That's the spirit.

I travel quite often on the Shinkansen. It is quite efficient, and is an indispensable infrastructure for the contemporary life of Japan. The safety record of Shinkansen is a marvel.

While relying quite heavily on the sophisticated railroad technologies, I sometimes miss the old days when traveling used to be more relaxed. The old spirit is depicted quite nicely in the wonderfully humorous essay "Idiot Train" by Hyakken Uchida. I made a blog entry . on this topic on December 29th, 2006.

I reproduce here my own translations of the Idiot Train posted on that day.

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I call this trip idiot train because people would say so behind my back anyway. Needless to say, I myself do not consider this undertaking to be that of an idiot. To be honest, you don't need a reason to go somewhere. I don't have any reason in particular to do so, but I have made up my mind to go to Osaka on the train.
As I do not have any particular reason to make this trip, it is ridiculous to travel second or third class. Traveling first class is always the best. At the age of 50, I made up my mind to always travel first class. In spite of my determination, I might be obliged to travel third class when I have no money and yet have some specific reason to make the trip. But I would never travel second class, which is irritatingly ambiguous. I don't like the appearances of people traveling in a second class coach.
-----------
------------
"I would like to go to Osaka."
"Ah, that is a good idea."
"So I came to see you on this matter."
"Is it an urgent business?"
"No. I don't have any particular reason, but I think I will go any way."
"Are you going to stay there for some time?"
"No. I think I will return immediately. Depending on the circumstances, I might even come back on the night train as soon as I arrive at Osaka."
"What do you mean depending on the circumstances?"
"Depending on how much travel money I have. If I have sufficient money, I will come back immediately. If I don't have enough, I might stay in Osaka for one night."
"I don't quite understand you."
"On the contrary, everything is clear. I have considered the matter with great care."
"Is that so?"
"Anyway, can you lend me some money?"
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That's the spirit.

Life is not very much fun if everything becomes efficient and logical. And the wise and sensitive will find that there is as much hidden logic and efficiency in Uchida's superficially idiosyncratic ways of seeing the world as in a report by a MBA.

Perhaps much more.

You must live

Soseki Natsume , in his beautiful collection of essays "Inside My Glass Doors", recalls a woman who visited him at his domicile to confide her woes. After narrating a painful history of her life, she asks Soseki whether she should live.

"I am afraid that the beautiful state of my mind would be marred as the time passes. I cannot bear the thought of a future when all memories would have been lost, and I continue to live on like an empty soul" she says.

The clock strikes eleven. Soseki says that he would walk her. It was a silent night, with the serene moon shining on the street. At the corner, the woman bows and says to Soseki "I am honored to be accompanied by you thus". Soseki answers that he is just a human being like her.

"Do you really think it is an honour?" Soseki asks. "Yes" the woman answers. "Then you must live". Soseki says to the woman.

Soseki walked her a little further, before returning home.

We don't know what happened to the woman after that evening. Soseki died a year after this essay was published.

Basic income

Everybody has a right to live, pursue happiness, and enjoy the small things in life. Of course, when the chips are down, and we are at the mercy of destiny, we may be not able to live. The problem with humanity is, the safety network is sometimes too loose and / or negligent when the society itself is well and thriving.

Thus I am for the introduction of a basic income. People might say that it is counterintuitive or morally suspect to be provided with an income when one is not working. Some might claim that its introduction might seriously undermine the work ethics. I rather think that the basic income can be incorporated into the economical system in a step conceptually similar to the renormalization in quantum field theory.

Self-reference.

There was a poignant obstinacy in Albert Einstein's effort to come up with an unified field theory in his later years. Einstein's rejection of the quantum mechanical solution was based on his strong intuition. Whether his intuition was wrong is still an open question.

It is interesting how gravity has withstood all efforts of unification so far. Gravity is after all a force pertaining to the space-time structure. So there is an inevitable element of self-reference.

It is interesting to consider how the theory of relativity, derived from Mach's principle, fares with the notorious problem of the self-referential.

Anne and Katherine

So I have been reading "Anne of Windy Willows" in the toilet.

Classics have many hidden truths that you discover when you re-read it. This morning I realized that Anne and Katherine are actually like mirror images. Both were orphans. Anne found a home full of love at Green Gables, whereas Katherine (spelt with a K) found that all these people who took care of her did not really want her or love her.

Anne invites Katherine over to Green Gables, despite her doubts, where the two souls finally come closer.

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Somehow, it seemed impossible to think of Katherine crying. But she was. And her tears suddenly humanized her. Anne no longer felt afraid of her.
"Katherine . . . dear Katherine . . . what is the matter? Can I help?"
"Oh . . . you can't understand!" gasped Katherine. "Things have always been made easy for you. You . . . you seem to live in a little enchanted circle of beauty and romance. 'I wonder what delightful discovery I'll make today' . . . that seems to be your attitude to life, Anne. As for me, I've forgotten how to live . . . no, I never knew how. I'm . . . I'm like a creature caught in a trap. I can never get out . . . and it seems to me that somebody is always poking sticks at me through the bars. And you . . . you have more happiness than you know what to do with . . . friends everywhere, a lover! Not that I want a lover . . . I hate men . . . but if I died tonight, not one living soul would miss me. How would you like to be absolutely friendless in the world?"
Katherine's voice broke in another sob.
"Katherine, you say you like frankness. I'm going to be frank. If you are as friendless as you say, it is your own fault. I've wanted to be friends with you. But you've been all prickles and stings."
"Oh, I know . . . I know. How I hated you when you came first! Flaunting your circlet of pearls . . ."
"Katherine, I didn't 'flaunt' it!"
"Oh, I suppose not. That's just my natural hatefulness. But it seemed to flaunt itself . . . not that I envied you your beau . . . I've never wanted to be married . . . I saw enough of that with father and mother . . . but I hated your being over me when you were younger than I . . . I was glad when the Pringles made trouble for you. You seemed to have everything I hadn't . . . charm . . . friendship . . . youth. Youth! I never had anything but starved youth. You know nothing about it. You don't know . . . you haven't the least idea what it is like not to be wanted by any one . . . any one!"
"Oh, haven't I?" cried Anne.
In a few poignant sentences she sketched her childhood before coming to Green Gables.
"I wish I'd known that," said Katherine. "It would have made a difference. To me you seemed one of the favorites of fortune. I've been eating my heart out with envy of you.

(From L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Windy Willows).

---------------------

Anne could have been Katherine, and Katherine could have been Anne, if fortune and misfortune have mixed with each other.

It is the feeling of the contingent that makes the episode between Anne and Katherine one of the most memorable in the whole novel.

Ten seconds

Many interesting problems can be stated in 10 seconds, like "what's the relationship between the brain and mind?" or "do you really love me?"

In Richard Feynman's wonderful book "Surely you're joking Mr. Feynman!", there is an interesting entry about how Feynman tries to answer any problem that can be stated in ten seconds with the accuracy of plus minus 10 percent, in just sixty seconds.

-----------

One day I was feeling my oats. It was lunch time in the technical area, and I don't know how I got the idea, but I announced, "I can work out in sixty seconds the answer to any problem that anybody can state in ten seconds, to 10 percent!"

People started giving me problems they thought were difficult, such as integrating a function like 1/(1 + x^4), which hardly changed over the range they gave me. The hardest one somebody gave me was the binomial coefficient of x^10 in (1 + x)^20; I got that just in time.

They were all giving me problems and I was feeling great, when Paul Olum walked by in the hall. Paul had worked with me for a while at Princeton before coming out to Los Alamos, and he was always cleverer than I was. For instance, one day I was absent-mindedly playing with one of those measuring tapes that snap back into your hand when you push a button. The tape would always slap over and hit my hand, and it hurt a little bit. "Geez!" I exclaimed. "What a dope I am. I keep playing with this thing, and it hurts me every time."

He said, "You don't hold it right," and took the damn thing, pulled out the tape, pushed the button, and it came right back. No hurt.
"Wow! How do you do that?"
I exclaimed.
"Figure it out!"

For the next two weeks I'm walking all around Princeton, snapping this tape back until my hand is absolutely raw. Finally I can't take it any longer. "Paul! I give up! How the hell do you hold it so it doesn't hurt?"
"Who says it doesn't hurt? It hurts me too!"

I felt so stupid. He had gotten me to go around and hurt my hand for two weeks!

So Paul is walking past the lunch place and these guys are all excited. "Hey, Paul!" they call out. "Feynman's terrific! We give him a problem that can be stated in ten seconds, and in a minute he gets the answer to 10 percent. Why don't you give him one?"

Without hardly stopping, he says, "The tangent of 10 to the 100th."
I was sunk: you have to divide by pi to 100 decimal places! It was hopeless.

Excerpt from "Surely your're joking, Mr. Feynman!"
--------------

The idea is not to require the exact answer. You need to work out only to 10 percent. Feynman's brilliance shines, among the mirthful laughter of the geniuses.

It is fun to extend the game to things other than those that are numerical. You can always come up with a pretty good qualitative appraisal of issues that can be stated within ten seconds, in just sixty seconds.

How to create a stone

When I was seven, I thought I discovered how to create a stone.

It was during the summer holidays. I was playing with mud near house, mixing with water and kneading the mud.
When the night fell, I left the mud dough on a gutter cover along the road, and went home to have supper.

The next morning, when I went to see what happened to the mud dough, I discovered a pretty pebble instead. The shape was elongated, not entirely round, and between the edges you could observe beautiful strata of colors.

I was fascinated, and believed (as a seven year old could believe) that the mud dough has somehow turned into a stone overnight.

In September, when the school started, we had to hand in each a short report about our holiday investigations. It was the thing to do for school kids in those days. I wrote a report about "how to create a stone". I theorized that you had to knead the mud dough as tightly as possible. Then you left it outdoors. The cool night air had a certain effect on the mud dough, the details of which were still unknown. By the morning, the mud dough would have been turned into a stone, its coloring depending on the details of condition.

As I look back, the strange twilight zone feeling of really believing in the metamorphosis returns. The magic of childhood.

It was not long before I started to suspect that there was something wrong with the whole idea. I started to understand that in order to make a stone you needed a very high pressure. Like when you are pressed under the massive rocks of mountains.
Despite the creeping doubts, I kept the stone as my personal gem in a drawer. When my father rebuild the house, the stone went missing. The school report was lost, too.

I would dearly love to see the stone and the school report now, if it was at all possible.

Brain and heart.

In the favorite novel of my youth "Anne of Windy Willows" (aka "Anne of Windy Poplars", but I somehow prefer the Willows version for the vivid visual image the title invokes), Anne Shirley gives a piece of her philosophy of mind.

"My brain agrees with every word you say but my heart simply won't," said Anne. "I feel, in spite of everything, that Katherine Brooke is only a shy, unhappy girl under her disagreeable rind. I can never make any headway with her in Summerside, but if I can get her to Green Gables I believe it will thaw her out."

(From L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Windy Willows).


In the context of referring to the emotional and sentimental dispositions with which one goes about in one's life, "heart" equals "brain". It is at least so from the modern brain scientific point of view. However, the wisdom of folk psychology often distinguishes the two, as the above Anne Shirley quote tells us.
The phenomenology of the conscious mind, as it is based entirely on the activities of neurons, is in essence bound to the brain. It is interesting to see how the word "heart" is used as a means of extending one's sensitivities beyond this limitation. Anne is trying to make the life brighter for her deprived colleague Katherine Brooke, and is thus trying to go beyond the borders of individualities. The colloquial expression "heart" as opposed to "brain" thus might reflect our often unconscious wish to go beyond the dichotomy between the Dionysian and the Apollonian sensu Nietzsche.

Up where the air is clear

Whenever I encounter an interesting person I try to strike up a conversation.

The other day I was running in the park forest. I chanced upon a man in the mid 50s, with a professional insect net. I used to study butterflies as a kid, and can tell a pro from an amateur.

I stopped jogging, said hello, and asked the gentleman what he was up to. "Insects", he said. "What kinds of insects?" I asked. "All kinds", he answered smiling.

I introduced my self as a "professional" entomologist. Then the gentleman became eager. "You know I have been coming to this forest for the last 10 years. Once every week. During this time, I saw Uranami-Akashijimi only once."
"Really?" I cried. "Can you really find an Uranami-Akashijimi here?"

Uranami-Akashijimi (Japonica saepestriata)
is a small gem of a butterfly, diminishing in numbers in recent years.

The gentleman told me an interesting fact. From then on, whenever I go running in the park forest, I sometimes look up to the treetops, where Japonica Saepestriata could be flying.

In the last scene of my favorite musical "Mary Poppins", the song lyric famously goes "up where the air is clear". The air has become clearer around the forest park ever since I met the gentleman with the professional net.


The tree tops in the forest park.

Spiritual embodiment

There are certain areas of spiritual tradition that leaves you bewildered in a special and indescribable impression when you are there.


The Ise Shrine is one of them.

I have visited the Shrine countless of times. The meticulous care taken in its construction in harmony with nature is apparent as you cross the bridge over the Isuzu river. The tradition of rebuilding the shrine every 20 years (Sengu) has been running for about 1300 years. The next Sengu is due in 2013.

Whenever I have been to a particular location of spiritual significance like Ise, I always wonder why I can't have the same set of feelings back in my daily environment. Why can't I be in the mindset of pondering remote things in the busy streets of Tokyo, in the laboratory, on the train.

In principle one thinks one could, but in actuality one can't.

The reason is most probably in the intimate interaction of the body with the environment. You rediscover the significance of spiritual embodiment.


The Old Shrine Site (Kodenchi) in Ise, waiting for the next rebuilding of the Shrine.

Mastery of admiration

One of the cute and poignant things I encountered during my recent stay in Hong Kong was the Yuen Po Street Bird Garden. There you could take a look and (if you would like) purchase a variety of birds. Those animals of flight were exhibiting their gaiety in the cages hung from the roof, or, the case may be, piled up on the pavement. I was particularly interested in birds which looked like a magpie. These birds pass the mirror self recognition test. It would be fun to observe their behavior as they learn to make use of the visual reflections.

Observation is an art open to anybody, but takes many years to develop and refine. One old gentleman admiring the birds stands in a particular vividness in my memory.

He seemed to be an epitome of the mastery of admiration.

Today's opposition

In the Christmas Special episode ("Party Games") of my favorite British political comedy, "Yes, Minister", Sir Arnold, the cabinet secretary, remarks to Sir Humphrey Appleby that "today's opposition is tomorrow's government".

A word of wisdom.

Because human hearts are weak, there is a tendency to take the status quo for granted. But history tells us that what appear to be the opposition today is acually tomorrow's standard and establishment.

The question is, with which you identify yourself today, the opposition or the government. I am one who always thinks that it is more fun to identify with the opposition, not only in politics but in scientific and cultural domains as well.

APCAP 2009 call for papers.

The fifth Asia-Pacific Computing and Philosophy Conference.
1st & 2nd October, 2009, at
University of Tokyo

You are invited to submit an abstract of up to 1000 words by 15th July, 2009.

There are eight tracks. I am going to chair the "Social Construction of the Self" session.


Social Construction of the Self
Track Chair: Ken MOGI
The self is a phenomenologically salient and functionally important aspect of human cognition. The discovery of the mirror neurons (i.e., cells in the prefrontal cortex representing actions of the self and others) has added a new and important dimension to the empirical investigation into this fundamental aspect of existence. Findings in cognitive neuroscience have revealed how the self is constructed through the interaction with others. The self is a socially constructed, embodied phenomenon. Various aspects of cognition, e.g., active vision, sensori-motor coordination, perception of time, body image, emotion, and memory, make sense only in reference to the self. Here experts from neuroscience, philosophy, artificial life, physics and other fields discuss the newly emerging science of the self. The session will be empirically based while trying to be theoretically enterprising at the same time.

AP-CAP 2009.

Sunset

When I was a kid, I used to imagine that it is always sunset somewhere on earth. Actually, as the earth rotates on its axis, the relation to the sun is always the same in essence. It is only that different parts of the globe are illuminated, and the bright and dark pattern moves on its surface.

There is a translational invariance in the time of the earth. Bound to Tokyo, I think that it is day, then twilight, and then night. But from the earth's point of view, it is always the same earth time.

When it comes to lives on earth, there is also a translational invariance. At any moment, somebody is being born. A loved one is passing away. Others are in the prime of juvenile joy. Some are feeling the decline. Although the points in the time of life is different for each one of us, taken on the earth scale as a whole, there is always and will ever be just one life time.

At any given moment, it is always sunset for the life of somebody among us.

Cloud of regret

Findings in the cognitive neurosciences suggest that the orbitofrontal cortex, along with other loci, is involved in regret.

Regret is fascinating. Therein you have a comparison between the factual and the counterfactual. You have chosen A (the factual), when you could have chosen B (the counterfactual). By regretting, you are going on a time travel, to that fateful moment of decision making, and wish that you could have chosen the other alternative.

Regret invokes a often dramatic change of your world view. The fact that you have chosen A instead of B reflects the value system that you had at that moment. By regretting, you repent and try to modify, if you can, the frame of cognition and the set of biases and prejudices that led to the regrettable choice, ultimately constituting the person that is you. This reconfiguring of personality is often painful, but is worth every agony in the long run.

Humans too often ignore incidents of failure, trying to forget what have happened. While oblivion is sometimes certainly beneficial, there is a silver lining to every cloud of regret, however thick it is.

Anticonsciousness?

There are countless electrons in the universe, and yet they all have exactly the same mass and charge. Why should all the electrons have exactly the same mass and charge?

Richard Feynman, in his Nobel Lecture , tells us of a telephone conversation with another great physicist, John Wheeler.

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As a by-product of this same view, I received a telephone call one day at the graduate college at Princeton from Professor Wheeler, in which he said, "Feynman, I know why all electrons have the same charge and the same mass" "Why?" "Because, they are all the same electron!" And, then he explained on the telephone, "suppose that the world lines which we were ordinarily considering before in time and space - instead of only going up in time were a tremendous knot, and then, when we cut through the knot, by the plane corresponding to a fixed time, we would see many, many world lines and that would represent many electrons, except for one thing. If in one section this is an ordinary electron world line, in the section in which it reversed itself and is coming back from the future we have the wrong sign to the proper time - to the proper four velocities - and that's equivalent to changing the sign of the charge, and, therefore, that part of a path would act like a positron."

From Richard Feynman's Nobel lecture, December 11, 1965
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The basic idea is that antimatters (such as positrons) can be regarded as matters (such as electrons) traveling "backwards" in time (e.g. from the future to the past). Then, you can conceive the world-line of a single electron traveling in a zigzag manner from the past to the future, and then from the future to the past, and so on and so on, giving rise to all the electrons and positrons in the universe.

The catch is, as Feynman says, that then there would have to be exactly the same number of positrons as electrons. Actually, the universe as we know it is composed mainly of matters, an asymmetry which has not been properly accounted for yet. Despite this catch, Wheeler's single electron universe is a fascinating idea.

Talking of the mind-brain problem, it appears that despite the superficial differences, we all have basically the same form of consciousness. In that sense, there is only one consciousness, like there appears to be only one electron.

Maybe we can conceive a single consciousness traveling in a zigzag manner like Wheeler's single electron in the space-time. Then, of course, we should have an anticonsciousness, whatever it may be.

That is yet to be found, but who knows?

Void

On 3rd January 2007, I posted in this journal an essay titled "Managing insanity in a proper way". Therein I quoted Ken Shiotani, my philosopher friend. I reproduce his words of wisdom here.

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Another Shiotani quote stayed with me. I think it was one of these days when I was wont to hang out with him in Tokyo bars and Izakayas. After speaking wishfully of his friends who was "climbing the ladders" smoothly and becoming authors and associate professors, Shiotani sighed and said thus.

"I don't want to be a star myself. I would rather like to be the dark void in which all these constellations shine".

From "Managing madness in a proper way". The Qualia Journal, 3rd January 2009
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Coming back from Hong Kong to Tokyo on the airplane, I thought that one could certainly imagine that one was the dark void in which the stars shone. Imagining the self as "voidness" makes one feel so eerie, lonely, transparent, isolated, omnipotent, permeating, and yet so intimate. I think it was this touch of intimacy which struck me most when I first heard Ken Shiotani mention the phrase.
We all need to have an element of the void sensu Shiotani in our heart, in order to remain a decent human being. We should never be dazzled by the stars alone.

Immediacy

I am in Hong Kong now, attending a conference on the science of consciousness. In the morning, I gave a talk in the auditorium of the Hong Kong Polytechnic University.
I started my talk with a discussion on immediacy. The slide on this theme read thus.

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The immediacy hypothesis

The phenomenological contents of a subject at a particular specious moment is determined by, and only by, the properties of physical properties of the subject’s brain at that moment
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Another slide read thus.

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Response selectivity is established in essence as a statistical property.
The selectivity to a bar of certain orientation can be empirically established only by the exposure to and comparison with the activities invoked by bars of different orientations.
Such a statistical property is not immediately available for the subject at a particular psychological moment, and cannot constitute the immediate cause of the phenomenological experience.
--------

Our consciousness is always enshrined in the immediate now, and yet, we can reflect on the past, dream about the future. Immediacy also applies to space. We are constrained by the spatially immediate. And yet, we can conceive of things distant and non-existent.
Perhaps it is because we are ever prisoned in the immediate that we developed phenomenological state of minds such as intentionality.

Cloud.

On August 9th, 1945, an airplane approached Kokura, a city in the northern part of Kyushu island. My mother, a girl of 9 then, lived in Kokura with her parents. It was a cloudy day at Kokura. The airplane circled above Kokura, looking for a break in the cloud. But the cloud covered the city, and the fuel started to run low.

So the plane went to Nagasaki instead.

If it had not been cloudy over Kokura on that day, my mother would not have lived to meet my father. I would not have been born.

So I owe my existence to the cloud over Kokura on that fateful day.

Advent of Gabriel

I have not figured out how and why yet, but I do observe that creative people sometimes have very strong visions, bordering on the hallucinatory, which would, taken literally, raise the eyebrows of a rationalist.

I met with one of Japan's leading photographers, Shimpei Asai, the other day. One of Shimpei's famous works was when he photographed the Beatles Japan Tour in 1966. He captured the Fabulous Four in many interesting poses while they relaxed in Tokyo hotel rooms, etc.

Shimpei is a man of common sense and a sharp sense of aesthetics. I enjoyed the conversation hugely, appreciating his deep understanding of the human condition. Then, in the middle of our conversation, he mentioned matter-of-factly that he had a guardian angel named Gabriel.

"Gabriel would come while, for example, I am having a meeting with a group of editors. When I notice that Gabriel has entered the room, I would smile to Him. I smile very secretly, so that the people around me don't notice it".

The advent of Gabriel was so sudden that it took me by surprise. But then, the conversation was practical and quite logical otherwise. Gabriel was the only hint of "insanity" (in the conventional sense) that came along during our two hours long discourse. Shimpei was very considerate of people's feelings, exhibited a broad knowledge, and above all very intelligent. Gabriel was like a gush of wind that suddenly came and then went away, leaving an enchanting fragrance.

I wonder if there isn't always a Gabriel in creative people's mind life.