The White Book by Han Kang

This was a work of revelation and inspiration in many senses. In parts, it read like Yoko Ono's wonderful Grapefruit. Images far reaching and penetrating were woven in terms of crystal clear words and poignant and sometimes even murky expressions. 

This was my second reading of Han Kang, after The Vegetarian, and surely would not be my last. I admire the writer very much. In a sense, reading The White Book helped me understand the merits of Han Kang's writings. I think the famed Korean author is capable of exercising gymnastics in the universe of concepts, weaving contemporary arts using linguistic materials. This aesthetics, combined with a keen intellect embracing the universal and generic human values, makes Han Kang the one and only in the world literature today. 

Civil War produced by A24.

 Civil War produced by A24.

To my surprise and delight, the film was totally different from the cleverly crafted trailer I have seen earlier, the effect of which I suspect was intentional. While the teaser appeared like another rollercoaster thriller of previously trodden paths, the work I saw before me in a movie theatre in Tokyo was a fresh, thought-provoking take at a theme people might have long started to think is run-of-the-mill.

The cinematography was stunningly beautiful and inspiring. My favorite scenes are the car trip through the burning forest at night and the terrifying scene in the field with the uncredited appearance of Jesse Plemons, who stole the show all the same.

From the beginning to the controversial ending, the film's statement seemed to be that nothing is sacred. While the more lucky among us breathe in the comfort zones of civilization, the reality of the world is that many people are suffering in chaos, right now, as I write this. There is no moat of presumed privileged society for people, even those in such a superb nation as the United States of America.

I am a great fan of A24, ever since I saw Lady Bird in 2017. It is reassuring that my trusted brand in the film industry took this creative approach to what is often treated as a mundane subject resting on the assumption of bipartisanship in the traditional media. Here's to the spirit of film-making and journalism.

The Vegetarian by Han Kang

The Vegetarian by Han Kang is a work of precision and structure. Although the novel deals with emotionally charged difficulties of contemporary human existence, the storyline follows a tightly-knit sequence which almost has the impression of the inevitable.

Han Kang is a great story-teller, and The Vegetarian is a page-turner, in the literarily heavy-weight sense. The co-existence of literature of the highest caliber and the ability to attract a wide range of readers with the basic urge to read on reminds one of Dostoevsky.

The Vegetarian is a great work dealing with generic human truths, and commonly-found difficulties of the present day. The fact that the novel deals with problems of gender, abuse, social norms, and existential risks could have well turned out to be yet another example of politically correct treatise, but the result is far from so. The novel is full of pleasant surprises out of the norm.

The almost beautifully savage intellect of Han Kang has made this work the true fruit of labour of love, which hangs from a tree of life in a wild orchard where other masterpieces coming from this Korean novelists thrive half-cultivated and half-native, with yet more surprises to be uncovered.

How to use my instagram account.

 I have been having a rather uncertain time figuring out how to make use of my instagram account.

https://www.instagram.com/qualiaken/

Posting photos from my daily life doesn't seem interesting. My ideas and feelings are better expressed here on X. This morning I have made two clumsy drawings on the hotel memo and posted them on instragram. Possibly, posting drawings from time to time would be the best use of instagram in my case.

Cosmic consciousness and star child.

 As Bergson noted things we are accustomed to tend to be processed unconsciously. A newborn would have maximum consciousness as everything is new, but they lack the fully developed cognitive system of adults to appreciate it all. Astronauts who have cosmic consciousness in outer space are like newborns with fully developed appreciative cognitive systems. The final scene of 2001: A space odyssey is an accurate description of this state with the star child as the protagonist.

Mr. Biden is a true hero.

In my humble opinion, President Joe Biden has already done a great job, not only through serving his country as a politician, especially during his presidency, but also by raising awareness of the detrimental effects that aging could have on one's cognitive functions. On a very high-profile platform on the presidential debate, Mr. Biden has inadvertently made the public become aware of what could happen to one when one grows older, a very important public health issue today.

As a human being, everyone would wish Mr. Biden the best of health, in the mind and the body. As a president and a president-to-be, Mr. Biden and people around might have to make decisions in the coming days, as suggested by the New York Times editorial. However, even in that case, through the process of tying to cope with one's conditions due to aging, Mr. Biden would show the world the true value of the human spirit, to do one's best no matter what. In that sense, Mr. Biden is a true hero.

American Presidential debate.

Listening to the Presidential debate, I have the feeling that the format is quite logically constructed, almost like a matrix of relevant issues. Presumably the journalists have done their jobs in preparing the platform. 

The candidates, however, tend to deviate, especially Mr. Trump. Mr. Biden has the tendency to stick to the boxed agenda, clear and crisp. I am not sure which candidate would give a more favorable impression on the American public. Perhaps it is the human factors that permeate through  the matrix that would help people form their opinion. 

Whoever becomes the President, I hope he will do his best to bring back reason and good-will to the international politics. The world is suffering enough from idiosyncratic expressions of interests, personal and national. Perhaps we need more of a matrix of rationality approach, based on universal human values, like this Presidential debate. 

Looking back, I have the impression that Mr. Biden probably did his preparations too rigorously, sticking to the pre-learned lines. A little more spontaneity would have been great.  Mr. Trump, on the other hand, was impulsive and repetitive as ever, but that was something already to be expected so that it would not have been a huge minus. 

The Musk conjecture.

 As humans go out into space and attain cosmic consciousness, novel and interesting questions could be found. Finding questions could be potentially more important than answering them, in the sense of Douglas Adams' The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Let us name this the Musk conjecture, after Elon Musk who repeatedly mentioned this idea. Exploring the Musk conjecture would have serious implications from here, as more people would explore the outer space, onto Mars and beyond.

Evidence that the whole universe is a gigantic simulation.

 Recently, I have discovered a truly remarkable evidence to suggest that the whole universe, including my thoughts and consciousness, are results of a gigantic simulation set up by an advanced artificial intelligence. 

I would like to report the details, but the simulation would not allow it. Whenever I try to type related facts, the movements of my fingers, which are simulated, deviate from my intended trajectories. In addition, I forget all details of the evidence, a few moments after I remember what they are. 

Damn this sad deficiency in my free will. 

I hope somebody else would be able to find a bug in the simulation so that they can discover and report the evidence independently, somehow circumventing the cosmic veto.

1st April, 2024

The silence of the lords. A review of the 3 Body Problem on Netflix.

I have finished watching episodes 1-8 of the 3 Body Problem on Netflix, based on the novel by Cixin Liu. The most interesting idea of the story, for me, was the association of the anti-scientific sentiments of the Cultural Revolution and the need for the aliens to contain the advancement's of earth's science until the arrival of their fleet. This viewpoint has some critical depth, as would be obvious even for a casual thinker.

It was intriguing to see a Chinese character (a female scientist) play a pivotal role in the course of humanity, by inviting the visit and interference into the matters of humanity by aliens. The historical background and context for this act is poignant, and perhaps resonates with the surge of pride of the Chinese people in recent decades in indirect and implicit ways.

Once kickstarted, the confrontations between the alien civilization and humans are mainly carried out by people in the Western civilization, by the UK, US, and UN specifically. Otherwise the drama would have perhaps lacked the crucial geopolitical balance.

The three body problem simulation game is a very original idea of the novel, and has been adapted well into the Netflix series. It also serves as a backdrop for the entire story, providing the rationale for the unpredictability of the plot.

The supposed omnipotence of the surveillance and execution on earth by the remote alien civilization is needless to say scientifically dubious, but may be deemed necessary for the sake of drama. However, the ubiquitous eye of the alien civilization poses a  unique challenge for story development, for obvious reasons. Maybe there is something inherently self-contradictory in the very idea of omnipotence, an issue not sufficiently pursued by this particular drama, making the silence of the "lords" in 3 Body Problem less profound compared to the "Silence" of God in Shusaku Endo's eponymous novel. On the flip side, this would be a testimony to the fact that the novel and the Netflix series have tackled a challenging task in entertainment making with great success, and the quest would go on in the second series, hopefully.

Artificial intelligence and animal spirits.

As artificial intelligence systems advance and execute computations for humans, there are arguments that human jobs would be lost. We would have nothing to do, and just idle away, enjoying the technological Eden that advancements of science and technology have prepared for us. Arguably, it is possible that humans would have less and less need to work, although I remain skeptical about such a vista of workless society. Having said that, I suspect that humans would still have a lot to work on even in a society of ubiquitous AGI and ASI.

We should never forget what the economist John Maynard Keynes described as animal spirits. Humans by nature are restless, and would move around, creating trouble, and then tying to solve them, in a perpetual movement of the soul. Working is not need-based. It is rather urge-based. Even if artificial intelligence systems achieve marvels, humans would never cease to be driven by animal spirits. Animal spirits are sacred, and off-limits, even for AIs.

A dream

I was in a university lecture room, and waiting for Kim Jong Un. There was tension around, with many security guards. 

Among the students sitting near me were apparently expatriates from the North. I had a rather large black camera which looked like a cylinder, and was worried that the guards might mistake it for a weapon. 

However, nobody seemed to notice or care, slightly to my disappointment. As expectations rose high, finally the great leader came into the room. I originally planned to film my own reaction to the lecture, but decided at the last moment to record the movements of Kim Jong Un himself. 

He was accompanied by a female officer, and started to move around, in an agitated manner. He showed a famous Japanese tv drama, and said how he loved the theme. Kim Jong Un started to dance in front of the screen, as if choreographed by the music in the drama.

A growing uneasiness troubled my heart, and finally there was a click of realization. 

Precisely at that moment, a courageous student beside me said "Isn't his all fake?" Kim Jong Un stopped dancing. The organizer, through a microphone, immediately admitted that this was indeed a fake Kim Jong Un. He apologized and explained. They were planning the whole thing with comical intensions, but the authorities giving permission became increasingly serious. So the student union had to fake everything, and they were sorry. 

Listening, I was relieved and disappointed at the same time. I noticed that there were deep wrinkles on the face of the actor who played Kim Jong Un, and realized he did not look like the great leader at all. 

The light was turned on in the class room and I woke up, found myself in my hotel room in Hokkaido. When I opened the window, the streets were covered with snow.

Christof Koch talk at #SfN2023

 I attended the talk by Christof Koch at #SfN2023. A great take on the state of the art on the neural correlates of consciousness. Discussions on the no report paradigm and the need to dissociate between NCC per se and processes temporarily prior or posterior to it, e.g., attention modulation, motor response etc. were extremely interesting. 

It was heartening to see Dr. Koch intellectually still committed to Integrated Information Theory (IIT). I was there at the #ASSC26 in New York earlier this year when the rivalry between global workspace theory (GWT) and IIT was declared to be over in favor of the latter. In view of the turmoil that followed regarding the validity of IIT, it was audacious on the part of Dr. Koch to stick to his principles, although this author does not necessarily agree with the views put forward by proponents of IIT. 

The different ways that correlations between consciousness and intelligence appear in theories of consciousness is particularly interesting. I stood up and asked the first audience question to Dr. Koch, as regards his view on the biological constraints on the relationship between intelligence and consciousness, which, as was mentioned in his own presentation, seems to be roughly linear in actual biological systems. Dr. Koch seemed to imply that there could in general indeed be dissociations between them. IIT would assign low consciousness values to AI systems such as AlphaGo and ChatGPT, although they do exhibit sparks of intelligence. 

Another audience question also addressed the possible biological constraints between intelligence and consciousness. As Dr. Koch suggested in the questions and answers session, there could be dissociations in artificial systems, but in biological systems intelligence would be associated with consciousness in typical states of mind due to evolutionary constraints. I thank Dr. Koch and the organizers for this interesting session.

A great divide in the world today.

In the contemporary world, the greatest divide would not be between the liberals and conservatives. It would be between people who believe in the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and those who don't. Alternatively, there would be a deep chasm between believers and non-believers of the idea that the world is a simulation run on a huge computer (presumably designed by some superintelligence, natural or artificial).

When someone says that he or she believes in the simulation hypothesis, the most appropriate and fun follow-up question would be:

At what time exactly in your life did you realize that this world, including you, is a simulation? Did you notice a bug in the program, or was there a noticeable hole in the visual field?

Neither has happened to me so far, and I don't believe in the simulation hypothesis.

I thought about this rather humorous idea after a close friend of mind, Kaoru Takeuchi, who got his Ph.D in string cosmology from McGill, said that he believed in both the many worlds interpretation and simulation hypothesis. This is indeed a great divide. Rather unsettling, actually. I needed some psychological defense mechanism, and I came up with the above thoughts.

Once you become adequately connected to the central ideas of consciousness, you would become a sincerely ignorant person.

 One of the most important things in consciousness studies would be to realize that you don't understand consciousness. 

It is too easy to fall back on a particular idea, theory, and set of data to (falsely) believe that one has understood the nature of consciousness. Too many people have gone that way and basically never came back, perhaps tragically for themselves. 

I am not necessarily arguing that the cognitive closure argument of Colin McGinn (which, by the way, is a beautifully presented exposition) is correct. I am just making an observation that one of the blessings of learning the facts about the neural correlates of consciousness and related ideas in the philosophy of mind is that one becomes aware of the tremendous difficulty involved in understanding consciousness. 

Indeed, the more you learn about the intricacies of the mind-brain problem, the less confident you become as regards the power of any specific theory (be it the integrated information theory, global workspace theory, quantum theories of mind, etc.) to account for the origin of consciousness. 

In consciousness studies, an intellectual hubris of understanding would come from an insufficient understanding of the field. Once you become adequately connected to the central ideas of consciousness, you would become a sincerely ignorant person. 

The enigma of free will evidently equals that of time.

 Conventional arguments about free will seems to be missing one fundamental aspect, which is the essentially non-existent nature of the future. 

Albert Einstein admitted that his theory of relativity cannot handle the enigma of the now. 

A particular point in time proceeds from the future to the present, and on to the past, in a way described in the historic McTaggart paper.

 In this temporal procession, the future does not seem to exist in any sense, until it becomes the now. 

The past is also non-existent, for sure, even allowing for the possibility of Bertrand Russell's five minutes hypothesis, which suggest that the universe came into existence five minutes ago, with all the relevant memories of the past. 

Henri Bergson's concept of pure memory would complicate this argument, which would solidify the reality of the past if taken seriously, but the five minutes hypothesis is not a logical impossibility on the surface within the conventional worldview. 

So much for the past. The future, on the other hand, is absolutely non-existent, or so it seems from the nature of the stream of consciousness. Any models of free will ignoring this remarkable asymmetry of time would be at best good for all practical purposes, but ultimately hollow. 

The enigma of free will evidently equals that of time. 

If an AGI system is truly general, then it should have nothing to do with intelligence

There is a fundamental problem in the concept of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) or Artificial Superintelligence (ASI). 

It is possible to conceive of a system with great computational capabilities. However, at a particular time under a specific context, the hypothetical AGI system can execute only one computation. Other possible computations exist only in the counterfactual.

 When it comes to designing the "personality" of an AGI, in line with, for example, Eliezer Yudkowsky's Friendly AI concept, the system would implement only one of the possible configurations in the vast personality space at one time. 

Thus, AGI can never be general, given the physical constraints in space and time.

 Indeed, Spinoza's argument about the infinity of God in his magnum opus Ethica beautifully addresses this issue. In this historic treatise, Spinoza states that God, the absolute infinite, has nothing to do with intelligence or personality, which by nature necessitates states of finite configurations. 

If an AGI system is truly general, then it should have nothing to do with intelligence. The same for ASI. As it stands, an AGI or ASI is likely to exist only as a sharply tuned specialist machine, rather than the conventionally conceptualized system of ubiquitous and omnipotent nature. 

We perhaps need to sort things out before we set about this supposed race to AGI, or even as we run on the competition track.  

Let flowers bloom out of the Johnny & Associates desert.

(This is an updated and longer text based on an earlier tweet)

From the cultural point of view, the disservice inflicted by Johnny & Associates has been that the stars from the agency were fakes, avoiding serious auditions, propelled by favoritism of the deceased founder and endorsed by complacent and uncritical Japanese media. If the talent agency endorsed a particular boy group, Japanese media casted them at the main stage, without asking seriously what the nature and quality of the performances might be. This applied, sadly, to the national broadcaster NHK, too.

Japanese entertainment deteriorated in quality as a result, including the film industry in which many from J&A were cast on the premises of dubious stardom, a far cry from the excellence of Ozu and Kurosawa. Needless to say, great films are still created, by people like Hirokazu Koreeda. If you go to a movie theater in Tokyo, and have the misfortune of being exposed to the tasteless trailers of latest Japanese films, many of them with the faces from J & A as the front roles, you would be shuddering in your soul, at the tragic demise of the once mighty and proud Japanese cinema. 

It is now time to say good bye to the kingdom of false stars.  Let flowers of individuality and serious talents bloom from the cultural desert left by Johnny & Associates, after the rain of regret falls on the ground, if tv producers indeed regret what they have been doing. I have no expectations for people at J & A. I wish they would change the name of the agency, and even better, perhaps dissolve the organization all together, as a service to the entertainment industry here. 

Japan deserves a much better entertainment industry than one dominated by the likes of Johnny & Associates. We've had quite enough for a long time.

An astronomer of existence. A review of Hunchback by Sao Ichikawa.

　How is intelligence nurtured?

　Most of the time, we are protected by too many things, to reach the truth of this world barehanded. Above all, those who are typical, or in the cultural majority, tend to be placed socially in such a comfortable position so that good intentions often turn into ignorance, common sense resonates with oppression, without the subjects, tragically for the soul perhaps, becoming aware of and acknowledging such terrible situations.

Hunchback by Sao Ichikawa has just been awarded the 169th Akutagawa Prize, and this masterpiece from a newcomer into literature shakes the world as we know it, and moves the readers closer to the kind of intelligence that humans need and deserve. However, there will still be people who would pass by without touching this philosopher's stone. Even if they get close to it, it might be only human nature to simply fly by and let their psychological guard mechanisms blur their sights again.

The novel gives us a sense of the author's command of language, a unique way of looking at the world from self-defined angles of approach to various representations, which the author has presumably been building up in the days of a prolonged period of handicapped and challenged life. Hunchback conveys a kind of fascination with the attitudes of the human spirit, which goes beyond the plot that has been circulating in the Japanese media so that many literary types would be probably familiar with it by now.

　

It is a personal novel, but that does not mean that it is a reading that relies only on subjectivity, topicality or eye-catching literary gadgets. The author's mind behind it all works as a black hole that would attract readers of today and the future. The author indeed seems to be a black hole of considerable mass, like the one at the centre of this galaxy. As the imploding novel spins, it emits radio waves of words far and beyond.

As discussed in some of the selection reviews published in Bungeishunju, it is understandable to argue that the biblical citation and the fiction within fiction inserted respectively in the middle and the end of the novel,  could have been better omitted. Nevertheless, as several of the judges of Akutagawa Prize wrote, there is something that makes us feel that the author would have seen some inevitability in placing these literary oddballs precisely in those places, even if it might appear disconcerting from a typical literary perspective.

Ignorance out of good intentions and oppression emanating from common sense are naturally inherent not only in the issue concerning physical handicap, but also in the institution of literature itself. The objections the author raises against the culture of the book lovers ignorant of the need for universal access for all spectrum of people could, if taken seriously enough, extend to the main assumptions of today's privileged advocates of literature. In Botchan, Soseki Natsume had readers off their guard, by appearing to narrate the dark sides of the local town of Matsuyama, while he was actually dissecting the limits of the supposedly modernizing Japan of the Meiji era. The same could be happening in Hunchback on a devastating scale.

Reading a great novel sometimes brings outlandish associations out of the blue. After finishing Hunchback, I suddenly remembered, as if in an episode of Marigold Linton's precious fragments, an episode with my awe-inspiring genius friend W in senior high school. W later became the top scorer in the nation wide Common College Entrance examination, an almost trivial feat considering his analytic and aesthetic mind combining the faculties shown by protagonists Narcissus and Goldmund in Herman Hesse's eponymous novel. On a winter school trip to Kyoto and Nara in the second year of school, I was somewhat embarrassed to be sitting around a hot pot with my classmates, including W. Although I kept the appearance of coo, I was secretly perplexed by the fact that I was suddenly in a intimate setting, wondering when to take the boiled ingredients into my own bowl and how to use the chopsticks, surrounded by my classmates, with whom I was usually discussing high-minded matters such as the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche.

At that time, my friend W said, casually and with a smile on his face. "I think real intelligence is tested on such occasions like eating hot pot together." I was pierced, and then comfortably struck and settled, by W's remarks.

Sao Ichikawa's ways of going about situations of accidental intimacy and social antagonism in Hunchback shows real intellect of that kind, sitting together for a hot pot. The truth of the world lies not in the abstract far away, but in the near, close to our skin. Hunchback bends the space-time of our everyday life experiences to show us just a little bit of the existence's rainbow hidden behind all humanity.  Sao Ichikawa is an astronomer of existence.

AI doomerism might actually be a form of end-of-history illusion.

On the web, I have come across some arguments concerning whether the discussions on AI risks are culturally conditioned. Specifically, there were some suggestions that the so-called AI doomers, people who are concerned that the end of humanity is near because of AI, tend to come from a certain corner of the religious spectrum. While there might be some high profile cases which superficially suggest such a correlation, I don't think it is accurate or indeed appropriate to link opinions about the existential risk to specific positions in belief.

To be fair, lines of arguments such as AI doomerism, simulation hypothesis, and mind uploading (not suggesting here that these ideas are  necessarily mutually resonant) might be influenced by culture in the broad sense. No matter what their cultural backgrounds might be, once they are formulated rigorously, everything would eventually boil down to logic and empirical evidence. I am of the opinion that the pros and cons of AI doomerism can be and should be discussed on pure logic, separate from religious connotations, if any at all.

Having written this, I do feel that there are certain cognitive biases that make people inclined towards AI doomerism. It might actually be a form of end-of-history illusion. While we must take necessary precautions to adversary effects of AI, the possibilities for humanity are far from over. Life would with all certainty keep going, with or without AI, or, for that matter, with or without humans as we know it. We tend to be too narrowly focused.