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All Those Oddball Theories At Once Not been a very happy week on the whole, with a physics prof's wife, a double-junior-in-a-way and my high school literature teacher all passing on. While I didn't know them much (if at all), it did still lead me to ruminate a little, as when my grandfather asked me to do his business taxes this year because his usual preparer had gone too (duplicating his typewritten forms in Courier New, and figuring out how the figures related to each other, was a nice exercise) It is at these times when thoughts inevitably drift to sadness and the appropriate degree thereof. Should one be anxious at not feeling sad enough, or be concerned at sinking into it? Then again, questions on human consistency usually leave me in a cold sweat and with a throbbing headache if I honestly attempt to resolve them logically. Following some ready-made creed would likely be easier, but alas, it is too late for that; the curse of knowledge, no matter how paltry. The realisation that everything is, at least, inextricably connected is then a sort of relief. If a connection is assumed between each and every particle in the universe and its closest neighbour, then a path can be found between any two of them, no matter how far apart (ok, like duh), and if time is similarly overlaid, all that is is linked to all that is. I sometimes wonder if the achievement of "higher states" of consciousness, aspired to by mendicants of various stripes, are actually attained often enough by most, but just not sustained. In analogy, almost everyone can, when sprinting at full tilt, exceed the average lifetime speed of any world-class athlete - they just can't keep it up for long. Thinking about it, we are immortal. Consider two broad possibilities:
In the first case, there is immortality as there is no time in which the person exists that he does not experience (when he isn't sleeping or otherwise unconscious, but this only furthers the point); as oft pointed out in Internet debates on this topic, he is no more and no less dead than when before he was born, a state that frankly doesn't bother many. In the second case, immortality is clearly the case - everything between lives can simply be regarded as a "sleep", as poets are ever so fond of pointing out. Religions typically prefer this option, mostly differing in how they think it is implemented - some postulate reincarnation, where the other lives, before and after, take place in this realm (or next door, if one's aim is bad, though always with eventual redemption); others promise special actually eternal realms, which saves them from the bother of very large numbers, and effectively prevents further one-upmanship. A question would then be - is a reincarnated/ascended being still the same? Consider Alice and Bob, where Alice dies and is in due time reborn as Charlie, and Bob floats onto the clouds and spends his spare time dodging Boeings and hiding from all those pesky Google Earth imaging satellites. In the first case, Charlie seldom - if ever - thinks to concern himself with whether he was Alice, or any one of innumerable beings, previously (N.B. if he does bother, ten to one he claims to be somebody famous, and not a peasant dung-gatherer or beetle, despite the latter options being far, far more likely). Furthermore, "Alice" is certainly not around to mourn her transformation either, so nobody loses.  They're already skipping the "reincarnation" part in South Korea, THROUGH SCIENCE! [Composite image of the twenty Miss Korea 2013 participants] (Source: imgur.com) This line of thought can be taken further. What about those suffering from amnesia (or Alzheimer's), such as the shipwrecked pianists who wash up every so often? Are they "themselves"? Do they feel bad at not being "themselves"? And what about growing up? Is Charlie at thirty-five the same as Charlie at five (hopefully not), or even at twenty-five? It could be asserted that Charlie at thirty-five is less like Charlie at five than most unrelated five year-old boys are. How often is the loss of the five year-old Charlie mourned? Additionally, I often wonder why such a transformation is traditionally regarded as unitary, i.e. Alice becomes Charlie, which requires that there be some fundamental and immutable property of "Aliceness". Could it not be "...some of Alice and Doug and Eliza and Fitzwilliam... and Zeke", or even "some of everything" become Charlie? Then again, it might be harder to get people to work for their souls, if they figure that "they" might not reap all the rewards. And in the second case of Bob, does he keep his identity perpetually up there, or does he become "not-Bob" anyway? Speaking of which, how would a human who is actually able to live for millenia behave? In the context of the Fermi paradox, perhaps a possible solution is "it is the nature of intelligent life to sink into self-contemplative philosophy". So perhaps it is not death itself that is feared, but the change and pain (for good reason) that accompanies it. Back To This Life Then all were for the State; Then the rich man helped the poor, And the poor man loved the great; Then lands were fairly portioned, Then spoils were fairly sold; The Romans were like brothers In the brave days of old. - Lays of Ancient Rome, Thomas Macaulay All that theorizing doesn't preclude being drawn by the more mundane too. Not much new, though - HDB leaking money (while the SLA stays conspicuously silent - as one forumite says, 凉爽故事，伙计!), home "ownership" good (it's not paying your rent upfront!), welfare bad (from one bad egg), the last dhobi shop in Singapore closing despite strong demand (of over 100 garments daily... what's that, five families?), due to labour crunch (See lah! All your fault for not letting us maintain cheap prices [hence strong demand] by using even cheaper hires! Repent!), and lots of sideways hints that we don't have an identity anyway, thus no loss... so, the usual. While a huge question mark continues to hang over who is really benefiting from the lax foreign workforce policy (with even slowing the growth - not even stopping it, mind - being held to be a huge sacrifice), some sentiments might have gone too far. On the flipside, it's almost reassuring that we're disliked in some quarters - it would just feel wrong otherwise, given that the freakin' Ku Klux Klan are protesting them! On the credit claimed side, the inflation rate is touted to have slowed its increase... thanks to a fall in COE prices. What about those who aren't buying cars? And isn't the fall in COE prices mostly down to the additional registration fee tax, which doesn't appear to be included in the Consumer Price Index as a non-consumption expenditure? At the same time, SingTel (recall, part of the Entity "TH" group) is throwing their toys out of the pram after their attempt at cornering Barclays Premier League coverage were thwarted, then amusingly slapped down. That was not even the funniest part of the affair, however, the title of which must go to this statement by one of their CEOs (with commentary):
...and then concluded by threatening not to bid in the future. Well, good riddance, I say! Over to the slightly more academic side, game theory is in, with cheating added to the syllabus (purely as an exercise, mind), while political scientists had the groundbreaking realisation that hey, those ditzy novelists who probably can barely count on their fingers understand strategy too! Wow! Also experienced firsthand yet again at how tiny, tiny errors can ruin entire experiments (or build new reputations; other given examples: dirt-cheap polarisers and piezos in physics, where it doesn't pay to skimp on the wrong things). In some fields, at least, one can get away with spelling errors. Next: Long-awaited Returns
anonymous said... (in reference to the korean girls) even without the surgery, they'd all look the same anyway, after your cum is on their faces
Mr. Robo G. Grey said... Dear Valued Commenter, We thank you for your input. However, preliminary research suggests that while this might be an economical solution, it would remain an inefficient allocation of resources. It appears to be an open topic in the area of hydrostatic optimization with emphasis in non-Newtonian fluids. 
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