Think Like a Stoic is out today.

 My new book Think Like a Stoic is out today. As someone based in Japan, this is a love letter to the western canon of stoic thinking, together with resonance from Japanese philosophy of life exemplified by such concepts as ikigai and nagomi.

I refer to ethics of samurai, as an instance of living for something greater than yourself. I define stoicism as a life in alignment with the laws of nature, and put it in the context of modern scientific discoveries.

I do hope that you will be interested to read this book. I tried to be as honest and uniquely personal as possible, keeping a vista of the wider view of human culture and civilization at the same time.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Think-Like-Stoic-Ancient-Lived-ebook/dp/B0D83QDBY6

We don't know Haruki Murakami yet.

 We don't know Haruki Murakami yet.

I recently reread Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood in an excellent English translation by the Jay Rubin. The unsettling aftertaste has left me thinking and soul-searching. My conclusion at this moment is clear: We don't know Haruki Murakami yet.

For a Tokyo resident like me, the journey of Haruki Murakami has been a quite interesting one at close sight, with ups and downs, traveling along the long and winding road of world literature.

I was at college when Norwegian Wood came out. It became such a huge social phenomenon. Well before this epic love story of Toru, Naoko, and Midori shot up in the popular imagination, people did know Murakami, but Norwegian Wood broadened the novelist's fan base (and his opponents) multiple tens of times, at the least. I vividly remember, as a graduate student in the Physics department at The University of Tokyo, how I was fascinated upon discovering the green and red covers of the original Japanese hardcovers in the co-op bookshop on the University's Hongo campus. It was love at first sight, followed by the joy of reading the story, in Japanese at that time.

Many waters have flown under the bridge since then, and the novelist's reception both in Japan and worldwide has been quite a sparkling phenomenon in itself. In Japan, the perceived contrast of mood between the avid readers of Murakami and his critics was interesting. The general image was that the fans of Murakami were new kids on the block in literature, and were often ridiculed by the self-proclaimed literature connoisseurs (unjustifiably, in my humble opinion) that they did not read anything else of substance. The gatekeepers of traditional literature in Japan, described under the umbrella term bundan ("literary circle"), were perceived to give Murakami the cold shoulder, although Murakami did win the prestigious Gunzo prize for newly emerging novelists for his debut work Hear the Wind Sing. Such an atmosphere was perhaps the reason, although the novelist (to the best of my knowledge) never expressed his explicit opinion on this, why Murakami has generally shied away from press interviews in his native land of Japan.

Then quite magical and ultimately justifying shift of mood happened. There was a global Murakami boom, and his novels were welcomed by readers in every corner of the globe. Murakami received major international literary awards, including the Franz Kafka prize, named after the legendary Austrian-Czech author with whose works Murakami's novels are sometimes compared. Murakami became a regular in the popular media's and bookmakers' predictions of likely winners of Nobel Prize for Literature, often heading the shortlist.

Interestingly, with the global rise of Murakami's reputation, the reception of Murakami by the mainstream bundan literary circle in Japan has changed. Some people attribute this change of hearts to the kurofune (black ships) effect in Japanese culture, where major influences from abroad would affect and bring about pivoting attitude changes in the Japanese psyche, just as the black ships (warships from the United States of America) in the last days of the samurai era kickstarted the rapid modernization of Japan, which later came to be known as the Meiji Restoration.

For many years now, Murakami's reputation in his home country appears to have been inscribed in solid gold. Murakami's novels are read by the younger generations, too, helped in part by such adaptations as the film Drive My Car.

Quite recently, there has been some newly emerging dialogues about the Haruki Murakami novels. I hear conversations on the gender implications of the Murakami works. Although I personally do not necessarily agree with such views, I do see some soul-searching among the Murakami fans and critics. In the popular discourses, Murakami is being compared with more recent Japanese novelists, especially female authors, e.g. Sayaka Murata, Mieko Kawakami, Yoko Tawada, Miri Yu, and Yoko Ogawa, and that's where attempts at Murakami reinterpretations are being conducted. Although there is always a danger of generalization, it would appear that the female authors, seen from the present day's social climate of political correctness, diversity, equity, and inclusion, have more appropriate standing, compared to male authors like Haruki Murakami. Japanese males might be considered to be something equal to white males in the United States—constituting the majority demographically, enjoying quite a few privileges, and therefore, by default, are suspect, although, needless to say, there are variabilities among individuals.

It is precisely in this cultural climate that some Haruki Murakami lovers are nudged to do soul-searching, to come to a possible revision of their views about the beloved author. In particular, after the awarding of Nobel Prize in Literature to South Korean female author Han Kang, a shift in the world literally mood seems to be generating currents in which Haruki Murakami works are drifting. Indeed, some predict that if the next winner of Nobel Literature Prize is to come from Japan, it would be a female author.

It was with such a rather tense awareness of possible tide shift surrounding Murakami that I recently set about reading Norwegian Wood again, this time in English. Naturally, I have read almost all Haruki Murakami novels in my native tongue Japanese. (That might make me a Murakami fan but I am not writing this essay particularly as one.). A few decades after the first encounter with Norwegian Wood as a college student, reading this magnum opus in English translation gave me a series of revelations.

For example, it read genuinely as an authentic narrative of the growing pains of a young college student, Toru Watanabe, in Tokyo, without any frills or distortions typically associated with a Haruki Murakami novel in Japan. One point of both praise and criticism directed towards Murakami works has been his unique Japanese prose style, which has been likened by some to be similar to Japanese texts translated from English.This does make sense since Murakami himself has testified that he wrote the beginning of his debut novel Hear the Wind Sing in English first and then translated into Japanese. Although the uniquely Murakami style that was thus originated has attracted a majority of Murakami lovers, the particular prose style has also been seen as a possible obstacle in appreciating the Murakami works at their face values, especially by traditionally-minded critics in the bundan. Reading in an English translation by Jay Rubin, all those additives disappeared, and Norwegian Wood tasted like a good Japanese sake, which leaves only a genuine and unobtrusive fragrance. Needless to say, a majority of Haruki Murakami readers in the world appreciate his works through translations in languages other than Japanese, and this distillation effect might have been the reality behind the global popularity of the novelist, somewhat akin to the reception of the Tale of Genji by Lady Murasaki or Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky by world readers.

In addition to beneficial effects through translation, I noticed something perhaps more essential, which is why I am writing this essay. Norwegian Wood made me very uneasy. There was something deeply unsettling in how the story developed, and the feeling was paradoxically not at all unpleasant. I had the feeling that a certain glimpse of the human nature could be attained only through this throwing off of balance from our preconceived ideas about gender, sex, life, and death. Such an epiphany attained through a perturbation of the otherwise fixed mind is a hallmark of great literature, and seemed to be particularly true for Norwegian Wood.

Of particular importance is the gender issue, perhaps the elephant in the room walking around the realm of Murakami novels today. In Norwegian Wood, women, as well as men, are uncertain about the border between love and lust, to Murakami's credit. It is not boy meets girl and boy seduces girl. It is often the other way round. To be sure, some characters, most notably Nagasawa, seems to take advantage of the weaker sex. The ego of Nagasawa inflates itself to fit the hollow cave of the bright lights, big city of Tokyo. Even then, there is something deeply sad and poignant about the way Nagasawa goes about girl hunting in Tokyo streets at night. What Nagasawa does is very far from toxic masculinity. It is more mono no aware than catch me if you can.

The protagonist of the novel, Toru Watanabe, most likely based on the author himself, is ultimately sincere about love although occasionally frivolous about lust. In all, the aftertaste of the novel is an endorsement of humanity, with such wonderful details as Toru eating a cucumber rolled with nori seaweed with Midori's terminally ill father, revealing a deep understanding of life's full spectrum by the author. The cucumber scene is such a great ikigai moment, on par with the madeleine moment in Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time.

In appreciating Norwegian Wood, it is of course legitimate to ask if a work has aged well. We don't need to sink into cultural relativism in which a work of a particular period is to be appraised only in the context of that time. For a work like Norwegian Wood, which continues to be read by new generations, it is entirely appropriate to measure it up against the best contemporary values and practices. However, it would be inappropriate to make hasty judgments on the work, in the current climate concerning gender, diversity, and equality, precisely because Norwegian Wood has the rare quality of taking us to places where the accepted norms and customs no longer hold.

Oscar Wilde wrote in his virtual swan song, a long private letter which came to be published posthumously under the title De Profundis, something quite relevant to the reception of Norwegian Wood and Haruki Murakami works in general: "People whose desire is solely for self-realisation never know where they are going."

Murakami does not know where he is going, at the best moments in his creative writing. His novels, Norwegian Wood, Hear the Wind Sing, The Wind-up Bird Chronicle, Kafka on the Shore, IQ84, Killing Commendatore, and so on are all great unsettlers of reason, shaking our prefixed values from the root and setting us on journeys in uncharted territories. The zeitgeist of our time might be that works that neatly fit into the accepted values of the time are given good marks. Murakami can certainly do and has done that, but his forte is perhaps something much more. If some part of Haruki Murakami makes the readers somewhat uneasy today, it is not because his works have not aged well. It is because Murakami is dealing with generic human truths, in which we cannot grasp ourselves so easily, because there are unfathomable undercurrents in human existence. Such a sensitivity of the human unconscious, reminiscent of works by Freud and Jung, is increasingly important in this age of rising artificial intelligence.

Requiring humans to fit into particular sets of evaluation functions, no matter how unquestionable they may appear, is like turning ourselves into inferior copies of AI agents. Maybe it is already happening, if you are sensitive of the symptoms, here, there, and everywhere.

A great work of fiction is an antidote for a dominant system of the day, in that it tells us that we are actually wider than the sky. If we are true to our nature, and we desire solely for self-realisation, we never know where we are going.

We don't know Haruki Murakami yet.

Figure: Picture drawn by ChatGPT with the prompt "Draw a thoughtful child wandering in a Norwegian Wood"

Collapse of generative AIs?

Some people are starting to predict a collapse of generative AIs, but I am perhaps more skeptical of the AI skeptics than of AI itself. The fact is that nobody, even the AI gods, don't know for sure. Butterfly effects are everywhere. It is difficult to predict the future, not only for AI (predictive AIs have bad track records) but also for humans.

Having said that, it may be argued that the road from intelligence (natural or artificial) to economic prosperity is not straightforward. Intelligent people do not necessarily make a lot of money. The correlation between IQ and income, if any, is very weak. Even if AI makes great progress from here, it does not necessarily follow that individuals or companies employing AI would be more productive.

The key missing link would be the embodiment of intelligence. Even if there is high intelligence, there need to be cleverly crafted schemes to make it socially and economically relevant. A newly discovered theorem in mathematics, for example, might provide brand new encryption schemes. In order for it to be materialized, certain sets of requirements need to be satisfied. The same goes for the road from AI to new cures of cancer, innovative ways to curb aging, and realization of nuclear fusion, all of which, needless to say, would provide huge utility and result in economic gains.

The benefits of AI are indirect compared to new energy resources. Right now, humans are converting a lot of energy into a huge amount of compute in the hope to achieve AGI and ASI. Even if humans are successful in that feat, ways to employ the superb intelligence to increase utility need to be considered. The societal and economic embodiment of AI towards increased utility would be part of the AI alignment schemes in general, and one of the most crucial challenges of our time.

Why Elon Musk is so powerful.

Mr Musk has been a marvel for obvious reasons, but in the last few weeks his influence has gown out of proportions. The bromance with Mr Donald Trump, the President-elect, is certainly a factor, but that alone cannot explain the Musk phenomenon that is sweeping the globe now. 

Wise people have always argued that it is not that AI would take over humanity. It would rather be that humans empowered by AI would overwhelm people less fortunate. The Musk phenomenon, bolstered by his success in Tesla and SpaceX, was given the crucial boost by his purchase of twitter (now converted to X). The house-made Grok is always on X, and X is evidently the embodiment of AI-powered dominance of the world, at least somewhere on the roadmap. Mr Musk has been one of the founders of Open AI. With his new startup xAI and much beyond to come, together with the track record of serial successes, give Mr. Musk power in reality and in imagination. If he could win in choosing sides in the American Presidential election, probably he will win in this arms race of AI towards AGI and ASI, at least will be on the winning side, an educated guess will suggest.

So as Mr. Musk goes about the business of interfering with European politics, even suggesting to King Charles to dissolve the parliament, there is an image of a man stroking a trademark white cat. AI would not conquer humans. People smart enough to employ AI would conquer humans. Mr. Musk is at the right place at the right time with the right track record. How the rest will turn out to be history is yet to be seen.

We don't understand what the language game is.

In board games such as chess, go, and shogi, the AIs have beaten human champions. Indeed, today, nobody is in the doubt as to whether AIs have edge over humans. The battle between AIs and humans are over in these fields.

When it comes to Large Language Models, the situations is not so clear. Although people are generally under the impression that the Turing test is now probably moot, especially because you can formulate the arguments in any ways you prefer, there is no clear measure to judge whether LLMs are doing the job better than humans.

The fundamental problem is our lack of understanding of the nature of the language game. Although Ludwig Wittgenstein described it in a passing manner in his Philosophical Investigations, the description is far from adequate. To this day, we do not have a clear model of what the language game is.

We humans don't know what the language game is exactly, and yet we engage ourselves in it every day. The Large Language Models are being developed and employed without a definite idea of what cognitive function it is addressing.  

How to measure the intelligence of AGI and/or ASI/

As we go on the road to AGI and/or ASI, there is a genuine problem of how to measure intelligence. IQ is based on the assumption of a Gaussian distribution and deviation from the mean as ratio to standard deviation, so it cannot be applied to AI far removed from humans.

Assessing intelligence purely by the vastness of memory and the speed of calculation would be a part of the equation, but not the essential part. Defining AGI and ASI in terms of the tasks they could perform would be helpful, but then we humans might not be able to conceptualize all the relevant tasks.

There is also the problem of Vingean uncertainty and xAI. If ASI ever materializes, it might not be possible for us humans to understand its functionality. It would be difficult to require explainable performance because that would mean mediocrity within the range of human intelligence.

The only hope would be instrumental convergence. Here, defining AGI and ASI in terms of embodied cognition would prove robust and essential.

Formalization of numbers.

I always felt that there was something strange about the way the concept of numbers are formalized by set theory or category theory. Although the concept of numbers do have some problems, unless we deal with infinities there does not seem to be an urgent need for formalization, as far as calculations are concerned, including complex numbers.

Humans seem to have an intuitive understanding of numbers, on par with qualia. By trying to formalize numbers by set or category or other theories, something extra is added, and there are consequently some "evil questions" that shouldn't be asked, as numbers represented by these formalisms have something external to our intuitive understanding of numbers. 

I am not saying that attempts at formalization are meaningless. I just feel that numbers should be treated on the same footing as qualia. Just as attempts at formalizing qualia do not go well, formalization of numbers is bound to be unsatisfactory, because such an approach is not addressing the essential nature of numbers directly. 

An entertainment of one's own. Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl by Nick Park, released from Aardman @aardman

It is so wonderful when grownups do their best to entertain children and the inner children in our hearts.

Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl (2024) is such a labour of love, that when you imagine all the efforts and ingenuity that went into it you almost wanted to cry.

I saw it on Netflix in Tokyo on the release day.

The opening sequence of Heath Robinson gadgets achieving feats of waking up, body washing, changing clothes, and breakfast preparation would put a smile on everyone's face. The new invention by Wallace, a robot gnome for whom "no job is too small", invokes an alarm in the viewers' mind when the AI assisted agent goes about tidying up the garden. The contrast between a more contemporary, naturalistic gardening principles and the old school geometrical garden making enforced by the gnome is cleverly slipped into the plot.

The liberal arts hight standards of the animation is evident, for example, when the disgruntled Gromit, chased away from the usual habitat by the Wallace's-favour-winning gnome, reads none other than Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own in bed.

The beauty is that the cleverness is never imposed upon the viewer. The AI alignment problem is clearly one of the themes, where an artificial agent designed with good intentions can cause unintentional havoc. The Waluigi effect, where an AI made as Luigi (a good guy) can turn into a bad guy (Waluigi) through a slight loss of balance, is one of the hidden themes of the film. Indeed, the whole film could be considered as a statement on AI safety, but the sheer entertainment value completely wraps it up, so that you don't have to notice to enjoy the story.

Children are very sensitive and they take messages with astonishing efficiency and sincerity. The fact that a number of grownups (I presume) of the Aardman clan led by the great Nick Park has produced such a sparkle joy for kids is a glimmer of hope at this otherwise gloomy turn of quarter century.

A final spoiler alert: You should take the art of old school tea making very seriously.

Queen of Hearts. Diane Morgan in Cunk on Life.

Cunk on Life, starring Diane Morgan as the cleverly irrelevant interviewer and interrogator Philomena Cunk, is a delightful repeat of this hugely popular franchise as well as a courageous trial at things sometimes shockingly and delightfully new. 

The hallmark deadpan dialogues with experts are still there (I wonder how the interviewees can keep straight faces confronted by Diane Morgan in the set), and the scripts are masterfully written, although I suspect there must be many ad-libs. There is something profoundly interesting in the way the Cunk character succeeds in producing laughter, by exposing something vulnerable in the experts or expert knowledge. It is quite all right, because that would be the job description for the experts involved. Well done.

Cunk is almost always beside the point, but in an up-to-date, politically aware (not necessarily correct, which is unfortunately important in today's cultural climate) way. Personally, Cunk somehow reminds me of Socrates, in that the ultimate wisdom can be only expressed in terms of self-acknowledged ignorance. But then Socrates was perhaps one of the first recorded comedians, and arguably one of the best ever.

When dealing with venerable issues such as religion, classic art, and theory of evolution, Cunk nonchalantly throws modern and contemporary items such as mobile phone, AI, and her mate Paul, which may appear inappropriate for the casual observer, but ultimately prove very relevant. After all, in Cunk on Life we are in a timeless zone, where things grand and trivial, meaningful and meaningless, noble and vulgar meet. 

That's the kind of place where genuine creativity happens, and Philomena Cunk reigns as the Queen of Comedy, as well of Hearts. The warm heart was felt, for example,  when the fourth wall was broken, and the sound guys were given the credit that were due. Wonderful stuff created by wonderful staff.  

We are all in the Big Bang gang, by the way.

Cunk on Life. BBC2 and Netflix.

Ken Mogi bio, contact, and profile photos.

 

Ken Mogi is a neuroscientist, writer, and broadcaster based in Tokyo. Ken Mogi is a senior researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratories, and a visiting and project professor at the University of Tokyo. He leads the Collective Intelligence Research Laboratory (CIRL) at the Komaba campus of the University of Tokyo, together with Takashi Ikegami, focusing on Collective Intelligence and AI alignment. Ken Mogi is the headmaster of Yakushima Ohzora High School, a correspondence-based institution with 13000 enrolled students. He has a B.A. in Physics and Law, and Ph.D in Physics, from the University of Tokyo. He has done postdoctoral research in University of Cambridge, U.K. He has published more than 300 books in Japan covering popular science, essay, criticism, self-help, and novels. Ken Mogi published several bestsellers in Japan (with close to million copies sold). He was the first Japanese to give a talk at the TED main stage, in 2012 (Long Beach). 

As a broadcaster, Ken Mogi has hosted and is hosting many tv and radio programs, in stations including the national broadcaster NHK, and Discovery Channel Japan. He has also appeared in several international programs, such as Closer to Truth and a Bloomberg documentary hosted by Hannah Fry.

Ken Mogi has a life-long interest in understanding the origin of consciousness, with the focus on qualia (sensory qualities of phenomenal experience) and free will. Ken Mogi’s book on IKIGAI, published in 58 countries and in 32 languages, has become a global bestseller. The German version of IKIGAI was the No.1 bestselling book in nonfiction in Germany for 38 cumulative weeks in 2024, becoming the no.1 Bestseller of the Year 2024 in nonfinction. Ken Mogi’s book with Thomas Leoncini, Ikigai in Love, was published in 2020. Ken Mogi's third book in English, The Way of Nagomi, came out in the U.K. in 2022 and in the U.S. in January 2023. Ken Mogi's fourth book, Think Like a Stoic, will come out in September 2025.

 

Contact:

e-mail:kenmogi2005qualia@gmail.com

X: @kenmogi

Instagram: @qualiaken

Ken Mogi profile photos.

You can download large files by clicking on the URL below.

Ken Mogi photos by Itaru Hirama (2021)

 

 

Ken Mogi profile photos unplugged