CIIC - On abortion

I was reading today the Catholic Pope’s 2016 Amoris Laetitia, or “The Joy of Love”, his post-Synodal apostolic exhortation (you can find it here). Boy, what a phrase that is. I will call him “Pope” for short, although I think in the movies they generally prefer to call their ministers the more familiar (indeed jocular) “Padre”. This Pope, an Argentinian named Jorge Mario Bergoglio (and this rolls off the tongue so well) took his papal name as Francis, after an Italian saint, Francis of Assissi (1181 to1226), whose back story is rather gruesomely one in which he received, perhaps miraculously, the wounds that the Christ endured at his death. Anyway, Francis, as far as appears to me, seems to doing a wonderful job, and in some ways the world has taken respectful, even admiring attention. And I have found his exhortatory letter to be quite well written, and I mean this exceedingly well. Of course, it tends to take the conservative view of things, but I think, sensitively, and intelligently. And simply, to be sure. So, for instance, he respects a relationship which is stable and well-meaning (my own words), but he thinks that a family must be centred on one which is able to “transmit” life. Of course, I would think that this does not go quite far enough in terms of even-handed treatment of the topic, but I will accept that for him the conversation has not yet been shuttered off.

I pause here to acknowledge that there are inherently some differences in what the average Catholic is said to believe and what the average Christian, or in my case, a (flakily) self-professed liberal Methodist (a neo-Wesleyan, if you like) might be said to believe. However for my purposes I think that one who accepts the Christ belongs properly to this wide concept of what a “believer” is and so I think that sufficiently disposes of this for now.

Exploring many facets of a life modelled on Christ, one of the things Francis wrote on concerned abortion. Without mincing words, the Catholic church is quite well-known for its stance against permitting contraceptives, and of course the darker corollary of permitted abortion. In this vein, Francis follows:

“Here I feel it urgent to state that, if the family is the sanctuary of life, the place where life is conceived and cared for, it is a horrendous contradiction when it becomes a place where life is rejected and destroyed. So great is the value of a human life, and so inalienable the right to life of an innocent child growing in the mother’s womb, that no alleged right to one’s own body can justify a decision to terminate that life, which is an end in itself and which can never be considered the “property” of another human being. The family protects human life in all its stages, including its last. …”

I think this is inherently an undeniably valid argument. But on the other hand stands an equally valid argument, and I will put it simply as this: No woman (or man) should be forced to do something which she/he does not wish to do, within reason. Of course, the fundamental premises of either point of view devolve entirely (if not under duress) from the deepest beliefs one holds: if one believes in a benevolent monotheistic figure, one might believe that any little human being (no matter the circumstances of his conception) is equally created and/or equally to be treated as any other; conversely, one might instead believe that there are certain circumstances in which no one could possibly expect (and here I sigh mightily in writing) a little human being to be given the benefits of physiological independence (a deeper sigh follows). You know, when I think about it, if one takes the strong Christian view that we are all born in sin, the former argument (of equal creation) takes on truly formidable strength.

Of course, there are also the thorny issues: what if the life of the mother is at stake? (sigh) what if the child is in a bad way? (sigh) what if the poor woman was forcibly taken? (deep sigh) Well, no one knows. These are awful, awful questions. You know, it could come down to anyone, and the answer could differ depending on the circumstances. And then there are further considerations for after the birth of the child. It seems to me that taken on the whole these are (and must be) deeply personal choices, and it matters a lot how one is involved in that choice. Even abstract questions become cornered into realist concerns: what is human dignity? can one’s posited understanding of human dignity survive one’s choice whether to abort or not? It is daunting, an impossible task.

Somewhere down the line, it’s inevitable: the choice will haunt a person. And you know, the line that separates what it is to “murder” and to “kill” is not really a clear, black one – one need only compare the categorisations in sections 299 and 300 of the Penal Code (and all the exceptions!). Take again an argument which could flow from natural law: in certain circumstances, even animals eat their young. Or look at it again in this way: if you had a computer which could, if given certain data about one’s circumstances at birth, simulate the life that person would have, life to death, and if you ran that simulation ten thousand times and out of all those, six thousand five hundred and eighteen tended on balance to be rough (including that person’s indirect effects, e.g. further children) wouldn’t there be some argument that, you know, not living might be predictively better? Like you know, if someone from the future could go back and have Hitler aborted, wouldn’t that be grand? Boy, oh boy.

In the end, I’ll say this: I think it’s OK for a woman to select abortion, but I sure hope she thinks about it (obviously, she’d also have to deal with all the general biological instincts at self- and child-preservation). So I don’t agree that a blanket view either way could ultimately be right (with full apologies to all).

My admiration and gratitude, Jorge, Pope Francis. Salut.

CXCVII - On the modern computer

I have recently been reading and thinking about the present era, which I think may be fairly, if somewhat uneasily, described as being the era of computers, the modern era. Let's imagine that the post-modernists are ahead of their time. No, this is still the modern era, and we are still the ones being outmoded.

Of course a computer would beat a man at a game set by logical rules. What else could you expect? I read recently about Bobby Fisher's genius at chess, and that the modern chess game had settled into how one played chess openings. Fisher was so disgusted with this that he developed Chess960, in which the row of pieces behind the pawns were set at random, and then mirrored on both sides. Chess played in this way would depend, presumably, on how one applied the ideas of each piece rather than the ideas of openings. But perhaps a computer would beat even Fisher at Chess960. And so what could one truly expect of a Korean champion at Go. Hubris on his part was a little strange, although understandably so, a kind of xenophobia.

And so I imagine that a computer could someday, if given the benefit of physical form, shoot a basketball more accurately than Larry Bird, hit a baseball more truly than Ted Williams, smite a man more soundly than Muhammad Ali, run the track more swiftly than Usain Bolt, dribble a football more supremely than Lionel Messi, or ride a motorcycle more unerringly than Valentino Rossi. All this is admitted. But this is nothing, for these do not comprise the essence nor the beauty of sport. A computer, by definition not subject to human limits, could never comprehend the way the game is played, that is, by humans. Thus it could not possibly see the things that a man must see to triumph over another, imagine and develop tactics which can be applied in unison, and finally, play the game in totality as it must be played so that one man and one side can fairly be said to have beaten another team of men. In other words, human institutions, whether of sport or otherwise, which depend inherently on the limits of man and thus the maximisation of man's abilities in competition, cannot possibly accommodate or tolerate the introduction of such a thing as a computer, and yet remain human institutions. But perhaps here we argue merely on the back of definition. So we must come to some point in all this, and it is this: it is only meaningful for humans, and not computers, to perform operations not inherently based on logic or on calculations. The universal computer may be able to perform any task given to it in program-data form, and perhaps someday it will be able to apply that logic at the most fundamental levels, but even then, it could never be as a human is, and that is, to live in a world where logic is perhaps a necessary condition, but never a sufficient condition. Even as to this necessity it is not clear: some believe in God, who by definition could not be forced into logic, some believe in the indescribable, in the paradox of the beginning of existence, as in Eastern philosophy.

At this moment I hesitate to think that a computer might play the violin more stupendously than Jascha Heifetz, or write a novel more eerily magnificent than Juan Rulfo did. But I will accept that a computer could mechanically do something as good as, if not better, than the masters, and I accept that given a transcription of Liszt's Liebestraum or a script of Pedro Paramo a computer might credibly pseudo-compose something not too distant from these. Nonetheless it seems to me that such a process could not even begin to describe beauty, creativity, or imagination, or any of the wonderful things that humans have done since we first looked up at the stars, down below at the sands, and out across over the hills and oceans. No computer could ever dream. No music playing into the microphonic ears of a computer could ever evoke the precocity of one's childhood days, of one's wistful longing for home, or for one's cherished loves. Per George Dyson, no computer could ever point out to another which clouds looked like strange, forlorn cats. (Here however I hesitate to say that no computer could ever see in a flash of insight past the apparent theoretical limits of its own logical framework.) For we are fundamentally different from computers, for although I suppose even computers, of digits and data and near-omniscience and formlessness, have limits, their limits are fundamentally different from ours. No computer would ever sit as Descartes did beside his fireplace and wonder whether he was in a dream world created by a devil of peculiar malevolence. Cogito ergo sum applies to us, ratio simpliciter applies to them. Man is a political animal, as Aristotle once wrote, and that is what separates us from all other animals. Computers are neither political nor animals, and that is what separates them from us. In some ways that is a rather simplistic way to sum up, but it remains, in my view, fundamentally significant.

To my mind our response to life in the modern era is to never forget that we are the ones who dream, who believe, who love beauty, who inspire and are inspired, who imagine and who create. We must grasp this closely and firmly, this the very fire that Prometheus risked his liberty to give to us, his beloved people. The history of the universe will record that out of life, the modern human walked the earth about 66 million years after the Cretaceous-Paleogene extinction event, the last of the great extinction events, that in 1936 the mathematician Alan Turing wrote a paper which would provide the theoretical architecture out of which the universal, programmable computer would first be developed, the ENIAC, in 1946, consisting of "17,468 vacuum tubes, 7200 crystal diodes, 1500 relays, 70,000 resistors, 10,000 capacitors and approximately 5,000,000 hand-soldered joints", that it was used to perform post-war calculations for the hydrogen bomb (probably in relation to implosions and fluid dynamics), that in 1997 a computer beat a world champion from Russia at chess, and presumably, that a computer will achieve many other things besides. But this I believe: it will not be stated there that the computer was ever the equal of a man.

p.s. On the Manchester Small Scale Experimental Machine, or the "Baby": the first random access memory equipped computer (see http://goo.gl/mQA5m3):

The first program to run successfully, on June 21st 1948, was to determine the highest factor of a number. The number chosen was quite small, but within days they had built up to trying the program on 2^18 , and the correct answer was found in 52 minutes, involving about 2.1 million instructions with about 3½ million store accesses.

F.C. Williams later said of the first successful run:

"A program was laboriously inserted and the start switch pressed. Immediately the spots on the display tube entered a mad dance. In early trials it was a dance of death leading to no useful result, and what was even worse, without yielding any clue as to what was wrong. But one day it stopped, and there, shining brightly in the expected place, was the expected answer. It was a moment to remember. This was in June 1948, and nothing was ever the same again."

p.p.s. When reading this essay again I think it is quite clear that I have given computers the benefit of certain doubts, but not others. In other words the assumptions I have taken, collectively speaking, put me in something of a middle position: I accept that computers can do more than merely follow instructions, but I do not accept that a computer could ever produce, say, a generally informed value judgment. Somewhere in there lies the concept of what it means to be "thinking". It is one thing to be given orders, it is quite another to be given objectives. But I suppose if computers were given every opportunity to do so, it would be silly to bet against their never being able to "make the jump". Conversely, I think that my essay ends up exploring what is, interestingly enough, significant about being a human being. Whether a computer should aim (or be aimed) to be more human-like is perhaps an interesting question in itself. After all, we are path-dependent in a very strong and important sense: we are the products of eons of adaptation, a process of conversation, if you like, between our environments and our genes. Without belabouring the point, a computer has neither. Obversely, why should anyone ever want a computer to give him an answer that might properly have come from a human? In other words, there seems to be to be a very important teleological (i.e. purpose-based) inquiry that ought first to be examined when it comes to the question of the future of computers. I hope however that I have, in these words, demonstrated this to require more than a merely practicalist examination.

CXCVI - For the rain to return

I never figured myself to be a writer of poems, because I don't like poems. I don't like having form and structure in quite this way. It seems often to compel one to artifice and forced manipulations and, what is worse, hollow pomp. Too often shallow finery is taken for artistry, and so I generally view poetry with disdain. Another thing with me is that I don't actually like Shakespeare, the Bard. It's too rich for me, too dramatic. I think also that his plays generally treat grandiose themes without quite sifting out the deeper things, the subtler things. Goethe's Faust, on the other hand, I thought was magnificent. But so much by the by.

I wrote a poem for a girl not long ago. It surprised even me. It occurred to me one day to do it, as I suppose it occurs to young men to do romantic things of this sort. In my mind I wanted to give her something; I wanted her to be able to be just the sort of beautiful woman that men wrote love poems to. I gave it to her in a text message. The story ends there, as things must, sometimes. On my part, I am satisfied.

I have titled it, For the rain to return.

As the ground gently awaits the summer rain
So wait I in patient respite. Listening, feeling,
For you. For I know not when this rain will return.
I know not the clouds which bear you,
Nor the cerulean blue oceans from whence you came.
I know not the lands where you rest your head,
Nor the waters which feed you, and give you strength.
I know not your moist lips, nor the warmth of your breath,
Nor the softness of your hands. These I adore.

I know only that you are rain.
Thus I can say that the earth adores the sky, far above,
And searches, not anxiously, but as it must, unceasingly, still,
For the winds to turn.
I wait for the first of the cool, steady breezes which sweep an arc before your feet,
For the lightest of soft drops which sprinkle the earth between your toes,
For the pitter patter which follow the trace of your steps.

Once more I inhabit, I become the soil of this earth,
Where I am laid down I wait, patiently, for this joy,
I am at ease.
The rain relents, and the rain returns.
Thirsty, I drink from its flow, your touch, your caress.
Famished, I clutch the warmth of your fingers,
I breathe in the fragrance of rain in your hair.
I am awash with the gaze of your eyes, deep and dark,
Impenetrable as the swells of the ocean.
I am swept along, leaving my shores
I sink in the water’s embrace, in the depth of your body.
For I am the earth, and I have waited for this joy, for you – for rain.

CXCV - on a Monday late afternoon

I went running this late afternoon after work, as I usually do on Mondays now.

It has become a good sort of rhythm. I like doing this, week in, week out.

It just is, for now, it just is. I run because I am, and on the rare occasion, hard, because it happens to be what I want to be.

I had to stop at a traffic junction, underneath a large flyover. I usually say long swear words when I have to stop. Where I stopped, there was a gap dividing the lanes spread out above. It was a concrete duo-lith, well, a shallow Y-shaped structure. It had in its centre a large rectangular inset about sufficient to fit a statue of an inconceivably tall man. Taller than the tallest man you can think of, and broader. If you stopped for a second and focused on just that idea, one step removed from just the right concentration, you might imagine being in front of an altar, stately in its existence, in its unassuming, un-intricate way. But carrying that on, the altar might just as well have been neglected for some time, un-noticed. All around its centre a running of dark green vinelings grew, upwards, towards the light, clinging with resilient tendrils along each hook and cranny of the roughened concrete surface. Some, not many, had made it to the top, drawn always to the block of light cast by the sides of the Y. You might cast your eyes towards those few little leaves that had made it to the very top of the concrete, basking tenderly in the still warm glow of the sky, framed against the gentle blue of the horizon. The curves of the vinelings tracing arcs along the concrete surface might make you think of the beauty of nature, of the laws of physics, of life that desires to live, all the time, all the time of time. Did those leaves win, reaching the top? Were those the only winners, and so the rest? And after a little contemplation the truth might be that existence is, in this way, its own reward. And so perhaps there is no necessary reason why life bothers to be.

Isn't it strange? Today I told the moon of my crush, of the adolescent longing in my heart. The wonderful woman I see on Sunday. Mr Moon, I told you my secret. My only regret is that I were not forty years old, and I would sweep you off your feet.

The moon may appear to stand still in the sky. But clearly it moves. It waxes and wanes, and it appears in different positions. More importantly, if it weren't moving, it would be hurtling right into the ground at my feet. The moon is always moving, even though it appears to stay right there. Even when it always appears to stay in one spot when the car is moving. I wonder how big the moon is, whether I could go around it on my own. I wonder what the earth looks like, whether it is green and blue with white splotches. That's my favourite part of the day, looking at the sky.

CXCIV - 无，名天地之始；有，名万物之母

道德经第二章

天下皆知美之为美，斯恶已；皆知善之为善，斯不善已。
故有无相生，难易相成，长短相形，高下相倾，音声相和，前後相随。
是以圣人处无为之事，行不言之教，
万物作焉而不辞，生而不有，为而不恃，功成而弗居。夫惟弗居，是以不去。

The Canon of the Tao, chapter 2 (translation by Professor Chang Chung Yuan)

When beauty is universally affirmed as beauty, therein is ugliness. When goodness is universally affirmed as goodness, therein is evil.
Therefore: being and non-being are mutually posited in their emergence. Difficult and easy are mutually posited in their complementariness. Long and short are mutually posited in their positions. High and low are mutually posited in their contradiction. Voice and tone are mutually posited in their unity. Front and back are mutually posited in their succession.
Thus, the wise deals with things through non-interference and teaches through no-words.
All things flourish without interruption. They grow by themselves, and no one possesses them. Work is done but no one depends on it. Achievements are made, but no one claims credit. Because no one claims credit, achievements are always there.

====

I have long wondered after the utterances of the Taoist philosophers, and of "eastern" philosophy in general, beginning of course with the wonderfully enlightened teachings of Confucius. How does one begin to approach such a body of thought? Serious philosophers have taken these works seriously, but why? What have the "western" philosophers, Schopenhauer et al, felt were their counterparts' contributions?

With some amateurly reflection I have come to vaguely grasp that the limits of the western classical schools, premised generally on rational thought and epistemological analysis, must, by their own inherent premises, come to a hard end where the absurd, the unfathomable lies. The world of thought, beyond the sensible, material world, the theory of the forms, the things in themselves, the utmost margins where Descartes' cogitations (ergo sum) end, beyond that, what? Why did Kant posit existence in real space and time? What played in Kafka's and Camus' mind? Why did Wittgenstein create a novel, perhaps even now poorly understood, theory of logic? What did Derrida's deconstruction theories consist of, if not the limit of the fathomable? Can nihilist ideas contain some kernel of meaning?

I feel that this chapter 2 posits one of the central tenets of eastern thought:

"being and non-being are mutually posited in their emergence ...
故有无相生 ...".

It is in the acceptance, from the beginning, of the paradox that emerges from these ideas as a characterisation of the unfathomable - and the relationship of the material world with this the formless Tao - it is in this that I think one begins to grasp that which spans the vast divide between what is rationally defensible (i.e. western philosophy) and what might be described as acceptance of premises decided arbitrarily, for instance, by faith in a prophet's writings. The unfathomable, accepted as the antithesis of and somehow also the source of the material world, gives the key to insights possible without formal epistemological structures.

"Thus, the wise deals with things through non-interference and teaches through no-words. All things flourish without interruption.They grow by themselves, and no one possesses them ...
是以圣人处无为之事，行不言之教，
万物作焉而不辞，生而不有，为而不恃 ..."

CXCIII - filled with silences

A few weeks ago I thought to myself, it would be nice to finish reading Pedro Paramo one more time before I died.

I feel a little tired. I have often felt that life is an unending series of minor disappointments. In all this I don't know if I'm a good guy, or not.

Does beauty and virtue only seem to be meaningful? What are we in our quiet moments? I don't believe in myself much. Is this self loathing? I think I begin to see what Josef K sees. And if I am not whole as myself what then for the others of the future? Very poorly, it seems, very poorly.

CXCII - Farewell, old man

My first grandfather was on my dad's side. He passed away when my dad was young, fifteen, I'm told. I have often asked my great aunts and my dad what he was like. By all accounts, he was intense, intelligent, compelling, charming, passionate, and taken to drink. I quite like the tales. His gravestone carries a photo which I often recant as resembling a famous actor, Chow Yun Fatt: thick, black hair, black glasses, a full, white Chinese face, dressed smartly in a shirt and dark tie. My dad isn't the type to praise another man too keenly. But from what I suppose to be his reserve about my granddad I figure my granddad must have been a strong character. I wonder if he had Chow's on-screen intensity, his great, almost frightful grin. Yes, my great aunts often say that he was a wonderful man, gregarious, effusive, and perhaps they are disposed to fondness, to nostalgia. They said he was at Raffles, survived a bombing that nailed his entire classroom, worked as an editor at the Straits Times, died when his liver gave out. My dad's brother, my uncle, says that intelligence sometimes skips a generation. I hope he doesn't mean I'm smart. But the stories end there. I have no one else to tell me about him. In a way it's difficult to treat seriously a person you only hear about. But I think often about what a grandfather of mine would think of me, whether he would be proud.

My second grandfather stayed with us when we were young. We had a mansionette, if that's what they're called, a little two storey flat in Hougang. We slept upstairs, parents and children two to a room each, and my step-grandfather downstairs, his grilled window towards the corridor. I think we were on the third floor. I remember he had a tummy, he yawned loud enough to be heard throughout an entire bus, no mean feat to a child. He often went shirtless while sitting at home, and I remember amusing myself by poking and prodding his chest. He drove a van and it made warning beeps at a certain speed. The story most told of him and me is that he once sent me to school and being displeased at sitting in his van instead of my dad's car I stepped out and kicked his van. He drank soda water, which tasted awful, and he watched wrestling, which was fucking awesome. We weren't allowed to watch but the rest of the time we saw the undertaker on this little ten inch tv, a cathode ray tube thing. I don't know what he was like, except that he spoke less than I remember, and made more grandfatherly sounds in replacement. When he passed away my sister said that he told her which of his big rings on his hands were real and which were not. They were ugly, garish things. He passed away and I don't remember much more than that, other than wearing socks and walking down the road at his funeral. I remember my dad sitting at a table, tired. Strange, I don't remember it as a sad occasion. Maybe it had some air of inevitability toward it. I haven't recollected my thoughts about him until now, and that makes twenty plus years. When my mum came back recently we went to a temple on a really hot day, where a little ensconced portrait of his was kept with many others, in a side hall where recorded prayers were played on repeat. I remember my mum crying, saying that she had returned. I don't remember what he looks like from the photo. I guess that means his memory is well treated.

My third grandfather lived in a one room flat in Chinatown. My parents referred to him as the Chinatown Gong Gong (not to be mistaken with the Hougang Gong Gong). We visited him three times or so, not more, as far as we were children. I once bought a cup for him, when I was eighteen or so, and I remember feeling extremely put out that he didn't seem too enamoured to receive my present. My mum who was there chided him, a little roughly, that he hadn't seemed too appreciative. We rarely visited him; when we did, it was usually at night, and we usually didn't stay too long. Nothing much was said, except my mum who spoke to him in Hokkien, a dialect I could not fairly grasp until more recently. Over the past year or so I visited him three times. He seemed worn out, a little threadbare. We had dinner, we had hor fun downstairs. He spoke in a chesty, reticent, and simple manner. I read him his letters, explained the damned CHAS scheme to him in Hokkien. I brought him a bottle of Yomeishu, and he chided me for it, embarrassed to receive a gift. The second time I went to visit him I knocked on the door for a really long time. I wondered if he was there, or however else it might be. After a while the door opened. He was hard of hearing, and he was about ready to turn in for the night. He had a radio and a television, a lot of video CDs which he showed me, and a lot of photos of him and his friends and family, travelling in various parts of China. They were exactly what they were, photos of people, old photos. He had a window which faced the back part of Havelock Road, towards the Ministry of Manpower. It was quite a good view from the flat, to be honest, and the wind came through, wu hong or hong beng dua, as was polite to say. He worked in a hospital as a janitor for forty something years, and my mum said that he used to prepare the hot powdered milk for her. He divorced my grandmother, I am told because she gambled too much, and she stayed in the flat that they bought. He still wore the wedding band on his left ring finger. He was hard of hearing but he understood just fine. He had vision problems, but in his resigned way he would say that it was sometimes worse, and sometimes not so bad. All this in Hokkien. After a few visits I stopped. When my mum asked if I still visited him I said that I didn't feel like visiting him, I don't feel that I should be visiting him. It's difficult to explain things to my mum. I didn't want to sit with him, grandson to grandfather, and feel like a stranger, given the distance our lives had taken. I didn't want to sit there and feel pity for him. It was a difficult emotion for me to deal with. There was little I could have done. He was happy to have someone to visit him. I don't know if I felt that I did so as his grandson. That was the difficult part. Today, I was about to go home when I thought of him. I thought, hey, I should ask him to stay with me in the flat I'm buying, at Bedok. That will fix everything, that's obviously the right thing to do here, to ask him to stay with me. At his door, the gate was broken apart, the door handle chained to the nearest part of the gate. Partial boot marks marred the exposed tiles at the front of the door. It was all there, and clear. I knocked and shouted to him, hoping he was in there, and he wasn't. The police said they had taken him that day. It seemed a matter of fact, a coincidence. Years ago, I stood in a burned out room when an enormous fire had ravaged my grandmother's flat. It was blackened, completely destroyed, what a war zone might have seemed. The scene at my Gong Gong's door was just the same, it was completely evident. I offered, on perhaps my second or third visit, to take him to a church. Where there would be other lao lang. He declined. I think in my mind I was, alright, maybe next time. May God have mercy on his soul. God is a merciful God. What does that mean? That means that God cares. I hope that's enough.

Chinatown Gong Gong, Chin Swee Road Gong Gong. Farewell, old man.