Deliverance

Among the many Christmas songs, this particular line leaves a deep impression on me:

Mary did you know?
...
This child that you've delivered
will soon deliver you.
-- Mark Lowry, Mary Did You Know?

So, let us remember amidst all these Christmas celebrations -- we always think that the world delivered Jesus, when it's really the other way around: Jesus once delivered the world into existence and He will deliver the world once again into salvation.

So, let me deliver the Christmas greetings to fellow Christians:

Jesus was once delivered in a stable,
of uncomfort, of uncleanness
But this year
May He be delivered in your heart
Knowing that He will deliver you someday

When it breaks

When it breaks,
Appropriately in the dead of the night
When things come to a close

Where it breaks,
Appropriately within a similar, much bigger symbolism as itself

Who breaks it,
Appropriately oneself, for whom it represents

Something of glory, a faraway dream-like past;
(A jar pickling the totality of youth, passion, ambitions, aspirations,
Identity -- or prototype thereof)

A bystander, or participant, of the scene -- depends on how you see it --
Appropriately the youth just like oneself was
Before breaking

When it breaks,
Cracks appear on my heart, it too almost breaks
Invisible fragments bursting, a firework of entropy
But when it breaks,
Something was set free

Sink your head underwater

On a summer's day in the empty pool
Swing your arms and legs and all
Wonder at the sea of sparkling ripples
beneath and above

Sink your head underwater
Cast aside those goggles
Close your eyes, your eyelids little dams of tears,
Hear the whispers of the waves beckoning:
Come, flow with us

Hoist your head up
Look at the sky

Sink your head in the blue expanse
below, above;
in the blue expanse that is
yourself.

Uncountability

"I don't have much friends," a friend remarked sometime ago on Facebook. The grammar Nazi in me almost jumped at the incorrect quantifier, but I held back and pondered a little.

When you think about it, his quantifier there makes very much sense. Friends are uncountable. You value some like treasures; some are just plain bad company.  

And this is especially true in the context of social networking. It doesn't matter how many Facebook friends you have; it does matter how much.

Toxic

If you think the only people who care about metaphorical-to-literal transcendence are pedantic linguists like yours truly, then you are mistaken.

It is important to be aware that metaphors are woven to the very fabric of language itself, and affect its dynamism.

Take toxin, a relatively modern concept due to the advance in medicine. If you trace the etymology, it comes from Ancient Greek word toxikos (τοξικός), which "[pertains] to arrows or archery". The concept of toxin being deadly and fast-acting is then borrowed from arrows: toxin is a metaphor.

Consider how toxin now has transcended its metaphorical husk, flapping wings, gliding gracefully on the literal plane, landing on the minds unaware that it is a denizen of the otherworld.

Literally

There has been some commotion regarding the use 'literally' a general intensifier, basically just a substitute of 'very'. Language Log has a post with links to older posts and xkcd, here.

My initial reaction was, you guess it, lamenting of the disrepaired state of ignorance concerning semantics nowadays, and left it at that. 

Recently when I came across another usage, I reconsidered my stand. Perhaps 'literally' here could just be another case of metaphorical-to-literal transcendence. The purpose of this device is, I repeat, to confuse the literal and metaphorical planes; one is transcended to the other, so as to deliver impact. Very similar to the effect of hyperbole: we know it's just an exaggeration, yet the impact is still there.

Put in another way, 'literally' here is to be interpreted metaphorically, so that the act of transcending the metaphorical plane to the literal plane, the act itself exists on another metaphorical plane altogether.

So there you have it. You may employ 'literally' as a general intensifier. It's just, if you don't think about why you may, that is pure ignorance.

God and Personification (Addendum)

Just a bit of juxtaposition. Divine simplicity says that God is simple. On the other hand, Man is a composite, which is nicely captured in this excerpt:

The phenomenon called 'I'
Is a single green illumination
Of a presupposed organic
alternating current lamp
(a composite body of each
and every transparent spectre)
The single illumination
Of karma's alternating current lamp
Remains alight without fail
Flickering unceasingly, restlessly
Together with the sights of the land and all else
(the light is preserved... the lamp itself is lost)
(the totality flickers in time with me
sensing all that I sense coincidentally)
For these twenty-two months
Brought together in paper and mineral ink
Passage by passage of light and shade
They are truths as they are drawings of the spirit
-- Kenji Miyazawa, Spring and Asura

Apologia pro semita meo

Or defense for my (university) course. Or something like that.

Looking at my writing alone, one probably cannot tell that I am actually a chemist-in-training. 

I have been told for ever that I belong to the science stream. I suppose I do. I always excel in the sciences, my maths is not so bad, and am mostly a creature of logic. Nevertheless I have always suspected that I have some penchant for the Arts, if only an inkling of it. Take my linguistic pedantry; it's been there since I was at junior high level. 

A former teacher said that a person should not be pigeon-holed. That is something I'll always remember, since it confirms my aforementioned suspicion. To label a person as science person or humanities person is just shallow thinking, Of course, it is alright to categorise for certain purposes, say, for education streaming or screening potential employees, for example. But many cannot see the underlying complexities beneath the labels, and end up seeing people as caricatures of sorts; inadvertently oversimplifying and degrading them.

So, despite my proficiencies in seemingly mutually exclusive areas, I ended up in the science. Why? Because, as those who have gone through it can tell you, you can only choose a narrow area. I should digress a little bit to describe my education philosophy. One of my students asked me before, why he has to do English, or Maths, or other subjects, for that matter. I answered, because a person has to be equipped with all areas of knowledge until certain level. At least junior high level, or if you can, high school level, in my opinion. This level is arguable, but I think the paramount criteria are: 1) It is enough to get by in life, 2) It gives enough glimpses of the area in consideration to stimulate interested students to specialise in it. You have to specialise, simply because the amount of human knowledge is too enormous that one cannot know everything in-depth. This vantage view of education is illustrated nicely here.

Next question, why science not other things? (Note that I do not differentiate between physics, chemistry, or biology here, simply because just as you should not pigeon-hole people, you should not compartmentalise science, if you can afford not to). Take a look at my process of elimination. Take into account my nature: I am quite pragmatic, but not shallow; and most of all, am a pursuer of knowledge. I crossed off the humanities, since I doubt I can make a decent living out of it; besides I have greater talents for science. I crossed off business since I do not want to end up as money-making machine. I have read accounts of people feeling empty despite having great wealth (more like, from literary works. Literature is a lens on humanity, more on that next time). I thought to myself, why wasting time learning about laws that can change. Perhaps such is the nature of the said emptiness, the accomplishment of nothing. Another reason that I can put up quite eloquently, if I may say so myself, is that the financial and economic systems are just creations of man, that is, artificial and transient. The laws of nature that science seeks after, on the other hand, are enduring, and will be there as long as this world as we know it exists. To this, a friend countered: but money makes the world goes round. To that, I quipped: perhaps, but I know angular momentum sure does.

Why not engineering? I have already revealed a little that I am interested in the inner working of the universe, more so than applying it into design, to produce technology. I am more interested to be at the frontiers of knowledge, and make a little dent on the current boundary. But the very fundamentals are also not for me. In science and engineering tree, maths is the root; physics, lower stem; chemistry, upper stem; biology, branches; engineering, fruits. I chose chemistry because of its centrality; there is balance between the fundamentals and the applications.

Academia, then. First, I enjoy teaching. Second, as I said, I want to be at the frontiers of knowledge, so I have to do research. I have to admit that the prestige of professorship is also quite alluring. But a darker reason is that I am just plain dastardly. I want to deal with the world from the the lofty ivory tower, dealing with living indirectly, cocooned by the scientific bubble. Say what you may, but I am of the opinion that there is a need for scientists to be separated from the 'world' at large, even though the separation is artificial. In The Glass Bead Game, Herman Hesse depicts a world where this separation is even made geographical. Castalia is the central of academia, much like Vatican is the central of Catholicism. Castalia is called 'aristocracy of the spirit', which has an inkling of elitist connotation. Yes, the separation is unnatural, nevertheless necessary, to protect the scholars from 'money, fame, rank'. Not for everyone, but I feel that it is for me. Deep down, I am just fragile: I don't have the ruggedness to take on the world by its horns; it will break my spirit.

Ultimately, whatever field you are pursuing, keep in mind your purpose. Mine is the pursuit of knowledge, truths that are everlasting. Then to pass on this knowledge for generations to come. 

That you are here — that life exists, and identity; 
That the powerful play goes on, and you will contribute a verse.
-- Walt Whitman

God and Personification

I used to wonder why we Christians say that 'God is love', not 'God is loving'. 'God is loving' is fine, because 'loving' is an adjective, so it is a modifier, explaining the attribute of God being full of love (it seems that the linguist has always been dormant in me). Well, now that I am a student of literature, I found that it is just a personification, a literary technique. A quick recapitulation, as I wrote before:

When the first letter of a word is capitalised, it is like a name of a person, so we say that the word is personified. Other notable examples would be 'Mother Nature' and 'Death'. Think of those two words carefully -- if you are imaginative maybe you will conjure images of benevolent mother and grim reaper. So you see, personification firstly changes the status of the intangible to the tangible. Fear, nature, death -- those are abstract concepts and are difficult to picture. What personification does is giving them bodies -- embodying them in real objects, bringing them from imaginary to real plane. What's more, they are not just tangible objects, but persons. With personalities, with emotions, with will, with mind; it's a Being.

Then it makes sense. God is, then, not only loving, but the very embodiment of love. Seen in this light, John 1:1 also makes a lot of sense:

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.
-- Jn. 1:1

'The Word' is translated from the Greek word logos [λόγος], from which we derive logic and all our -logies; basically, knowledge. Here we can see also that God is also the embodiment of knowledge itself.
But it should be noted that this is not, and should not be regarded as, simple personification.
First, as the name suggests, personification seeks to make a person out of something, to the level that other persons, that is, we, can relate to. We borrow the attributes of 'Mother', for example, to describe Nature; something we can easily conjure images from. Sometimes, personification also borrows infallibility of humans, subject to passions and other things. This, of course, cannot be true for God, since an infallible God is not God.
Second, personification is a subset of metaphor, a literary technique. But when we say 'God is love', or 'the Word was God', we don't mean metaphorically, but literally: God is the very embodiment of all His attributes. In other words, the Being God is, is identical to His attributes, literally. When Moses asked God for His name, God replied: "I am who I am" (Exodus 3:14). God just is.
For these two reasons, this concept is, to be sure, not just simple personification. This concept can be summed up as divine simplicity, originating from Thomas Aquinas, or, some may argue, the ancient Greek philosophers.
I will leave the more theological and philosophical discussions to the Wikipedia page and the references therein. Be warned that divine simplicity, despite its name, is not simple. Goes without saying.

Paradoxes of Omnipotence and Freedom II

...in serving be free.
-- Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, p.74

Freedom, then.

I held out writing this one to finish reading Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game and Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus. One of their major themes is freedom, or more accurately, the paradox thereof.

Let's put aside free will aside for a moment. Let's deal with the more general concept of freedom first. The paradox, in Christian context, is this: We often speak of being liberated from the slavery of sin. But Paul called himself the slave (doulos) of Christ (Rom. 1:1). Certainly, no man can serve two masters (Mt. 6:24). Though the latter's context is about serving God or Mammon, we can see that we are under the slavery of sin or God, never neither. Some questions: Is there, then, true freedom? If the said true freedom means being free from sin and God, does that mean necessarily a good thing? Do we really want such true freedom?

What does freedom really mean? I find it necessary to quote at length (emphasis mine):

After the principal's address, while everyone was on the way to the bravely bedecked dining hall, Knecht approached the Master with a question, "The principal," he said, "told us how things are outside of Castalia, in the ordinary schools and colleges. He said that the students at the universities study for 'free' professions. If I understood him rightly, these are professions we do not even have here in Castalia. What is the meaning of that? Why are just those professions called 'free'? And why should we Castalians be excluded from them?"
The Magister Musicae drew the young man aside and stood with him under one of the giant trees. An almost sly smile puckered the skin around his eyes into little wrinkles as he replied: "Your name is Knecht, my friend, and perhaps for that reason the word 'free' is so alluring for you. But do not take it too seriously in this case. When the non-Castalians speak of the free professions, the word may sound very serious and even inspiring. But when we use it, we intend it ironically. Freedom exists in those professions only to the extent that the student chooses the profession himself. That produces an appearance of freedom, although in most cases the choice is made less by the student than by his family, and many a father would sooner bite off his tongue than really allow his son free choice. But perhaps that is a slander; let us drop this objection. Let us say that the freedom exists, but it is limited to the one unique act of choosing the profession. Afterward all freedom is over. When he begins his studies at the university, the doctor, lawyer, or engineer is forced into an extremely rigid curriculum which ends with a series of examinations. If he passes them, he receives his license and can thereafter pursue his profession in seeming freedom. But in doing so he becomes the slave of base powers; he is dependent on success, on money, on his ambition, his hunger for fame, on whether or not people like him. He must submit to elections, must earn money, must take part in the ruthless competition of castes, families, political parties, newspapers. In return he has the freedom to become successful and well-to-do, and to be hated by the unsuccessful, or vice versa. For the elite pupil and later member of the Order, everything is the other way around. He does not 'choose' any profession. He does not imagine that he is a better judge of his own talents than are his teachers. He accepts the place and the function within the hierarchy that his superiors choose for him–if, that is, the matter is not reversed and the qualities, gifts and faults of the pupil compel the teachers to send him to one place or another. In the midst of this seeming unfreedom every electus enjoys the greates imaginable freedom after his early courses. Whereas the man in the 'free' professions must submit to a narrow and rigid course of studies with rigid examinations in order to train for his future career, the electus, as soon as he begins studying independently, enjoys so much freedom that there are many who all their lives choose the most abstruse and frequently almost foolish studies, and may continue without hindrance as long as their conduct does not degenerate, The natural teacher is employed as teacher, the natural educator as educator, the natural translator as translator; each, as if of his own accord, finds his way to the place in which he can serve, and in serving be free. Moreover, for the rest of his life he is saved from that 'freedom' of career which means such terrible slavery. He knows nothing of the struggle for money, fame, rank; he recognizes no parties, no dichotomy, between the individual and the office, between what is private and what is public; he feels no dependence upon success. Now do you see, my son, that when we speak of the free professions, the word 'free' is meant rather humorously."
-- Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, pp.73-74

Leverkühn suffers from the excessive freedom of post-Romantic subjectivity, which paradoxically has at this stage in musical history itself become an oppressive convention; and from a hyper-intelligent technical grasp which allows him instantly to see through every musical trick used by other composers – or hinself. What he craves is a compelling new order that will lift the paradoxical burden of freedom, and a new primitive simplicity that will be a refuge from his own sophistication.
-- T. J. Reed, Introduction, Doctor Faustus, p.ix

Germany is free, in so far as one may apply to a land prostrate and proscribed.
-- Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, p.518

You can't miss the unmistakably contemptuous and Aristotelian-golden-mean tone everytime freedom is mentioned. Too much freedom can't be good. Freedom may just be an illusion of it.

The first passage may sound socialistic. Let's not go into that, but you can watch this TEDTalk instead where the speaker talks, among other things, of freedom of choice in once-socialist countries.

I should just conclude this post in thoughtful tone with my opinion on free will and predestination:

Some might argue that predestination precludes free will; it is deteministic. This is not necessarily the case. It just happens that God has free will, too. You are free to choose, so is He. Men try all the time to turn the tides of history; if God chooses to dip His finger in the flow of Time, how would you argue that He can't? 

Paradoxes of Omnipotence and Freedom I

Listverse has just released a list of paradoxes. They are excellent sources of philosophical discussion, but alas, when it involves religion, the paradox in question has to be resolved, or at least has its illusory contradiction laid bare. 

There are two paradoxes which may confuse the Christian. The first being the paradox of omnipotence, which is the first item on Listverse's list. The other being the paradox of freedom, not on the list.

I shall try to touch on them at length.

Of omnipotence:

A classical problem:

Can God create a rock so heavy He can't lift it?

Answering yes or no would imply incapability of either creating or lifting the stone, and assuming omnipotence is the "capability to do all things", this is a paradox.

As Utahraptor said here, this can be generalised like thus:

If you can do anything, then you can do things that prevent you from doing other things, and therefore, you can't do anything.

In simpler terms: if you have the powers to do everything, you would have the power to strip yourself of all powers included, then you don't have any power. Clearly, this has to mean that there is a fundamental error in our notion of omnipotence, because if we follow the logic of the paradox, omnipotence itself may lead to impotence.

Omnipotence, then, has to be redefined so as the definition is such that it excludes contradictions to itself, unlike our definition above. In turn, we have to narrow down the list of the powers of the omnipotent. This may sound absurd if we relate back that the omnipotent Being is God. This has to mean that God has limitations of what He can do.

Fair enough, but it is even absurder if you don't limit on what God can do, for instance: God can sin. Well, no, of course not. Does that mean God is not all-powerful? Quite the opposite. 

God cannot sin. If we generalise this, we can say: God cannot contradict himself. That would solve the rock problem. The answer is a simple 'no', simply because God cannot contradict himself.

Thus, the source of the paradox is on the inherently contradictory definition of omnipotence itself. The definition cannot be all-encompassing, because some powers would contradict others.

Paradox of freedom, in due course.

Lexical Order

If you have shelved your thermodynamics at the back of your mind, go retrieve it. Done?

Δ_fH^O 

According to the order of appearance: change, formation, enthalpy, standard. 

But lo and behold, you are supposed to read that as: standard enthalpy change of formation. How can that be?

This is because English language adopts lexical order which does not really follow natural thinking process. First off, languages can be divided into two according to the lexical order: modifier-modified and modified-modifier. English belongs to the former, since the modifier precedes the modified. Consider the phrase:

beautiful girl

girl is the noun, the modified, while beautiful is an adjective, so it is an attribute, a modifier.

In Swahili, the same phrase would be (courtesy of Google Translate):

msichana mzuri (literally, girl beautiful, preserving the lexical order)

Note that now the modified precedes the modifier.

As English speakers we probably do not realise how unnatural is the English lexical order. If you think about it, the main idea must be the modified, while modifiers are just attributes. If we are talking about a 'beautiful girl', we are talking about a girl, not a beautiful.

Our mind is usually concerned with the bigger picture first, i.e. the modified; while details, the modifiers, can be filled later. Is there evidence that this is the natural way of thinking? We write symbols that way. Again, look at the same symbol of  'standard enthalpy of formation':

Δ_fH^O 

Note that the modified is change. The main modifier is enthalpy. Thus it is a change -- what kind of change? Enthalpy change. 

Other modifiers, formation and standard, appear as subscript or superscript. f subscript is appended after change because formation specifies the type of change. (Digressing a little bit: This is the new IUPAC convention. Last time, the f subscript used to be placed after the thermodynamic state function. This is not very accurate since, as mentioned, formation is the attribute of change rather than that of enthalpy. IUPAC actually pays attention to proper lexical order!). Nought superscript is more like the modifier to the whole thing, like thus: (Δ_fH)^O . 

Having said all that though, it languages do have ways to reverse lexical order. English uses 'of' to place modifier after the modified:

girl of unworldy beauty

While Japanese uses the familiar 'no' (の), which performs very similar functions to 'of'. This though, one must admit, is kind of unwieldy. The rendering of our symbol if the order of appearance is to be followed would be:

Change (of formation) of enthalpy, in standard conditions

There is an alternative argument to the 'unnatural' argument, which is to say that the modifier-modified languages put more importance, then, in the details rather than the big picture. Language and culture are intertwined, as I wrote quite lengthily before. Language is the frame on which thoughts are built upon, so its structure will influence the product of thoughts, i.e. culture, in some ways. We can extrapolate, say, that users of modified-modifier languages are more individualistic than they are socialistic, because they are more concerned with details. This conclusion is, of course, far-fetched. However, you may be surprised that there is actually correlation of sorts: A lot of Western languages are actually modifier-modified and the Western culture tends to be more individualistic. 

But then again, as I pointed out before, you have to be aware that indeed language influences culture, but the other way is also true; the two are intricately intertwined. Like nature and nurture. Ouroboros-like.

Metaphorical-to-Literal Transcendence

And what the heck is that, you might ask. It just sounds fancy but it is actually very simple.

To appreciate this literary technique fully, however, one needs to understand the technicalities of metaphor first.

So, what is a metaphor? A good start is the TEDTalk titled Metaphorically Speaking by James Geary:

I would like to modify a bit:

Geary talked about

X=Y (equal)

Let us change it to

X//Y (parallel)

instead.

So for "Juliet is the sun":

Instead of Juliet=sun, we have Juliet//sun. The importance of which will be clear later.

In my working definition here, a metaphor draws a parallel from the literal plane to the metaphorical plane.

"Juliet is the sun"

"The sun" is on the literal plane. Juliet is on the metaphorical plane, having all the sunny qualities Shakespeare intended for her to have. Maybe she is warm, but nothing to do with temperature. Maybe she is radiant, but nothing to with how many lux she emits.

When we draw parallels, it is important to recognise that nothing is ever equal to something except itself.

So X can never be equal to Y, but there are some aspects of Y that in X we can find similarities to. Juliet is warm, yes, radiant, yes, ball of nuclear fusion,... wait a minute. There are only so many that you can draw parallels, but never all aspects exhaustive.

On the other hand, how many parallels one can possibly draw attests to the genius of the metaphorist. Wikipedia offers Shakespeare's As You Like It passage as a fine example of extended metaphor. I couldn't agree more:

All the world's a stage

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. -- Shakespeare, As You Like It, Act II, Scene 7

Breaking down:

World//stage, men and women//actors, birth//entrance, death//exit, profession//role, periods of life//acts

This is the power of extended metaphor, to amaze by the many parallels and somehow all of them are coherent, unified in a certain manner or theme.

Now, there is a reason to segregate the two planes and keep them separate. Simply because it can get quite confusing otherwise. But of course rules are meant to be broken right?

Don't judge a book by its cover. But a car is not a book.
-- Seen outside a car showroom

Outside of a dog, a book is man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read.
-- Groucho Marx

These are what I call metaphorical-to-literal transcendence. It simply means that the metaphorical has been transcended to the literal. 

Let's dissect the first one first: car//book, outer appearance of a car//book cover

So far so good. The metaphor is implied through the cliché and the context that the writing is on a banner outside a car showroom. The second sentence then promptly destroys the parallel and transcends the car from metaphorical to literal plane. A car is not a book. Of course! They exist in different planes in the first place. The ruination of the metaphor is a clever ploy, since it forces one's mind to consider the literal car, not simply a generalised consumable that is not to be judged by its outer appearance alone.

Second one -- easier to use equality model of metaphor here: outside of a dog=other than a dog, inside of a dog=dog innards

It is quite clear that the first sentence, 'outside' is meant metaphorically, but in the second 'inside', defying the logical pattern, is meant literally.

Bottom line, what does this literary technique serve?

It should be noted that the obfuscation of metaphorical and literal planes is, as I mentioned, exception rather than the rule, so it has the novelty, defiance-tinged kind of impact, but it has to be used sparingly.

Last thing. If you notice, I have explained metaphorical-to-literal transcendence using 'planes', which is itself a metaphor. That just means that the whole article itself is metaphorical-to-literal transcendence, no?

The first thing that dissolves in alcohol is dignity.
-- Anon

Monotheism and Causa Prima

If I am capable of grasping God objectively, I do not believe, but precisely because I cannot do this I must believe.
-- Søren Aabye Kierkegaard

When a friend ask me a while back: "Why can there be only one God?", I was taken aback a little. Sure, I am a Christian, believing in monotheism, but it had never crossed my mind why it is so. This was not ignorance but more like in my mind the inescapable conclusion is that God can only be one.

The argument I thus offered my friend was the causa prima argument: 

Look at the world as a series of causes and effects with innumerable branches. An event is preceded by a cause, which is in turn preceded by another cause, and so on. Up the branches, we inevitably have to come to a point where there is a single cause that itself is not caused. This cause, or entity if you like, is called Causa Prima, the first cause.

To me, the extrapolation until every event is reduced to singularity of cause is inevitable. Animals cannot extrapolate far enough. An old dog-and-cat joke: If a dog is taken care of, it would deem the one taking care of him the Master. If a cat is taken care of, it would deem itself the Master. 

Humans are then a little better. We see something greater than ourselves, then we extrapolate upwards to find God at the zenith of infinity. If we ever go along the way of arrogance of the cat, our rationale would tell us that a lot of things are beyond our control, therefore we ourselves cannot be gods. 

By the way, the causa prima argument provides answer to chicken-and-egg question:

A chicken originates from an egg; an egg, a chicken; and so on. Sounds awfully familiar to cause-and-effect picture? This obviously has to stop somewhere up the origination branches. Simply: God creates the first pair of chickens. If you cringe at the word 'God', fine, you can replace the causa prima as anything else that causes the first pair of chickens. Evolution from another species, for instance. You should note however, that this causa prima is not the Causa Prima. It only is as far as existence of chickens is concerned. Regarding the existence of everything, subsuming chickens, the Causa Prima can only be a Supreme Being, with intelligence and consciousness.

You may realise that our extrapolation to find God is quite feeble. We have the concept of 'infinity' but it so taxes our mind when we try to rationalise it. The picture of God is then a fuzzy one, One whose personage we can only deduce from the ramifications down the branches of cause-and-effect. Religions then, can be seen as the attempt to illuminate on the identity and motives of this fuzzy God. This definition may not apply to some religions, like Buddhism where there is no God. Again, it depends on what religion means. Some people do not classify Buddhism as religion, but merely a way of living. If you look at the world's religions, monotheistic ones are surprisingly scarce: Zoroastrianism, Islam, Judaism and Christianity. Some might even group the latter three as Abrahamic religions collectively. 

I should highlight that most religions view this attempt to uncover who God is anthropocentrally. Do good deeds, accumulate enough points to gain the entry to Salvation. In Christianity the picture is a little different: God understands that Man's picture of Him is fuzzy, so He went and revealed Himself, his personage, purposes, and ultimately His authorship of Salvation in Jesus Christ.

If you say doing good is enough for salvation, you have gone the path of arrogance of the cat. Who are we to say that our moral standard is good enough, that our 'good' is truly good? The Bible mentions several discrepancies between our own moral standard and that of God. If someone slap you in the cheek, you would be entitled to retaliate with another slap, an eye for an eye, right? No, Jesus said, give him your other cheek. You are entitled to love your friend and hate your enemy, right? No, Jesus said, love your enemy. That illustrates how Man finds himself deep in the mud of corruption, even his own moral is already corrupted; he cannot hoist himself to the higher ground. The only salvation is to reach the outstretched Hand coming down from above. 

Doing good then is not the requirement of salvation, rather it is the consequence of it.

Fuzzy?

Dear the Personification of Exams

You have finally come around
Should I treat you like best friend or archenemy?
Your arrival is always accompanied by ambivalence.

Perhaps an elderly, fatherly figure?
The mischievous author putting his protagonist
into yet another rite of passage,
to colour the whole bildungsroman
blacker, redder, whiter?

Or a warden.
You lurk in my calendar grid
Imprison me behind the bolded bars
Will I ever see again the light of day?

Well, yes, I know I will
But around you the fabric of Time twists into a loop
A moment with you can be gruellingly interminable:
Eternity in three weeks.

So here I am paying tribute to your existence
When I should be doing something else.

You are the very calmness of my soul

No, not You, God, I'm sorry;
Not at the moment.
(But since You are the causa prima,
You also account for it in one way or another,
but I digress)

Notice how
I circumvent the Law of cause and effect
It's not:
"You cause the calmness in my soul."
That's because --
The mechanism, the invisible gears
are unbeknownst to me
The cascade: emotional, physiological, psychological, chemical
-- take your pick --
is too mysterious.
So, laziness, literary effect, or otherwise:
You yourself might as well be the calmness itself personified.

Your face
is not one that can launch a thousand ships
but one that can drown a thousand troubles

Let's transcend the metaphor
or the Law of cause and effect, or whatever:
You are the very calmness of my soul.

The Captain and the Ship Analogy

When explaining about why emission spectrometry is more sensitive than absorption spectrometry, my professor shared this analogy:

Imagine a ship and its captain. If we were to measure the weight of the captain, how would we go about doing that?
Well, we can weigh the ship with the captain onboard. Then weigh the ship sans the captain. Substract.
Otherwise, we can just extract the captain from his ship, then weigh him.

Silly as it sounds, the former is actually what we are doing in absorption spectrometry. Shine light onto sample. Measure the light coming out. Subtract to get the amount absorbed by the sample. This results in a lot of background noise because the difference between what comes in and out is very little, like the weight of the captain.

In emission spectrometry, the source of photons is essentially the sample itself, so background noise is essentially zero. (Not exactly zero, because there may be scattering of the incident light used to excite the sample, e.g. fluorospectrometry. If excitation is by high energy electrons, then noise is probably zero, but there may be other factors)

I think this analogy does not only apply to analytical chemistry but also a lot of other things. There is a concept of big and small here. The ship is big, the captain is small. The presence of the big distorts the measurement of the small. Big and small is kind of a motif in chemistry. You see that in HSAB theory and of course, in regioselectivity explanation of Diels-Alder reaction in terms of coefficients.

Also, relativeness. The ship with or without the captain weigh roughly the same. So the weight of the captain is only negligible because it is being juxtaposed with the weight of the ship.

Chemistry being one perspective on the inner workings of the universe, you can expect the same principle to be applicable in real life. The other day another lecturer found that the computer in the lecture hall has problem with connection to the projector. His solution? Switch to another hall. While he can just borrow a laptop, from a student or the IT office down the corridor, to connect to the projector.

It's like being aboard on a ship, finding that the captain not unable to do this job, then you proceed to find another set of ship and captain. Why not just replace the captain?

Morarity

Just pointing out:

             L                  R
   ---------------------------------------
L  |      MOLALITY     |     MOLARITY    | 
   --------------------------------------- 
R  |      MORALITY     |     MORARITY?   |
   ---------------------------------------

Why hasn't someone filled the gap? Quick, quick, someone define 'morarity'!

(On an interesting note, MORARITY is an anagram of MORIARTY, the archenemy of Sherlock Holmes. Also, I would reckon a Japanese speaker of English would have a hard time distinguishing the four since romanisation of all four would be the same.)

No such thing as free lunch

Was I really seeking good
Or just seeking attention?
Is that all good deeds are
When looked at with an ice-cold eye?
-- Elphaba in Wicked (No Good Deed)

This clichéd line reveals a question that always bogs the knower: Is there true altruism?

Put simply, every altruistic act may arguably be traced to selfish motive(s). You volunteer to feel good about yourself or to satisfy your superiority complex; you help a friend to invest in a future return of favour; you donate to make yourself look good; you treat the person you love well so that he/she will requite your love; you treat someone for lunch to curry favour; and the list goes on.

A friend of mine commented that, well, since an altruistic act is performed by self, it can never be separated from self. The self is always entangled with the act: they can never be separated, so one can never be truly altruistic.

I nodded to that at the time, but then it turns out it may not be that simple.

Victor Frankl wrote about 'transcendent quality of conscience' in Man's Search for Ultimate Meaning. In essence, it means that the self can transcends itself and considers itself objectively. This is so deeply embedded in the language that we tend to overlook it: consider the reflexive pronouns (the 'selves') – say, myself. "I consider myself": 'I' is the subject and 'myself' is the object, right? Following that, we can argue that the transcendent self may then be fully removed from its selfish desires and be truly altruistic. This is what makes a person a person. The etymology of 'person' is per-sonat, literally: sounding through. Frankl goes on to point that what sounds through is the voice of transcendence.

Personally though, and I think most people would agree, that it does not matter whether one is truly altruistic or not. Is it so bad to love yourself? Jesus said, quoting the Law: "Love your neighbour as yourself." (Mark 12:31). It's true that you have to put others before yourself (and of course God before all), but the 'self' element is still there. Here we see another entanglement, albeit a slightly different one. 'Others' is always entangled with 'self', so there is no need to remove 'self' from the picture.

On a darker note, you just have to realise that people always have ulterior motives in things that they do, consciously or otherwise. You yourself also have selfish motives in everything that you do. When we play it out in the arena, we just have to be aware of those often invisible conflicts of motives and wade cautiously. Well, to be pragmatic: use and be used, needless to say, tactfully.

There goes my free lunch.
Update: Regarding loving for the hope of requital, there's a song blatantly saying exactly that.

The Colour of the Bear

One of my favourite mathematical riddles:

An explorer travelled 5 km South from his camp, then 5 km East, then 5 km North. He found himself back in his camp and saw a bear rummaging through his food supplies. What is the colour of the bear?

Don't cheat! Answer is below -- you need to highlight it to see.

The explorer's path forms an equilateral triangle with all the angles equal to 90°. Obviously we cannot assume a Euclidean plane here, but curved plane like our very Earth. The only possible situation for the stipulated directions and path is when the camp is exactly at the geographical North Pole. So the bear was a polar bear. 

It was white.

The neat thing about this riddle is that it does not seem mathematical at all, what's with the question seemingly not related to the clues given. The additional deduction (North Pole --> polar bear) is witty, to say the least.

Johari Window and Epistemology

                        Known to self    Not known to self
                     ---------------------------------------
Known to others      |      Arena      |     Blind spot    | 
                     --------------------------------------- 
Not known to others  |      Façade     |      Unknown      |
                     ---------------------------------------

Johari Window belongs to the field of psychology and the 'rooms' categorise aspects of personality as shown above. However, we can modify a little and apply this to the issue of knowledge, like thus:

                             Awareness         Unawareness
                        ---------------------------------------
Knowledge possessed     |        1        |         2         | 
                        --------------------------------------- 
Knowledge not possessed |        3        |         4         |
                        ---------------------------------------

Shall we dub this Epistemological Window? Now, this is going to get a little bit confusing, so read closely:

1. Things that you know you know

The body of your cognitive knowledge. Facts that you have learned, conscious reasoning, conscious perceptions from the senses. 

2. Things that you don't know you know

I believe that the thing we call intuition is the sum of subconscious reasoning. Somehow the vibes and nuances are too subtle, too weak to be picked up by the conscious, so it sinks underwater to the lower part of the iceberg. It stays there until somehow it floats up again changed, as an inexplicable feeling. Intuition, gut feeling, sixth sense, whatever you call it, I believe that belongs to this category. My sense of direction is not, though.

3. Things that you know you don't know

Gaps in your body of knowledge. Of course you don't really know in literal sense what the gap is, because that's missing. What I mean here is that you recognise from the context, or the surrounding information, that there is a missing part. Being aware of this niche is what I mean by 'knowing' it.

4. Things that you don't know you don't know

Ignorance, basically. 
Joking aside, these also include things for which the framework of knowledge around them has not been established (you cannot be aware of the gaps because there is a gaping abyss there).
These may also include things beyond the limits of our mind itself, like God. Sure, there are some things we know about Him, but there are things that we don't obviously. And for some of those, we don't even know that we don't.

Like the psychological Johari Window, classifying our knowledge and unknowledge helps to understand ourselves better. We are recalling and acquiring #1 and discovering #2 everyday. Scientists strive to fill in on #3 and uncover #4.

How is your Epistemological Window?

Nothing matters except knowing nothing matters.
-- Fiyero in Wicked (Dancing Through Life)

Wisdom is knowledge plus: knowledge -- and the knowledge of its own limits.
-- Victor E. Frankl 

Solution

Cleavage

Bed of Roses

Inorganic Chemists' Farewell

Your name

is a mint pastille melting in my mouth.
Stuck right at the tip of the tongue:
flavour diffusing, taste buds tingling.
Uttered repeatedly, voicelessly, scurrying
Like an unfinished mantra,
wishing to conjure you up
right here, right now.
Like you,
your name is illusive,
minty cold, but temperature's the same.
Excuse me, the aftertaste's disappearing;
I'm going to need another helping.

Utopia (again)

Utopia should be this place of impeccability, of manifested ideals. Based on previous argument, where I said that dystopias lack something, then utopia must be this place of completeness, all things in a harmonious gestalt. But what is 'complete', really? Gandhi said that "[t]here is enough for every man's need but not greed". We always desire for something more. And there's another question: after the state of completeness is attained, what next?

Let's answer the latter first. Atwood has this to say:

Happiness is a garden walled with glass: there's now way in or out. In Paradise there are no stories, because there are no journeys. It's loss and regret and misery and yearning that drive the story forward, along its twisted road.
-- Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin

Her view is a morbid one. After we are in paradisum, that's it. The story stops. This is difficult for me to imagine. After all, they always say that the only thing that is constant is change. Or maybe there is another kind of perfectness where it is more dynamic, changing from perfection to perfection? I imagine it to be so because by definition, there is no such thing as 'boring' in a utopia, isn't there? So are we doomed to never reach there?

Moving on: What is 'complete'?

My picture of 'completeness' would be the Oneness that the Hindus are trying to find paths of enlightenment to. And that wouldn't be too far-off -- we can relate spiritual enlightenment here to the utopian state of perfection. This idea of Oneness as the highest state has also pervaded sci-fi. I have encountered a few stories whereby there is a running thread: the highest state of evolution is where we would abandon our physical bodies and spiritually become one single consciousness.

Summing up: Will we ever reach 'completeness' then?

Let's reword 'completeness' as 'fullness' here. In Avatar, Mo'at, Neytiri's mother and the shaman of the Omaticaya, mentioned a metaphor about empty and full cups. I'm borrowing that metaphor here: a cup fully filled is our 'completeness'. To be full, then, the cup has to be emptied first. And you can see how this fits very nicely with what Khalil Gibran said:

The deeper that sorrow carves onto your being, the more joy you can contain. Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter's oven?
 -- Khalil Gibran

And William Blake echoes:

And when this we rightly know
Thro' the World we safely go.
Joy & Woe are woven fine,
A Clothing for the Soul divine;
Under every grief & pine
Runs a joy with silken twine
-- Auguries of Innocence, William Blake

I talked about this before under Dualism Paradox, so read the details there. So the first way to achieve utopia: suffer through dystopia first. Like Pandora's box, Hope tends to come the last, after the evils.

The second way -- and I have already dropped the hints -- is to follow the Hindus. Now, topos in Greek means 'place'. It doesn't mean that we've got to take it literally. Then we can interpret a utopia not as a place but a state instead. The Eastern spirituality seeks inward journey (compared to outward one in Western spirituality). So it's change-your-paradigm thing. Again I invoke William Blake, from the same poem no less:

To see a World in a Grain of Sand
And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand
And Eternity in an hour.
-- Auguries of Innocence, William Blake

The journey inward, besides exploring the Self, also includes exploring other Beings. To see the perfections in the imperfections.

Final thought: If you see the Wikipedia entry on utopia, you would find an uncited reference to the humorous coinage of the word 'utopia' (probably factual, albeit uncited, since one of TED speakers mentioned that, too). It goes something like this: the etymology of 'utopia' is from Greek, as I already mentioned. This presumably comes from eu (good) + topos (place). But there is another Greek prefix which in English transliterates to the same spelling: ou (no) + topos (place). It is said that the coiner intentionally keeps the ambiguity as a joke. Good place; no place.

In conclusion: I think it is really your choice to attain 'the good place' or 'the no place'. We can strive towards the 'goodness', not necessarily perfection, or at least not the idealised one, by looking inwards and getting up stronger every time we fall down. Or we can keep it as an ideal, intellectual projection that can never be.