Kevin Low

Wanted to write another posts ranting about the dumb Singaporean/Asian lifestyle that requires that we mug and work harder during holidays but I decided that it was unnecessary in getting people convinced that we are not living very well – I guess it is too obvious.

Nah, don’t feel like writing anymore. Mugging Time.

Realising that my computer is running really slowly after acculmulating a hell lot of junk from my 4 years of secondary education and experimentation with different digital art forms, I know something had to be done. The 40GB Astone Portable 2.5″ harddisk is definitely running out of space and I can’t be carrying about 20GB worth of precious data in an unstable storage and potentially lose it. I didn’t set aside any budget at all for computer equipment this year because there’s nothing new coming out this year that I required or desire (Wanted Leopard but I guess I wasn’t that ready for it, so I decided it shall be left to 3 years later).

Comex came at a timely period when the junk is lagging my computer and the internet instability is really starting to irritate me. I worked out all possible solutions and decided that I have to transfer the education document archives in my computer and harddisk out. So I headed to Singapore Expo today and got a Maxtor Basics 200. It was a huge plastic box, measuring 45 by 130 by 226 millimeters and have a real storage capacity of 189GB. It is prettier than the Ranger casing though probably not as good, but I wanted to feel good about the thing I spent on so out fly the 170+ bucks on this plastic grey box, which I subsequently went on to dump 16GB worth of data into. If I happen to decide to backup my iTunes database, the usage will be much higher.

So I am sitting down here blogging and realising that my computer is running faster – though it probably is some kind of illusion that stems out of the desire to justify my buy.

Realising that my computer is running really slowly after acculmulating a hell lot of junk from my 4 years of secondary education and experimentation with different digital art forms, I know something had to be done. The 40GB Astone Portable 2.5″ harddisk is definitely running out of space and I can’t be carrying about 20GB worth of precious data in an unstable storage and potentially lose it. I didn’t set aside any budget at all for computer equipment this year because there’s nothing new coming out this year that I required or desire (Wanted Leopard but I guess I wasn’t that ready for it, so I decided it shall be left to 3 years later).

Comex came at a timely period when the junk is lagging my computer and the internet instability is really starting to irritate me. I worked out all possible solutions and decided that I have to transfer the education document archives in my computer and harddisk out. So I headed to Singapore Expo today and got a Maxtor Basics 200. It was a huge plastic box, measuring 45 by 130 by 226 millimeters and have a real storage capacity of 189GB. It is prettier than the Ranger casing though probably not as good, but I wanted to feel good about the thing I spent on so out fly the 170+ bucks on this plastic grey box, which I subsequently went on to dump 16GB worth of data into. If I happen to decide to backup my iTunes database, the usage will be much higher.

So I am sitting down here blogging and realising that my computer is running faster – though it probably is some kind of illusion that stems out of the desire to justify my buy.

Great, I learnt a new word ‘Satisfice’. A few moments ago I still lived in the delusion that ‘Satisfice’ meant the same as ‘Satisfy’ but it cannot possibly be. It has the similar kind of essence as the term it resembles but it meant something deeper, more sophisticated and much more specific. The aspect of the term I am most concerned about is it’s vaue in the study of Economics, so I ‘answer.comed’ it and found the following:

In economics, satisficing is a behaviour which attempts to achieve at least some minimum level of a particular variable, but which does not strive to achieve its maximum possible value. The most common application of the concept in economics is in the behavioural theory of the firm, which, unlike traditional accounts, postulates that producers treat profit not as a goal to be maximized, but as a constraint. Under these theories, although at least a critical level of profit must be achieved by firms; thereafter, priority is attached to the attainment of other goals.

The word satisfice was coined by Herbert Simon in 1957. Simon says that people are only ‘rational enough’, and in fact relax their rationality when it is no longer required. This is called bounded rationality.

Some consequentialist theories in moral philosophy use the concept of satisficing in the same sense, though most call for optimization instead.

In an attempt to describe the world better, we invent terms, and for the Economists, we have to come up with simplification of scenarios. In the case of ‘Satisficing’, we realised our classical theory that assumes we are perfectly able to achieve what we want – or at least it seems. In reality, we have to settle for something less everytime and not being able to make up our minds meant that the second best alternative used for measuring opportunity cost does not really exist (because you have ‘many other’ alternatives) and moreover, your option is usually not the best choice made – at least in restrospect (which is why we have a term to describe this phenomenon and it is known as ‘regret’).

The concept of bounded rationality is not new – in fact, all students of economics who have not learnt about it would have a sense of it already because the concept of economic rationality is somehow flawed. I wanted to write the article ‘When Smith meets Kant’ but haven’t got the chance to. It’s going to be a long treatise to reconcile the concept of self-deception, reality, morality, economics and perhaps all questions that lies fundamentally in how decisions are being made based on a variety of theories. It relates very much to the question of rationality. In essence, we have absolutely no idea what rationality is. We may have a degree of knowledge about it, but not sufficient to quantify all decision making in the world. The concept of insane is also frequently misunderstood to be a lack of rationality. I would think it is more like a ‘postponed rationality’ because our perception of the world changes with time and so is the idea of rationality.

Back to the topic of how imperfect the world is, it is unrealistic to learn about the perfect world actually. For if we cannot get to the ideal, do not want to make use of the ideal, know about the consequences of the ideal which we do not want to befall on us, and have clear idea of the disadvantage of what is known and thought to be ideal, then there’s no point even constructing it in the first place. If you know your stuff, you know I am referring to concepts of Market Structures that forces us to think about the Perfect Markets. I guess we all know about the Perfect Competition and the merits of it. We think it is best market structure because it is perceived to maximise utility in peaceful, unregulated conditions. Unfortunately, if you see hard enough, you will realised that a Perfect Competition Market Structure raptured by an economic recession is never going to recover and I guess I don’t have to elaborate on these facts of life.

We withhold what thought to be the essence of the ideal when in fact, there’s no such thing because of the way what is ‘idea’ is defined. In my opinion, those ‘ideal’ scenarios should not have any conceivable disadvantages and must not be attacked in any way to render it as not being ideal anymore. As such, nothing can be ideal and perhaps in Economics, we should cease considering such kind of knowledge. The models we know of and reject as ideal are mere product of the imaginative mind that persuades us that things that do not occur are ideal and perfect – which cannot be true because it would have pose a strong incentive for us to work towards it, when we are not. Let us then, settle for the less ‘ideal’.

‘Yes!’ I exclaimed to myself suddenly as I was at the bus stop waiting for the bus that comes every 20 minutes and is supposed to translate me in the spatial dimension over to a locus that is deemed to be my house. I just realised that we have all been wrong about the concept of time – gravely wrong in fact.

My preoccupation with the idea of time began very much after watching the video on ‘The Elegant Universe’ 2 years back and I was struggling to imagine time as another dimension that exist in space. It would make it the 4th dimension or so we call. The problem with the existing imaginative model of time is that it exist as frames, as though a video documenting our lives, and therefore, we can rewind, review, pause, and even ‘overwrite’ events. This model is gravely wrong if we analyse time in the spatial dimension kind of way.

Let us assume that our spatial dimension is collectively a ball in some form of 3-dimensional space but only able to translate in a single dimension. This ball, is on a ramp and it rolls down as though there’s gravity pulling the ball on a ramp. It rolls in a straight line and it can only keep rolling, unable to cease without help of any external force or whatsoever. The ramp is infinitely long, or we can say it is as long as time can go. This ramp, is the dimension of time itself. The action of rolling down the ramp is an innate physical property of everything that exist on and within the ball, which is our spatial dimension.

At every moment, the rolling continues, we translate in time. When we translate in time, the time we have passed simply cease to exist. Thus, when you go back in time, it would mean you are jumping off this spatial dimension (the ball) and on to the dimension of time (the ramp, which is a single dimension), and the only experience I can postulate from this ‘jumping off’ action is simply ‘void’. You are said to be ‘erased from our time’ and you become stucked in this void. As everything has translated along the axis of time, it cannot possibly still be expected to exist on the same position so in no way can you go ‘back’ in time.

Similarly, trying to ‘jump off’ the ball, to be ahead of it, or to ‘travel’ to the future, would leave you in void, and if you are lucky enough, you can return to our spatial dimension when the ball catches you, if not, you’ll be as lost as those who ‘travelled back in time’. In this model for the concept of time, there’s entirely no room for time travel. For in the first place, you are unable to create this external force to change the movement of the ball on the ramp and more importantly, nothing ‘moves in time’ with you and even if ‘travelling in time’ is allowed, it is going to be pure gloom and nothing else. In fact, the rolling momentum can even destroy you entirely before you leave the spatial dimension – assuming there’s such a rolling motion.

In this sense, time is possibly the largest dimension, containing everything in it, including those dimensions within our spatial dimension. There are, as suggested by the string and M-theory, other dimensions so small we can’t translate into them. Though we can’t actually measure the ‘size of a dimension’, we can gauge that sort of property by thinking in such imaginable models. Unfortunately, this model I present focuses too much on the conventional idea of space that may not be applicable to time (which would mean I forcefully attached the idea to the concept), and disregard possible presence of more sophisticated systems in newer and unimaginable dimensions.

Because of all the busying over this few weeks, I haven’t been keeping up with my reading and I failed to read the books I previously borrowed from the school library. To be fair to myself, I must say I was tricked into borrowing one of those really profound books that has a childish cover page. It was really tricky in that the book had a colourful cover that said it’s title and since I decided that the title was something of my interest, I borrowed it – only to realised that the language and content is beyond my level.

Enough said about my present adventures with books, I have to agree with Scout in ‘To Kill A Mockingbird’, you don’t give a damn about things that you do everyday until you realise you probably can’t do it anymore – you are never gonna enjoying breathing this moment, or some other times later, but there’s gonna be a time when you truly appreciates it. Reading for me have come to such a natural state that I feel perfectly neutral to it. I have hated reading when I was a child for the mere reason of not liking the way letters, and the characters and symbols of each alphabets are designed. They just didn’t appeal to me and I sort of hated language as well, so I hate them altogether. I rarely read and most of the time, I look at the mindless comic strips that doesn’t even have dialogues or speech bubbles. For that matter, I must say I was once an ‘action-oriented child’.

It turned out that I started enjoying reading some time in Secondary Education, when I begin enjoy writing as well. The reading fueled the writing and the writing create this void or rather thirst for knowledge and thus a demand for things to read. So the cycle goes. I have always liked writing but in the past, I wrote in a different way – I think about things within my own world and I write. So I had a book on wooden human figures living with their families in this real-world-like world and with everything made of wood. There’s also another story (or perhaps series of stories) I wrote, which chronicles the operation of a charity organisation that helps children with different needs. I deceived myself and believe that imagination was all that I need.

It was later, when I stopped and observe, and stop living in the world I claim to belong and very much own, that I begin writing about the real world and criticising it. It started out as pure factual writings that had extremely neutral take on the world and superficial analysis of the context. As I write more, they all just got more sophisticated, and I couldn’t help. I just got addicted some way and continued to pen my thoughts profusely.

Having no time to read is bad, because there’s so many things you want to write about but you have no accurate content to speak of, no ideas about the real world through the eyes of others, and thus less to criticise. The things I know simply wouldn’t suffice for the big stuff I seek to write on. I am simply ranting now – not very much writing. Just ranting.

Somehow, I enjoy applying scientific laws to society – that must mean that our society can be governed by the same principles as those which governs nature. I begin to wonder about the Law of Conservation of Sense. Sense, like energy and perhaps in a way, mass, should be at some kind of constant throughout the entire universe and thus, to ‘make sense’, we have to use some raw material, thus depleting sense, manifested in some other forms, much like coal storing energy. Compacted ‘sense’ should usually be in the form of books but it appears that if books are sources of sense, then the law cannot apply because books would then cause sense to be increasing – unless we are reading it and using it in the expense of our future. Which is also meant to say that our future would lack sense.

Assuming that we are not really making sense now, though perceiving that we are, then the future would have lots of sense to work with. But that would also mean that I have not uncovered where all the sense go in the meantime. It turned out later, that sense, much like energy, has the other form. Just that at the present time, we cannot accept it in this form, just like the way when we cannot accept the fact that energy can be manifested as mass. It is hard to believe that ‘crap’ is just another manifestation of sense. It is through combusting ‘crap’ that we get sense – just like the way we burn coal to get energy locked in it. This is an important concept because it would mean that whole collection of thoughts that we can have, all contributes towards creating sense.

Sense, in the first place, is an articifical concept, much like energy. We decide on what makes sense through our intuition, which in fact, is perceived as a counterweight to sense itself. That’s why people argue easily that we are using reasoning by faith – for we will be caught in a cyclic argument to prove that reasoning is justified. We are ultimately deceiving ourselves for ‘greater good’.

Relating such ideas to the previous entry on Way & Will, we must again realised that it is way that is tangible and not will. If such is not sufficient for us to discover the inherent flaw in our intuition, consider the fact that we have already embraced way but continued to deny it, spending loads of resources on absolutely redundant ‘rationalisation’. More importantly, the fact that we even exist, is a result of way and not will. It is ‘crap’ that we ultimately are – and ‘sense’ which we seek to become. There are so many thing we believe in, which we have no way of justifying, and yet, at the same time, we have to believe in reason. That puts us in a spot we sometimes realised but largely ignore. And as usual, I am just pointing out things, unable to change them. To put it in the context of this entry, I am just trying, just trying to Make Sense.

Being forty-one isn’t that great but gettting on with the same group of people [up there] for forty-one 365s is quite a feat. Having been in this place for more than a decade, all I can say is that it has helped me quite a bit since the forest couldn’t possibly be a better place than this. I realised too, that things that we keep criticising, like not preserving stuff, are really not that valid because we have to stress constantly the invalidity of such topics with pragmatism. Admit it, everyone are Kantian in some way or another, unless we have another set of logic, that probably says that 22 times 2 is 41, at least in the typical numerical kind of sense.

I was thinking Kantian for a few days and getting confused by how utilitarian our Justice system is. Intuitively, we have been right in applying certain punishments and so on but to think Kantian sets things in another perspective. Let me just give you a scenario for the thought experiments all philosophers enjoys indulging in.

You walk on streets and get robbed of our wallet. You recognise the guy and reports to police. That guy went to buy some cheese from the supermarket to eat with your money. The police caught him with your wallet in his pocket, finishing his last bit of cheese on a park bench. He gets arrested, goes on trial, you testify against him, he admits, and he gets jailed for a week – you don’t get your money back, not even the cheese that he didn’t quite finish because he was chased by the police.

Pardon my preoccupations with cheese, but just think about it, you lost your money (or cheese), the thief loses his freedom for a week and the supermarket makes a profit from the cheese they sold. Doesn’t this resemble the Positive Externality model we learnt in Economics? Except it has a twist, the third party gains in expense of the consumer and this third party can considered a messenger of transaction. In jailing the thief, we punish the messenger, ‘do justice’ for the consumer and rewards the producer. What does it say about our ‘sense of justice’ from a Kantian perspective? Tweaked. Absolutely.

To maximise welfare for the society then, we should make the thief work in the supermarket until he makes enough pay to buy the cheese, put the money into the wallet he stole, then walk on the streets – getting the victim to rob him and he is not to give chase. The police then closes the case – no judge needed, just the one who gains, the supermarket. As with all welfare maximising solutions of the economy, allocative efficiency cannot be achieved, we are simply attaining the social efficiency, and that’s through the police intervention with the aid from the ‘producers’.

When taking on ideas of utilitarian, we can hardly rely on philosophical intuition that have been trained and destroyed by culture and upbringing – we can only depend on economic analysis and rationalisation. Of course, that may not work out as best because of the nature of the ‘counter-intuition’ and the perception of the pure stupidity of the solution as a result of our nuture, once again. So sadly, Kantian ideas remains invalid in the eyes of law and justice.

I came across a a book on economics research methodology today – at least that’s what the title suggested. The first page ended up being devoted to telling some interesting stuff about Philosophy of Science that I thought would be extremely interesting to share. It failed terribly in an attempt to surprise me with the fact that Philosophy of Science has nothing to do about studying the social or other implications of scientific discovery, nor has it have any hint of links with studying the ethics involved in scientific research and discovery.

The thing that intrigued me came later – the book spoke of the Philosophy of Science, as a field that tackles the logic involved in the scientific research and debating on what is really science; probably questioning the methods involved, the level of ‘scientificity’ of the methods and so on. I guess that was the precursor to how methods of study are important, so important that it is probably more essential than the study itself.

Very often, I must say, we think always about the will, we attempt to rationalise, give reason, produce purpose and otherwise, things do not make sense. In a way, I must say that our emphasis on reasoning is quite surprising, for we can easily have our emphasis on the ‘way’, the methods rather than the will. So much so that we have a line that says, ‘When there’s will, there’s way’ and the statement could easily have been otherwise.

The world can center around finding ways, for absolutely no reason, then conceive a reason for it. This has been going on in the commercial world, just not widely publicised. More commonly, it appears in the sotware world, where people design these wares for just aesthetic reasons or absolutely nothing at all. Other times, we design a software that, say, save the screen in some way (right now I still couldn’t conceive a purpose for screen-saver), and don’t bother to think of a reason for it. There are worse times – we design some lame toy and make it fashionable (reason given: the toy looks cute).

Being a purpose-centered world, we seek to rationalise everything before working on it – something with no purpose has no value. As such, the reason for something to exist must exist before the thing exist. From an existentialist perspective, that’s not true. Things must exist to create a purpose for itself. Therefore, we have many things that existed, then a reason is created for it. There’s nothing wrong with that. Screen-savers and trendy toys prevails because we have the ‘way’ before the ‘will’. Yet this does not justify a step towards the more ‘way-world’ – because there’s greater reason to remain in the ‘will-world’. The void in philosophical studies about the existence of man requires that we use the ‘way-world’ paradigm, and such would necessitate that all man possess no single will and thus, monoism cannot be possible – unless of course, there is only one will in the first place.

The world must start to heterogenise in the harmonious way that glues way to will. We must approach the ‘way-will’ world so that pseudo-will cannot persist so force us to contradict ourselves and the way can stand till the will is found – just as man have lived over the ages. I wonder if it is difficult for us to attain that; we are now at a pretty stagnated stage, no one has discovered this form of thinking yet, probably because of culture-training and the pride in our power to reason. This is hard to go against for conventional wisdom suggest very much that with a way without will, the way can hardly be trusted for the way cannot exist without the preceeding will. Just look at life itself and you’ll probably find your answer against conventional wisdom. Let’s not make our life difficult by pursuing the will for way is the way to go (no pun intended).

Being a student of economics, there’s an urgent need to bail the subject out of its cruel accusation of being dismal – okay, this topic seem pretty old. I could have gotten back to Geography but I think my pretty lengthy discourse is going to share similar nature has what I have done on Geography.

Unfortunate for the geographers who thinks only of problems and nothing else, and the environmentalists who argues how ungreen our world is – I am on the side of the economists. The subject, being extremely depressing on the systems, in which human interactions work upon, seem extremely optimistic about the way nature is played around and growing with humans. In other words, humans are interacting with nature better than with themselves. The views on resource balance that have long gotten out of date are still pretty much dwelled upon by the students taking Geography (like me) and therefore, there’s s great need for economist to correct the ideas involved. We have to clarify that the world has much more than it needs and the problem really lies not on the nature but the logistics involved and the distribution, which can be part of nature’s fault but looking on the bright side, humans should be able to resolve such problem if not for their nature (not abilities). As such, if we fix the context, and simply change a single variable and that is the burden to bear, we realise that there’s isn’t much problems to speak of.

Geography, because of its roots in natural sciences, in contrast, needs a more systematic way of describing everything, much like economics, while economics are heading towards a more mathematical viewpoint that involved studies of mathematical theoratical models. That would make things more balanced. Unlike the sciences, data and models in Geography are rarely updated because of their irrelevance in dispute. Unless new landscapes or natural compositions are found, it is hardly possible to postulate any theories on the behaviours of nature. It is such a circumstance that makes Geography unrealistic as compared to economics. For economics, it appears that things are logical in the sense that when we assume ceteris paribus, things can still apply in reality, but not that well for geography because of its apparent lack of control over the subject matter. As such, there’s a real need for geography, especially its human branch to merge with economics to study human interactions with themselves and nature in the process, and thus the effects on our environment and so on.

Things are just being studied in such isolated manner that I think the world would have been much less depressing if people can correct each other well enough before they present themselves. Disputes in the hybrid fields arises out of the over-reliance of traditional theories within individual subjects. If these traditional theories could be revised, fused and reviewed, we can get the universal equation tha Physics seek for, or at least get close to it. Making sense at first won’t be easy – but at least we try.