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.