition bar has been raised much higher. 

In an earlier article, Gratitude for Simple Pleasures, I listed the following activities as 'simple pleasures': waking up, reading/writing, walking and sitting. They are still in my list, but I'd like to add a new one now: coding. Coding used to be tedious because modern software has so many dependencies, and each one of them has to be tracked and maintained. The thought of keeping a piece of software working turns me off from building them. But now, I can get my AI agents to do it for me. And I'm filled again with immense gratitude for that.

 My AI agents are my co-workers now; I brainstorm together with them, and they have allowed me to explore domains I had hitherto avoided. While conversing with one of my "researcher' AI agents today, I hit on another idea of building my very own agent that could be customised for my mind experiments. 

My AI researcher now acts like my augmented mind; I use it like a blender of thoughts: I just drop all my intuitions into it, and it attempts to build a coherent picture from them. The good thing is, it always produces something and whatever it produces gives me further insights, which I feed back into my AI blender again, in a fascinating spiral of insight generation. It is an exhilarating process of man-machine symbiosis.

While my interactions with these virtual intelligences have increased manifold, I have also had the opportunity to spend time with friends that I don't get to meet very often. I shall continue to do so in the coming weeks. Maybe I could add this activity to my growing list of 'simple pleasures'.

 I don't have a bucket list to tick off. I don't have plans to travel to exotic places that I've never been to or try extreme activities that will 'change my life'. All I have is just a simple pleasure list to keep on adding to. I will add list-adding activity into the list too--my list has now become a loop of simple pleasures!