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.