the four right chords can make me cry
Sunday, October 30, 2005
Saturday, October 29, 2005
spent the entire day doing 2104 project work. my head hurts.
in other news, the gay penguins broke up! interesting. more to discuss.
the observatory was really good, but i think i enjoy ublues' music more. remind me to blog about the observatory some other time, too brain dead now. the company was excellent tho!
note to self: check out the kings of convenience
ok, back to more penguins. sigh, why doesn't nus have the book penguin biology (1990)? would make life so much easier.
in other news, the gay penguins broke up! interesting. more to discuss.
the observatory was really good, but i think i enjoy ublues' music more. remind me to blog about the observatory some other time, too brain dead now. the company was excellent tho!
note to self: check out the kings of convenience
ok, back to more penguins. sigh, why doesn't nus have the book penguin biology (1990)? would make life so much easier.
Wednesday, October 26, 2005
i love dr don, but this post is very long.
still, want to keep it here for my own future reference, really explains a lot about the course. - becks
WARNING: YC’s post is funnier. Nonetheless:
This is a GREAT point to bring up and I’m going to break my usual silence here and address this post and Su Qian’s post ONLY because I had happened to be writing about these two issues anyway today for the “Final Review Handout” I am preparing for all of you, so if you want a sneak peak of how such issues are addressed in that document, read on. (If not, skip this long long post and merely wait! It actually turned out to be a whole mini-lesson, I think – but again, I’ll include it in the handout) And to everybody reading this: note that I will NOT be responding in this drawn-out fashion to any subsequent posts (so don’t try! J) And, in fact, I think I’d better stop reading IVLE entirely (as fascinating as it is!) or I’ll never get this handout done I time! Anyway, here’s some thoughts for you about “science, understanding, and objectivity”. Hope it clarifies more than it confuses! Best wishes, Dr. Don
So here's the bit from the handout, re-arranged to address Nadia's critically important post: (Again, not the rest of yours aren't as important - I just happened to be writing about this today. Here:)
In short, "OBJECTIVE" DOES NOT MEAN "TRUE" AND SUBJECTIVE DOES NOT MEAN "BIASED" even though people sometimes use these terms in these much too-loose ways. "True" means "true" and "biased" means "biased" and to conflate these PROPERTIES (of statements and individuals) with the PROCESSES of objectivity and subjectivity is to guarantee confusion and the setting up of paradoxes that cannot be logically answered. So let me take a little time here to discuss two things: REIFICATION (the talking of processes as if they were things) and the relation of truth, consensus and science (and for the latter, you can't do better than reading the MACINTYRE optional reading for clarification). OK, here goes:
Nagel’s argument is (and of course, it is just an argument, you can agree with it or not) that the whole colloquial misunderstanding notion of – as you say - objectivity as a view devoid of subjective interpretation and the imposition of normative values is nonsense. As you say yourself in this post, Nadia, there never has been and then never can be such a view. Views always presuppose viewers, both in science as in social science (and, of course, in animals). So yep, Nagel’s view – which I think is of some relevance to this course, is the that even though there is no such thing that we can ever have that would correspond to the long-sought after objective ideal of "view from nowhere" [and even God's view, he argues, would not qualify as observer-independent], the practices of reaching objective consensus in science is our best example of how genuinely reliable knowledge can be “observer-congruent” (but never observer-independent).
Again, I think that this has many parallels with the way that we’ve been thinking about animal cognition and communication in this course, so I lay out a little of the basic argument here (mostly mine, not Nagel’s, but on the “science” part I’m sure he would agree). OK: 20th century physicists came to this conclusion about the “observer-dependant” nature of our understandings about reality early in the century. (It’s actually quite an ancient understanding – and even a common-sense one, I think, but like so many common sense ideas about our limitations and relations to nature, it got a little be “skewed” during the Newtonian age of the “man’s conquest of the mechanical clockwork universe” etc). Anyway, by the beginning of the last century Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, etc all were forced to confront the fact that their own work on sub-atomic particles revealed that ALL science is ultimately observer-dependant (which, again, is only common sense if you think about it carefully enough).
However: Einstein's famous statement that "all science is the product of the human mind" does NOT mean that "there's nothing really out there" or that "we make it all up". Rather, it means that science is our symbolic way of attempting to understand things that themselves can only be known to us not "in themselves" (can’t put the universe in your pocket; can’t see what the paramecium is doing when you’re not looking at it – don’t even ask about the quark!) but they can be more and more reliably known through our better and better representations (samples, equations, models, etc.) of these observer-external things. And that the instruments that we use to measure a phenomenon can’t be “taken out” of our understanding of that phenomenon, leaving the phenomenon knowable to us “as it is.”
BUT: it is in just thus sense of using instruments of measurement (and these can be theories, numbers, systems of derivation, etc and not just things like bubble chambers and rulers) that are agreed upon by ALL the individuals using them and who “interpret” them to “stand for” the same “measure” (another symbolic sign signifying real things that it itself is not, of course), that IS science's greatest tool for reaching "objective" ("all who look at") consensus. Unlike in say, philosophy and some of the social sciences, not just any old one person's subjective claim is as a-priori “valid” or “plausible” as any other. Instead, here all single individual person’s claims must be VALIDATED by the views of the many (by re-running the experiments to get the same results, using common scales of measurement under rigidly delineated conditions, pointing out overlooked problems in others' data collection or analysis, sharing counter-experiments that indicate opposite conclusions, maintaining rigorous "control" standards through the use of peer-review and public sharing of results, etc etc).
It is because science tries to solve problems as a community (as opposed to, say, the way that philosophers and many social scientists try to solve problems) - establishing firm and fast agreed upon rules about what criteria are needed for something to count as evidence, how findings must be publicly presented and refuted, etc. - that they can harness the power of the many to aggregate knowledge that could almost certainly never be arrived at by single individuals. (Scientists - Galileo and Einstein included - do their work on the shoulders of the very scientists whose work their work refutes - see our MACINTYRE optional article for more on this). "Only derivatively” (meaning “as a consequence of these actions”) writes Nagel, “do we call the truths that have been established in this way 'objective' truths”. They are “objectively true” BECAUSE there is agreement that has been reached upon them – it is not the other way around, ie - the agreement doesn’t come about because the objects under study exhibit some property called “objective truth” in themselves and scientists recognize that and respect it as such. (To “object-ify” incidentally, comes from a Latin word meaning “to throw before sight” – or to put in public – so you can see that the whole notion has its roots in consensus, viewing and public access).
Firstly, if it's an amalgamation of subjective experiences then... what if the masses are wrong?
Science is BASED on the idea of being wrong! "Fallibility" - the notion that today's consensus is the best we have - but it can be proven wrong with one good experiment, observation or theory tomorrow - is what ALLOWS science to evolve and grow! (Unlike, say, ideologies where “the truth in itself” is thought to be known, and anything that refutes it must be made to fit). Science (like species) grows towards "beliefs that better fit with observation" not towards "beliefs based on a truth in itself that is beyond all observation.” No scientist that I have ever met understands the work of science as anything other. (Curiously enough, though, many non-scientists have this kind of naive belief about Science [with that good old big Capital S]. It seems that, especially in the secular West, people's need for magic and for absolute answers has been transferred from religion to this idealized caricature of Science]
Secondly, subjective experience is highly interpretive.
Nadia, ALL experience is ALWAYS "interpretative" - THAT, if nothing else, has been the one of main points of the entire course! The key thing that I've been trying to get you to see all this time is that THAT DOES NOT MEAN NOTHING'S REAL (in fact, for living organisms, "experience" - interpreting signs of the world [eg - interpreting - not just receiving - photon particles and wavelengths as "sight", molecular vibration in the air as "sounds", contact with the shapes of other molecules as "smell" - or as messages to activate certain cellular events] IS just about the most REAL thing there is! (Certainly without it, we don’t consider things lacking this ability for interpretative experience – clouds and rocks and tables and chairs – “alive”! [or at least I don’t! J]
And, scientifically, too, OF COURSE one has to first "interpret" e=mc2 in order to understand it or to do anything with it. But again, in science the limitations on HOW you can interpret it are (profitably) constrained. “Interpretations” must "fit" in with the bigger system of scientific thought in order to be CORRECT interpretations (or at least "good" ones). The majority of such interpretations (eg: e=mc@ = e=mc3) will be rejected out of hand (again, unlike in, say, philosophy where there are not as many rules about what's "the right interpretation" - though there are some [logic, grammar]) Perhaps far more importantly – science has a worldwide community of workers ENFORCING the rule that for ideas to gain acceptance to the system in the first place, they must meet all this agreed-upon criteria (peer-review, repeatable experimental results, etc.) to “count” as science.
This concerted action amongst millions of individuals towards a COHERENT understanding of any one phenomena (how the liver functions, how a blood cell works, etc.) is, I think, what gives science its greatest tool (and maybe what makes science the greatest tool) for arriving at accurate, reliable, repeatable knowledge. But it is based on human observation through and through (even when one is observing how one’s symbols such as numbers relate to one another during human or machine manipulation). It is therefore impossible without interpretation on all three nested semiotic levels (iconic, indexical and symbolic SIMULTANEOUSLY) – meaning there must always be an interpreter … not for the object itself to exist (such as the universe – everything can, of course exist without any living observers – and almost certainly did for billions of years previously), but for any possible “experience” or “understanding” of that object to exist.
To say “I want to understand (or I want somebody to be able to understand) what is x is really like apart from any particular human observations, devoid of any subjective interpretation or imposition of normative ideas about it” is, as I maintained in class, an incoherent and self-contradictory question (…at least if you’re a human!) For anything to be “like” anything, it has to be “like” something for someone, and for anything to be “known” it has to known by a knower – and it can only be so known in that knower’s way of knowing (eg- the tick, the blind mole rat, us)! Nothing can be “known in itself” (ie – apart from whatever processes that lets an organism know it in the first place) anymore than any thing can be “thrown away” in itself (apart from the processes whereby someone throws an object way). Both verbs point to relations between living subjects and the (not necessarily living) objects of their actions – and the action in the case of “knowing” is what Peirce calls the interpretant of the process – the action that a living subject undertakes in arranging its own internal relations (physical or mental) to structurally couple with event and objects in the outside world that it can only “know” through sign relations (photoreception, activation of a molecule receptor, vibration of a hair follicle – and those are just some human signs!)
Things are whatever it is they are. Our experience of things is a something different than the things themselves (Wilson, first reading – and von Uexkull). Trying to think about what is “out there in itself” – without the “norms and interpretations” that we have to use in thinking about it – is itself nothing more than a product od pure symbol use – a logical impossibility that can be entertained because symbols don’t have to stand for “possible” events only. (Hoffmeyer alludes to this in Chapter 1). For even the greatest scientist to understand or tell us about the colloquial idea of an ‘objective truth’ meaning: “the true state of affairs devoid of subjective interpretation or the imposition of norms” his or her answer, to even make sense, would still both presuppose and require a human interpretation of whatever set of symbols he or she came up with to represent “things as they really are” --- and would THAT satisfy anybody’s criteria of “a description of things as they really are without interpretation or norms”? (for the norms will be the system by which we make sense of the answer). The problem – like so many philosophical dead-ends, failed quests and irresolvable paradoxes - arises entirely as a result our not using our words carefully, which in turn leads us to not thinking clearly, and frustrated that we can’t locate those objects of our symbolic creation (eg - the disembodied mind, the unmoved mover, the view from nowhere) that we know just must be somewhere, because, well … (“because we set it up to be so in our conceptual schemata!” is the real answer. But we too are fallible – and can learn much from our intuitions and mistakes – eg, Deacon shows us how the notion of the disembodied mind can be re-understood naturalistically and this discussion about Nagel, I hope, shows us how “objective consensus” can be – for all our real practical intents and purposes – “objective truth”. [“99.9% True enough! J”)
Again: you can look at this argument two ways: “All is hopeless. We can never know things as they truly are!” OR: We can critically think about our own unquestioned premises and say “Wait a minute. What do I mean by “how things truly are”? For whom? Don’t you think a rose is “truly” red for us and just as “truly” purple with white stripes for a bee? But a thing can’t logically be both truly red and not truly red, truly purple with white stripes and truly not purple with white stripes at the same time, then, could it? So how would you decide who is “wrong”? And decide “devoid of subjective interpretation and the imposition of norm” no less! What you need for deciding, of course, is precisely a subjective interpretation and the imposition of a norm – in this case, for us, recourse to our symbolic understandings of what we call “the electromagnetic spectrum” as well as “the neurobiology of vision” and for the bee – well, I’m sure the bee norm and subjective experience of getting nectar, making honey, telling the others and all the rest is a “true” enough understanding for it!
Similarly, if I re-phrase the question to ask “how is x truly, for humans” OF COURSE I can find out A VERY GOOD ANSWER to that question with enough research and by breaking down my questions into tiny parts. At worst, I can get A LOT of reliable, useable knowledge and get VERY CLOSE to certainty (eg – how is the rate at which fuel oxidizes “truly” enough to allow me to calculate how to send a spacecraft to Mars and land within a few cms of our target; what is it that I need to know about veins and lasers “truly” that will allow me to mend veins safely using laser surgery, how we can discover which combinations of foreground and background wavelengths are perceived as which colors “truly” for most humans, etc etc etc). And so too if I ask “how is this x truly for animal y” I can get many reliable (though, again, never exhaustive) results about its physiological reaction to x, its behavioral response to x, its use of x to accomplish certain actions, etc etc etc. [True, I could never find out what its mental experience of x “truly” is –but neither could I for the human being. The only difference is that the latter can give me a symbolic report that I can use to make better guesses.]
But if the question is framed as “No, I mean how things truly are – not for humans or for animals or for any other living creature – but how they are when they are by themselves, devoid of anyone’s norms and interpretations of them” one may have set oneself up a false set of criteria by constructing a question that – by its very construction – can never be logically answered. It is logically the same as asking: “How is x truly before we start interpreting how x is truly”? Take out the italics and you see the question makes no sense. It asks us to be in position that we never could be in, as a matter of logical impossibility. It also hopelessly muddies the relations between subjectivity (one person’s experience) and objectivity (many people’s collective consensus of experience) – both REAL things in a real world of real people – into two existing nowhere abstract “entities” – Objectivity (per se) and Subjectivity (per se) – and to then set them up as polar opposites such that their relations can never be reconciled. That, to Nagel, is “sweeping the problem under the carpet” of reducing to made up abstractions the physical flesh-and-blood world of interacting individuals – and then demanding to know what the real-world events can’t live up to the criteria we ourselves packed into the abstractions.
Things are the way they are when no one is examining them (My example in class, I think, was “the speed of light was the speed of light before anyone examined it”) – but it makes no sense to ask how things really are apart from our system of examining and understanding them – because even in the speed of light example, our sticking the number 186,000 mps on this phenomenon is a human-made representation that only makes sense (or has any truth-giving use at all) embedded in our systems of observation, measurement, numerical reasoning, etc. Humans must make and interpret such representations of things (which are not the things themselves) at every step – though they do not “make” the phenomenon being interpreted. And this is the crux of the whole sign-OBJECT-interpretant process: “the thing itself” surely is none of that knowing process (a number, an equation, a dreading sensation, a sensation of smell) – but our way of KNOWING the thing IS precisely through this process and nothing else.
One of the main things that I’ve tried to get you all to see in class there is the tendency to reify what is a PROCESS and its PRODUCTS into some over-riding and non-existent "entity" or "quality" or "force." We saw this with the word "evolution" and - I'll argue elsewhere - we see the same mistake for the word "mind." So ONCE AGAIN, we see that we may be too sloppy in our use of words as shortcuts for thinking about things. KNOWLEDGE, too, is a PROCESS that we go through (sensing signs, putting them in relations, working on the relations – and, for us symbol users, making signs for these relations and working on the signs instead) and its PRODUCTS – like evolution, like objectivity – are really more the most current “points in the process” as Deacon says, than autonomous, self-existing, process-independent “things” or “forces” that have some causal or ontological existence or power of their own.
We tend to see processes and events as things when we can, simply because it is easier for us to picture things then to picture processes. Apparently it is even easier for us to picture ghostly, imaginary “things”, such as “evolution” as a force that stands outside animals, controlling them and directing their development – when what really directs (more accurately: biases their possibilities for development) in certain directions – are consequences of the very physical actions of certain kinds of animals thriving in certain kinds of conditions, leaving behind more progeny that their neighbors who did not so thrive, and bequeathing (unintentionally, of course, but as a consequence) the resulting environment so changed by these actions to the next generation of animals are going to have to live there. Cumulative changes are one of the consequences of these actions between organism and environment and vice-versa. The physical fact of those changes over time is the product of all those prior real world actions (the actual, eating, mating, fighting, dying and changing) that, when looked at in retrospect, we can label “the process whereby this species has come to have the form it has today” – the history of its real-world action, reaction and consequence – as its “evolution” from one form to another. The “evolution” is the product of the animal’s actions – like our own body’s “deterioration.” Similarly, I don’t fall asleep because some force outside of me with purposes of its own called “somnambulism” catches up with me and “causes” me to fall asleep. Rather, I fall asleep due to a number of real-world biological events and the abstract name of that process is called “somnambulism.”
But thinking of a descriptive name for a process - such as “evolution” or “objectivity” or “autopoesis” – as a “thing in itself” (with goals, ends, designs, and the power to “control” to meet its purposes) misleads us. And the more of this “picturing of processes as things” we engage in, the more inexplicable the world becomes. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, understanding this, once wrote: “A 'picture' held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” One of the goals of this course was to try to get you to break out of such counter-productive ingrained habits and to think more clearly about processes such as heredity, perception, cognition and socialization. Only by picturing processes as processes (or at least never forgetting that they are, and attributing to them mistakenly the properties of things) can we stay out of the kind of confusion that a “too loose” use of words and their meanings can bring. (And why it took us all this time just to build up to the point that we can try to clearly define what processes the word “meaning” points to!)
Perhaps when I told you all at the beginning of the semester that we would not be bringing in any “forces from outside the system of the natural world” [such as angels, devils, power spirits, etc] to explain the workings of the natural world, it was not obvious that none of the actual workings of the natural world [e.g., the processes of real animals knowing, or evolving, or sharing viewpoints via mediated external channels] were not going not escape the bounds of naturalism and become “transcendent things” with “superpowers” in their own right either! What can I say? That’s autopoesis! Things stay within the system (where they can exert top-down influence – but only because they are the result of bottom-up processes in interaction. Nobody gets to “jump out” of the system and exert autonomous control over the rest of the system from “without”– not the brain, not DNA, not natural selection, not “objectivity”… All only have the power that they do within the system that brings them into being in the first place). At least that’s so in the biosemiotic way of looking at things.
But again: this is only one way of looking at things – it is not the only way and it may not be the way that you think is most useful for trying to understand these things. But the goal of this course has been to introduce you to this one new way – a way that may be fruitful in helping you think about the complexities of the lives or organisms without falling into some old familiar traps. That it may hold some new traps of its own is, of course, a given. It is a human understanding about such things – not a “perfect view from nowhere” - that we are talking about here, after all!
Hoped this helped a little bit!
Dr. Don
still, want to keep it here for my own future reference, really explains a lot about the course. - becks
WARNING: YC’s post is funnier. Nonetheless:
This is a GREAT point to bring up and I’m going to break my usual silence here and address this post and Su Qian’s post ONLY because I had happened to be writing about these two issues anyway today for the “Final Review Handout” I am preparing for all of you, so if you want a sneak peak of how such issues are addressed in that document, read on. (If not, skip this long long post and merely wait! It actually turned out to be a whole mini-lesson, I think – but again, I’ll include it in the handout) And to everybody reading this: note that I will NOT be responding in this drawn-out fashion to any subsequent posts (so don’t try! J) And, in fact, I think I’d better stop reading IVLE entirely (as fascinating as it is!) or I’ll never get this handout done I time! Anyway, here’s some thoughts for you about “science, understanding, and objectivity”. Hope it clarifies more than it confuses! Best wishes, Dr. Don
So here's the bit from the handout, re-arranged to address Nadia's critically important post: (Again, not the rest of yours aren't as important - I just happened to be writing about this today. Here:)
In short, "OBJECTIVE" DOES NOT MEAN "TRUE" AND SUBJECTIVE DOES NOT MEAN "BIASED" even though people sometimes use these terms in these much too-loose ways. "True" means "true" and "biased" means "biased" and to conflate these PROPERTIES (of statements and individuals) with the PROCESSES of objectivity and subjectivity is to guarantee confusion and the setting up of paradoxes that cannot be logically answered. So let me take a little time here to discuss two things: REIFICATION (the talking of processes as if they were things) and the relation of truth, consensus and science (and for the latter, you can't do better than reading the MACINTYRE optional reading for clarification). OK, here goes:
Nagel’s argument is (and of course, it is just an argument, you can agree with it or not) that the whole colloquial misunderstanding notion of – as you say - objectivity as a view devoid of subjective interpretation and the imposition of normative values is nonsense. As you say yourself in this post, Nadia, there never has been and then never can be such a view. Views always presuppose viewers, both in science as in social science (and, of course, in animals). So yep, Nagel’s view – which I think is of some relevance to this course, is the that even though there is no such thing that we can ever have that would correspond to the long-sought after objective ideal of "view from nowhere" [and even God's view, he argues, would not qualify as observer-independent], the practices of reaching objective consensus in science is our best example of how genuinely reliable knowledge can be “observer-congruent” (but never observer-independent).
Again, I think that this has many parallels with the way that we’ve been thinking about animal cognition and communication in this course, so I lay out a little of the basic argument here (mostly mine, not Nagel’s, but on the “science” part I’m sure he would agree). OK: 20th century physicists came to this conclusion about the “observer-dependant” nature of our understandings about reality early in the century. (It’s actually quite an ancient understanding – and even a common-sense one, I think, but like so many common sense ideas about our limitations and relations to nature, it got a little be “skewed” during the Newtonian age of the “man’s conquest of the mechanical clockwork universe” etc). Anyway, by the beginning of the last century Bohr, Heisenberg, Schrodinger, etc all were forced to confront the fact that their own work on sub-atomic particles revealed that ALL science is ultimately observer-dependant (which, again, is only common sense if you think about it carefully enough).
However: Einstein's famous statement that "all science is the product of the human mind" does NOT mean that "there's nothing really out there" or that "we make it all up". Rather, it means that science is our symbolic way of attempting to understand things that themselves can only be known to us not "in themselves" (can’t put the universe in your pocket; can’t see what the paramecium is doing when you’re not looking at it – don’t even ask about the quark!) but they can be more and more reliably known through our better and better representations (samples, equations, models, etc.) of these observer-external things. And that the instruments that we use to measure a phenomenon can’t be “taken out” of our understanding of that phenomenon, leaving the phenomenon knowable to us “as it is.”
BUT: it is in just thus sense of using instruments of measurement (and these can be theories, numbers, systems of derivation, etc and not just things like bubble chambers and rulers) that are agreed upon by ALL the individuals using them and who “interpret” them to “stand for” the same “measure” (another symbolic sign signifying real things that it itself is not, of course), that IS science's greatest tool for reaching "objective" ("all who look at") consensus. Unlike in say, philosophy and some of the social sciences, not just any old one person's subjective claim is as a-priori “valid” or “plausible” as any other. Instead, here all single individual person’s claims must be VALIDATED by the views of the many (by re-running the experiments to get the same results, using common scales of measurement under rigidly delineated conditions, pointing out overlooked problems in others' data collection or analysis, sharing counter-experiments that indicate opposite conclusions, maintaining rigorous "control" standards through the use of peer-review and public sharing of results, etc etc).
It is because science tries to solve problems as a community (as opposed to, say, the way that philosophers and many social scientists try to solve problems) - establishing firm and fast agreed upon rules about what criteria are needed for something to count as evidence, how findings must be publicly presented and refuted, etc. - that they can harness the power of the many to aggregate knowledge that could almost certainly never be arrived at by single individuals. (Scientists - Galileo and Einstein included - do their work on the shoulders of the very scientists whose work their work refutes - see our MACINTYRE optional article for more on this). "Only derivatively” (meaning “as a consequence of these actions”) writes Nagel, “do we call the truths that have been established in this way 'objective' truths”. They are “objectively true” BECAUSE there is agreement that has been reached upon them – it is not the other way around, ie - the agreement doesn’t come about because the objects under study exhibit some property called “objective truth” in themselves and scientists recognize that and respect it as such. (To “object-ify” incidentally, comes from a Latin word meaning “to throw before sight” – or to put in public – so you can see that the whole notion has its roots in consensus, viewing and public access).
Firstly, if it's an amalgamation of subjective experiences then... what if the masses are wrong?
Science is BASED on the idea of being wrong! "Fallibility" - the notion that today's consensus is the best we have - but it can be proven wrong with one good experiment, observation or theory tomorrow - is what ALLOWS science to evolve and grow! (Unlike, say, ideologies where “the truth in itself” is thought to be known, and anything that refutes it must be made to fit). Science (like species) grows towards "beliefs that better fit with observation" not towards "beliefs based on a truth in itself that is beyond all observation.” No scientist that I have ever met understands the work of science as anything other. (Curiously enough, though, many non-scientists have this kind of naive belief about Science [with that good old big Capital S]. It seems that, especially in the secular West, people's need for magic and for absolute answers has been transferred from religion to this idealized caricature of Science]
Secondly, subjective experience is highly interpretive.
Nadia, ALL experience is ALWAYS "interpretative" - THAT, if nothing else, has been the one of main points of the entire course! The key thing that I've been trying to get you to see all this time is that THAT DOES NOT MEAN NOTHING'S REAL (in fact, for living organisms, "experience" - interpreting signs of the world [eg - interpreting - not just receiving - photon particles and wavelengths as "sight", molecular vibration in the air as "sounds", contact with the shapes of other molecules as "smell" - or as messages to activate certain cellular events] IS just about the most REAL thing there is! (Certainly without it, we don’t consider things lacking this ability for interpretative experience – clouds and rocks and tables and chairs – “alive”! [or at least I don’t! J]
And, scientifically, too, OF COURSE one has to first "interpret" e=mc2 in order to understand it or to do anything with it. But again, in science the limitations on HOW you can interpret it are (profitably) constrained. “Interpretations” must "fit" in with the bigger system of scientific thought in order to be CORRECT interpretations (or at least "good" ones). The majority of such interpretations (eg: e=mc@ = e=mc3) will be rejected out of hand (again, unlike in, say, philosophy where there are not as many rules about what's "the right interpretation" - though there are some [logic, grammar]) Perhaps far more importantly – science has a worldwide community of workers ENFORCING the rule that for ideas to gain acceptance to the system in the first place, they must meet all this agreed-upon criteria (peer-review, repeatable experimental results, etc.) to “count” as science.
This concerted action amongst millions of individuals towards a COHERENT understanding of any one phenomena (how the liver functions, how a blood cell works, etc.) is, I think, what gives science its greatest tool (and maybe what makes science the greatest tool) for arriving at accurate, reliable, repeatable knowledge. But it is based on human observation through and through (even when one is observing how one’s symbols such as numbers relate to one another during human or machine manipulation). It is therefore impossible without interpretation on all three nested semiotic levels (iconic, indexical and symbolic SIMULTANEOUSLY) – meaning there must always be an interpreter … not for the object itself to exist (such as the universe – everything can, of course exist without any living observers – and almost certainly did for billions of years previously), but for any possible “experience” or “understanding” of that object to exist.
To say “I want to understand (or I want somebody to be able to understand) what is x is really like apart from any particular human observations, devoid of any subjective interpretation or imposition of normative ideas about it” is, as I maintained in class, an incoherent and self-contradictory question (…at least if you’re a human!) For anything to be “like” anything, it has to be “like” something for someone, and for anything to be “known” it has to known by a knower – and it can only be so known in that knower’s way of knowing (eg- the tick, the blind mole rat, us)! Nothing can be “known in itself” (ie – apart from whatever processes that lets an organism know it in the first place) anymore than any thing can be “thrown away” in itself (apart from the processes whereby someone throws an object way). Both verbs point to relations between living subjects and the (not necessarily living) objects of their actions – and the action in the case of “knowing” is what Peirce calls the interpretant of the process – the action that a living subject undertakes in arranging its own internal relations (physical or mental) to structurally couple with event and objects in the outside world that it can only “know” through sign relations (photoreception, activation of a molecule receptor, vibration of a hair follicle – and those are just some human signs!)
Things are whatever it is they are. Our experience of things is a something different than the things themselves (Wilson, first reading – and von Uexkull). Trying to think about what is “out there in itself” – without the “norms and interpretations” that we have to use in thinking about it – is itself nothing more than a product od pure symbol use – a logical impossibility that can be entertained because symbols don’t have to stand for “possible” events only. (Hoffmeyer alludes to this in Chapter 1). For even the greatest scientist to understand or tell us about the colloquial idea of an ‘objective truth’ meaning: “the true state of affairs devoid of subjective interpretation or the imposition of norms” his or her answer, to even make sense, would still both presuppose and require a human interpretation of whatever set of symbols he or she came up with to represent “things as they really are” --- and would THAT satisfy anybody’s criteria of “a description of things as they really are without interpretation or norms”? (for the norms will be the system by which we make sense of the answer). The problem – like so many philosophical dead-ends, failed quests and irresolvable paradoxes - arises entirely as a result our not using our words carefully, which in turn leads us to not thinking clearly, and frustrated that we can’t locate those objects of our symbolic creation (eg - the disembodied mind, the unmoved mover, the view from nowhere) that we know just must be somewhere, because, well … (“because we set it up to be so in our conceptual schemata!” is the real answer. But we too are fallible – and can learn much from our intuitions and mistakes – eg, Deacon shows us how the notion of the disembodied mind can be re-understood naturalistically and this discussion about Nagel, I hope, shows us how “objective consensus” can be – for all our real practical intents and purposes – “objective truth”. [“99.9% True enough! J”)
Again: you can look at this argument two ways: “All is hopeless. We can never know things as they truly are!” OR: We can critically think about our own unquestioned premises and say “Wait a minute. What do I mean by “how things truly are”? For whom? Don’t you think a rose is “truly” red for us and just as “truly” purple with white stripes for a bee? But a thing can’t logically be both truly red and not truly red, truly purple with white stripes and truly not purple with white stripes at the same time, then, could it? So how would you decide who is “wrong”? And decide “devoid of subjective interpretation and the imposition of norm” no less! What you need for deciding, of course, is precisely a subjective interpretation and the imposition of a norm – in this case, for us, recourse to our symbolic understandings of what we call “the electromagnetic spectrum” as well as “the neurobiology of vision” and for the bee – well, I’m sure the bee norm and subjective experience of getting nectar, making honey, telling the others and all the rest is a “true” enough understanding for it!
Similarly, if I re-phrase the question to ask “how is x truly, for humans” OF COURSE I can find out A VERY GOOD ANSWER to that question with enough research and by breaking down my questions into tiny parts. At worst, I can get A LOT of reliable, useable knowledge and get VERY CLOSE to certainty (eg – how is the rate at which fuel oxidizes “truly” enough to allow me to calculate how to send a spacecraft to Mars and land within a few cms of our target; what is it that I need to know about veins and lasers “truly” that will allow me to mend veins safely using laser surgery, how we can discover which combinations of foreground and background wavelengths are perceived as which colors “truly” for most humans, etc etc etc). And so too if I ask “how is this x truly for animal y” I can get many reliable (though, again, never exhaustive) results about its physiological reaction to x, its behavioral response to x, its use of x to accomplish certain actions, etc etc etc. [True, I could never find out what its mental experience of x “truly” is –but neither could I for the human being. The only difference is that the latter can give me a symbolic report that I can use to make better guesses.]
But if the question is framed as “No, I mean how things truly are – not for humans or for animals or for any other living creature – but how they are when they are by themselves, devoid of anyone’s norms and interpretations of them” one may have set oneself up a false set of criteria by constructing a question that – by its very construction – can never be logically answered. It is logically the same as asking: “How is x truly before we start interpreting how x is truly”? Take out the italics and you see the question makes no sense. It asks us to be in position that we never could be in, as a matter of logical impossibility. It also hopelessly muddies the relations between subjectivity (one person’s experience) and objectivity (many people’s collective consensus of experience) – both REAL things in a real world of real people – into two existing nowhere abstract “entities” – Objectivity (per se) and Subjectivity (per se) – and to then set them up as polar opposites such that their relations can never be reconciled. That, to Nagel, is “sweeping the problem under the carpet” of reducing to made up abstractions the physical flesh-and-blood world of interacting individuals – and then demanding to know what the real-world events can’t live up to the criteria we ourselves packed into the abstractions.
Things are the way they are when no one is examining them (My example in class, I think, was “the speed of light was the speed of light before anyone examined it”) – but it makes no sense to ask how things really are apart from our system of examining and understanding them – because even in the speed of light example, our sticking the number 186,000 mps on this phenomenon is a human-made representation that only makes sense (or has any truth-giving use at all) embedded in our systems of observation, measurement, numerical reasoning, etc. Humans must make and interpret such representations of things (which are not the things themselves) at every step – though they do not “make” the phenomenon being interpreted. And this is the crux of the whole sign-OBJECT-interpretant process: “the thing itself” surely is none of that knowing process (a number, an equation, a dreading sensation, a sensation of smell) – but our way of KNOWING the thing IS precisely through this process and nothing else.
One of the main things that I’ve tried to get you all to see in class there is the tendency to reify what is a PROCESS and its PRODUCTS into some over-riding and non-existent "entity" or "quality" or "force." We saw this with the word "evolution" and - I'll argue elsewhere - we see the same mistake for the word "mind." So ONCE AGAIN, we see that we may be too sloppy in our use of words as shortcuts for thinking about things. KNOWLEDGE, too, is a PROCESS that we go through (sensing signs, putting them in relations, working on the relations – and, for us symbol users, making signs for these relations and working on the signs instead) and its PRODUCTS – like evolution, like objectivity – are really more the most current “points in the process” as Deacon says, than autonomous, self-existing, process-independent “things” or “forces” that have some causal or ontological existence or power of their own.
We tend to see processes and events as things when we can, simply because it is easier for us to picture things then to picture processes. Apparently it is even easier for us to picture ghostly, imaginary “things”, such as “evolution” as a force that stands outside animals, controlling them and directing their development – when what really directs (more accurately: biases their possibilities for development) in certain directions – are consequences of the very physical actions of certain kinds of animals thriving in certain kinds of conditions, leaving behind more progeny that their neighbors who did not so thrive, and bequeathing (unintentionally, of course, but as a consequence) the resulting environment so changed by these actions to the next generation of animals are going to have to live there. Cumulative changes are one of the consequences of these actions between organism and environment and vice-versa. The physical fact of those changes over time is the product of all those prior real world actions (the actual, eating, mating, fighting, dying and changing) that, when looked at in retrospect, we can label “the process whereby this species has come to have the form it has today” – the history of its real-world action, reaction and consequence – as its “evolution” from one form to another. The “evolution” is the product of the animal’s actions – like our own body’s “deterioration.” Similarly, I don’t fall asleep because some force outside of me with purposes of its own called “somnambulism” catches up with me and “causes” me to fall asleep. Rather, I fall asleep due to a number of real-world biological events and the abstract name of that process is called “somnambulism.”
But thinking of a descriptive name for a process - such as “evolution” or “objectivity” or “autopoesis” – as a “thing in itself” (with goals, ends, designs, and the power to “control” to meet its purposes) misleads us. And the more of this “picturing of processes as things” we engage in, the more inexplicable the world becomes. The philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, understanding this, once wrote: “A 'picture' held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.” One of the goals of this course was to try to get you to break out of such counter-productive ingrained habits and to think more clearly about processes such as heredity, perception, cognition and socialization. Only by picturing processes as processes (or at least never forgetting that they are, and attributing to them mistakenly the properties of things) can we stay out of the kind of confusion that a “too loose” use of words and their meanings can bring. (And why it took us all this time just to build up to the point that we can try to clearly define what processes the word “meaning” points to!)
Perhaps when I told you all at the beginning of the semester that we would not be bringing in any “forces from outside the system of the natural world” [such as angels, devils, power spirits, etc] to explain the workings of the natural world, it was not obvious that none of the actual workings of the natural world [e.g., the processes of real animals knowing, or evolving, or sharing viewpoints via mediated external channels] were not going not escape the bounds of naturalism and become “transcendent things” with “superpowers” in their own right either! What can I say? That’s autopoesis! Things stay within the system (where they can exert top-down influence – but only because they are the result of bottom-up processes in interaction. Nobody gets to “jump out” of the system and exert autonomous control over the rest of the system from “without”– not the brain, not DNA, not natural selection, not “objectivity”… All only have the power that they do within the system that brings them into being in the first place). At least that’s so in the biosemiotic way of looking at things.
But again: this is only one way of looking at things – it is not the only way and it may not be the way that you think is most useful for trying to understand these things. But the goal of this course has been to introduce you to this one new way – a way that may be fruitful in helping you think about the complexities of the lives or organisms without falling into some old familiar traps. That it may hold some new traps of its own is, of course, a given. It is a human understanding about such things – not a “perfect view from nowhere” - that we are talking about here, after all!
Hoped this helped a little bit!
Dr. Don
Tuesday, October 25, 2005
NUSRiders Display
NUSRiders, a newly-established group for student motorcyclists is set up by riders working together to serve the rider community in NUS. Besides formally introducing ourselves to the NUS community, we are taking the opportunity to display some of our members' motorcycles and riding gear. Take your time to look at our bikes, feel free to sit on them and take pictures. Watch videos at our booth. This is a chance for current riders to sign up and join our future activities. Non-riders won't be left out, this is your chance to find out more about riding and clarify your doubts and misconceptions.
27th-28th October 2005 (Thursday-Friday)
10am-6pm
oh my goodness. I've been beaten to it!!!!!!!!!
NUSRiders, a newly-established group for student motorcyclists is set up by riders working together to serve the rider community in NUS. Besides formally introducing ourselves to the NUS community, we are taking the opportunity to display some of our members' motorcycles and riding gear. Take your time to look at our bikes, feel free to sit on them and take pictures. Watch videos at our booth. This is a chance for current riders to sign up and join our future activities. Non-riders won't be left out, this is your chance to find out more about riding and clarify your doubts and misconceptions.
27th-28th October 2005 (Thursday-Friday)
10am-6pm
oh my goodness. I've been beaten to it!!!!!!!!!
Monday, October 24, 2005
things i want to do again soon.
sunday nights out with the boys
last week had a good time with alan and alwin, so good to see them after so long. things feel like they haven't changed a bit. =)
this week it was running with daniel and leon, followed by chilling at iman with tianen later. me and dan recalling the days when he was just 16, and tianen was just 14(!) and he was their cg leader. marvelling at how fast time flies (timo ord liao!), talking about mentoring people in church, and nonsense, like how i should name my son daniel and he'll name his son tianen and tianen will name his daughter becky, and how they would buck the trend and talk to each other about DOTA at age 60 rather than boring adult things like CPF and selling flats and taking mediciene, and then about making a time capsule etc. hope we can go running and iman again next week bros!
had a good time staying over with chels too =) but i felt a little paiseh cos i was causing so much trouble for everyone. made jeffery they all wait for me and send me around! paiseh... but i really enjoy staying over at pgp, spending time with chels or ber or both, just talking to them about anything and everything.
went out with lydia today for lunch, we finally got a chance to meet up! went window shopping after that! saw so many nice things... tempting, yes. haha, that aside, it was good, just talking to her and seeing what she's doing in her life. hope to do that again soon too!
sunday nights out with the boys
last week had a good time with alan and alwin, so good to see them after so long. things feel like they haven't changed a bit. =)
this week it was running with daniel and leon, followed by chilling at iman with tianen later. me and dan recalling the days when he was just 16, and tianen was just 14(!) and he was their cg leader. marvelling at how fast time flies (timo ord liao!), talking about mentoring people in church, and nonsense, like how i should name my son daniel and he'll name his son tianen and tianen will name his daughter becky, and how they would buck the trend and talk to each other about DOTA at age 60 rather than boring adult things like CPF and selling flats and taking mediciene, and then about making a time capsule etc. hope we can go running and iman again next week bros!
had a good time staying over with chels too =) but i felt a little paiseh cos i was causing so much trouble for everyone. made jeffery they all wait for me and send me around! paiseh... but i really enjoy staying over at pgp, spending time with chels or ber or both, just talking to them about anything and everything.
went out with lydia today for lunch, we finally got a chance to meet up! went window shopping after that! saw so many nice things... tempting, yes. haha, that aside, it was good, just talking to her and seeing what she's doing in her life. hope to do that again soon too!
Sunday, October 23, 2005
my dad just made a comment, that my dog seems to have free range in the house now. he used not to be allowed upstairs, but he's in my room or around most of the time now.
made me realise that its actually my dog who owns this whole house. he's around most of the time to enjoy it, he walks around freely where ever he pleases, sleeps anywhere he wants (like on my bed and the sofa, whichever tickles his fancy more), goes from room to room and visits family members whom he thinks might be entertaining to visit, makes the most of the afternoon sun by sleeping the afternoon away in this nice sunny spot near the door. so shiok! i plan to be enjoying the house more with him when my exams are over.
made me realise that its actually my dog who owns this whole house. he's around most of the time to enjoy it, he walks around freely where ever he pleases, sleeps anywhere he wants (like on my bed and the sofa, whichever tickles his fancy more), goes from room to room and visits family members whom he thinks might be entertaining to visit, makes the most of the afternoon sun by sleeping the afternoon away in this nice sunny spot near the door. so shiok! i plan to be enjoying the house more with him when my exams are over.
Wednesday, October 19, 2005
"Let's take this paragraph you are now beginning to read. Who owns it - you or I? Does my intention matter more than your response? Questions like these divide the writing act in an unhelpful way. The text is neither mine nor yours - no one owns it. Even in writing it, I did'nt feel that I was putting my meaning into language that would fit your needs. Rather, there was a constant interplay between audience and intention so that I can no longer disentangle my meanings from your expectations. I did not feel set against you, my audience; rather, you became part of me in the act of writing. And so it is in a good writing conference, like the third one I quoted, where the teacher becomes an active instrument in the student's search for meaning."
Thomas Newkirk
The First Five Minutes: Setting the Agenda in a Writing Conference
The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing Centre Theory and Practice
R. W. Barnett and J. S. Blumner
p. 314
I thought I had an appointment today, but realised the slot's for friday, not wednesday. So I decided to use the time to upgrade my skills and do some reading! I like this passage, puts into words these vague notions I had. I love being a WA =) so satisfying to help someone write a good essay!
Thomas Newkirk
The First Five Minutes: Setting the Agenda in a Writing Conference
The Allyn and Bacon Guide to Writing Centre Theory and Practice
R. W. Barnett and J. S. Blumner
p. 314
I thought I had an appointment today, but realised the slot's for friday, not wednesday. So I decided to use the time to upgrade my skills and do some reading! I like this passage, puts into words these vague notions I had. I love being a WA =) so satisfying to help someone write a good essay!
Monday, October 17, 2005
twas a memorable night, thanks alan and alwin, we should do it again some time soon =) hope more ppl can join us
Saturday, October 15, 2005
cloudless day turns to cloudless night
i'm still waiting for the sight
of something beautiful
the sunset was spectacular, but i didn't see it too well under all that water and frustration and hopelessness. would it be too much to ask for a repeat performance, just for me, in tommorrow's sunrise?
but thinking of tommorrow tires me.
i understand what she meant when she said that she only seems alright when she's with people. but today i realise it's the people that make it so blah in the first place.
on a completely unrelated note, i stumbled across something that i probably wasn't meant to see. it disturbed me somewhat, should i be worried?
there's a tension i'm caught in. i want to be alone, i don't want to be lonely. yes? thats the thought that occurred to me as i was sitting on the stairs, watching the afternoon sun slant in from the front door below and the stairwell above, noticing how my dog kinda blends in with the wood of the parquay(?) floors.
for the past 3 days, this song has been looping in my head. i'd hear it playing when i wake up in the morning, i'd hear it playing when i'm spacing out, i'd sing it to myself unconsciously while sitting on the bus. the bgm of my life?
She's got her ticket
I think she gonna use it
I think she going to fly away
No one should try and stop her
Persuade her with their power
She says that her mind is made
Up
speaking of recurrence, every single radio channel was playing brittney spears last night! hilarious! seems like we can't run away from good old BS.
the escapist in me wishes i were back there in that picture. a big mountain ahead to climb, fresh air and open space, good friends all around. no responsibilities and no worries. not having to think about the troublesome things. ah well.
i'm still waiting for the sight
of something beautiful
the sunset was spectacular, but i didn't see it too well under all that water and frustration and hopelessness. would it be too much to ask for a repeat performance, just for me, in tommorrow's sunrise?
but thinking of tommorrow tires me.
i understand what she meant when she said that she only seems alright when she's with people. but today i realise it's the people that make it so blah in the first place.
on a completely unrelated note, i stumbled across something that i probably wasn't meant to see. it disturbed me somewhat, should i be worried?
there's a tension i'm caught in. i want to be alone, i don't want to be lonely. yes? thats the thought that occurred to me as i was sitting on the stairs, watching the afternoon sun slant in from the front door below and the stairwell above, noticing how my dog kinda blends in with the wood of the parquay(?) floors.
for the past 3 days, this song has been looping in my head. i'd hear it playing when i wake up in the morning, i'd hear it playing when i'm spacing out, i'd sing it to myself unconsciously while sitting on the bus. the bgm of my life?
She's got her ticket
I think she gonna use it
I think she going to fly away
No one should try and stop her
Persuade her with their power
She says that her mind is made
Up
speaking of recurrence, every single radio channel was playing brittney spears last night! hilarious! seems like we can't run away from good old BS.
the escapist in me wishes i were back there in that picture. a big mountain ahead to climb, fresh air and open space, good friends all around. no responsibilities and no worries. not having to think about the troublesome things. ah well.
Friday, October 14, 2005
and the worst part is, there are so many people like him, their hearts hardened against God, so much anger and bitterness in their lives.
Lord, how very hurt you must be when you see your child destroy himself that way, to have him reject your love, to have him scorn your sacrifice.
i only am able to hope that i have never caused, in any way, anyone to stumble like that through my actions and words, even in thought. Please, help me to live a life worthy of the gospel, i know i fall so short.
i pray, that one day you will lift the veil, and bring your children to repentance.
Amen.
Lord, how very hurt you must be when you see your child destroy himself that way, to have him reject your love, to have him scorn your sacrifice.
i only am able to hope that i have never caused, in any way, anyone to stumble like that through my actions and words, even in thought. Please, help me to live a life worthy of the gospel, i know i fall so short.
i pray, that one day you will lift the veil, and bring your children to repentance.
Amen.
Wednesday, October 12, 2005
on a motorbike
the journey so smooth
he never set his feet to the ground once
i looked over his shoulder
and saw hair whipping around madly
framed by a helmet, sloping off into shoulders
i considered the shadow we cast on the ground
and contemplated independence and freedom
i retrieved the memory of a conversation
which, only upon reflection
seemed utterly ridiculous
it was then that i realised
it had only been a dream
which made me shudder at
the blurring or reality and memory
the journey so smooth
he never set his feet to the ground once
i looked over his shoulder
and saw hair whipping around madly
framed by a helmet, sloping off into shoulders
i considered the shadow we cast on the ground
and contemplated independence and freedom
i retrieved the memory of a conversation
which, only upon reflection
seemed utterly ridiculous
it was then that i realised
it had only been a dream
which made me shudder at
the blurring or reality and memory
Tuesday, October 11, 2005
Cheese Test: What type of cheese are you?
the cheese pictures very amusing!
speaking of cheese. today, i was subjected to the worst that local tv has to offer. shooting stars was playing on tv mobile on the way home, and incidentally, thats exactly what it makes you feel like doing, if the singapore idol people can be considered stars that is. it was sooo bad, i had to eat chocolate cake when i got home to get over it. the idols are having their last class with their teacher-person and he says "no singing today!" and they're all like, can you give me contacts for gigs (sylyuckster), any tips for performances blahblah. and very naturally, he takes them to the treetop walk at macritchie and desecrates it. blindfolds them and makes them walk across, so that "they can go through life without me holding their hand". CHEESE ALERT!!! its like, so not challenging lah! its a treetop walk for goodness sake, not some indiana jones thingy. and the excruciating part was, every single time one of them crosses, they get flashbacks about their path to fame, get shaky and feel like they can't cross, then suddenly remember some breakthrough moment thingy and can confidently get across. ARGH. then every single time that happens, they play the person's theme song. its bad enough when they did it for taufik (he was first to go), but when they repeated for every subsequent one... ARGH! CHEESEY to the max, enough to make you throw up. Someone should really shoot them, at least finish off the scriptwriters.
Sunday, October 09, 2005
it's like my old mail.com email account, i return once in a while to take out the trash, but it's not my real home.
his resignation was officially announced today. i can't quite help but feel sad, resigned. sometimes things just seem so messed up.
take for instance these two people. i really do not like them at all, feel like punching them actually, sometimes. go away.
but there are people whom i love. thanks marianne, and thanks ben. it was good to talk to you and share my struggles. appreciate the perspective. and the memories and nostalgia, it didn't seem so long ago.
aiyah! i just realised i didn't get to say bye to small ben! lamby, if you're reading this, big hug from me to you. take care, hope to see you again during christmas!
thanks gabs, for the jacket, its really nice and soft (like you? haha...) i think i will borrow it more often. did you think about what i asked you to think about?
all this time i was worried about him, but today it was he who showed me concern. much appreciated.
at least some of us are meeting later to run. the group is growing!
wondering where you've been and how you're doing. not quite sure how to ask though. hopefully you'll volunteer the information.
still thinking about yesterday and regretting being such a punk.
his resignation was officially announced today. i can't quite help but feel sad, resigned. sometimes things just seem so messed up.
take for instance these two people. i really do not like them at all, feel like punching them actually, sometimes. go away.
but there are people whom i love. thanks marianne, and thanks ben. it was good to talk to you and share my struggles. appreciate the perspective. and the memories and nostalgia, it didn't seem so long ago.
aiyah! i just realised i didn't get to say bye to small ben! lamby, if you're reading this, big hug from me to you. take care, hope to see you again during christmas!
thanks gabs, for the jacket, its really nice and soft (like you? haha...) i think i will borrow it more often. did you think about what i asked you to think about?
all this time i was worried about him, but today it was he who showed me concern. much appreciated.
at least some of us are meeting later to run. the group is growing!
wondering where you've been and how you're doing. not quite sure how to ask though. hopefully you'll volunteer the information.
still thinking about yesterday and regretting being such a punk.
Saturday, October 08, 2005
music day.
john lennon at 65? unthinkable for me. people that massive are meant to go down in flames. i still think the beatles were the best band in all history.
i bought two new CDs. Tracy Chapman and Sheryl Crow. Halfway through Chapman now. Stirring stuff, music with a soul and conscience, not just fluff and jingles.
This song reminds me of blogging.
Telling stories : Tracy Chapman
There is fiction in the space between
The lines on your page of memories
Write it down but it doesn't mean
You're not just telling stories
There is fiction in the space between
You and me
There is fiction in the space between
You and reality
You will do and say anything
To make your everyday life
Seem less mundane
There is fiction in the space between
You and me
There's a science fiction in the space between
You and me
A fabrication of a grand scheme
Where i am the scary monster
I eat the city and as i leave the scene
In my spaceship i am laughing
In your remembrance of your bad dream
There's no one but you standing
Leave the pity and the blame
For the ones who do not speak
You write the words to get respect and compassion
And for posterity
You write the words and make believe
There is truth in the space between
There is fiction in the space between
You and everybody
Give us all what we need
Give us one more sad sordid story
But in the fiction of the space between
Sometimes a lie is the best thing
Sometimes a lie is the best thing
john lennon at 65? unthinkable for me. people that massive are meant to go down in flames. i still think the beatles were the best band in all history.
i bought two new CDs. Tracy Chapman and Sheryl Crow. Halfway through Chapman now. Stirring stuff, music with a soul and conscience, not just fluff and jingles.
This song reminds me of blogging.
Telling stories : Tracy Chapman
There is fiction in the space between
The lines on your page of memories
Write it down but it doesn't mean
You're not just telling stories
There is fiction in the space between
You and me
There is fiction in the space between
You and reality
You will do and say anything
To make your everyday life
Seem less mundane
There is fiction in the space between
You and me
There's a science fiction in the space between
You and me
A fabrication of a grand scheme
Where i am the scary monster
I eat the city and as i leave the scene
In my spaceship i am laughing
In your remembrance of your bad dream
There's no one but you standing
Leave the pity and the blame
For the ones who do not speak
You write the words to get respect and compassion
And for posterity
You write the words and make believe
There is truth in the space between
There is fiction in the space between
You and everybody
Give us all what we need
Give us one more sad sordid story
But in the fiction of the space between
Sometimes a lie is the best thing
Sometimes a lie is the best thing
post 360
is it meant to be a turning point? nope.
Event Title: ExxonMobil Campus Concerts presents The Observatory
Description: This 6-piece setup is currently working on their 2nd album which promises to elaborate on the band’s philosophy of perpetual change. Their relentless pursuit of non-formulaic music lies at the root of their belief that music should always be a transforming experience. Set against a constantly changing backdrop of space and sound, The Observatory uses live instrumentation and sound design to create a rich, potent mix of sonic intrigue and striking metaphors.
Date/Time: 26th October 2005 (Wednesday)
7.30pm
Venue: UCC Theatre
Price: Free Admission
not to be missed!!! one of singapore's best bands, ever!
is it meant to be a turning point? nope.
Event Title: ExxonMobil Campus Concerts presents The Observatory
Description: This 6-piece setup is currently working on their 2nd album which promises to elaborate on the band’s philosophy of perpetual change. Their relentless pursuit of non-formulaic music lies at the root of their belief that music should always be a transforming experience. Set against a constantly changing backdrop of space and sound, The Observatory uses live instrumentation and sound design to create a rich, potent mix of sonic intrigue and striking metaphors.
Date/Time: 26th October 2005 (Wednesday)
7.30pm
Venue: UCC Theatre
Price: Free Admission
not to be missed!!! one of singapore's best bands, ever!
Wednesday, October 05, 2005
Tuesday, October 04, 2005
ok, this is a little late. but it was the most fun thing i've done all year! (possibly more!)
i really should be studying stats now, so read their accounts.
tian en
timo
hozea
all i have to say is: "AGAIN! AGAIN!"
i really should be studying stats now, so read their accounts.
tian en
timo
hozea
all i have to say is: "AGAIN! AGAIN!"
Sunday, October 02, 2005
if you're reading this, and you happen to be one of those friends who will be one of my lifelong friends to grow old with, and you happen to live longer than me, this is the song i want to be sung at my funeral ok? no, i'm not being morbid, this is a beautiful song. and i think it gives the correct perspective on death, and all that we go through in life as well. it speaks of the great hope we have, hope that is not groundless and futile, but something we can be certain of, something that we can anchor to. I know that whatever happens from now till then, i will surely be able to say that God has been faithful in my life. And if people miss me when i'm gone, this song will comfort them, and reassure them that "all now mysterious shall be bright at last" and remind them that love's purest joys will be restored.
Be still my soul
Be still my soul, the Lord is on thy side
Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain
Leave to thy God to order and provide
In every change, He faithful will remain
Be still my soul, thy best, thy heavenly Friend
Through thorny ways, leads to a joyful end
Be still my soul, thy God doth undertake
To guide the future as He hath the past
Thy hope, thy confidence let nothing shake
All now mysterious shall be bright at last
Be still my soul, the waves and winds still know
His voice who ruled them while he dwelt below
Be still my soul, the hour is hastening on
Soon we shall be forever with the Lord
When disappointment, fear and grief are gone
Sorrow forgot, love's purest joys restored
Be still my soul, when change and tears are past
All safe and blessed we shall meet at last
Be still my soul
Be still my soul, the Lord is on thy side
Bear patiently the cross of grief or pain
Leave to thy God to order and provide
In every change, He faithful will remain
Be still my soul, thy best, thy heavenly Friend
Through thorny ways, leads to a joyful end
Be still my soul, thy God doth undertake
To guide the future as He hath the past
Thy hope, thy confidence let nothing shake
All now mysterious shall be bright at last
Be still my soul, the waves and winds still know
His voice who ruled them while he dwelt below
Be still my soul, the hour is hastening on
Soon we shall be forever with the Lord
When disappointment, fear and grief are gone
Sorrow forgot, love's purest joys restored
Be still my soul, when change and tears are past
All safe and blessed we shall meet at last
Saturday, October 01, 2005
tapioca. sweet and mushy or crispy and bland. depending on how you cook me.
About Me
- Name: beckyboo
- Location: Singapore
i am extraordinary, if you ever get to know me, i am extraordinary, i am just your ordinary average everyday sane psycho supergoddess
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