Saturday, June 21, 2025

The Pageant of Life

I had originally planned to drop by at my library-apartment to read and write, but some unexpected errand cropped up and after I was done with it, it's already 4pm. So I thought it's best for me to do my usual blogging from a cafe, which is how I ended up at Komugi Cafe today.

The past week has been great because I managed to catch up with a couple of old friends. A lifetime is finite, and as you grow older, you realise that everything you do, you'll only get to do it a finite amount of times. There's a touching passage in The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles that reflects on this fact:

“How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, some afternoon that’s so deeply a part of your being that you can’t even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four or five times more. Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless.”

The book was adapted into a movie in 1990, directed by Benardo Bertolucci, starring John Malkovitch and Debra Winger as the doomed couple in search of existential meaning in post-colonial Algeria. Paul Bowles himself made a cameo appearance in the final scene of the movie, as one of the patrons in the cafe, quietly observing the fate of his protagonist, while narrating the above lines in voice-over.

How many blog articles will I post in my lifetime? It is certainly not limitless. This thought makes me appreciate every moment and opportunity that I get to do so. Moments like this: sitting with a warm pot of Earl Grey, in a cafe, watching people passing by, while I type these lines in deep reflection, is tinged with magic.

I can only feel gratitude being able to record what I'm thinking and feeling now--this very state and configuration of my mind, in space and time--perhaps for posterity? From a cosmic perspective it is an insignificant moment; but then again even the wars that changed the course of history on earth sink into nothingness against the vast backdrop of the universe. 

We are all insignificant beings and yet we, for being conscious of our existence, is the sensorium of the cosmos, experiencing its very own existence. We are finite when we think of ourselves as separate from the universe and seek to dominate others to stake our claim in the world; but when we are at one with it, even briefly during those rare moments of epiphany, our wisdom, our might is so all-encompassing that, any human endeavour seems laughably petty.

Perhaps one day, we'll be surpassed by our very own creations--the artificial minds and robots that are already, and will soon be an inevitable part of our everyday existence.  If we see this as part of a natural progression of life's evolution, we might be more accepting of our fate. 

Our lives are not lived only through our mortal bodies; they continue in whatever substrate we choose to deposit our thoughts and dreams, long after this mortal coil is extinguished. Ultimately, the pageant of life is much grander than what our finite mind can conceive.


Sunday, June 15, 2025

The Patterns of Human Affairs

It's already Sunday and I'm late in posting my weekly blog article. There has been a flurry of social engagements over the past two days and only now do I get to slow down and catch up with my thoughts.

The weather has been excruciatingly hot over the past weeks and I've been training myself to tolerate the heat, working without air-conditioning most of time. I try to make do with less whenever I get the chance. I've not always been successful but I do have that as a goal.

It is a great feeling to be self-sufficient and resilient. I want to be able to think and write even in very uncomfortable and noisy environments. To get into the writing mood, I have to relax my mind and allow thoughts to simply bubble up. Every thought is held up against the light of scrutiny and observed like a translucent crystal.

As you grow older, you see more patterns in nature. And this includes the patterns of human affairs. You are able to see the trajectory of your actions and intentions and that enables you to see things from a higher level of perspective. 

Last week I wrote about how mathematics is built from axioms, which are the basic building blocks of reasoning from which theorems and other statements of truths are formulated. Axioms, in a way are self-evident patterns. When it comes to everyday events, and when you've seen enough of them, you observe patterns, and the mind begin to see them as the basic building blocks of even larger patterns.

Any pattern is characterised by repetitions and regularities. As you grow older, you naturally become wiser in your conduct, simply because you are able to see the patterns of human actions and reactions. It is no different from how AI is able to be trained to identify objects or patterns in human language.

The patterns of human affairs are obviously more complex. But as you experience more in life, the outcomes of certain actions become predictable because you've seen similar patterns before. So you use them as 'theorems' to make wiser decisions. These theorems become life principles. 

Every one of us have these set of principles, some of which we adopt from our culture and religious beliefs, others through our personal life experiences. Religion provides a prescriptive collection of principles which we could adopt and adapt to our life circumstances.

The theorems or principles of religion too rely on certain axiomatic beliefs: the belief in one creator God, for instance, the doctrine of Original Sin or the law of karma. They have been distilled by the wisdom of the ages, through the collective experience of flawed humans like you and me.

To understand one's own religion is to understand the axioms from which all its tenets are built from. In many ways, we have many advantages over our prophetic fore-fathers who laid down the doctrines of our adopted religions. For one, we have technology, which has opened up our vista of knowledge and experience, allowing us to build even more powerful wisdom models.

We could refine existing axioms or adopt better ones since we have a better understanding of history, science and other systems of religious beliefs. But we must also be vigilant of intellectual hubris, which could delude us into thinking that anything that's new is good and anything that knocks down the old is to be embraced.

The basic skill of the brain is to detect patterns. Just observe the world and allow your neural network to readjust its own weights. The more exposure your brain has to information, the more adept you are in recognising the patterns of human affairs. And that is the essence of wisdom.