The Abridged Ajani

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Now, I have some reservations still about this scheme, before and after reforms - officially in-theory CIP is much-better now, but in-practice… I reserve my comment.

A few weeks ago I was approached by some other students to interview me about my opinion about the CIP scheme, the former whom identified themselves as doing this for a project. I guess I said a bunch of easily-misquotable phrases and all, but I was honestly giving them my personal opinion, even as it was completely politically-incorrect. Now I wish I had the actual transcript of the conversation but I do not, thus I will just rely on a potentially-fallible memory then.

I recall telling them that perhaps ‘they should scrap it (the CIP scheme)’. Immediately I was rebutted by this interviewer who obviously shared a very-different opinion from me. In an urgent tone he queried me. “But don’t you think that the CIP program has made you more aware of such issues and developed you into a better person etc. etc.” Something like this he said.

Okay, at this moment I thought I knew what was going on - I immediately sought to recorrect his idea of my perspective. To express what I told him in about twenty sentences into a few lines, this was the gist of what I said:

Oh alright, I think I know where you are heading. This is my view:

PREMISE: I am already aware of these issues; I am already-considerate; I am already a “better person”. (something like this declaration ought be be frowned upon in any other case, but I think I needed to make my point)

CONCLUSION: THEREFORE I do CIP to continue what I have.

This is your perspective:

PREMISE: I am not already-aware of these issues; I am not yet so-considerate; I can still be a “better person”.

CONCLUSION: THEREFORE I do CIP to accomplish what I have not.

It took a while before all the interviewers got my causality exposition. In fact, I had modified my actual premise before verbally-expressing it for better understanding, at the risk of myself sounding so arrogant. After they had understood my perspective a little better, I then introduced them to my real premise: that it was neither an issue or anti-issue for me to do CIP or not, it was just a non-issue. You want to do it? Fine. You don’t want to do it? Okay. You want to make those who don’t want to do it do it? No! You don’t want those who want to do it not do it? No! If you can catch what I mean by “non-issue”, I think you got my gist. I am not committing a special pleading fallacy when I told the interviewer that I “do CIP the conventional way”.

CIP does give us an avenue to continue/practice/put into action/commit/do (replace with a semantically-correct word of your choice) what we have already learnt or understood. The official stance of CIP by the Ministry, though, looks at it as that CIP gives us an avenue to learn/understand (replace with a semantically-correct word of your choice) what we have not-already continued/practiced/put into action/committed/done. Nothing wrong with that - just that the causality… Okay, fine.

I have found a new justification for the Ministry’s stance using economic concepts - this deals with the phenomena of positive externalities and market failure. Hmm, I’m not talking crap here - Freakonomics has taught one that economic concepts are beyond mere monetary markets and purchasing power. My stance on CIP actually works only in an ideal society. In a realistic society though, because of the nature of CIP itself being an activity with “spillover benefits” not just to the CIP doer himself; or perhaps even if I were to say that there are no benefits to the doer, the social benefit of CIP far outweighs the private cost of the doer. Hence, it is a “positive externality” in the sense that more people should enjoy the benefits of CIP, and where its supply is insufficient to meet the demand, legislation, in this context “recommendations” have to be put forward to encourage the provision of the CIP good hence. Therefore CIP should stay in all its guises - but this justification would work too for the pre-reforms CIP.

It is therefore a balance between causalities and externalities. I am not making a straw man fallacy here, rather a suggestion to what can work as a potential knowledge-based argument. I personally lean towards the non-issuification of CIP though: Hear, there shalst be no recommendations for CIP! I will not discount the fact that it is possible to learn from CIP too, in a “service learning” fashion - but my main issue? Have everyone learn from CIP to accomplish the causality, or just make it a non-issue and forget about externalities and all.

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In case you were wondering (heh the homonym), I did not make a spelling mistake in my post title - “Wandering” is really what I meant.

Why? My slightly-Romanticized ideal of the Chinese ???? (xiaòaòjianghú) makes it so. This phrase is one which is not exactly in common-use in the world of today, with connotations of a careless wandering about the Central Plains (or the world). Chinese martial arts novels classically depict the hero at the end, after his saving of the world, walking off mentioning this phrase as his next objective and walking off into the horizon, disappearing into the mountains and rivers and never to be seen again - the abandonment of the world and entering a state of carelessness and a deep, spiritual journey.

It’s links to anarchy?

My first exposure to the notion of “voting with your feet”, or “perpetual travelling“, “past tax-payer” etc. introduced me to the possibility of anarchists amongst us - by this I do not mean people who believe in anarchism as a social state, but rather people who have already attained citizenship of an anarchist state (if there is such a thing). Perhaps you will get my point better if I were to illustrate that by “democrat” I do not mean people who believe in democracy e.g. Aung San Suu Kyi, but people already living in one e.g. any random Swiss, maybe.

Although I will confess a certain resonance with anarchist ideals myself (But what ideals? I can’t even define ‘anarchy’ properly myself, do such ideals really exist in the metaphysical realm even, gee?), I really have a problem with its precise definition; schools-of-thought; implementation; stability etc. In effect, my current cognition seems to point to anarchy as at best, an un-creatable utopia and a castle in the air, and at its worse, completely illogical nonsense, though it may also be because of myself not holding enough analysis and understanding yet to truly realise anarchism as a perfect system of existence.

In any case, I drew the link between the wandering heroes of Chinese novels and perpetual travellers (PTs) today. Both to a certain extent appeal to the Romantic and Existentialist self in me, being just being and being what they being. (Lexical ambiguity!) In fact, both are similar as wanderers, and my assumption here is that the PT is not a PT, just so to avoid taxes because they are selfish, rather than individualist. (Subtle difference there…)

My stereotype of the PT is one who goes around the world, curious about all of Earth and it’s people, living each day to the fullest (not necessarily busiest though). Not necessarily anarchist, the PT is nevertheless compatible with anarchist ideals. There is nearly nobody to answer to (except where you really break a serious law, duh), you live for your own. Unrestricted by geographical boundaries and only restricted by the size of our globe, the PT embodies the “vote with your feet” philosophy within him - you don’t like it here, you move to somewhere else. Then if there is nowhere on Earth that can satisfy the curiosity of the PT, then the world he shall call his home. For the average individual, by virtue of his minimal involvement with any authority e.g. because of his lack of crime, the life of the PT should resemble the life of the anarchist in terms of the lack-of political will imposed upon himself.

In practice, I see that virtually no country I know of allows the free movement of any individual without a valid citizenship in any valid country into their borders- in short, if you are stateless, you are about stuck where you are unless you have a special reason for being so. If a stateless individual is afforded the luxury of free movement though, he could very much be a true anarchist. Pseudoanarchy is technically existent in our world, if you are a PT - but that does not guarantee the effectiveness of anarchy on a full-scale. The way I see it, is that PTs are “world citizens” unconscious of or unbothered with their pseudoanarchist state of being. It’s almost like a possible alternative lifestyle to follow for anarchists to put idea into action, albeit limited since they might still need to pay some taxes, belong to some state etc.

To my knowledge, anarchy movements today seem to want the entire world anarchistic, to really make the effect felt - like duh, if 99% of the world belongs to some sentiment of government, how would an anarchist theorist decide if his belief is indeed successful? Perhaps the anarchist amongst the non-anarchists feels peace only because the latter are still bound by laws and authority, otherwise if anarchy was global, maybe all hell would have broken loose.

Empirical evidence for anarchism’s success is scarce, notwithstanding the lack of really-anarchist states throughout history, discounting civil war. My only knowledge of it’s academically-documented success is in Somalia, where anarchy has actually raised the standard of living. (I do think Wikipedia is nice - but if you really want to be critical, don’t count on it and don’t discount my book cred because of my using of it. :)) Now, in response to the criticism that it’s just civil war instead of anarchism, picture this - if the government sucks and war has actually made life better, what the heck is really bad about it? Ignoring the lives lost for a little war, if the war is against the state, without a state, where is the war? The only complication here, though, is probably the reason too why anarchists propose worldwide anarchism - how would an anarchist state not entice it’s non-anarchist neighbours to eat itself up? So ignoring the greed of Ethopia too, anarchy here is empirically workable. But I will confess that that’s too many things I assume and isolate, though the end-statement is that we should not give up on anarchism as a subject-of-thought because it could be what would advance humankind further down our existence.

Why Democracy? Why Communism? Why Anarchism? Why [insert political philosophy here]? Ultimately it’s about affirming humanity itself - we should remember this as our fundamental ethos, rather than thinking democratic ideals like the rule of society as a priori - if anarchism can potentially, by the rule of the individual, bring us happiness, I see no reason why we should reject it based on democratic ideals right away e.g. Anarchism destroys the society! (Anarchism would in fact either make it not compulsory, a non-issue, or allow it to spontaneously recreated, rather than destroying it totally.) Anarchism deserves as much attention by political thinkers and anyone else as does democratic thinking; socialist thinking; royalist thinking or even communist thinking. It is a valid political school-of-thought to study, despite its definition.

The funny thing anyway, is that I found my own country topping the list of countries good for this “vote with your feet” business.

Full, complete anarchism (not just the PT stuff) overnight will radically change the way we think and perceive and live through alot of things even if it is ideal, that means the rise of spontaneous order and perfect satisfaction. It will be a new social order and will give rise to generations of future mankind who will see our democracy now as something tyrannical even - maybe we will have very-original philosophical movements and ideas when we transit to such a foreign existence. Exciting! I must emphasize again though, anarchism remains as a gigantic thought experiment in my head currently, so don’t mark me out as an anarchist just yet. Officially I declare no political affiliation except for the standard upholding of democracy.

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It starts off with me pondering about my thesis to-be-written. The proposal has already been submitted, so I may not change anything. Even if I could, I would not even though I have now come to realise the difficulty of my task. After all, this is but a limited-word length college academic research essay that shall not be published anywhere mainstream to allow the mass construction of an artificial untruth. Perhaps I could expand on this new realisation of mine next time, in the universities where such deepness of thought may find a willing audience to critique upon it.

It must be my most-unconscious assumption in writing for my independent study, but I find that this very same thing may happen to anyone around the world as long as they may engage in social and human trend-spotting and truth-meditating. This is the problem of anachronisms in trend analysis.

In my proposal, I would have written of exactly how the treatment and views towards ‘madness’ by society has become more humane over the years. The independent variable here is “humane” - I defined it as the holistic-ness of their treatment methods, and their regard for the patient’s will. I shall be comparing the biomedical etiological model of psychiatry, to the biopsychosocial etiological model of psychology, using these models as the objects to be assessed against a fixed set of criterion - to figure out how “humane” are they really.

There is an anachronistic flaw here. Undoubtedly, I will eventually propose that psychology is the more humane of the two. Why? Arguments will be elaborated in my study later (which may or may not be published online here at The Abridged Ajani), but essentially I will be bringing up the fact that in clinical psychology, rather than to simply say that maladaptiveness is caused by biophysical causes, it also acknowledges and proceeds with treatment from the line of thought that the former could also be caused by psychosocial factors, hence accounting for the ‘psychological dimension’ of sanity.

What could be so wrong with that? Is it not correct of us to criticize a field of knowledge that has neglected a truth to compose an exclusive form of treatment? The problem comes when we must understand, from when, did our conception of knowledge regarding mental illness include the “truth” that there is a psychological dimension to things? This only came with the rise of clinical psychology in the 1960s, when the works of Michel Foucault and Thomas Szaz found resonance with the general public and the “survivors of psychiatry”. The “Third Force” of psychology emerged with an emphasis on humanistic psychology, to understand maladaptiveness not in terms of chemical imbalances, not conditioned behavioural responses, not repressed sexual desires, but rather support the idea that it is for a lack of meaning in events, that cause one to have maladaptive behaviour, for an incapability to adequately adjust to one’s circumstances and accept the human condition. Above all, this movement put forth the notion that human beings cannot be reduced to components, or that the whole is more than a mere sum of parts. The holistic-ness of a human-targeted therapy was therefore compromised if they were not treated as human.

What is a human? We are more than our material bodies, even as I may make some assumptions in this, that the world is not purely materialist. We humans think and therefore have thought, we feel and therefore have emotions. We reason and therefore have ideas, we perceive and therefore have insecurities. All these may not be reduced to as being mere by-products of biology, chemistry and physics.

Hence, when we dysfunction, according to humanistic psychology, which we must remind ourselves stresses that in the treatment of men must first treat him as a man, we cannot solely point to one place and say “that is it”. With this, a shift of emphasis away from age-old biomedical models towards psychosocial influences on this concept of “sanity” therefore evolved. The contribution of psychology was to create the “truth” of the existence of other dimensions of the human self which we can blame for our maladaptiveness.

At this point of time, “truth” is not an objective body of knowledge. It is subjective, and its nature remains uncertain. Could it be true? Could it not be true? Truth remains to be created. Upon its creation, the function of a truth is to testify for its own validity and supplement existing true knowledge. Psychological etiologies hence only now became part of the truth, that things have a psychological dimension to it.

This new truth altered the way we saw psychiatry. Today we may attack the premises of psychiatry as being exclusive, as a result inhumane, treating the human by his components. Yet we must notice that what is humane shares a relation with what is our truth. Prior to the addition of the “existence of the psychological dimension”, we could, to a certain extent, very safely declare that psychiatry, despite focusing only on chemistry and biology, was holistic. This was because of our etiology of maladaptiveness, that the latter is caused by simply those. Treatment was therefore prescribed to tackle those very same causes, and was in itself wholesome. You exhibit maladaptiveness because you are suffering from a chemical imbalance, we treat your imbalance to cure you of your ‘madness’.

This changed with psychology. By the addition of new dimensions to the etiology, psychology therefore saw the need for new methods of treatment as well, to attempt the therapy of that cause which psychiatry never once considered as a cause even. We today take it almost for granted that all mental problems have a psychological basis (save for genetic disorders like Down Syndrome), but it would be anachronistic thus to judge psychiatry based on our modern views. We should bother to think that back in the Middle Ages which prescribed supernatural origins of madness, the emergence of psychiatry was a revolution of the etiology. There is an irony in this process - when we today consider psychiatry to be inhumane because of psychology, our earlier ancestors would have seen otherwise and determined psychiatry to be humane because of supernaturalism. Even lobotomy in its earliest days were seen as humane, whereas today it is subject to much debate. We claim that something is humane - okay, but humane to what?

Previously, I would have stopped here and treated our conception of “human rights” as something fixed. Psychiatry would be inhumane, because it neglected psychological roots of illness. Now I question, really? To say something like that would be a classic anachronism. Psychiatry did not neglect so, but it simply did not set out to do so by its own design. Psychiatry was unholistic, but this “missing gap” of human madness did not exist until the much-later rise of clinical psychology. How humane is something would be indirectly judged by how holistic it would be - but if we now take a second look at this, we must observe that even as one field of knowledge acknowledges more aspects of madness than the other, both are holistic. Humanist forms of thinking may have remained constant throughout this time, but humanist truth definitely did not.

We have heard occasionally that “we are smarter than our ancestors” - we have scientific theories that are reliable, massive skyscrapers that a single glance cannot contain, civilizations that still remain too complex to understand. Yet is it necessarily true, or is it just another anachronism? They may have been as smart as us, only that the design of their circumstances and knowledge of that time did not allow them the dream of such. Yet if you would place them into our world of today and have them recognize the intricacies of our world, they may easily do as we do today. It is the truth of their times that render them different.

Therein lies the problem with trend analysis - especially of ideas. Perhaps across a period of two years or five, we could still isolate a phenomena and command in economic terms, ‘ceteris paribus!’, to assume all other factors remain constant, for proper study, for the independent variable we set as criterion may not have changed much. Yet when we compare across decades and centuries, suddenly we realise that many small changes along the path of the independent variable have led to a major paradigm shift already, affecting our “fair test” with inconsistent variables.

When academic scholars examine the history of ideas, unconscious anachronisms such as this may have crept in. Of course, it really does not matter much - the ways of thinking about an idea may not be synonymous with its truth. After all, all meaning is up to us to define. To arrive at some knowledge is better than arriving at no truth. And yes indeed, I find that with this, no certain knowledge, or truth, can be possible. It is not a mistake by any human, but it is rather ingrained with the Universe - our methods and tools of information-gathering and interpreting are limited in the isolation of variables. Where variables can never be isolated, and even independent variables always changing, it is I feel to a certain extent even an understatement to say that it is but only complex. It is not complex, for “complex” may still connote a massive causality and feedback that although daunting, can still be figured out assuming infinite time, but impossible in this case connotes an inability to figure out any causality even, when every step is technically an anachronism. Given this, how can any truth about human ideas be possible from our perspective? I approach with extreme skepticism with any trend-spotting that masquerades as truth, as I suggest, perhaps if God exists, on the highest level, perhaps the latter would be the only one to know the truth apart from knowledge.

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Mathematics as a language sounds strange, when the only thing we can recall whenever someone asks of us to “do Maths” is to take out a piece of paper and start filling it up with numbers and symbols unable to be understood to the untrained mind. This should be merely a technicality of speech. The symbols and numbers we write form mathematical language, and it is to the field of Mathematics how the English language should be to English literature.

We use English not simply to express ourselves as Shakespeare does, obviously, but perhaps to describe an activity, converting the scene from pictures to words. This is just like how mathematical language is to physics. We also use English to categorize people and things for easier understanding, which reminds me of the equations of Mathematics.

How did Mathematics, this parallel language, evolve alongside Man, even as we were changing the way we speak to each other with our natural languages evolving? How did this language unify from the many ways of writing into the standard Arabic numeric labels, and how has it from there been able to give birth to the many other extensions of Mathematics even we humans can sometimes not understand, like differentiation, integration, complex numbers, chaos theory etc.

Mathematics today, because of its extensions on arithmetic into integration and the lot, has become almost like a pseudo-dead language. It exhibits virtually all of the characteristics a “dead language” like Latin, with only the best-specialized academics able to understand and speak it “like a native”.

At this point of time, I am slightly reminded of Bertrand Russell’s Principia Mathematica, Russell seems to work backwards in his evolution however, logic must have been a formal afterthought of the first quantifying systems. Not to say, however, that logic is a rational product of Mathematics, but perhaps, we should start from the first empirical count.

One, two, three… I believe that the first counting system simply employed, or coined, new words for the concept of the numbers, that would eventually become 1, 2, 3… Out of convenience, and perhaps practice, the earliest ways of writing numbers was actually in tally marks or similar, I would suppose. For the sake of writing, I shall refer to numbers and symbols, of all cultures and time, with the conventional Arabic numerals “1, 2, 3″… and the conventional infix “+, -, /, *” for simplicity and understanding, but it is to be noted that these notations actually vary from culture to culture, era to era.

One also cannot forget how many different fundamental tenets of Mathematics there was. The base-10 system we use today could have been base-60 for the ancient Babylonians.Despite all the differences, Mathematics remained a language contiguous, with all the differences forming the basis for “mathematical dialects”. These dialects were, at the core, unified by a common system of logic, which began with counting. Placing two leaves together made one leaf and one leaf add up to two. The observable hence became our basis for what we today call Logic - though Logic, like its cousin Mathematics, has went through its fair share of evolution through time, but has successfully broken into different languages of itself, not necessarily unified. (Dual-valued logic may be “logical”, but “fuzzy logic” and multi-valued systems show as much promise as the former in answering problems.)

As early as the Babylonians, however, humans would already have had the mathematical fields of algebra, geometry and even trigonometry as part of the standard mathematics canon. At this point of time, one can still accept that mathematics was an empirical subject. Why the change from counting to equations? Maybe the Babylonians were counting the average yield of crops per square metre of land for harvest purposes - there was still pretty much an application of Mathematics to the observable world.

When the concept of ‘perfect numbers’ and ‘prime numbers’ crept into Mathematics, it became clear that Mathematics started to become somebody’s playground, much like English is to word pun crafters. Such numbers were conceptualized in both Egypt and Greece, but popularly it is attributed to the work of Greeks. Advanced civilizations such as Egypt and Greece in their days must have had much time to ponder upon such intricacies of Mathematics - “knowledge for knowledge’s sake”. In fact, Philosophy and Mathematics for the Greeks like Pythagoras were virtually complementary if not the same. The search for the Absolute led many men into the realm of abstract Mathematics, while some others preferred material Physics while there was still a great deal unknown about the observable world. I believe this was when Mathematics started to accelerate towards the abstract. In fact, the Greeks had by then even thought of ‘integration’ in the form of the ‘method of exhaustion’, something modern mathematicians call the ‘precursor of integration’.

Not forgetting contributions from the East, Indian mathematicians experimented with permutations and combinations, logarithms and the like. The ‘inventors’ of mathematical fields, I daresay, must have had the ultimate creativity that is no longer associated with mathematicians today. Completely new radical methods of solution are extinct, while modern mathematicians merely expand the knowledge of a given field of Mathematics. There are little “new” fields of Mathematics to be pioneered anymore - would anyone creative enough dare do it?

The Chinese synthesized, or otherwise must have independently worked out, shorter and more-powerful methods from existing knowledge to really beautify Mathematics a lot. Algebra was expanded to include binomial theorems and matrices. Ways to shorten long calculations made Mathematics elegant - this would have a lot of influence on how Mathematics is viewed today despite its rationalist nature now.

The Arabs also dealt with non-Euclidean geometry. This brought Mathematics to its esoteric level of today, in a sense, as non-Euclidean shapes had not even real-world foundations to begin with. As mathematicians hurried to apply existing concepts to non-Euclidean shapes, many concepts were either re-written or expanded upon to encompass such virtual ideas. In fact, strangely, Mathematics, with its open-ness to the virtual and abstract henceforth, was to become more and more suited to be the official language of contemporary Physics, where truth actually can defy common sense. By now, the language of Mathematics was now huge with an extensive vocabulary and as Arabic numbering spread over the world, Mathematics broke down language barriers. With its acceptance to discuss abstract, non-existent shapes, Mathematics was no longer a field of knowledge that was held by its own constraints and scope, but was already a fully-fledged language, to be employed to describe anything it could. Mathematics therefore became a language of itself.

Little revolution in the history of Mathematics was to occur till the times of the Renaissance and the subsequent Enlightenment. With an intellectual keenness, people like Galileo and Kepler looked to the skies and began to seriously use mathematical language to describe physical phenomena - hence, Mathematics functioned as the language of Physics. The power of Mathematics over English, most importantly, was in its precision and extendability. In computing terms, one could say that Mathematics was a more ‘powerful’ language than English, specific to the field of Physics. Equations became as much a description as a prediction - the language of Mathematics proved to be infinitely more powerful than the natural languages of Man. It was neater, more precise and it mapped the Universe excellently to the eyes of Man. Without the conveniences of Mathematics, one could never have seen how mathematical the Universe could seem - a later starting point for the anthropic principle, which was to condemn science as an inaccurate measure of objective truth.

I like to think that Mathematics and mathematical language influence one another. English literature often coined and/or re-defined several words, and the language was expanded, to be later used by others. This is akin to Mathematics. The birth of Newtonian and Leibniz calculus was very-much a synthesis of mathematical knowledge. Building upon geometry, algebra and many other mathematical fields, calculus if personified would be a bard of mathematics.

Why do I wonder about it anyway?

A year ago, I had decided to continue with an education in Physics for my GCE ‘A’ Levels. That was after I was greatly inspired by the book “Parallel Worlds” by Michio Kaku. I must say that I was very much ‘misled’ by the book as I misunderstood a formal Physics education. Instead of the wormholes and relativity theories I had been reading about in plain English, I was immediately overwhelmed by a multitude of mathematics and rational proofs as I started to ponder about the role of Mathematics in the Sciences.

A certain Mr Donovan Lee was invited to my college recently to give a talk entitled ‘Exploring the Mathematical Wormhole’, which is well, an introductory, mathematical, rather than plain English, exploration of wormholes. In it he declared that ‘mathematicians discovered relativity before physicists‘. After the talk I was intrigued about the meaning behind the single sentence, much more than I was with everything else he had said for the hour-long lecture. I failed to completely understand the mathematics behind wormholes, even as I could explain it, with limited success, using some English and some imagination. Discussing it briefly with my friends, one suggested that if I wanted to understand the bizarre mathematics behind it, I should use Physics to reason.

Now, I recall vaguely, that String Theory, the best answer so far to the much fabled Theory of Everything for Physics, actually had it roots in pure, abstract Mathematics. The building blocks of the Universe, too small and impossible to observe, were actually the shape of strings, fundamentally. Now, if it was too ‘impossible’ to empirically observe, how did they arrive at this conclusion then? There I realized - it was mathematics. How should I use Physics to reason, if it was Mathematics that had reasoned Physics so well beforehand?

That, is my main concern. Is it valid to call Mathematics a language of Physics? Even so, would it be okay to use the language to figure out missing pieces of the puzzle of Physics? With virtually nothing outside of Physics with such case I know of, it is a question I cannot properly answer. Is String Theory science? In the most accurate wording, String Theory is correct for science because it was based upon Science, though built using Mathematics. Perhaps it is this kind of strange “back-copying” that really proves the power of mathematical language.

Then, if so, is it possible to invent a language with the power and abstraction of Mathematics? Mathematics started out from counting, could we invent a separate language from the simplest of life? A necessity drives the invention of a language. I cannot name any examples for which we could even think of wanting a new language for - I do not think that the first “counters” could have imagined that eventually what they did would evolve into a system to solve the mysteries of the Universe.

There is a reductionist concept which states that psychology can be reduced to biology; biology to chemistry; chemistry to physics. If Mathematics can not just describe Physics, but in fact form a subset of it in answers, could physics be reduced too to mathematics? It is scary to think that the ancient Greeks can be right, after all. Yet we are left with a paradox - what is Mathematics? Are the numbers the Truth? Is the later calculus Truth? Mathematics is actually not as constant a field of knowledge as it is absolute - what is Mathematics? The mathematical language can still evolve, can it not? How can we ever apply abstract Mathematics to our existence? Maybe we could, if we expand it reverse of the reductionist argument, till we finally meet back psychology. Lost is what we initially came to prove, in the end.

Mathematics, an abstraction that is so beautiful, but with it so esoteric, sadly.

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To get some terms clear first, according to my understanding of Baudrillard, simulation and simulacra are different things. Simulation is that which copies the real world, representing it “virtually”. To put it rawly, simulacra is simulation which is a corrupted, or different, copy of the real world, in turn affecting the original subject copied.

Structured academia could be a simulation, but not likely to be a simulacra - while there have been arguments about biased history textbooks, untruthful texts on creationism and evolution, analogies which falsely illustrate scientific phenomena and such, these to my knowledge do not cross-over back into the real world to seriously corrupt the truth as is known. However, textbooks, notes and lectures, of the structured academia - these are simulations of knowledge to me.

Contemporary examples of simulations are the Internet, the media and high technology. Some of these are simulacra, and away from technology, there is always Baudrillard’s Disneyland, which he finds to be offering one the illusion of a fairytale land, but sadly unconsciously bound to the rules of the real world. Before all these, however, I should think that we were already living in yet another first-generation, unconscious simulation, in education.

Textbooks and theory create the illusion of learning, when actually what was involved was memorizing, comprehension, and at best an abstraction of real-world knowledge. In the classroom alone, actual learning of knowledge can almost always never take place. What happens all the time is the simulation of knowledge, as “known scientific facts”, social phenomena, empirical research becomes coded in paper, and the knowledge within the words becoming represented very-much like a simulation.

Science fiction once gave us the “knowledge machine” - the machine with the one plug that could be plugged into any human directly, feeding information into his or her brain. Walking out of the kiosk containing this machine, one could perhaps have learnt new knowledge about flying helicopters, performing martial arts, or even understanding quantum physics.

While we are still quite away from this ideal “knowledge machine”, we are pretty near in terms of the concept. Walk in, sit down, go out with new knowledge. I should think that this resembles the classroom a lot. We live a simulation in the classroom.

Let’s see - we know by enough understanding of the scientific method, that whatever your science teachers speak of in class may always be proven independently by yourself via experiments and enough brainpower. While simpler scientific experiments by the teachers may be done to illustrate phenomena, in primary schools usually, I find that as you progress, your experiments become theoretical and mentally-performed, and empiricism gives way to rationalism. Eventually when you reach junior college physics, you are left pondering about how exactly does an atom split, and what is a quark and all. To understand such, you definitely must draw on your theory. I ask, to prove my point further, how many of us have actually witnessed a particle smasher in action during our academic days?

It is all a simulation in the mind, where one does not experience the learning, but instead learns the experience. What happens on a molecular level when water boils? Certainly anyone educated in it can tell you the answer - but it is all based upon a conceptual understanding, not so much of personal observation under magnification.

I guess that no one exactly escapes from this easily, until one reaches the tertiary level of education in universities and polytechnics. With the adequate funding and specialization required in these cases, most if not all one has learned since young is finally redone in experiments and empirical research. Then, one actually learns, because there is finally an experience with the phenomena.

Hence science education can be a simulation. What about the humanities and arts?

Unless science bears us birth to the time machine, we can never experience history in the making - that is for sure. Given this, there is no chance of actually experiencing any learning as is possible with science. History, especially, feels like a drama serial in the making, with all the weekly lectures involved.

“On the next week of “YOUR HISTORY LECTURE”, Gorbachev faces widespread opposition to his reforms. Hardship falls upon the Soviet people and a coup in in the making. Will Gorbachev survive history? Or will history destroy him?”

The next week, we learn all that which Gorbachev went through. More accurately, while the lecturer is speaking, we visualise all that spoken text into a moving picture. We see Gorbachev being outshadowed by Boris Yeltsin, and we see the fall of the former. It is like watching a show - and a simulation a show is always.

Learning equates to simulation - or is it? For history it is a sad fact for we cannot revisit the past and at least witness the facts before we search for opinions. Yes - opinions, perhaps this is what saves the humanities and the arts from certain simulation?

Ah, this too is questionable. Does one actually think through what the teacher analyzes and take it critically, or does one choose the easier path towards examinations and grading, memorizing opinions and arguments? Is one allowing his education to be a simulation, or is one more wanting to actually learn?

The arts is a realm where those in simulation cannot easily survive. The blank stare on the face when one who memorizes theory of music speaks of it tells it all - the arts is not for simulation.

Take your education seriously. It is not up for simulation. Unfortunately structured education gives no escape route at times, and ultimately, we must ask - is it us who make the simulation, the system which makes the simulation, or is it both us and the system working together to create a simulacra? Ah, it would really become a simulacra, if our teachers too were educated in the form of this simulation, and have it passed onto us. Even more hyperreal, would be when somebody actually offers exams-based tuition to polytechnic and university students, caring only to ensure knowledge of all that is required for tests, and not for the knowledge that a professional of his field must have. Education as a simulation? Not much of a problem for general “learning” - but mind you, it should not become a simulacra if education is for skills specialization.

I wish Baudrillard could have said something on this.

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It is said that after the passing of German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, Michel Foucault is his direct successor, both whom explored philosophy via the “genealogical method” of conceptual analysis backed by historical evolutions and categorisations.

Interestingly, Foucault had earlier called his works an “archaelogy”, and it was only much later that he started to deem them as “genealogies”. Why so? Many who read the works of Foucault are left wondering often about what exactly is the genealogical method. It is uncodified, unlike that of the scientific method and the likes of it - but it is an interesting way to “empirically study philosophy”, just as how the scientific method offers us a way to demystify the workings of Nature.

Not explicitly, Nietzsche himself actually is the pioneer of the genealogical method, not Foucault as popularly believed, who even had called himself a “Nietzschean” once. Foucault gave the Nietzchean method a name - hence the “genealogical method”. Yet it should not be of much concern to the average philosopher save for the critic of Foucault - definitions of the philosophical methods of inquiry are never as much scrutinized and fundamental as say, the historical method or the scientific method, raised by postmodernists in recent years.

Nietzsche had once called for a “study of other histories” other than that of morality, he having written on it once with On The Genealogy of Morality (1887). Foucault fulfilled this very request many years later, penning down the micro-histories of madness; sexuality; punishment and more. It is therefore advisable for us to look at the Nietzschean method of “genealogical analysis” first, and how Foucault employed it second. Also conversely true, is to understand how the genealogical method shows itself in Foucault’s works - here, the example used shall be Foucault’s Madness and Civilisation (1961).

The method was based, quite simply, on the historical behaviour and thought of Mankind - to look at a single concept, and to wonder, how would it look like to different individuals across different times in the existence of Man, to be an objective examiner studying a particular phenomena’s evolution, to “interview” people of different times via texts and records left by them about an issue. Perhaps the “genealogist of concept” was not so concerned with an evolution of meaning, but rather a change in social definition of a concept.

Herein lies a history of society - an “archaelogy” of concept. Yet Nietzsche and Foucault both saw links in between each conceptual change, a cause for redefinition from the previous, a “birth” from a parent - hence the “genealogy” of conceptual meaning. It is very much like the traditional genealogist tracing up the family tree, trying to uncover the man before this man of the same surname, of the same brand, of the same representation.

Finally, the “genealogist of concept” usually derives from his tale a hidden trend, a “side-effect” of the change of meaning. Intriguingly, rather than to have the trend be the “side-effect” of the concept, Nietzsche and Foucault, the two well-known users of this method, have virtually always made the concept sound like the “side-effect” of the trend instead - and this has very scary consequences for society if true.

We shall be looking at how Foucault is the “genealogist of concept” for the idea of “madness” in his 1961 work “Madness and Civilisation”. He begins his retelling of the story of “madness” from the Middle Ages. He argues that the definition of the “mad” by society has not been constant.

In the fifteenth century, there was no “madness” - while lepers were excluded socially and physically, the “mad” had not come to exist as a concept, as a social group (anti-social, rather) of people of their own. Those with what we would call “mad” today, were allowed to roam the streets freely, not seen as a public nuisance of any sort, and it was as far as noted - a non-issue.

Only with the decline of leprosy, were the mad’s turn come to take over the status of the lepers - to be excluded. Foucault cites the example of the “ship of fools”, supposed to bring the mad away from Europe and all the land of mortals, to isolate the mad on the seas for life.

In the seventeenth century, against the backdrop of the Enlightenment, came what Foucault termed as the “Great Confinement”, where the “unreasonable” members of the populace were locked away and institutionalized. They, Foucault taught, were the new mad. In the eighteenth century, madness had came to be seen to be an opposite of Reason.

The nineteenth century deemed “madness” as an illness of the mind. This was the final straw in the history of madness which allowed Foucault to draw his conclusion. Interestingly, Foucault views “madness” in all its notions, as something not necessarily bad, but good - as a check against social order and Reason, a license to be against society, to be anti-social. With the rise of “madness” as a mental illness, and consequently “treatments” designed to “cure” the mad, madness was losing such of its function.

Foucault argues that such “treatment” was but punishment to the mad - they cured nothing as the mad were “tortured”, only serving to prevent the mad from the “maladies” internalising the fear of punishment - there is nothing cured, only “legally prevented”.

Indeed, this “trend” I spoke of earlier on seemed to be the increase of perceived “social order” and Reason. Yet it is necessarily from the evolution of Madness that has these occurred, or is it an attempt, at doing so that the evolution occurred? Is it the means to the end? Or is it the ends to the mean? I leave you with that thought. A hint is that Foucault’s works are popularly agreed to discuss about a topic in relation to yet another concept called Power.

Foucault ended, hinting excellently, that madness viewed as a disease was not necessary - and could very well not be beneficial. Madness, to him, was a genius of Romanticism, in the so-called Age of Reason. Age of Reason, really, with the way Madness is dealt with and defined? Again that is another thought left best to you the reader to ponder.

The genealogical method is truly interesting - and is a tool that can generate new ways to look at a given topic. In Introducing Nietzsche (2005) by Laurence Gane, he says “to write such histories requires a transgression of the traditional boundaries of thought - a radical rethinking of what we mean by ‘knowledge’ in relation to ‘power’.” The genealogical method seems to be archaelogy on the research, but genealogy on the thought process.

Having said that, the genealogical method is clear to have flaws. Just like one can criticize the conventional genealogist (on family trees) for inaccurate or incomplete data, one can too criticize Foucault so. Just as the ancient world would like to erase some parts of history away against contemporary Man’s study, archaelogy “on paper” must be done to uncover these unglamorous bits of human history for inclusion in Foucault’s writings. My point is that the “genealogical method” is as open to debate and criticism as any other mode of inquiry, and yet is as valid as a philosophical mode of inquiry as compared to any other e.g. dialectical analysis.

However, if correctly practised, those who follow the genealogical method can find themselves unearthing the ugly side of Man in his attempt for his betterment, and applied towards concept, can give important clues to Man in his quest for knowledge and it is exceptionally useful for those studying sociological concepts, and put a philosophical twist to things.

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What in the world is a pure race? Race is but a majority of bloodline percentages. Who today can claim himself to have only Chinese, British or Pakistani blood? In fact, one can say that he is of any race, but ultimately we might as well say we all are Africans - that is where our ancestors all came from, after all.

People of the conventional “mixed race” ought not feel any identity crisis coming on the search for “race”. To put it quite bluntly, “mixed race” is quite a racist term by itself, which I think has some degree of continental-scale racism involved.

The identity crisis, as I see it, is a society illness. One can grow up thinking he/she has two races, no race, or just side with a race and be fine. It is society that questions the validity of one’s chosen race or lack thereof, to cause the individual to grow up to have serious doubts over self-ethnicity.

Just look at the white Americans. How many of them can profess to have solely German roots, Spanish roots or perhaps English roots? Amazingly, they have no problems with it, so I guess the mixed races should not have them too. However here I would like to bring up my point on continental-racism. White Americans are unembarrassed for the very reason that you cannot easily tell apart their mixed roots. For Asians too, a Korean-Japanese is not easily told apart. It is only as geographical distances grow, the distinctiveness of a mixed blood is seen more and more easily e.g. Malay-Japanese, that one may be presented by society the question - “What is your race?”

Do not doubt your ownself, mixed races! Even the man born to both Chinese parents may have varying, insignificant, but still present strands of Malay and Thai blood, so mixed race as we see is such a huge phenomena, the “mixed” label ought to just be removed for convenience’s sake - we all might as well be race-less. It is no problem, really.

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I think everyone of us (other than real religious fundamentalists) would have heard of, and maybe agreed even, on the idea that we humans, after undergoing millions of years of evolution, have finally stopped evolving. Indeed, Man’s technological advances have overtaken Nature’s evolutionary advances to render evolution obselete. As such, Nature seems to be the unforgiving, wiser of the two.

Nature is de-evolving us. We are going backwards. All this as a result of our increasing reliance on computers and technology.

Yet in midst of this argument, loudly I shall declare, ‘Quit complaining that we are “de-evolving’! That is such a corruption of the concept!”

Yes, I believe that whoever subscribes to the “de-evolution” argument has quite the warped understanding of science. An urban legend, if I could call it by any sense, it would be. Okay, maybe we are all couch potatoes and have problems climbing trees and have issues with corporal punishment. We are weaker, de-evolving, you say?

Evolution is a nasty thing to explain. Some parts of it are still unclear, just as much of science is fuzzy. In his 2005 book “Think for Yourself”, Steve Hinder remembers a medical school dean announcing to the class, “Half of everything we are going to teach you is wrong. We just don’t know which half.” Myself never having a certified understanding of biology, (holding only O-Level qualifications in Chemistry and Physics, while currently continuing A-Level Physics). I will not claim to be presenting the facts as it is, but I advise you to take everything as opinion. I shall attempt to explain scientific concepts factually to the best of my knowledge, of course, but if any factual error be pointed out to me, I shall stand corrected. Evolution is a difficult concept to explain sufficiently.

Bear in mind that in this essay, Nature is just that. Whenever I may refer to Nature, it is from my limited human viewpoint. Indeed, this is where the debate starts from really. Is Nature, or evolution, to be viewed from the eyes of Man?

One thing to first make clear, is that evolution is not about advancement towards a more advanced entityhood. Evolution, rather, is just about purely random mutations. It is a furtherment of the concept - natural selection, that determines who gets to survive. Even so, natural selection is never about “being better”. I would guess this misconception came from the cliche “survival of the fittest”. Natural selection is actually about this thing known as adaption. Whoever is better-adapted to the surroundings is the winner, simple?

What use does tree-climbing have in this era where we keep tigers and lions locked up in cages? Maybe the zookeeper working in an under-funded zoo might have some justification to know it for safety’s sake (in case the cages break), but it’s really of not much utility to us faceless businessmen. Can we climb onto trees to escape our bosses? I hope, but no.

The modern world is a product of our past. The environment is changing, and has already changed visibly from that which our primitive ancestors were used to. The African savannahs have given away to concrete buildings and the daily hunt has become the weekly grocery shopping. All this, however, is because of technology. Technology is going to win the war against Nature, in fact, contrary to what I mentioned above to be the suggestion of many. Okay, maybe not that radical, but may I suggest technology to be a result of natural selection?

The random mutations were initially meaningless. Organisms found them meaning. The gift of sight, argued to be quite a complex series of mutation, would be useless if the world was without light. Would an extra ear sticking out from the back of your head be useful to you? I bet, you could then hear what was going on behind your back, would you not? Why do men have nipples? Why do we have fingernails, only to be cut away? To make nose-picking easier? Of course not, it is to protect our fingertips. Why should the fingernails protect the fingertips? If we know that we are in for a potential nail-hazard, we just wear gloves.

There is no purpose in evolution. We find meaning for our evolution, and find de-evolution for our loss of meaning. Technology is that which replaces the meaningless gap of today. The lions are tamed with psychological tactics and locked in cages of engineering marvels. All these can be traced back to our mutations and our interpretations of them, in the past. We found meaning in bipedalism. We found meaning in using our new hands. We found meaning in signalling we know today as language. We found meaning in imagination. We found meaning in preserving information. We found meaning in knowledge. Ultimately, we overtook the pace of evolution and replaced it with our construct - technology.

Technology offers us several advantages over evolution. Technology is purpose-engineered, meaning that it pinpoints a specific problem and solves it, within the human context. Evolution is random, and has no concept of “problem”, let alone “solution”. Evolution modifies and works on a grand-scale. It may not matter how many eventually are lost in the process of natural selection. As long as one superior species survive from the mere probabilities, life is successful. It would be a mistake now, however, to suggest that Nature is responsible for that, for it is Man who gives that meaning. As Man, then, we are not likely to treat human lives as just mere statistics. If we want to get better, we need to have a much-more reliable means of becoming so, than to rely on evolution.

Hence, the purpose of technology. As our utilization of modern technology increases, our need for evolution to serve us against Nature itself has decreased, ironically. We are no longer the slaves of Nature’s own power, but remember, this is to be seen only within the context of human thought.

Much of the misunderstanding about evolution stems from the ignorance of Man to actually see Nature’s workings with the human eye (symbolically, not literally). If we see everything as random, rather than to see things as constant and predictable, maybe technology is the child of evolution. We are already starting to use it against what Nature herself may throw against us - we are experimenting with weather control, we already have fire-resistant clothes, we have ventured to where we face problems never encountered before by our ancestors - Space. I am not saying that evolution ought to die, it shall always live in some way or other as long as Nature exists, but its importance ought to be downplayed, its basics to be clarified.

A lesson we can all learn from this is maybe that life in itself never has any meaning. Nature never gave us any. It is we who make the meaning, adapting the meaning to our times.

Further Reading:
Is the human race evolving or devolving?

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