Butterfly alerts

As a kid I used to collect and study butterflies quite seriously. My butterfly mania was quite famous in the neighborhood and school. One day, when I was eight years old, one of my class mate girls contacted me. Apparently, there were some interesting looking butterfly larvae in the garden of her house, and she was wondering if I wanted to come and have a look.

That was one instance of the many butterfly alerts that I used to get from people around me those days. When at home, I would sometimes get media related butterfly alerts. I had my room on the second floor, and I would be reading books, when my mother yelled "Kenichiro, come, butterfly's on t.v.".

I would rush downstairs, and if I was lucky, would get a glimpse of butterflies on the screen, either in a news or a nature documentary.

When your love is known, people would give you alerts, out of kindness, and you respond with quick moves. Butterfly alerts were highlights of my youthful life.



Myself as a kid (10 years old) waiting for the butterfly in the woods, possibly in the northern island of Hokkaido on a butterfly trip.

To the river

When I strolled in Cambridge U.K. for the first time back in 1993, I was fascinated by the ancient ambience of the academic city. As I approached the Trinity college, I noticed a small writing on the wall.

"To the river", it said, with an arrow pointing towards the river Cam.

I liked the metaphor, and it stayed with me to this day.

In my life, whenever I can, I am looking for a road leading to the river.


"To the river" sign on the wall near Trinity college, Cambridge, U.K.

Thousand people bath

My mother originated from the southern island of Kyushu.
I was about five when my parents took me to the hot spring city of Beppu, a few hours away from my mother's native town.

The city is famous for various kinds of "hells." The hells are actually special kinds of hot springs, which have been turned into fictional realms belonging to another world where earthly sins would be corrected.

My aunts and uncles were with us. Seeing some hells must have fuelled my imagination. I remember vividly how we came to the entrance of a hot spring bath, when my aunt said that it was called a "thousand people bath" (sen-nin-buro), as a thousand people could bathe at the same time.

The word stimulated my mind, which had been made soft and sensitive by the exposure to the hells. I pictured a thousand people in bare skins standing very close to each other, with the white steam encircling them.

I wanted to see it for myself, but I was dragged by the hand and was taken to the station, where we took the train to travel further.

More than 30 years later, I visited the city of Beppu for a brain science conference. I found out where the "thousand people bath" was in the tourist office.

The real "thousand people bath" was a gigantic hot water pool, roofed by a huge glass structure. The sunshine filled the interior, and there were trees and grasses shining in healthy green colors.

It was nice, but very different from what the five year old imagined it to be.

I am still looking for my thousand people bath.

Extremists

I don't know how it is, but I can breathe easily when there are rooms for extreme people.

Extremity is an art, and requires a certain level of intellect. I really enjoy a conversation when there is somebody in the party who has eccentric views on, for example, the second law of thermodynamics, or the collapse of wave function in quantum mechanics.

Most scientists take a mild attitude towards these venerable enigmas, saying that as far as they can calculate things for all practical purposes (FAPP), they don't care. Those conservative people, although they are certainly the main stream in the academics, do not really interest me. Because they don't make the air lighter.

Being an extremist is not easy nowadays, when the society becomes increasingly practical. It is well advised to keep a sensible day job, while you maintain the extremist's activities at night.

It fills me with indescribable joys to think that there are still extremists around.

Principles

Now I have kept this journal for one month in a row, starting from the 6th of June entry "A double sin". There were two entries prior to that (3rd and 4th of June), but the continuation was broken because I did not make any entries on the 5th.

The Qualia Journal itself as initiated on 9th October 2004, with the entry "Hello World". There were 11 entries in that year. The year 2005 saw 44 entries, followed by 29 in 2006, 68 in 2007, and just 11 in 2008.

This year I intend to continue this "blog streak" for quite a long time, unless something inevitable prevents me from doing it. The reason why I am doing this is complex in psychology but simple in the principles.

It is always the principles that count.

Pursuer of inner light

The paintings by El Greco (1541-1614) always struck me as very original, ever since I glanced upon one in an art museum.

Giorgio Giulio Clovio was an artist freind of El Greco, although much older than him.

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Clovio reports visiting El Greco on a summer's day while the artist was still in Rome. El Greco was sitting in a darkened room, because he found the darkness more conducive to thought than the light of the day, which disturbed his "inner light". (quoted from M. Acton, Learning to Look at Paintings, p.82)
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The figures depicted in the El Greco paintings appear as if they are shining from within.

The inner light, when it comes from the painter, is the source for great originality.

In order to be unique you need to listen to your inner voice, rather than attend to what is being said and circulated around you.

A pursuer of inner light goes far, freed from the conventions of the day.


"The Opening of the Fifth Seal" by El Greco.

Two infinities.

I was talking with my best chum Yoshi Tamori.

Yoshi is a mathematical genius. He likes to talk about iterations and infinities.
One of Yoshi's favorite topics is the Euler–Mascheroni constant. One is filled with a sense of wonder when you ponder its definition.



Both the harmonic series and the natural logarithm of N tends to infinity as N->inifinite. However, the difference between these two infinities is finite, namely

gamma = 0.57721 56649 01532 86060 65120 90082 40243 10421 59335 93992.


The two infinities are "relatives" separated exactly by this finite number.


Myself (left) and Yoshi Tamori at the Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.

Secret Buddha

I did not understand the philosophy of the hibutsu (secret Buddha) until I chanced upon one a few years ago.

To treat a Buddha statue as a hibutsu is an essentially Japanese phenomenon. The statue can be sometimes made open to the public (Gokaicho, or "unveiling of the statue"), which is, and has always been, a great time of festivities. The statues which are occasionally made open to the public (even if it is once in hundred years) are secret in the relative sense. Other statues are secret in the absolute sense, e.g. the famous secrete Buddha in Zenkoji temple, which became the site of the opening ceremonies for the 1998 Nagano Olympics.

The Buddha statue in Zenkoji is absolutely secret. Nobody has seen it, not even the powerful warlords like Oda Nobunaga (1534-1582) .

Even when one can worship a secret Buddha statue, one is not allowed to take a photograph or make a drawing most of the time. If you are lucky enough to glance upon one, the only thing you can do is to try to keep its image in your memory.

The secret Buddha experience makes one reflect on the onceness of life. Some things just happen and then pass by for ever. You cannot capture the essence and keep it for record. Life happens to you once and for all, never to return.

Hidden agenda.

When I was 15, I learned about the Game of Life invented by John Horton Conway.

The idea immediately fascinated me. I used to calculate generations of life game on a graph sheet while I was attending the school classes. From these early days, I was somebody who could not sit still just listening to what people said. I was wont to do this or that with my hand, while attending to the speech at the same time. For some enthusiastic months in my teens calculating generations of the Game of Life on a graph sheet was the thing to do.

Daniel Dennett discusses the Game of Life in his book "Freedom evolves". The point is that there could be a great degree of separation between the basic laws of temporal evolution and the phenomenology of what emerges as a result.

It has been shown that you can build a universal Turing machine in the world defined by the Game of Life algorithm. With proper mappings, complex life forms like ourselves could inhabit the universe of the Game of Life.

I am sure that the great distance between cause and effect exists as a hidden agenda in our own life. The intricate relation between the initial conditions and what result in the Game of Life teaches us a lesson. You should not be too serious about the supposed "objectives" in life. You are well advised not to base your actions entirely on explicit objectives. At least you must never take it too literally.

You know, nature can hide the true agenda in a very clever way, like in the Game of Life.



Initial conditions for the Glider Gun.

No knowledge, no imagination.

Albert Einstein famously said that "imagination is more important than knowledge". If I may add a humble something to the words of wisdom by a genius, knowledge sometimes helps one's imagination.

Actually, knowledge can serve as the secure base (as was described by John Bowby) for one's imagination. Knowing for a fact that the sun is burning hydrogen to make helium can set one to imagine a lot of things on an idle afternoon.

No knowledge, no imagination.

One could go quite far in one's imagination based on scanty information. When I was a kid, I used to imagine a lot, because in those days there was relatively little information about anything that you cared about.

With the advent of information age, there is a danger that imagination is suffocated. To avoid death by knowledge, one should have a strong pair of legs. By jumping from the springboard of knowledge, one can dive into the ocean of unlimited imagination.

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?"
------------

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!"
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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.