Kevin Low

Perhaps some people are just naive, but they will claim that it’s just some crappy lines, so why bother. They just don’t get the idea of an asymptote, tending towards but never ever reaching. I saw this line somewhere:

Practice makes Perfect. Nobody is Perfect. So why Practice?

And I think it makes absolutely no sense; just because something that is meant to bring you to an aim that is impossible to attain doesn’t mean you give up on it. After all, there was the Babel Attempt, we don’t seek to truly reach the Heavens but to be nearer. Yes, no one can be perfect, not wholly, and not even in a single thing, but we can tend towards perfection. We have never fulfilled our moral responsibility to everything we have to, but at least we try as best as we can to do that – if we were to give up completely on this role, the world would sink into absolute chaos. It is thus, never pointless to do anything. Every single action can make a difference, no matter how insignificant it is – you can prove that mathematically for economic phenomena and the assumption cannot hold in a finite world.

In fact, let’s just treat every single goal as a function, I guess there’s a special name for this sort of function but I am not sure what it is, these functions that can never be expressed as quadratic, or cubic, or anything else – functions like ‘ln x’, ‘sin x’, ‘cos x’ or the exponential function. All these goals that we have are these functions, and I believe there’s infinite of these in the world, except we may not have discovered so many. All right, we have got goals, but because they cannot be expressed such that fitting the variable into it’s different power, they are ‘perfect goals’, never attainable. Still, we try to express them, with our best knowledge and best efforts, perhaps using the Maclaurin’s Expansion. Every single time when we differentiate the function, when we substitute x=0 into each of the differential equations, and attempting to form the Maclaurin approximation, we are going closer to the goal, tending towards it. We can get very close, but never perfectly hitting it – but that would be enough. That’s life.

In a world without absolutes, perfect stuff, or a ceiling for anything, we just have to accept that we slog our lives just to ‘tend towards’ certain goals. We can never truly attain them, and that’s why we never manage to define success, or an exact purpose in life. Some people hope for money, and others want fame – so naive people decide to question how much fame or money we need to ascertain that we have attained our goals in life, and fulfilled the purpose of life. Let’s propose a simpler way out, a solution that we have been using long ago but never truly acknowledge it’s presence – the notion of a tendency towards success, asymptotic approach to the goals. We live like that, and as we approach the end, the function may be a close fit, with only like 0.00000145242 units away from our goals but it’s great enough, that’s all and when we decide it’s time to let go, it will leave us, very much like an asymptotic graph tapering off, out of life to spare.

Isn’t that a wonderfully elegant model of life and its rat race/paper chase of our model world?

Perhaps some people are just naive, but they will claim that it’s just some crappy lines, so why bother. They just don’t get the idea of an asymptote, tending towards but never ever reaching. I saw this line somewhere:

Practice makes Perfect. Nobody is Perfect. So why Practice?

And I think it makes absolutely no sense; just because something that is meant to bring you to an aim that is impossible to attain doesn’t mean you give up on it. After all, there was the Babel Attempt, we don’t seek to truly reach the Heavens but to be nearer. Yes, no one can be perfect, not wholly, and not even in a single thing, but we can tend towards perfection. We have never fulfilled our moral responsibility to everything we have to, but at least we try as best as we can to do that – if we were to give up completely on this role, the world would sink into absolute chaos. It is thus, never pointless to do anything. Every single action can make a difference, no matter how insignificant it is – you can prove that mathematically for economic phenomena and the assumption cannot hold in a finite world.

In fact, let’s just treat every single goal as a function, I guess there’s a special name for this sort of function but I am not sure what it is, these functions that can never be expressed as quadratic, or cubic, or anything else – functions like ‘ln x’, ‘sin x’, ‘cos x’ or the exponential function. All these goals that we have are these functions, and I believe there’s infinite of these in the world, except we may not have discovered so many. All right, we have got goals, but because they cannot be expressed such that fitting the variable into it’s different power, they are ‘perfect goals’, never attainable. Still, we try to express them, with our best knowledge and best efforts, perhaps using the Maclaurin’s Expansion. Every single time when we differentiate the function, when we substitute x=0 into each of the differential equations, and attempting to form the Maclaurin approximation, we are going closer to the goal, tending towards it. We can get very close, but never perfectly hitting it – but that would be enough. That’s life.

In a world without absolutes, perfect stuff, or a ceiling for anything, we just have to accept that we slog our lives just to ‘tend towards’ certain goals. We can never truly attain them, and that’s why we never manage to define success, or an exact purpose in life. Some people hope for money, and others want fame – so naive people decide to question how much fame or money we need to ascertain that we have attained our goals in life, and fulfilled the purpose of life. Let’s propose a simpler way out, a solution that we have been using long ago but never truly acknowledge it’s presence – the notion of a tendency towards success, asymptotic approach to the goals. We live like that, and as we approach the end, the function may be a close fit, with only like 0.00000145242 units away from our goals but it’s great enough, that’s all and when we decide it’s time to let go, it will leave us, very much like an asymptotic graph tapering off, out of life to spare.

Isn’t that a wonderfully elegant model of life and its rat race/paper chase of our model world?

Was a the bookstore and I was forced to simply browse at books without buying them because I already have about 4 books back at home that’s not completed. Worst, school work is piling up and I have absolutely no idea when I will even go back to the books. I hope to complete them before the June Holidays. Anyway, I saw this travel guide series published by some foreign press and so I picked up the one on Singapore. It was an orange book so I guess that’s partly the reason why I even bother to pick it up.

I looked through the chapters: 24-Hours, Hotels, Leisure, etc. The last chapter caught my eye: ‘Escapes’. I was wondering what kind of escapes in Singapore the guide would recommend – some resorts, or whatever exorbitant country clubs? I flipped the pages, looking through the photos of places I don’t seem to remember, Indoor Stadium, Botanic Gardens, and so on. These were the places I visited last time but it’s been a long time since I was there the last time and I am rather sure at this point of time, or any point of time, there’s some construction work at any single location/place that the guide recommends you to visit. In any case, I soon reached the chapter that previously caught my eye…

The first paragraph read (loosely presented from my poor memory): ‘Singapore’s great central location in South East Asia means that it’s convenient to move around to different places out of town…’ That didn’t seem a valid statement, as the part about ‘out of town’ deviates from the part about being central in South East Asia. I looked at the picture on the next page and found it unfamiliar. There’s this tinge of unfamiliarity about it, much like the feeling that you get when you watch foreign films, the yellowish or some other shades that sets it apart from the perfect-white-balance kind of photos of Singapore places. Well, some photos are artistic but it is this un-Singaporean feeling that makes it artistic in some sense. So my eyes reorientated slightly to read the captions beneath the photo on the page. It gave the name of some hotel, followed by a comma and then the words ‘Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’. I checked the cover again and it was still the same book, the title in front was still ‘Singapore’ and I looked back at the page my fingers was gripping. My visual senses weren’t conveying the wrong messages to me a moment ago. This is a Singapore travel guide and they are telling you that the escapes out of town is some hotel in Malaysia? Goodness.

Singapore, it appears, has no urban escapades after all.

Was a the bookstore and I was forced to simply browse at books without buying them because I already have about 4 books back at home that’s not completed. Worst, school work is piling up and I have absolutely no idea when I will even go back to the books. I hope to complete them before the June Holidays. Anyway, I saw this travel guide series published by some foreign press and so I picked up the one on Singapore. It was an orange book so I guess that’s partly the reason why I even bother to pick it up.

I looked through the chapters: 24-Hours, Hotels, Leisure, etc. The last chapter caught my eye: ‘Escapes’. I was wondering what kind of escapes in Singapore the guide would recommend – some resorts, or whatever exorbitant country clubs? I flipped the pages, looking through the photos of places I don’t seem to remember, Indoor Stadium, Botanic Gardens, and so on. These were the places I visited last time but it’s been a long time since I was there the last time and I am rather sure at this point of time, or any point of time, there’s some construction work at any single location/place that the guide recommends you to visit. In any case, I soon reached the chapter that previously caught my eye…

The first paragraph read (loosely presented from my poor memory): ‘Singapore’s great central location in South East Asia means that it’s convenient to move around to different places out of town…’ That didn’t seem a valid statement, as the part about ‘out of town’ deviates from the part about being central in South East Asia. I looked at the picture on the next page and found it unfamiliar. There’s this tinge of unfamiliarity about it, much like the feeling that you get when you watch foreign films, the yellowish or some other shades that sets it apart from the perfect-white-balance kind of photos of Singapore places. Well, some photos are artistic but it is this un-Singaporean feeling that makes it artistic in some sense. So my eyes reorientated slightly to read the captions beneath the photo on the page. It gave the name of some hotel, followed by a comma and then the words ‘Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’. I checked the cover again and it was still the same book, the title in front was still ‘Singapore’ and I looked back at the page my fingers was gripping. My visual senses weren’t conveying the wrong messages to me a moment ago. This is a Singapore travel guide and they are telling you that the escapes out of town is some hotel in Malaysia? Goodness.

Singapore, it appears, has no urban escapades after all.

Getting too economics nowadays, and the philosophical mind slips into inquiry into behaviour that does little to question purpose of fundamental existence or the reason behind non-economic emotions. I scurried through some blogs and found how sentimental people around me are. Cool. At least for the hungry philosophical mind. Then economics mode set in and all sorts of question concerning the utility people obtain from being labeled ‘philosophical’ or more colloquially, ‘cheem’, or the kind of incentives that pushes people to thinking in ‘philosophical’ ways despite overwhelming social pressure that considers philosophical inquiry out of modern context or simply put in the most Westernized way, ‘uncool’. That, is supposed to be more of my concern – what exactly drives people to be philosophical? Innate curiosity about the world, pure divine inspiration, or just for the exclusive label forced upon by the society that has some form of mixed-blessing effect?

The last driving force seem the most powerful, though the second last may be as valid. The fundamental things that drives people is based on the incentives involved and thus the utility gained from the action. If the action of inquiry provides such high absolute utility, blogging these thoughts would have such low marginal utility that the action is unlikely to be carried out, so we can be rather sure that innate curiosity is insufficient to make people think philosophically, or at least, insufficient to allow us to perceive the philosophical-ness of a being. The fact that this property is detectable leads us to the next 2 plausible driving forces.

Divine inspiration is an attractive solution to the problem but it’s in no way a stable conclusion to this little problem we have over here. The fact is that people around me shares some similar properties about perception of social forces and they way of handling it leads us closer to the justification of social forces. However, in a bid to remove the ‘divine inspiration’ theory, we first have to present the empirical situation. The circumstances is such that many people are feeling sentimental, philosophical, emotional and they blog about it, and they convey if with such cliche statements that unless ‘divine inspiration’ is a mere software programme that behaves like a virus, that should not happen. The question naturally comes – if everyone’s having this divine inspiration, why not me; or perhaps now is the time? No. The answer is that there’s no divine inspiration to discuss, for everyone’s merely succumbing to this social pressure that innate desire to question seems to fuel. The word is ‘seems’, for it doesn’t. The forceful incorporation of humanities’ way of inquiry in Sciences have upset our youth’s way of thinking. We are ‘forced’ to think of something meaningful to ask about rather than having questions naturally arise from us when we have our encounters. That’s a clear example of pure information overload.

So, what the crap is this social force making people inquire about the natural world, the humanly interactions, and the things we perceive? It is a high level kind of social pressure, one that works it’s way not from interaction, or mirroring the rest, it works through imposing a barrier, that ‘exclusifies’ the author and encourage them to immortalize themselves, at least within their narrow scopes of perception. This sort of crap inquiry, pseudo-philosophy, may be capable of destroying our foundation of humanities, our roots in questioning about the world. Scientists, can never become the sort of philosophers who have asked the great questions we spent centuries seeking to answer, and the effort to make them so can have devastating results to the field of inquiry itself; for the wrong method of inquiry naturally leads one to the wrong solution and thus the wrong answer to the true inquiry. There’s a philosophy version of Alchemy and it’s brewing. Better whip out your Philonomics to clear the way.