Sisyphus Unbound

“According to some, the punishment of the rock had only one purpose: to keep Sisyphus occupied and prevent him from hatching new schemes. But at the least expected moment, Sisyphus will devise something and he’ll come back to Earth...” - 2666, Roberto Bolaño

Of all the punishments in Greek mythology, few are as iconic as that imposed on Sisyphus. For ratting on Zeus, screwing around with Thanatos, and tricking Persephone, he was condemned to forever roll a boulder up a hill in Tartarus and having it roll back down again. His fate of endless futility earns him the sympathy of us moderns. But his tale also warns us of the hubris and uselessness of intelligence against authority, a message which is anathema to our revolutionary Zeitgeist. Is intelligence always a force opposed to authority? If so, which would win in a Hegelian slugfest? Or are they two sides of the same coin? And what of the different forms of intelligence? Let us seek to answer these questions intelligently.

Pumped Up Kicks

Bruce Lee claimed not to be afraid of the man who had practiced 10,000 kicks once each, but the man who had practised one kick 10,000 times. This seems prima facie a case of fox versus hedgehog in martial arts, with the hedgehog being the one-trick pony and the fox being the one with a wide repertoire of moves. Without running simulations like the Discovery Channel did for tigers fighting lions and so on, let us try to derive a definitive result to this debate.

Night of the Feeling Dead

For Halloween this year, I will be dressed as a philosophical zombie (p-zombie). By any measure it is the easiest costume, seeing as p-zombies are by definition behaviourally and hence sartorially indistinguishable from your garden variety Homo sapiens. But they are arguably the scariest of monsters as well. The parochialism of conscious beings leads them to consider only other conscious beings as suitable for entering into moral relations with, if that (although Shaun of the Dead provides a counterexample, with Shaun playing PlayStation games with zombie Ed). And given that our basis for believing in other minds is merely pragmatic, inductive faith, even the simple act of contemplating the possibility of p-zombies is sufficient to throw doubt on the rest of humanity. Other people would seem uncanny. It would be as if a genocide had been conducted stealthily in the heads of everyone else. All whom we love would be no more. (Of course some, like horror writer Thomas Ligotti, would consider the existence of consciousness to be the horrifying fact, but I venture it would be way more horrifying for those consciousnesses if other humans weren't conscious.)

Am-ing Myself

Triumphantly and anti-grammatically supreme I'll speak of 'am-ing myself'. I'll have stated a philosophy in just two words. - Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet

This is the time of the year when people are too busy for anything other than are-ing themselves. All dreams of being someone else are put aside for the moment, and the price of being oneself must be paid before any new purchases made. We aren't are-ing ourselves; we are merely ourselves. Let us be ourselves then, so that we may better are ourselves when the time comes.

The Origin of Cognition in the Breakdown of the Caffeinated Mind

Ah, coffee. The sine qua non of modernity. And not merely the opium of the masses either. Alfréd Rényi once said, "A mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems." Does coffee make me think better, or does it just make me think I'm thinking better? It feels like the former. Although, I hear a voice in my head asking, "And how would it feel if it was the latter, pray tell?"

Your Friendly Neighbourhood Philosopher

Deleuze and Guattari (D&G) note that the word "philo-sopher" comes from the Greek for "friend of wisdom". But how would philosophers fare as friends of people? In befriending a philosopher, would one also come closer to becoming friends with wisdom?

What criteria would we adopt in choosing philosophers as friends? The quality of their ideas or their writing? Their personalities or even their actual track record as friends to others? All valid considerations. Perhaps we shouldn't isolate any of these variables, and must instead treat each philosopher as a whole, as a person, which is surely what friendship demands of us. If, as Aristotle says, the best life is one engaged in reason, and true friendship is that in which persons of similar character exercise their virtues together, then philosophers are uniquely suited for friendship. These, then, are my choices in chronological order.

Consider the Hydra

The hydra (ὕδρα) is a polycephalic reptile native to Lake Lerna in Greece. The number of heads common to this species has been variously reported as five, seven, nine, or a hundred (the last known sighting of a hydra occurred more than three milennia ago, by a certain Heracles (a notable wildlife enthusiast of the day) so any knowledge we have of this creature has suffered from the Chinese whispers of time). Nonetheless, all accounts agree that the hydra regrows two heads for each one cut off, and has poisonous breath and blood.

Due to the overcompensatory nature of its response to trauma, Nassim Taleb has elected the hydra as the symbolic beast of antifragility. It roams the sands of Extremistan indifferent to danger, impervious to harm. The one known Black Swan for the hydra is cauterisation, so it seems the hydra has no natural predators. Yet it is not even sure that the hydra will survive the Blank Swan of my writing.

The Neo-Amazons of New Amazon

I am Erodotus, the Mad Historian. No ears will any longer take in the warnings I give. Which are the dreams, my nights or my days? The nights are haunted by visions of civilisations long ruined, where men spoke tongues understood by none today, save one. In the day I struggle so to find an audience for my words, I might as well be speaking an incomprehensible tongue. They are all asleep, in the day as in the night, delving into the same pasts I see, addicted to those pasts as to those potions they take to prolong their dreams. There are those who dwell in the past to hide from the present, and those who search unfathomable pasts for answers, both equally mad. Yet the healers think me mad! Would that I had known it would come to this.

But first...

Legend has it that the peoples of New Amazon were visited by two plagues which shaped their present race, and are doomed to be scourged by another that will prove their end. The first of these was a pox which took all their menfolk, yet left the women untouched bar their grief. Their treasuries possessed stores of seed with which to sire new young; but any boys born fell ill with the same pox and did not last long. But the women knew not despair, for their cities were high in Science. They attempted to find cures for that dread disease, but all manner of elixir, herbal or alchemical, proved futile. The women then turned their efforts to finding a way to bear children without men, at which task they succeeded by a method (involving two women) still used in the present day.

Thinking en Passant

I read an interview of a chess hustler in New York expounding on his personal philosophy. It was certainly an interesting interview with an unusual character. His theories struck me with a few thoughts. But perhaps a disclaimer and aside first.

I sucked at chess for a child of my intelligence. I used to play against the computer in primary school. I knew the rules, sure, and the goal of the game as well, but I could never figure out how to string them together. My eyes saw material and nothing else, even though the software had fancy features to help you track legal moves, fields of influence, and so on. I saw only the surface level, playing it like a Democritean atomist (I nearly said reductionist, but that would be false because I saw nothing to reduce). Barren of abstractions, the chessboard is a mere particle accelerator, one governed by a physics which permits only annihilation, not transmutation (except the occasional promoted pawn).

Cities and Walking

Walking hints at a hidden connection between the physical world and the realm of thought. As the sights of the city unfold before our eyes, so do our problems unravel and our ideas compound. Familiar places unearth forgotten facts; each unexplored alley promises an epiphany. It should come as no surprise then that many of the great thinkers were also great walkers, a connection that probably goes back even further than Aristotle's peripatetic lectures. Kant's daily walks were so regular that clocks were set by them. Kahneman and Tversky used to walk together as they thought through the problems in behavioural economics which would lead to a Nobel prize. Nassim Taleb likes holding discussions while walking, but only if his partner walks slowly enough. It is heartening to see I follow in distinguished footsteps with my habits. When I was little, I used to pace my room as I roamed elaborate fantasy worlds. Now I ponder my philosophical projects as I walk, whether on my way somewhere or wandering without destination. It is surely an oversight of the English language that there is no word for the combination of walking and thinking.

Notes from the Lift

If you want to go to heaven, you gotta climb the stairway. Turns out the way to purgatory is by lift. I found out after my recent move. In a bid to optimise travel time from the ground floor to my apartment, I pressed the door-close button in the lift immediately after selecting my floor.

No response.

I tried again. Then it sunk in.

The door-close button does nothing. Not even placebo, because the delay was so long that I did not get any feeling of agency when the doors eventually closed. An idiot button. I'd long heard rumours purporting the existence of these mythical beasts, but to actually come face to face with one in the field. They say the best part of being a cryptozoologist is when you can drop the crypto-. Like that guy who found coelacanth on sale in some African market.

LoL 2012

So much happened in one year, it feels like a lifetime has passed. The theme of 2012 was, for me, epistemology (retrospectively I would call the theme of 2009 ethics, 2010 aesthetics, and 2011 networks). How do we know what we know? How do we know what we don't? How do we know that we know? I have remained conscious of these questions throughout the year, whether during active contemplation or by implicit awareness. This has also had the effect of making me realise the pervasiveness of intellectual sins in the world, rendering them all the more frustrating, and even at times discouraging.

Yet I am heartened by the beauty of the works which I had the pleasure of encountering throughout the year, all monuments to human achievement in their own right. Only the three categories of fiction, non-fiction and movies appear below as they are the only categories to which I had sufficient exposure to judge in 2012. It is astounding how many of the non-fiction books I read in 2012 were the magna opera of their authors, even though not all of them made the list. If I have seen further over the last year, it is because I have been fortunate to have stood on the very top of a totem of giants, whom you will find below.

Rain

It is pouring as I write, almost as if someone is desperately trying to hit the rainfall quota before the end of the year. It has been pouring the whole of December since I’ve been back. So there is winter in Singapore after all. I never known the difference between seasons to be so drastic. Had I merely never noticed, or is global warming moving up a notch?

The rain seems to portend the passing of a year, a torrent of emotion no longer being held back. Yet it is also as a waterfall in some run-of-the-mill adventure story, a diaphanous veil concealing treasure beyond, the Ding an sich, the hidden reality of which I wish to speak but am unable to. That failure to describe reality is itself the reality which I must describe.

Forever Alone Supervillain?

I recently read an article by Kevin Kelly discussing the impossibility of a Hollywood-style lone supervillain killing large numbers of people on his own, arguing that the power of an individual to kill has not increased over time. Even large-scale acts of terrorism depend on teams, not to mention entire networks of support personnel.

Yet this, or any analysis that seeks to predict the future based on current knowledge, cannot help but overlook the possibility of Black Swans. The largest event to date is no guide to even larger events that could occur but have yet to. So is there a fundamental obstacle to mass killing by an individual, or are we less safe than we (or at least Kelly) think we are?

The article offers two main reasons why this should be so, which are that killing large numbers of people is a complex task, and that social resistance hinders recruitment of resources. Which got my inner evil genius wondering if there were ways to bypass these difficulties.

De Reader Dunno De Différance

Due to an untimely laptop crash recently, my reading program has been expedited. I have surely exceeded 100 books already this year. Which of course pales in comparison to Winston Churchill's alleged book-a-day even while Prime-Ministering. Nonetheless, here's a few things I noticed while reading during the past few months.

1. You know you're reading some serious shit when the author uses the word 'problematic' as a noun rather than an adjective.

2. Buckminster Fuller likes to omnioveruse compound neologisms and Heideggerian hyphens in his throughout-the-book prose.

3. You're not reading a book qua book or a newspaper qua newspaper if you're not flipping any pages.

4. It's interesting how every author aligns philosophers differently. One author may villify Plato, Descartes, Heidegger and Nietzsche and lionise Socrates, Hume and Popper, another may decry Socrates, Bentham and Mill and praise Hume and Kant, and yet another may criticise Kant, Descartes and Bentham and adopt Socrates, Hume, Mill and Nietzsche. And yet others just disagree with all of them. Makes one wonder if everyone was reading the same writings.

5. One man's epiphany is often another man's truism. But isn't a truism always-already just a truism however it is expressed? At least truisms are true, by definition.

6. Books with the words 'tractatus', 'principia', 'being' or 'critique' in their title are guaranteed to be difficult. Let's hope no one writes Tractatus Principia: A Critique of Being.

Incomplete

Valéry famously said, a poem is never finished, only abandoned. It is impossible to perfect a work, of course. Even if a line or stanza has been perfected by making all the best word choices, there is always the possibility of adding more lines to it, or the poem. And adding more alters the context, such that what was the best artistic choice may no longer be so. It is just like Gödel's incompleteness theorems, where extending a formal system to prove a previously unprovable theorem adds new unprovable theorems to the system. The trick then, is to find the right point at which to abandon a work.

An August Month Indeed

This August has been unusually eventful, and fruitful. The month started off with my presentation on the possibility of achieving immortality. I also attended several screenings at the Melbourne International Film Festival. The English Premier League kicked off once more. And in that time I finished reading perhaps five books, of which three were of the highest intellectual achievement, on neuroscience, consciousness, and ethics respectively (although of course each book necessarily encroached on the other two areas, sometimes vastly so).

A Thousand and One Unanimous Nights

"Nadie lo vio desembarcar en la unánime noche."
"No one saw him slip from the boat in the unanimous night."
- The Circular Ruins, Jorge Luis Borges

Readers of Borges are unanimous in their curiosity about that choice of adjective. Its author later disowned the word, calling it an example of his early, irresponsible writing and allowing it to be translated as 'encompassing' in some English editions. Yet there is something undeniably enchanting about that word. He had intended it to take its meaning from the Latin roots, so he was referring to a one-souled night. But even if he had recanted his mistake, Borges is much like a father who has no idea how his son will turn out (an apposite analogy given the plot of that story), having stumbled onto a very real phenomenon with 'the unanimous night' - one which is endangered by captivity within our modern metropolis.

On the Nature of Cool

Being cool is a talent that begins where talent ends. Yet we find ourselves surrounded these days by those who seek to perfect the art of cool with no other talent. Such a pursuit can only be pretense, so those that do succeed must have a talent for mimicry. These we celebrate as actors, and we do not begrudge them their coolness - it is merely an occupational hazard.

Sailors, Playboys, and Intellectuals

In the Etro main collection for menswear Spring Summer 2012, "sailors, playboys and intellectuals all meet up amidst the colours and fragrances of Provence". Sounds like quite a gathering indeed. Tony Stark the "genius billionaire playboy philanthropist" would surely approve.

The assembly of sailors, playboys and intellectuals is itself decked out in a brilliant (in both senses of the word) combination of clothing. Nothing less than what we'd expect from Kean Etro, a maestro of colour and pattern (John Galliano and Paul Smith lay good claims to that title as well), whose runways showcase the wildest mix of hues, checks and paisleys that somehow avoids becoming kitschy. Bringing these groups together may simply be an exercise of artistic license, an excuse to bring together even more patterns and styles of clothing for creative purposes. Yet there may be something more lying beneath the aesthetics. Marcel Proust encouraged us to reach a suitable level of receptivity, with which we can learn as much from a soap advertisement as from a pensée by Pascal. Let us now attempt to do so from a fashion collection.