Category: Philosophy

Posted in Philosophy

Heroes And Villains

Posted on by Jinavie

A nearly universal belief most people seem to share is that we all like to think that we are the “good guy” in the story of our lives. We like to think that we are doing our best in life to be a positive influence in the world. No one likes to think that they are a villain; all our actions – even the questionable, harmful ones – are justifiable by our intent. Even Hitler thought that his massacre of the Jewish people and other horrible deeds were simply a means to an end to provide an environment where his own people could flourish.

But there comes a point in our lives where we are faced by a situation that challenges this belief. More often than not, it is when someone close to us, such as a friend or partner who we trust in to know us well, criticises us. Not superficial things such as critiquing your fashion sense or correcting your grammar, but digging deep and shining a bright spotlight on a flaw in your person, pointing out how much you have hurt them because of what you said or how you acted.

Such an event typically shocks us to the core. Because of the invisible social contract, we rarely point out people’s character flaws out of politeness and to avoid hurting them. This means we do not always know our own deepest flaws. However, sometimes enough is enough and people will explode in a fit of rage to let you know that you have hurt them through your behaviour. You have not been the good guy. You have been a villain.

Our response to this type of situation defines who we really are. An appropriate response is to listen to this criticism, have a period of introspection to understand your flaw and make an effort to try and correct this and improve yourself. This is a display of maturity. But if you become defensive, reject all criticism and continue to act in a way that hurts those around you, then how could you call yourself a hero?

Remember that life is not a story revolving only around you. You are simply one of many characters, like other people, in the grand, unifying story we call life. Whether you develop your character to be a mature hero willing to accept and improve on their flaws, or an immature villain deluded that they are always good, is up to you.

Posted in Philosophy

Zugzwang

Posted on by Jinavie

Chess is a game of choice. Each move sets in motion a myriad of possible games and a single misplay can drastically turn the tables. A skilled chess player will deliberate on each move as they try to predict how the game will flow on from the decision they make, but in an infinite sea of possibilities, choosing the best outcome is extremely difficult.

However, there is one situation that is the direct opposite. Zugzwang is a state in which the most viable, ideal move is an impossible one – to not move. In zugzwang, whatever decision you make will reduce your odds of winning compared to skipping your turn. In some cases, you are even forced to make a choice that will spell your inevitable doom.

Life is similar to chess in that we are always faced with choices. What outfit will you wear today? Will you sit in the front seat or the back? Who will you ask to be your date for the ball? Should I take this job offer to change my career path, or stay in my current, stable job? Some choices are simple and appear inconsequential, yet others make us feel stressed even considering the implications. We often regret choices we made, looking back and wondering “What if?”. How would my life be different had I chosen differently?

But in the grand scheme of things, how important is it that we make “the best choice” each time? A majority of the time, it is highly unlikely that a single poor decision will completely ruin your life. Sure, your life may turn out different for better or for worse in a certain way, but we neglect to account for all of the other ways our life may change. Chaos theory teaches us that even a small change like a butterfly flapping its wings can wildly and unpredictably affect the future. For example, it could be that changing jobs results in your career progress being delayed by five years. However, by changing jobs you may meet the woman or man of your dreams, when you would have not met them had you not changed jobs.

We often trap ourselves in a state of zugzwang – pondering all the horrible ways our decisions may cause regrets in the future. Our fear of the unknown causes us to be paralysed by these choices. But as discussed above, our choices do not cause purely good or bad outcomes, but instead result in a simply different future due to the sheer number of variables that can change.

Ergo, there is no point stressing about each and every choice you make – you might as well pick one, see how it plays out and learn from the experience.

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Posted in Philosophy

Mary And The Black And White Room

Posted on by Jinavie

Mary is a brilliant scientist who specialises in colour. She knows everything about colour – the spectrum, wavelengths, properties of light, the mechanism of how human vision works… She knows exactly how a certain wavelength of light will excite the retina and what kind of electrical impulse it will send in the brain. However, Mary has never seen colour. She has lived all of her life in a black and white room and can only observe the world through a black and white TV screen. The question is: if Mary was to leave the room and see the colourful world for what it is, would she learn something new?

Considering that Mary already knows everything theoretical about colour, would her seeing colour change anything? Or is the experience of seeing a colour something that you cannot learn without actually experiencing it?

This was a thought experiment proposed by Frank Jackson to question the nature of knowledge. Is physical knowledge truly everything, or is there something more than that? In philosophy, there is a concept called qualia, which describes the subjective, qualitative properties of experiences. That is, experience is a unique type of knowledge that cannot be learnt without experiencing it first-hand.

A further expansion of this idea is the refutation of physicalism – the school of thought that argues that everything (including knowledge and the mind) is physical. The logic is that since Mary knew everything “physical” about colour before leaving the room, her learning “something’ (i.e. experience of colour) is a direct argument against all knowledge being physical, as she learnt something “new”.

Another way to look at it is this. Some things in life can only be learnt through experiencing it. It is not enough trying to learn about life and the world purely from stories and books. To truly learn everything, you must get out there and experience it yourself.

Posted in Philosophy

Where The Wind Blows From

Posted on by Jinavie

Wind is a funny thing. It is all around us and we know it is there from what it does. From how it rustles the leaves on a tree, how it feels against our cheeks, to even the destruction it causes through a storm. However, we never know where it comes from. Sure, we can point at the general direction, but we cannot pinpoint exactly what caused the wind and where it started.

Sometimes in life, a similar thing happens to our hearts as well. Sometimes we are smitten with a feeling or emotion. It may be a warm, breezy sensation that makes you feel happy, or it may be a whirlwind that makes you fall head over heels and feel absolutely helpless in the face of it. More often than not, we cannot find the exact reason or source for this. Even worse, sometimes we figure it out, but far too late.

Like the wind, you may never be able to find where those feelings are coming from, no matter how far you travel. But regardless, perhaps it’s not such a foolish thing to follow the wind. You may not find where it’s blowing from, but at least it will feel nice and keep you cool.

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Posted in Philosophy

The First Move

Posted on by Jinavie

In the game of chess, every move counts. Each action you take can drastically change the way the game will play out from there on. By the second move, there are 72,084 possible games. By the third move, 9 million possible games exist. By the fourth, there are 318 trillion possible games. Essentially, after the first move, the game becomes nearly impossible to predict. There are more possible games on a chessboard than there are atoms in the universe. What spawns all of these possibilities is the first move.

This makes the first move all that terrifying. One mistake and you have destroyed countless possibilities where you are victorious. On the last few moves of the game, the results are much more predictable as the possibilities have been weeded out. Therefore, you can have more confidence in your moves. But the first move is as far as you can get from the end move, with an infinite sea of possibilities between you and the other side.

The corollary to this is that if you do make a mistake on your first move, then you have infinite ways to fix that mistake. So don’t be afraid of taking the first move – simply relax and play the game.

(inspiration/paraphrased from Harold Finch, Person of Interest)

Posted in Philosophy

The Minds Of Others

Posted on by Jinavie

How do we know that the world we perceive is the same as other people? How do we know that what I call “red” looks the same to another person? How do we know that other people are hearing the same music, smelling the same scent or even feeling the same emotions that we do? We infer from other people’s behaviours that fundamentally, we are all the “same”. We see other people enjoy the same things as us or think along the same lines as us, then we empathise.

However, as human beings, we are unable to read other people’s minds. All we can do is interpret people’s speech and behaviour to try gauge what they are thinking. This means that technically speaking, we can never truly know that other people have minds of their own. For all you know, the person in front of you could be an automaton that is programmed to respond to their environment in a manner similar to you.

As discussed above, we subjectively know (or assume) that other people have minds of their own, given what we observe. But then what of animals, artificial intelligence or even comatose people? How can we know that they have a conscious mind? The short answer is that there is no black-or-white answer, but it sure is an interesting philosophical discussion to ponder – one which has been pondered for millennia. This is the problem of other minds.

We cannot objectively “see” or read into another conscious mind. However, we can approximate what that mind is like from the person’s behaviour – their words and their actions. This is almost like sketching an animal that you have never seen just by listening to someone giving you an account of it. Therefore, if you want to get to know someone – to understand their mind, their essence, their soul – all you can do is talk with them, sketching out the finer details as the conversations get deeper and deeper.

Posted in Philosophy

Eternity

Posted on by Jinavie

“High in the North in a land called Svithjod there is a mountain. It is a hundred miles long and a hundred miles high and once every thousand years a little bird comes to this mountain to sharpen its beak. When the mountain has thus been worn away a single day of eternity will have passed.”

~ Hendrik Willem van Loon

Posted in Philosophy

Why Things Happen

Posted on by Jinavie

We have a tendency to want to believe in reasons. The human brain loves answers and explanations, so when something unexplainable or uncertain happens, we try our best to find a “reason” for why it happened. This psychological bias has shaped history, resulting in women being burned at the stakes as witches, cults and religions being founded and even entire ethnic groups being purged for a crime they did not commit.

But believing that things happen for a reason – whether such a thing exists or not – is not always a negative thing. Hope and faith that things will be alright and that the future will play out according to destiny or fate gives us comfort, as it allows us to begin to understand an uncertain future. Although the future will come no matter what and there is usually not much we can do to change it, we still want to know what will happen. This is why people seek fortune tellers, read horoscopes and secretly enjoy spoilers for books and movies.

But no matter how much we wish that our lives will play out as the universe has planned (hopefully towards a happy ending), the harsh reality is that things just happen. Things happen in the world not because of a pre-written script, but because of causality.

Earthquakes happen because of plate tectonics and hurricanes happen due to warm oceans and convection currents. Wars and economic crises happen because of human greed. You get heart disease because of lifestyle choices and your genetic make-up. Good things happen to good people because they treat people well and their deeds are reciprocated. You lost your wallet because you were careless and you ended up with “the one” because the two of you took action to get to know each other and did everything in your power to be together.

Everything in life is a result of cause and effect. Although it is more comforting to think that the hand of fate will push you towards the right career or your soulmate, or that good things are happening because of some karmic reward system, but isn’t it more rewarding to think that your happiness is a result of your own choices and actions? Sure, sometimes in life we need something to blame when bad things happen, but never let that be an excuse to stop yourself from taking that leap of faith to try change and build your own destiny.

(Image source: http://maythethoughtsbewithyou.com/)

Posted in Philosophy

Souls Of Trees

Posted on by Jinavie

In spring and summer, everything is green and idyllic, with every tree boasting its own coat of leaves. But in winter, the trees are stripped of their leaves and are forced to show their bare branches. A once lush, beautiful forest becomes a field of bony, crooked wooden skeletons. No matter how magnificent a tree may be in the summer, you can see its true form in winter.

But are the trees ashamed to show their true selves? The reason trees bare themselves in winter is so that they can store up energy and chlorophyll to produce more leaves in spring, when there is more sunshine. The branches continuously reach upward and outward, biding until better time has come.

It is the souls of the trees we see in the winter – continuously struggling to survive, but always holding on until it can bloom its flowers and leaves again. No matter how tough the conditions, these souls live on.

(Inspiration from Nymphomaniac Vol. I)

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Posted in Philosophy

Ticking Bomb Scenario

Posted on by Jinavie

Imagine a situation where a terrorist has planted a nuclear bomb in a major city and has it rigged to explode in 24 hours. Only he knows where the bomb is and how to disarm it. The authorities successfully capture him but he is not volunteering the information after hours of interrogation. Millions of lives are at stake because one man hides behind his rights and the control of his tongue. In such a scenario, is it morally justified to torture him until he gives away the information needed to prevent a catastrophe?

Torture is an unacceptable violation of a human being’s most fundamental rights. By inflicting pain and terror, the torturer systematically destroys the victim – physically, emotionally and psychologically. However, in the above scenario, not torturing the bomber will result in the death of countless innocent lives. Is the right of a murderous madman equivalent to a million other human beings? When asked this, the majority of people would answer that yes, in this scenario, torture can be justified.

However, this scenario is a hypothetical philosophical model to outline the argument that torture may be morally justified in certain situations. It is not a way to prove that governments should legally use torture as part of interrogations. The ticking bomb scenario has many weaknesses, such as the fact that such a scenario where all the elements line up so perfectly is highly unlikely to arise. But even so, it may be used as a base of a slippery slope, with people arguing that if a million lives can be saved by torturing an individual, what about a thousand lives? A hundred lives? Or even five lives? What if we have a legal system in place where a judge must issue a warrant after assessing the scenario? Then surely an argument can be made that in certain scenarios, there is no time for this process and lives are at stake. Ultimately, the legalisation of torture is an extremely dangerous slippery slope that can facilitate the violation of human rights with ease.

An alternative system is the so called Dirty Harry case. In this case, torture is still illegal, but a single individual in law enforcement decides to go rogue and takes the matter into his own hands. Because he decides to torture the suspect as an individual, not as part of an institution, he will be committing a crime for which he will be tried in the future. If the jury finds him guilty, he will be punished by being imprisoned. Therefore, the “Dirty Harry” must weigh the potential benefit of torturing the suspect (i.e. saving lives) versus the potential risks (i.e. going to prison), giving him incentive to make a more careful decision.

(Source: Check out this Reddit comment for a more elaborate explanation with references)