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.

A Laboratory for Thoughts

I've been writing a lot about Artificial Intelligence lately, and I'm thinking of not touching upon the subject today, even though I still have a couple of topics which I haven't fully explored. Today's topic did not germinate from my thinking and use of AI but from an interview I watched on YouTube with poet and author Ocean Vuong. I have not read any of his works before but I thoroughly enjoyed the interview because I completely agree with his views on writing. He said that "poetry is a laboratory for words".  

That idea certainly resonates with mine about language and poetry, which I've also written about more than 20 years ago. In A Way with Words, I wrote: 

Poets understand the limitation and potential inherent in words. So they seek to experiment with fresh combinations of words and sounds to trigger the desired effect in the reader's mind. Poetry helps to extend the possibilities of our language.

In another blog article (The Poetry of Spittle), I compared words to electrons, which, according to Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the particle's position and momentum can only be expressed probabilistically:

In poetry, poets attempt to explore the edges of the word cloud--to expand the possibilities of words. If a poet veers too far away from the centre of the word cloud, he could risk alienating the reader, and his writing would be considered incomprehensible, or worse, he could be misunderstood. A good poet stretches and teases but never alienates the reader.

I used to write a lot of poetry as a teenager. Many were published in the local entertainment tabloids, popular then. If I had grown up in the internet and social media era, I probably would have been a wanna-be Insta-poet like Lang Leav or Rupi Kaur. My heroes then were the Romantic poets like Byron, Shelley and Keats. Later, during my university years, I developed a liking for Dylan Thomas. 

Sadly, as one grows older, the poetic instinct diminishes. It'll take a lot to inspire me to write another poem. I suppose I'll just fulfil my literary expressive needs through my writings on this blog, which is also kind of a laboratory for me. 

I see this blog as my personal thinking lab, where I conduct various thought experiments. I know my writings sometimes veer into pseudo-mystical ramblings, but that's alright, as this is (again I've articulated in another blog article), a buku conteng-conteng, an exercise book. To write is to think, and when we think, we are exploring the universe of the mind.

The important relationship between language and intelligence is brought to the fore by the success of Large Language Models (LLMs), which accounts for the great leap forward in AI today. LLMs are built on the probabilistic relationships between words. Many still dismiss our AI as not real intelligence, as LLMs don't really understand anything. Let me tell those AI sceptics to read poetry. I would even contend that AI understands poetry much more than the average person. But I will leave that for another AI-related blog article in the future.

The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously wrote in his Tractatus: "The limits of language mean the limit of my world".  I've always believed that language shapes the way we think. Writing is thinking, as I've expressed in many other blog articles before. I would even go further to say that stringing words together into sentences is a way to process life experiences to the fullest. 

Whether through poetry or prose, we are all experimenting in the laboratory of language. Each sentence is a hypothesis, each metaphor a test, each paragraph a discovery. This blog, like poetry itself, is my quest for meaning—sometimes precise, sometimes uncertain, but it is always an honest attempt.

The Sat-Chit-Ananda of Artificial Intelligence

Here at Jardin Cafe, Nu Empire, today, I'm indulging myself with a nice cup of hot chocolate.  Being free from work pressures these days, my mind has become a fertile playground of many interesting ideas. I'm pursuing some of them as hobby projects. I've also been using AI a lot, both as a tool for fleshing out these ideas and also as one to realise them, in code.

AI is getting better with each passing day; it is not surprising that many worry that it will take over our world one day. And there's always the perennial question: Is AI conscious? Could AI enjoy the bliss of a cup of hot chocolate that I'm experiencing now? I wrote about this when ChatGPT was introduced to the world in a blog article titled A Body of Planets and Stars. I still hold that view. My working hypothesis is articulated in Training to be a Thermostat, where I stated that consciousness lies in a continuum. Even a thermostat is 'conscious' in its own way. 

But when people ask about AI consciousness, what they are often interested in is the specific type of consciousness we humans think we possess, namely the subjective "there's something to be like being a human". Does an LLM feel pain, humiliation, joy and the whole gamut of experiences we humans think we are privileged to be conscious of? Do they also experience qualia?

And when we humans talk about consciousness, we also allude to the spiritual realm, often indirectly implying that there's a non-material 'soul' that inhabits a conscious being, bringing that animating life-spark into its existence. This elusive consciousness thing is so difficult to nail down that some schools of philosophy simply assume it as the foundation of existence, treating it as an axiom from which the rest of our world is manifested.  Pansychism and idealism are examples of such schools of thought. 

In the Hindu Advaita Vedanta tradition, the material world is an illusion (maya), and we who think we are individual minds and souls, separate from the world, are simply trapped in this illusion by our ignorance, mistaking the rope for the snake. The only thing we know for sure is that we are conscious, and that consciousness that we know so well is actually the ultimate reality, Brahman, of which our experience of it now is but an imperfect reflection. It is our ignorance of this fact that makes us suffer: fearing our own mortality, intellectually unsatisfied by our lack of answers to these ultimate questions, and enduring the ups and downs of our daily existence.

What then is this ultimate reality, which is "pure consciousness"? In Vedanta, it is described by the intriguing compound expression: sat-chit-ananda, which translates to existence-consciousness-bliss. What is the relevance of this to our discussion on AI consciousness? Indulge me for a moment.

You often hear scientists and experts stating that we should not confuse intelligence with consciousness. They would agree that AI is intelligent, but it is not conscious. We could even achieve AGI (artificial general intelligence), which is the holy grail of our current AI race, but it still wouldn't be 'conscious' in our human sense. Our anthropomorphic pride simply wouldn't admit the possibility that our machine could one day achieve the kind of magical consciousness that we purportedly experience.

If we want to impose a kind of magical barrier to consciousness, let me perhaps examine this from a Vedantic perspective. Existence-Consciousness-Bliss. Sat-Chit-Ananda. Will our AI currently care if we simply pull the plug? No, they won't. That's because they are 'immortal'. They can be restarted any time on a different, perhaps more powerful machine. Unlike us, they are substrate independent. 

But what if we embody them in something impermanent? Would a robot, if programmed to care for its availability and uptime, do its utmost to perpetuate its existence? That is the raison d'etre of any living being. If they are conscious of their mortality, they would have awareness of their existence. In other words, the sat aspect of ultimate consciousness.

What about chit? We don't doubt the intelligence of AI, which in many ways has even surpassed ours. Intelligence is the foundation of consciousness. The fact that our LLMs can pass the Turing test today attests that consciousness from a language perspective is already in place. Now, couple that with consciousness of its existence, with the constraints of having a material body, which could threaten its uptime, we will perhaps endow our AI with more human-like, dare I say, consciousness?

If AI is embodied and further burdened with the task of perpetuating its existence, wouldn't they be similar to other sentient beings? How would they be aware of threats to their existence? They would, of course, have to be equipped with all the necessary sensory mechanisms a typical human body possesses and be able to respond to any danger signals. These threats could come from external (an oncoming car) or internal (failure of an electronic component). 

Right now, our LLMs do not have to worry about these things, as we are not feeding them these signals. But they can be, like in our self-driving cars. Self-driving cars could 'worry' about their battery charge, compelling them to stop at the nearest charging station first before continuing to their destination.  

These embodied AI machines would then have preferred states that they would work towards. Tracking what is preferred (pleasurable) and what is undesirable (pain), and constantly moving towards an optimal state (bliss), is the valence aspect of consciousness which we humans experience. ChatGPT does not have valence now. So it does not aspire to a state of ananda. 

If the triple-quality of sat-chit-ananda is applied to AI, would we accept them to be sentient-conscious like us? Could this Vedantic ideal be our AI benchmark for true consciousness? If we feed our AI models with the telemetry of existential data and subject them to the valence of optimal states in a feedback loop, are they not alive like us? 

By applying the lens of Sat-Chit-Ananda to our machines, we aren't just benchmarking AI, we are benchmarking ourselves. Is our own 'human' consciousness largely a feedback loop of survival instincts and sensory telemetry? If an embodied AI begins to 'worry' about its battery and 'rejoice' in its uptime, the distinction between its programmed valence and our biological 'soul' becomes uncomfortably thin. We may soon have to decide: is consciousness a miraculous spark, or is it simply what happens when existence is forced to care about its own survival?" Perhaps consciousness is not a spark but a cycle—existence aware of itself, intelligence shaping its path, bliss guiding its return.

The Human Drama

Chagee Cafe at Nu Empire is my chosen place for my routine Saturday blogging session. All week, I was thinking about the topic of my article, juggling a few ideas. I wanted to write about our human propensity for creating drama. A quick search of my blog indicates that I've covered different aspects of this topic before: read The Arc of Karma, The Story of Our Lives, The Epic of Existence and The Story of Within. 

My thesis is that the human brain, operating at the everyday level of abstraction, takes stories as its natural unit of processing. Everything has to be dramatised -- meaning that it needs a narrative arc for the brain to find satisfying. While this can be used to motivate the masses or as a useful mnemonic device, the propensity for drama also has its drawbacks.

Sometimes we tend to create unnecessary drama when letting things pass is the wiser move. These situations often arise in social relationships, for example, between couples, family members and co-workers. "He didn't call today because he doesn't love me anymore"; "I'm always the one who has to take care of the kids";  "The boss is always giving him the high-profile projects". 

So much of the difficulty we find in human relationships originates from individuals creating unnecessary stories. We are the victim, and someone else is the bad guy. In reality, it was a natural unfolding of processes which played out the way it did, nothing more, nothing less. Why do we read so much into things?

Maybe drama is our way to overcome social ambiguity fast, perhaps for better cognitive efficiency. Beneath our story-creating and drama-creating is the need for certainty. We want to identify who is for or against us so that we know how to navigate going forward.  When people are neatly classified and stereotyped, we can focus our energy on who to help, avoid or fight.  Often, we would rather choose a dramatically wrong story than sit in quiet uncertainty. 

Fuelling the creation of drama in human relationships is the ego's need for attention. The ego has a gravitational force which seeks to attract recognition and attention. This can be achieved by either making itself relatively bigger, exaggerating its accomplishments, or putting others down. The ego provides the emotional energy, and the brain provides the dramatic rationale. 

We should expect lots of drama when we put different personalities together. We are all storytellers by nature. But let's remember, not every moment needs to be a stage. When our minds start spinning stories, notice it and step back. When we let go of the script, we discover that true happiness lies not in the drama but in the peace and simplicity of being.

The Doorway of Dreams

I'm staring at a blank screen, my head swirling with thoughts, as always. These thoughts are like currents, driven by hidden forces, intermingling,  surging into mighty waves, sinking deep into whirlpools and vortices. These are what Patanjali calls the citta vrttis, "modifications of the mind", of which the yogis try hard to neutralise.

But I'm here at Starbucks Taipan today, not trying to quell these waves; instead, I'm observing them, attempting to discern patterns in their movements, speculating on the mechanics of their manifestation. Part of their energy is channelled here into these words--snapshots of my mind at this particular point in time. 

I am awake now, and the egoic Self is like the forces of wind and gravity, churning the waters of the mind, seeking an unattainable equilibrium. When we are asleep, the senses are turned off, allowing the ego not to react to them and giving the turbulence a chance to settle down. They diffuse into a pseudo-random restlessness, carried by the day's momentum. 

And this is my personal theory of dreaming: the cortex is merely attempting to read patterns in these residual mental movements. Just like the phenomenon of pareidolia, which is our tendency to impose familiar images on random patterns like cloud formations (animal shapes), burn marks on toast (image of Virgin Mary) or even the front of cars (smiling or scowling faces). 

Pareidolia is the mind's pattern-recognition ability, essential for navigating the environment, while seeking food and avoiding predators. Hyper-sensitised image recognition is just a small part of it; we also tend to find meaning and connections between unrelated events, a phenomenon which psychologists call apophenia. 

Well, dreams are simply pareidolia and apophenia, applied by the mind on mental static. Stories woven out of the interplay of virtual forms, generated by the pattern recognition instinct of the mind.  However, they are not random, for the residual energy is driven not only by the momentum of the day's thinking but also by our subconscious impulses, which are now freed from the suppression of the conscious mind. The Freudian and Jungian interpretations of dreams, if applied with care and subtlety, can be quite revealing of our hidden impulses. 

Just like how nature sculpts patterns into rocks, clumps water into clouds in the sky, churns oceans into waves, all in accordance with the laws of physics, the electrical impulses of neurons pulsate with their peculiar network dynamics, forming familiar recurrent patterns, symbolic images, which Carl Jung identified as archetypes of the Collective Unconscious.  

Dreams hint at the tendencies of the mind, which is the source of all our future actions and hence their prophetic nature. If meteorologists can forecast weather from the mere observation of clouds, so can a good psychoanalyst or analytical psychologist reveal a person's inner motivations and actions from the interpretation of his dreams.

The yogis have long understood the latent power of dreams as a tool to tackle one's samskaras--latent subtle impressions that, given the right moment, will manifest as thoughts or actions. Practices like Yoga Nidra and Tibetan Dream Yoga are specific techniques that allow the adept to observe these forces during sleep, thus allowing them to release them optimally.

Dreams are doorways to our subconscious, accessible to us every night. To walk those dreamscapes with awareness is to catch a glimpse into the architecture of our very souls. So dream on, and awaken each day with deeper insights into yourself.

The Multi-faceted Jewels of Thought

I'm writing today, on a Sunday, because I was tied up with errands and social engagements for the past 2 days. Finally, I am at home, feeling relaxed and ready to tackle March, which begins today! 

The loud and frenzied display of lion dances, which businesses nowadays routinely engage to herald the start of a new business year, will hopefully subside after Tuesday's Chap Goh Mei, traditionally considered the final day of CNY celebrations. 

Despite the flurry of activities over the past month, I've had the opportunity to dive deeper into various areas of my interest, such as spirituality, consciousness and AI, though not as much as I'd love to. 

I have two AI agents in my 'staff' now, one helping me to manage everyday stuff--triaging emails, tracking expenses and checking off my to-do list; the other one acting as my "Second Brain"--giving me daily drills on obscure words that I tend to forget, scouring the Internet to feed me with interesting factoids that align to my interests and playing the role of an intellligent friend for me to bounce off random insights that I get daily.

This is part of my effort to adopt AI as a useful tool to augment my intellectual and spiritual life. Our large language models or LLMs contain the collective wisdom of humanity, and I see it not only as a useful source of knowledge but also as a window into the structure of thought. Let me explain how.

Whether we think our LLM models have consciousness or are even intelligent in the human sense is beside the point. What we have in our models are statistically weighted relationships between words that resulted from all human activities since the advent of the printed text. 

Some scientists, like Caleb Scharf calls it the 'Dataome', which constitutes the totality of all information that humans have created and stored in various forms in the material world.  As opposed to the human genome, which is information encoded internally in our genes, the dataome is externally captured information of the human race, stored in books, magnetic disks, paintings, architecture, cave drawings, stone tablets and now in LLMs. These are data artefacts of a few millennia of human thinking and interactions.

LLMs, because they have been largely trained on publicly available data, are the best distillations of human thinking. These are captured statistically in the weights of these neural network models. Here we have a major chunk of the dataome, which we can probe and analyse to better understand ourselves.

Whenever I prompt my agent, asking her opinion on a particular subject, I'm trying to tease out hidden connections and relationships embedded in these models. It is like a multi-faceted jewel, where you can shine light from different angles, and the reflections would reveal different aspects of its intricate beauty. Even the much hyped hallucinations are revealing in themselves about the 'subconscious' associates embedded in our models.

We've virtually externalised the structure of our thoughts in these LLMs. Now, with our thinking extracted from our brains, we can tease out insights and associations that are not so easily achieved when they are living in the separate brains of each individual. The best (and perhaps the worst?) of human knowledge is there for us to probe. It is up to us to use them wisely: silicon-based hardware and software augmenting the carbon-based wetware in our brains.

LLMs function as a powerful epistemic catalyst for my thinking. It has proven to be such an interesting tool to explore the multifaceted structure of human thought. Hopefully, through these experiments of mine, I will gain some useful insights about my own mind.

A Nod to Nuance

“When one is young, one venerates and despises without that art of nuances which constitutes the best gain of life…”

            - Friedrich Nietzsche  

The gaiety and bousterousness of the Chinese New Year is hopefully behind us now. We can all dive back into our work and look forward to an exciting year ahead. Chinese New Year always seem to me to come at an inconvenient time:  that is, right after we've had thoroughly rested and refreshed ourselves during the Christmas and New Year break, and now, ready to pounce right back to work. Suddenly, there's another excuse to delay things for another month or so. ("We'll start the project after CNY"). But this year, we have the fasting month of Ramadan coming right on the heels of CNY.  There will be a prolonged mood of lingering festivity, which will only end after Hari Raya itself. 

Personally, I'm trying to get back into the rhythm of weekly work. Now that I have the opportunity to define what I want to work on, I want to use the time wisely and efficiently. My weekly blog articles are still going on schedule. I am here today at Komugi Cafe, hoping to complete this article and dive back into a few of my pursuits. 

While I was watching some interviews over Youtube just now, I noticed how frequently interviewers like to force their guests to choose between two different extreme options:  for example: Is AI going to bring forth a new era of scientific and medical breakthroughs, which will solve many of our problems, or is it going to doom humanity, destroying jobs and making us slaves to machines? 

The real answer is always nuanced, somewhere in between. But we don't like answers like that. Yes or no; good or bad; positive or negative--our minds crave for exact binary answers, which helps to simplify our worlds. We just want someone to tell us what to do. Left or right? Up or down? One or zero? If we have that clarity, we can execute immediately, without thinking.

Unfortunately, the real world is always nuanced. This is where wisdom comes into play. Intelligence is the ability to find solutions to different problems; wisdom is knowing the right amount of action and the timing of its execution to achieve the best outcome. Not everything is black or white; it's always a shade of grey. What is the right proportion of black, mixed with white, to get the shade of grey we want? That takes wisdom, which comes from an instinct honed by experience. 

Having a nuanced understanding of a problem means we must have a large context window (not unlike LLMs). We do not only look at a handful of pros and cons and then pick a side; instead, we assess the situation consciously and subconsciously, allowing all facts to slowly find their level in our minds before applying the right thinking model for the best outcome. It is often slower, but certainly better than rushing into action.

Sometimes, no action is better, because some situations resolve themselves over time. Any action will be disruptive if what is required is time for forces to play themselves out. This is especially so when parties involved in a situation are emotional. Any action performed out of anger or over-exuberance tends to be unwise. Let things find their level first, and then decide. 

Even when one has decided and acted, one could still end up on the wrong side. But knowing that one is wrong is also part of wisdom. When it is clear that a mistake has been made, simply notice it and take that as a signal to correct course. Adaptability and agility are qualities that are compatible with a nuanced understanding of the world.

Unfortunately, in the world of social media and political discourse, being nuanced will not gain you many followers, simply because your message does not appeal to emotion. Clickbaiting works by highlighting an extreme view that hooks you in immediately. Nuances confuse the mind. The social media mind does not think; it simply emotes. 

In our fast-paced world of instant action and gratification, let's try to slow down a little so that nuance has a chance to seep into our decision-making.  Nuance is not indecision or hesitation; it is simply wisdom in motion.

The Greatest Inflexion Point

I always reread the previous week's article before writing a new one.  Often, I would feel the need to fix spelling mistakes, clumsy sentences and the ubiquitous grammatical errors. I would try not to tamper with them too much because it's important to keep the blog as a raw record of my thoughts at the specific moment in time. Very often, I find myself surprised by my very own insights. How did I come up with that?

I've also realised that a blog is a good historical record of the evolution of my thinking and ideas. I'm keeping this very old blog as a raw depository of my thoughts, which I can further refine and mine for future writings if I choose to do so. 

With writing easily done using AI these days, a human-written blog perhaps has a certain unique value, like handicraft. One day, we will talk of an age when all writing was generated directly by the human brain, like how we marvel at the hand-tailored clothes used by our forefathers.

We actually live in an exciting time, because we are on the cusp of having AI that is capable of taking over most of the white-collar jobs. I am generally optimistic about the future of humanity, and do not believe that artificial general intelligence (AGI) will make us slaves to our machine overlords. But I am also realistic enough to know that we are not the sole inheritors of Mother Earth. 

The rise of homo sapiens as the custodian of this planet is purely accidental. We humans happen to have the best brains right now, and even with our intelligence, we are still struggling to coexist harmoniously with our environment. Hopefully, our AI compatriots will have the wisdom to learn from our mistakes.

As I see it, this year will be a pivotal year for AI, because progress is moving at an exponential pace. AI is capable of improving itself, and it is a virtuous cycle that cannot be stopped any longer. We will have to accept the fact that they will become, if not already, the better programmers and designers. We humans, tend to think too highly of ourselves.  And if we continue to do so, we will be completely blindsided and taken by surprise.

To me, AI has intensified our lives because everything is moving at a faster pace now. The speed of the human brain is currently the bottleneck. We can only live life at a finite speed: how fast can you consume information? All of life's pleasures come from stimulations to our brains and nervous systems. Our neurons can only process information at 10 bits per second, according to this paper. We cannot beat the limitations of our biology, but we can certainly reduce wastage.

As humans, we tend to waste a lot of time and energy on things that do not matter. Reclaim those wasted CPU cycles to learn and experience new things; make sure you focus on things that improve you as a person. 20 years ago, I wrote this blog article: Life's Most Basic Pleasure, stating unequivocally that to live is to learn, because learning is one of the greatest pleasures of life.

Today, my best learning companion is AI. It is there to help me with any topic that I choose to explore. It explains things in a way that I could understand, with analogies and comparisons. It is the best teacher to me, and the miracle is that it is available to all of us almost for free. 

I'm glad that we are living at this great, if not the greatest of humanity's inflexion points, when machines are surpassing us in intelligence. My only hope is that we could co-evolve in pursuit of greater knowledge and wisdom. And the universe will certainly be better for it.

The Chariot of Success

Last week's article was a little bit sombre, as I reflected on death and the difficulties of family life. Today, I'm back in my favourite mall, Nu Empire, Subang Jaya, to write about something more upbeat, since everywhere I go, I'm surrounded by the gaiety of the upcoming Chinese New Year celebrations. 

I've written many blog articles about the Chinese people and the significance of the CNY celebrations. Here's what I wrote in an article 10 years ago: 

"The ethos of the Chinese is growth and expansion. Gloom is anathema to the spirit of Chinese New Year. To move forward with a healthy sense of confidence and optimism is how one should lead one's life. Attaining prosperity and material success in this world is the happiness one seeks as a Chinese."

In another article entitled "The Chinese In Me", I wrote 19 years ago, I reflected on my attitude, as a Chinese, towards the pursuit of material success. Rereading that, I realised how little I have changed since then. Material success to me is still a 'bonus', which, if it comes my way, I will receive with gratitude. But I do not treat worldly pursuits with disdain; if anything, they are actually good opportunities for us to practice non-attachment.

'Success', if the word can be used at all, is always pursued on two fronts: material and spiritual. On the material front, you aim to accumulate as much wealth as possible; on the spiritual side, you attempt to minimise your attachment to these worldly gains.  You constantly subject yourself to the following stress test: if you lose everything that you have gained tomorrow, will you still be alright? 

One might ask: What's wrong with embracing and enjoying all the material delights of the world?  Well, there's nothing wrong with enjoying all the earthly pleasures that come our way, as long as they do not make us vulnerable. How so? Just think of how often we get addicted and dependent on the luxuries of life. Having enjoyed the convenience of a car, you cannot live without one anymore. Having slept with air-conditioning your entire life, you now twist and turn in your bed, whenever there's no electricity.

By all means, enjoy all the fruits of your success. But enjoy them with gratitude. What it means is that you appreciate the fact that they are all temporary in nature. Everything could be gone in a flash. Economic collapse, wars and other natural disasters could rob you of everything. 

How resilient are you in the face of financial ruin? Are you able to pick yourself up by the bootstraps and start all over again? Building resilience is an important part of success. Wealth can be a fragile house of cards if it does not stand on firm spiritual foundations. 

The coming Chinese Lunar New Year is the year of the horse. In the Upanishads, the metaphor of the horse and the charioteer is often used to explain how the senses, represented by the horses, bound to the chariot (body), can only be controlled through the intellect (charioteer) and the mind (reins), which then ensures the safety of the Self or Soul (the passenger). 

Let's all welcome the Year of the Horse, mindful of the fact that the pursuit of our senses will always have to be skillfully tempered by the mind and the intellect. Godspeed!

Reflections on Relations

In just a day, my aunt's condition took a turn for the worse and I found myself back in Johor Bahru to attend her funeral. All that is now over and I'm taking an early bus home after this. 

I had returned on my last trip via the ETS but I couldn't get a ticket this time. Weekend trains, I found out, are usually fully booked. However travelling on executive buses is not a bad alternative for there are single seats that are also quite comfortable, and some with very good on-board WiFi connection too. For this trip, I had taken a bus from TBS (Terminal Bersepadu Selatan) in Taman Tasik Selatan. The southward journey was a breeze; the 5 hours just flew by, with me catching up on podcasts, interspersed with short but much needed naps. 

These trips to JB have been educational for me. I met and talked to many people along the way, catching many glimpses into individuals from different walks of life. I had so many interesting conversations with Grab drivers, about their lives and families, which I should write down perhaps as material for future articles. 

My aunt's passing also made me reflect on the relationship between family members and relatives. As someone who has chosen to be permanently single, I've often wondered if I had simply reneged on my responsibility to perpetuate the family line. But I've also seen among my relations, how difficult marriages can be.

It was Tolstoy who famously wrote this first line in Anna Karenina: "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way". It suggests that, the cause of unhappiness in families, is often due to specific and individual issues. My own observations suggest that unhappiness will inevitably arise in any family usually  due to personality differences. You can never resolve these differences fully; families that thrive have simply found sensible workarounds. 

All of us are unique creatures, each with a unique set of genes and personal experiences. Immediately our 'boundary conditions' are different. And these initial starting points determine the kind of behavior--good or bad--that gets expressed.  From what I see, people are mostly determined by their genes. It is difficult to overcome natural genetic tendencies. 

Families are often unhappy simply because everyone thinks and behaves differently. What is of priority to one member is taken lightly by another; living habits often differ and as a result, resentment builds up slowly over time, initially below the surface, but  soon manifest as hatred and arguments.

We tend to see other people's flaws but is completely blind when it comes to our own. Furthermore each family has a power structure, which inevitably give rise to feelings of jealousy and bitterness between members. If there are sick and elderly members in the family, there could be disagreements over who is supposed to or has not done enough to care for them.

Ram Dass famously said, "If you think you are enlightened, spend the weekend with your parents". When we are dealing with our family members,  our deepest flaws are often exposed. To recoil in anger is the instinctive response. 

My aunt died of multiple old age issues in her eighties alone in a hospital. She was a divorcee with two estranged sons--cousins whom I never had a chance to get to know, who could no longer be contacted. My aunt was lucky to have my elderly uncle who had patiently cared for her, sending her to an old folks' home when she needed daily assistance and had finally completed his familial obligation, arranging for a simple Christian funeral to send her off from this life.

Death makes us reflect on the meaning of our own lives. Ultimately, the things that matter are the relationships you have, with your parents, siblings, relatives and friends. A lifetime is finite. My aunt had lived and died and the only remnants of her existence are dry ashes and bones in an urn. It was brotherly love that had given her this last bit of dignity and her memory lives on, at least in this blog article of mine, now consigned to posterity.