Philosophy of the Void

I recently read an article that examined the impact of human behavior
on the evolution of flowers.  Turns out that we have a
pathological tendency to create an ugly world.  Humans naturally
tend to pick flowers that are beautiful rather than ugly -
unfortunately, this means ugly flowers are more likely to reproduce
than beautiful ones.  In turn, generation after generation, wild
flowers become more and more ugly.  It’s ironic that those who
seek beauty leave a less beautiful world in their wake.

A Harvard economics professor, Martin L. Weitzman, was arrested on April Fools Day
for stealing manure from a local farm.  The story sounds awfully
suspicious, but I haven’t found a disconfirmation anywhere.  If
true, it’s a story that is both pathetic and hilarious. 

I had an interesting conversation this weekend about visual
illusions.  First, my friends and I were on a beach and we started
talking about what you can see when you stare at a bright sky. 
One of my friends mentioned that the big, floating spots you can see
are impurities in your retina.  These are the things that seem
suspended in your eyes and tend to float around when you move your
eyes.  Apparently, they are called floaters.

I then pointed out that you can also see little white spots spinning
around very quickly when you look at the bright sky.  My friend
had never noticed these before and we couldn’t figure out what they
were.  I did a google search and it turns out this is called the
“entopic phenomenon.”  It’s caused by white blood cells moving
through the capillaries in your retina.  That’s sort of amazing
that you can actually observe your own white blood cells in motion
without any magnification.  Here’s a link with more details.

Finally, my dad mentioned there was one visual illusion he’d never
figured out: when you stare at an accelerating, spinning wheel (i.e. on
a car), the spinning motion appears to reverse at a certain
point.  We all agreed that this is weird and there is no obvious
explanation for it.  Turns out the scientific community hasn’t
figured it out either.  One theory
suggests that the eye sees the world in discrete snapshots like a movie
camera.  When the wheel spins really fast, the snapshots don’t
keep up with the motion.  Therefore, the wheel can turn almost all
the way around between snapshots, and your mind interprets those
successive snapshots as backward motion.  Another theory focuses
on “perceptual rivalry.” 
This is a little bit more complicated, but basically your brain
incorrectly interprets the motion it sees due to occasional stimulation
of reverse-motion detectors. 

If you’ve never experienced these illusions before, try them sometime.  They’re really cool.

Across the world, fertility rates are falling.  Wealthy places
like Japan and Western Europe have the most serious problems.  I
wonder if this is due to a failure of specialization.  Human
society is increasingly specialized.  Instead of growing our own
food and making our own tools, we engage in a specific occupation -
computer programming, research, accounting, etc. – and delegate other
tasks to strangers.  In societies with very high levels of
specialization, perhaps it is unnatural for each unit to bear
children.  Ants and bees delegate the task of bearing progeny to
one member of their society.  A specialized group rears the
younglings.  Will our society eventually move in this
direction?  Schooling, nannies, and surrogate pregnancy might be
elements of this.  What will our society look like if we go all
the way?  Will the family go the way of the family farm? 
Will we construct centralized facilities to develop children?  I
wonder what it would be like to live in a society like that.  It
all seems so repugnant and alien today.  Then again, I suppose
every generation feels that way.  Maybe I’m the grumpy old man of
tomorrow, reminiscing about the good old days before they’ve come to an
end.

I’ve come to think that fear of death is nothing more than a biological
mechanism that evolved to keep us alive.  None of us has any
recollection of the situation before birth.  I have yet to meet
anybody who feels traumatized by the state of affairs before they came
to exist.  If existence is far superior to non-existence, we
should have negative reactions to non-existence regardless of whether
it occurs before or after our lives.  

I wonder if this relates to why we value life so much more when it
already exists.  Killing someone is a heinous crime.  Denying
birth is a trivial affair.  The debate over abortion is all about
whether or not abortion constitutes murder, not about the wrongs of
denying birth.  After all, abstinence is also a form of denying
birth.  

Which brings me to a question: would you prefer to die tomorrow or never have existed? 

I’m not very good at writing or understanding poetry.  This is
true in general, but I understand Japanese poetry a lot better than
English poetry.  I’ve never been able to figure out just why this
is.  I have several theories:

1. I grew up speaking Japanese in personal settings but English in
academic settings.  Since poetry is usually emotional, naturally I
understand poetry in Japanese better.   

2. I learned Japanese before English.  I didn’t speak English
until I was three years old.  In the realm of poetry, this makes a
big difference.

3. There is something qualitatively different about poetry in Japanese
and poetry in English, and either A. Japanese poetry is better, or B.
my personality/inclinations fit better with Japanese poetry.

I’ve heard some people say English is not a very poetic language even
compared to other Western languages such as Italian.  I’m in no
position to opine on this.  I’ve always been puzzled by the
importation of haiku into English though.  In Japanese, I think
haiku work well because the language is based on monosyllabic
characters and the intonation tends to be constant regardless of how
you put them together.  It’s really hard to get anything close to
this using English words.  Take something like:

So the children play
From the spring and through the fall
Every single day

As opposed to something like:

Magnanimously
Overflowing abundance
Cornucopia

The latter doesn’t have the right rhythm.  The former is
rhythmically closer to a Japanese haiku, but the intonation is still so
different that it doesn’t sound like a haiku.  I think this is
because English words have strong accents (i.e. KA-RA-O-KE vs.
“kar-E-’O-kE).  I don’t know whether these should really be called
haiku or not… I guess my opinion is that enough of the essence is
missing that they shouldn’t be – it’s sort of like asking whether a
marching band minus the percussion and brass is still a marching band.

My friend claims that 95% of the people he meets are boring.  In
this context, boring means uninteresting.  This got us started on
a conversation about what makes people interesting.  In his view,
an interesting person is intelligently subversive.  The antipode
would be somebody excessively conformist and concerned about mundane
affairs.  I disagree.  A lot of it comes down to
compatibility.  The people you find interesting are those who are
similar to you but different enough to keep you intrigued.  But
let’s leave this aside, accepting my friend’s definition.  I still
think the majority of people would qualify as interesting.  Most
people are quirky and unique in ways that aren’t revealed until you
know them  well.  

Actually, come to think of it, if boring people exist in some
absolutist sense, I would find that (and by extension, them) very
interesting.  What characteristics make somebody absolutely boring
to everybody?  Isn’t that the ultimate form of subversion? 
Perhaps these ultimate bores have attained some elusive truth the
purported “interesting” ones can’t grasp.  

I suppose this gives me an excuse if you think this entry is really boring…

It’s always interesting to compare world maps from different
countries.  The differences are usually subtle, but they tell you
something about how a country sees itself in the world. 
Australian maps are famously “upside down.”  Countries generally
try to put themselves in the middle and towards the top, even if this
means distorting the relative area of each hemisphere.  I bought a
map in a Japanese bookstore that marks the Northern Islands as Japanese
territory, and leaves southern Sakhalin blank – a reflection that
Russia and Japan never signed a peace treaty after World War II. 
If you ever see a world map from China, you will find that the Chinese
maritime border extends way into the South China Sea, right up to
Singapore and Malaysia (Spratly Islands dispute).  Changes over
time are also interesting.  The Stanford history department had a
classroom map that proudly displayed two Vietnams and Okinawa as US
territory.  I recall visiting the State Department in 2000 and
seeing a map on the wall that ominously declared much of Eurasia “the
communist bloc.”  Presumably this reflected lack of funding rather
than an ossified mentality. 

Moments of clarity come at random intervals.  A human atrophies
when overworked or underworked.  Life can be combusted or left to
waste.  Transition lends itself to inspiration. 

Moments of clarity come at random intervals.  A human atrophies
when overworked or underworked.  Life can be combusted or left to
waste.  Transition can lend itself to inspiration.