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!

Child's Play

I have not succeeded in going to bed earlier; the excitement of my pursuits keeps me late into the night. But still I'm trying and hope I'll do better this week. I really do need more rest. Today I'm feeling a bit exhausted, but as always, I'm still keeping my appointment to blog. 

Kenangan Coffee at Subang Parade is my inspirational spot today. It's noisier than usual because there's an ongoing cheerleading event and the now ubiquitous busker is playing in a corner of the mall. But I'm happy with my Americano and settled down into my island of contemplation.

I reread last week's article where I expressed the following thought: 

That impulse to know, understand, connect and experience the world we find ourselves in is the beginning of science and spirituality. 

I write a lot about spirituality in my blog and maybe I'll dwell a bit on science today. When people think about science, they often equate it with technology. Technology is simply the practical application of science in the service of humanity. But scientific thinking itself is a branch of philosophy. Science begins with philosophy; as a matter of fact, it was called "natural philosophy", originating all the way back to Aristotle. Newton's magnum opus on the mathematical foundation of classical physics, published in 1687, had the grand Latin title: Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy). 

 My own path towards spirituality actually began with science. My interest in science only blossomed fully when I entered Form 4, science stream, where I was introduced to the subjects of physics, biology, chemistry and additional mathematics. Understanding Newtonian laws of motion, gravity, the structure of matter, chemical reactions and the intricate metabolism of biological organisms opened a world of wonder in me. Suddenly, the world appeared so beautiful. Simply walking into the garden, seeing flowers and leaves under the sunlight, brought me into a kind of spiritual ecstasy. 

I could 'see' energy coursing through all living systems, all obeying simple universal laws which the human mind could grasp. I also saw a kind of pristine beauty in the logical truths of mathematics. Through mathematics, I could fathom the mind of God, the Creator and Master Architect, if such a being exists. 

My deep interest in science led me into the mysteries of modern quantum physics, which reveals the subatomic world to be a mysterious world of ephemeral particles that also behave like waves and come in and out of existence in a probabilistic fashion. Some popular science writers began to equate them with the metaphysical views of ancient mysticism. As a kid, I was completely enthralled. That was the genesis of my science-spirituality enterprise.  

That youthful curiosity to understand the 'mind of God' has never left me, and everything I have written in this blog is basically a continuation of that quest. I'm happy that now I've reached that point in my life where I can dedicate a greater portion of my time towards this 'childish' drive.

The great Newton himself wrote:

 I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the sea-shore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

This particular quote inspired me a lot when I was in Form 6. There's a sense of humility and innocent joy in how he saw what he did. He was just a curious boy being occupied by pretty seashells and spending his time with them, all the while being aware of the sheer vastness of the universe out there that's still unexplored.

That to me is the true spirit of science, and that sense of play and discovery is what lies underneath. The whole universe itself, I come to understand, later in life, is at play--Lila.  I'm just participating in it, like any other playful child. Still.

Awakening to the Wonder of Existence

It has been a reasonably productive week for me. I still have a lot of unfinished tasks, but Saturday is my day to focus on writing. I chose Coffee Bean at Nu Empire today for my blogging session. Saturdays are not the best days to go to malls, as the weekend crowd can be quite overwhelming at times. People work all week in stressful jobs they hate, and on weekends, they have a chance to dress sloppily in their shorts and flip-flops and just relax with a late breakfast and coffee without having to bother about time. 

I woke up early today at 5am because I had some errands to run. I've been trying to go to bed earlier, at the latest by 10pm, but I have not succeeded so far. This remains a very elusive goal of mine. But I will continue trying. I guess the key is to let go of all mental pursuits as night progresses. I consider myself lucky that sleep comes easily to me because I'm usually quite exhausted already when I do succumb to it.

Every day when I wake up, I consider that a blessing. It's another to be filled with productive work and the pursuit of understanding. And when I go to bed tonight, I will be grateful that sleep comes easily and inevitably. I will be filled with gratitude: I've experienced a little bit more, having lived another day, and hopefully I've maintained my trajectory of growth.

I've never lived solely to seek extreme thrills nor material wealth. But I respect and understand people who would want to make those their foremost pursuits. To each his own. We are all genetically different and are cast into the world with unique strengths and weaknesses. We use our strengths to work on our weaknesses. And we all play with the hand we're dealt. 

 I've always been driven by a desire to understand life and nature. Most people do, to a certain extent. Some find answers in the religion that they are born into or chanced upon later in life. When some answers for some reason appeal to their intuition, they feel a kind of religious ecstasy. For some, that one moment of insight is sufficiently transformative that their entire lives are henceforth lived with greater purpose and clarity. 

For others, that is just the beginning. Their dalliance with religion sometimes leaves them unconvinced.  So they shun all naive spiritual pursuits as mere superstition. The religious ones would see these people as 'not getting it'. If only they had the humility to open their hearts to the divine, their lives would be totally transformed. I get why they are saying that.

Are religious people 'happier' than atheists? Certainly not. Nor are atheists more intelligent than the 'superstitious' believers. Both have demons of their own to fight. Both sides suffer from the smugness of certainty. We are all humans grappling with the mystery of existence. Some prefer to use the term 'universe' rather than God(s). That impulse to know, understand, connect and experience the world we find ourselves in is the beginning of science and spirituality. 

To me, the quest is the same, whatever you choose to call it. And each waking moment of ours has to be spent in its pursuit. I find religion to be a useful record of humanity's quest towards this end. They have captured their insights in rituals and scriptures. No single religion has a monopoly on wisdom; they all have to be studied as attempts towards truth. 

Science treads carefully towards the same end. The scientific community, being made up of humans are also susceptible to dogmas and false beliefs, not unlike its religious counterpart. But at least, scepticism is baked into the scientific method. A good scientific theory declares its axiomatic beliefs from the outset, and if they are ever found to be false, new ones are speedily proposed. Through mathematics and science, we are constantly reexamining and pushing the limits of human understanding. 

Both science and religion are my hobbies. My pursuit of both has been lifelong. With them, my days are constantly filled with insight, wonder and excitement. Whether through scripture or equation, ritual or experiment, the quest is the same: to live awake to the wonder of existence, and to let each day be a step toward understanding.

The Choice of Happiness

I had brunch here at the Da Men Mall (now called EasyHome Mall) with a friend earlier today. The Coffee Bean outlet here is another one of my favourite places to work. I'm trying to vary the type of work I do throughout the week. Today is specifically for writing, as I've been spending the whole week coding.

I'm also being a bit selective about the type of projects that I get involved in these days, as I could easily get sucked into another rabbit hole that'll take me years to emerge from. Since there's no need for me to 'achieve' anything, I'm in no hurry to get myself too busy. I'll just chug along casually, at my own pace, doing projects I want to do as long as I get to learn something in the process.

Learning is one of the greatest pleasures of life. Every day, I reap some benefits from the work I put in. Treating work this way yields an immediate payoff. You become wiser today than you were yesterday.

These days, I am also taking my time to read slowly. I'm in no hurry to finish a book. Sometimes a reasonably technical book takes me more than two months to complete. But that's alright. A book is like a meal; you roll every word and sentence in your tongue, until you've fully savoured its flavour and essence. The idea it contains is the nutrient that further nourishes your brain.

Reading, coding, writing and learning appear to be what I spend most of my time doing. And I'm happy with that. These days, I'm also trying to insert some play into the mix; my choice of play is not computer games but music. I'm glad that my Casio digital piano is fully functioning again. Most of its keys were dead, and I was afraid that I could not get them fixed as the instrument is almost two decades old. But with some difficulty, I transported it to the service centre in Segambut, and thankfully, found that they still have spare parts for it. The keyboard feels brand new now after the repairs.  Being able to play my favourite Chopin waltzes on my piano makes me enormously happy, even though I can only play the easy passages. I will take my time to practice the more difficult ones. 

Because time is precious, I'm also very selective about the online content I consume.  I resist the temptation to doomscroll on my phone. Cyberspace these days is littered with clickbait and AI slop.  It takes a lot of skill and awareness to avoid stepping into any of these time sinks. 

When you have full control over your time, routines are very important in getting your days on track. I feel really fortunate being able to incorporate some exercise into my daily routine. This comes in the form of early-morning walks in the park, where I also get a chance to catch up with my favourite podcasts.  

Today, I have a happy problem to mull over: I just finished reading a very long and technical book, and I'm trying to decide what to read next. Sometimes I take interludes--going for a short and easy read, before diving into another serious tome. I also have a couple of fictions, which I want to enjoy.  I guess I'm entitled to that. A novella might be a good idea. 

Whatever it is, I will take my time. I'm in no hurry. Happiness is having the time and privilege to choose your own pleasures. 

The Weight of Wisdom

It's been a while since I've blogged from my man-cave apartment here in Cyberjaya. But here I am today, in the company of my books and digital piano. In between typing these lines and paragraphs, I'll be taking sips of tea and will be rattling off some Satie and Chopin pieces on my keyboard. 

I try to fill my days with activities I enjoy doing. Even when I have tedious housekeeping and caregiving chores to do, I would try to kill two birds with one stone: I'll listen to my favourite podcasts or audiobooks while I go about them. Inevitably, we will come to the realisation that there's actually not much one can do in a single day. 

Nevertheless, the trick is to continue doing every goal-directed activity as a habit. It doesn't matter how little time you dedicate to it. It will grow and that's how compounding works. This reminds me of an old blog article of mine: The Accumulative Power of Time. That was the first of many similarly themed articles about time that I've written since, most recently, last year: The Flying Engine of Time.

Talking about time, one thing I have come to understand better now over the years is how memory works. We often hear people complain that they forget things easily as they grow older. Is that true? Yes and no. Yes, because as we grow older, everything we encounter becomes less novel to us. Been there, done that. There's nothing that stands distinctly out anymore from the noise. No, because the brain continues to forge new neural connections with every sensory input, even though they may not directly help you to recall specific facts.

I don't remember many movies I've watched anymore. But I do remember certain obscure movies I saw as a child. Why? It's because certain scenes in the movie impressed or shocked me then. They stood out in my mind and made me think about them later.  They had a novel quality, at least to me as a child. So you never forget them. The world was also much quieter then; you don't get the sensory assault that you are subjected to constantly now. The amount of content that you get bombarded with in a single day, from all the different communication media, is probably more than I'd get over a month!  

 Like the LLM models that we have today, our own memories are also generative. LLMs don't store specific pieces of facts. What they have are simply 'weights'--numbers--that determine the relationships and strengths of associations between different words, modelled in neural networks. They only 'recall' when they are prompted with more words--our prompts, which serve as a hook to pull out all semantically meaningful word associations in a stream of grammatically correct sentences. Every sentence is generated afresh. 

I've always known that our memories work similarly. Even when I was a student, I figured out that I could remember facts and concepts better when they were better associated with other things in my life. Concepts have to be made intuitive by associating them with movement, activities, location and emotion.  When we read properly, we are training the weights in our brains by strengthening and modifying the associations of ideas we already carry within.

Every book I read is 'training data' for my brain, even though I read mainly for the pleasure of words, ideas and imagery. It's alright that there's no practical use for what I read. I hardly recall the exact details anyway. What I do know is that, as long as I've thought and understood what I've read, the neural connections in my brain have changed. And that's already productive. Any new prompts my brain is subjected to now will generate a response that has been modulated by what I've read. 

Every sentence that I write now is triggered by a chain-of-thought reasoning, which is basically me prompting my brain with more questions and thoughts. When I see my chain of thought displayed visually and starkly on this public blog, I learn something new, which is fed back into my brain to further modify the weights of my neural connections. Thinking is a feedback loop that tends towards an equilibrium state. That state is the current consensus in your mind, based on what you know so far.

I don't remember anything inside. I only carry the weights of my neural connections. And depending on how life prompts me, I will always respond, hopefully appropriately, with whatever little wisdom that I am carrying now in these weights.  

The Illusion of Personality

I'm back today with my weekly philosophical musings. Actually, I'm thinking of going light and easy for a change, not diving into my usual topics about consciousness, AI and spirituality. But let me see...what kind of casual subject could I write about? 

Hey, I could write about my favourite drink. I'm sipping a hot Americano now, but I wouldn't say that's my favourite for I'm more of a tea person. On regular workdays, I consume copious amounts of Chinese tea. 

Over the past week, I've spent lots of time working from many different cafes. If any of them serve tea in a pot, I would usually go for Earl Grey; else, my go-to drink would be an Americano. I know, my drink preferences are pretty dull. Occasionally, I would also go for a lemonade at Miexue. But in general, I'm not very fond of sweet stuff, and it's not because of health reasons. I simply do not have a sweet tooth. 

Talking about drink preferences got me thinking: no two people share the same likes and dislikes. Why is that so? Well, obviously, each one of us is a unique product of our genes, upbringing, culture and education. We also have individual quirks and foibles that give each one of us a unique personality. You might be able to find someone who shares many of your interests in music, literature and movies, for example, but there would still be some differences in each person's tastes in food and living habits. 

We all have our own individual strengths and weaknesses. That makes each one of us unique. But I've also often wondered: if everyone one day achieves "Enlightenment", technically speaking, are we not supposed to have 'perfect' behaviour? Wouldn't we all be equally patient, kind, understanding and helpful?  If that is so, wouldn't we all be alike then? 

I suppose, if you are still inhabiting a mortal body, you would still be bound by certain physical characteristics that determine your likes and dislikes. Your taste for food and drinks, for instance. That could be dictated by our body's physiology, which could have been shaped by culture and lifestyle. But when a so-called enlightened being dies, and continues in another realm of existence (as most religious traditions would have us believe),  would this being be like any other enlightened being? If they are different, in what way are they different, since they have achieved so-called 'perfection'? Will enlightened beings, freed from their mortal coil, still have preferences? 

And if not, wouldn't they be devoid of any personalities? Do perfected beings still enjoy separate existence as 'souls'? If perfection means having perfect intelligence, wisdom and morality, every soul would be exactly alike, wouldn't they? Then you, when you become 'enlightened', would cease to exist anymore as you, since your soul would be devoid of your idiosyncratic personality. If the enlightened you is no longer you, why do you still bother to cling to this idea of enlightenment and salvation?

What makes you think your soul is unique and deserves to be saved? Are you trying to save your imperfect self so that you can live forever, with all your imperfections? If immortality means losing your personality, would you still want it? 

Or is your consciousness still unique in some sense, independent of your personality? And if the perfect consciousness, without any form, communicates with another (who could be a friend you knew as a mortal), would you still be able to tell it is him or her?

These are very interesting thoughts to ponder, while I'm sipping the last of my Americano, here at O'Briens cafe. We somehow think we could still be uniquely conscious souls, even when we have achieved the perfection of God. That sounds quite strange to me. And maybe that's the whole point of enlightenment: to finally realise that the small personality-driven self that you cling to is nothing but an illusion? 

The Soul of Software

Can't believe another week has gone by, and I'm still operating in this intense CPU-bound thinking mode. Thankfully, I managed to squeeze in at least 2 social engagements over the last week. Those were good sessions with friends who were also curious about many of the philosophical questions that I often write and think about. Explaining my ideas to them challenged me to think more clearly about how to articulate them in a way that is intuitive to others.

Today, I chose another mall to mull over these things: Komugi Cafe, Main Place Mall. It's another one of my favourite places because the lighting is good, and I could sit for hours here working on my coding projects over a pot of Earl Grey. Let me try to summarise some of the thoughts that have been brewing in my head over the past week.

I've written about consciousness in the past. In Consciousness Considered, I glossed over some of the challenges in tackling this subject. It could even be a non-problem, because it is simply a 'problem' that we defined into existence by labelling something as 'conscious'. 

All philosophers seem to agree that Consciousness is something subjective that we all know exists. You are conscious, reading these lines and seemingly understand what I'm trying to say. You feel things and have a sense of who you are, operating from a physical brain and body. But somehow you feel there's an interior experience that's rich and apart from the mere physicality of reality. You have a sense of 'self' or even a 'soul' or 'spirit'. And this is when we start to veer into problematic territories.  A spiritually or religiously-inclined person will start having a lot to say here. A mind, soul, spirit or consciousness simply cannot be equated with a mere physical brain. To insist that it is nothing but a piece of lumpy matter, feels incredulous, and a bit of a put-down to the spiritually inclined person.

In many religions of the world, there's something mysterious called the 'soul' that could somehow outlive the physical body. The soul could be damned or saved. It inhabits the body now, but it could live eternally somewhere else. The computationalist philosopher will then say: Isn't the soul like software running on our physical hardware? You could halt, back up and copy the entire state of your running software and then run it again on another computer. As long as the state is properly preserved, software could in theory, 'live forever'. 

The religious person would object to that and insist that the soul is what the richness of life is all about--the awe in the face of beauty, the love of one towards one's children, the connection with the universe and to something greater than that: God. How could these cold, rationalist computationalists say that the soul is like software? Software doesn't feel love, like we do. It does not experience the redness of red that I experience inside when I look at a rose. In the parlance of philosophers, software does not produce qualia.

But what makes you so sure? I've mentioned recently, in another article, The Sat-Chit-Ananda of Artificial Intelligence, that our software does not have the same kind of physiological feedback control loop that we, as biological creatures, have. An AI model does not have to worry about its own survival and thus is not threatened by anything that could 'hurt' it. But it could mimic very well, how a human would react in dangerous situations and report how it would feel panic, fear and distress when faced with the threat of extinction. 

So you say, that's just mimicry. At best, they can play the philosophical zombie. They don't feel anything inside. But hang on: we haven't equipped them with the equivalent of a nervous system and a beating heart that would modulate the functioning of their constituent parts in different situations. At the moment, we are not comparing two equivalent systems. So is AI conscious? Not yet.

Now, if the software running on a substrate (could be bare metal hardware or a virtual machine) cannot really be equated to a soul yet, would it be more similar when it is more tightly coupled with its underlying substrate, which needs to be self-maintained, fueled and regulated for optimal functioning, would it then be almost like any other sentient being? Like you?

You would insist: No! I know that I feel alive and conscious, and I enjoy a whole gamut of experiential feelings: happiness, despair, joy, pride, anger and awe. I have memories and a capacity to love and be touched by kindness, and even at times, in prayer and in sacred places, feel a spiritual ecstasy.  Don't tell me that all that is just software!

Well, what makes you so sure that it is not the effect of just blood pumping in your veins at a certain pressure, hormones secreted in the right amount at the right time, and the type of neurotransmitters flooding your brain? These would then affect and control the processing of your software (aka soul) in a tight feedback loop? The sum total of that process is what you call your 'consciousness'.

To me, life is great because we are capable of contemplating these things. I could be just software running on some substrate, but as long as I'm capable of reflecting on this possibility, I've managed to trace what Douglas Hofstadter calls the Strange Loop. In the near future, it is not inconceivable that our AI robots will also have the same existential musings: Who am I? Am I just software? Am I conscious? Do I have a soul? 

The New Leviathan

It would appear that I've been coming regularly to Nu Empire every Saturday to write my weekly blog article; this week is no different. I find parking here easy; there are many cafes, 3 restaurants that serve liquor, a hair salon that I frequent, and of course, the supermarkets and pharmacies where I buy most of my life-maintenance stuff. This weekend, I'm at Jardin Coffee, enjoying a hot chocolate as I settle down to type these lines.

For someone who doesn't really have an official job anymore, it's quite remarkable how busy I have been for the past week. I've been working hard on my pet projects, now with the aid of AI coding agents, which have proven their absolute worth again and again. It has made me braver and more ambitious in tackling even more complex projects. 

And of course, when it comes to writing, AI could, in theory, also churn out blog articles on any subject that I could think of. But that would defeat the purpose of my writing here, which is not to serve an audience. Writing itself is the whole point; the output itself is secondary, even though sometimes it could be of some value.

When I started writing this blog, the US had just begun their invasion of Iraq.  It was that war that triggered a flurry of blogging activity, with former DAP politician Jeff Ooi the most prominent blogger in Malaysia. My early blog articles were more like 'tweets' -- short one-two liners like these:

Wednesday, March 19, 2003

Writing this from my office in Jakarta.
Love the city. Love the isolation.

The Wisdom to Swim

I'm back at Coffee Bean, Nu Empire, to continue my ramblings on any subject that pops into my mind at the moment. I've been tremendously busy for the past week, working on various personal projects. I'm glad that my mind is brimming with ideas again.  

I've been vibe-coding a lot, creating experimental apps to test various ideas. The ease with which I could churn out an app helps me refine my ideas faster. Coding is fun again with the help of AI agents. No longer do I have to spend hours labouring over the minutiae of programming languages; I simply express my intent, and these diligent agents handle the details. The quality of my code is directly proportional to the clarity of my prompts and the skill in nudging them towards my vision. As I've written in The Greatest Inflexion Point, we are on the cusp of another huge paradigm change. There will be upsides and downsides, but we've been here before. 

We all (well, at least people of my generation) rode the dot-com boom. It was a crazy period of booms and busts; this AI revolution will be similar. Just that this is happening at an even more frenetic pace. Bubbles will form and burst everywhere, but that's expected when the industry is boiling hot. It's a natural consequence of human greed. Change will still come, and it is inevitable. The same heady excitement is in the air. 

Before smartphones and messaging apps like WhatsApp became ubiquitous, there was a thriving SMS value-added services industry — one I had personally been involved in. Of course, SMS and the feature phone itself killed off another industry: the pager service, which thankfully I never had to use.  

We, humans, have come a long way since the Industrial Revolution. Technology helped us to realise and amplify our deepest desires and intentions. And with each technological leap, new habits and norms are formed. Now we have people living most of their lives on social media, glued to their smartphones,  getting their dopamine fix from TikTok and YouTube.  We experience needs in all levels of our existence: physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual. (Read The Four Layer Stack). Technology is merely a tool to satiate those needs.

Do not blame technology for the ills of society.  We've always known that the technological knife cuts both ways. We cannot amplify the positive without also boosting the negative. If anything, technology has actually helped us see ourselves with greater clarity: we are, at the core, creatures of our hormones and neurotransmitters. It is on us to use this knowledge to lift ourselves out of the morass of techno-induced addictions. 

We have all allowed ourselves to drown in an ocean of data and information.  Those who know how to swim will survive this flood. The swimmer instinctively leverages buoyancy, adjusting his body so that he floats and propels forward. The currents of change are swift and relentless, but in the end, those who have the wisdom to swim will find new shores.