the roll over

and so yesterday ended my first working day at pathlight (:

i don’t think i’m going to ever blog about my experiences at pathlight, not because it is negative or anything, but i think it is not very nice to write about the students that i have interacted with, even though it was all positive, and i really did learn a lot from them. i would probably write about some of my reflections after i interacted with them, that is more important!

there is some kind of generation gap going on here obviously, cause i’m at the computer lab with them now, they just finished their IT lesson and are now given time to do any activity that they like (this is called “choice time”). and here i am reading blogs, blogging, checking my email, while all the students are at some website or another, playing games. haha. if i was at rj, the probability of the person next to me playing computer games would be like, 0.00001%. haha.

anyway, i love working at pathlight! no surprise, i think. the children here are amazing! some of them are really gifted in certain aspects, but others who may not have a certain known special talent, have ways to make people around them happy and optimistic about life. (:

who told us about the society?

how did we know that the society is governed by unwritten rules?

and sometimes, these unwritten rules outnumber the written ones.

is it that weird when some people are unable to understand these unwritten rules?

sometimes, i think that these social rules don’t even make sense anyway.

i read an article regarding autism, and the disability lies in them processing information differently. apparently, the most prominent theory now is that they lack the “mirror neurons” needed to imitate actions of others around them, and they are also unable to understand what others are thinking. they can’t feel empathy in a sense as well.

but i think that the autistic children are very amazing. there are times when i got quite mean with them, especially when they are not following instructions, but they do not take it to heart at all! they are always ready to share their thoughts and ideas with me, seemingly to have forgotten all about me being firm with them, or taking disciplinary action. i think this is what makes them so special. they do not hold grudges, unlike normal young children, who hate you forever when you discipline them as they are not listening to the instructions.

also, working with them shows me that there can really no social rules governing this society. there is no big deal with holding the hand of a stranger beside you, no big deal about calling a stranger by name,  and definitely no big deal in playing with the stranger you have just met. there are no hidden connotations in their world, everything is simple and straightforward.

why do we insist on restricting ourselves in this society with so many of the weird social rules that really, is nonsense at times? is it so that we are not deemed as weird?

there seems to be no other way of breaking out of this system.

innocence.

the most beautiful thing is this world.

are we ready to embrace it?  

flipping through it is not for you

alwyn » i don’t think because it cannot be proven means its not useful. scientific theories can’t be proven anyway.. the so much that logic and experiments can unearth might be useful enough..

right. okay well firstly, i said philosophers are not useful, i didn’t say that philosophy is useless.

anyway, when i said that philosophers are not useful, a larger part of the reason would be that they are unable to answer many questions that they raise. sorry i was unclear about that.

and yes, of course i think that a small part of it would be that the answers they give cannot be proven, and this is not useful because well, i see no application in them. okay, in the sense of ethical theories, maybe. but i guess the consensus is that they really do not guide people in making moral decisions, but more like serve as models as to how people arrive at these decisions. and i think there are too many competing models for any to be useful.

following that, scientific theories, which are not proven, might be more useful because they can often be applied in many ways. and for science, there seems to be some kind of “overwriting”, where there is some way to know whether one theory is better or more accurate than the other, so there aren’t so many competing theories. i guess it makes for better application then.

alwyn » ..is abit of a strawman, like if doctors dont cure all the time then they aren’t doctors. and i just realised my tags have appeared. shucks sorry for spamming..false analogy, cause at least doctors cure patients at some times, while i’m saying that philosophers have never been able to share their ideas.

yaxy2k » how about commenting =.=yes i agree with xinyang. -.-

i like the night better

just read mr chan’s blog and wah!

anonymous: ziLin being anal as usual. 

not something very nice to say, and so weird, from someone who actually knows me? i was wondering where the “as usual” came from. hm. anyway it was in response to my earlier tag.

ziLin: mr chan so loving! lol. but you need to learn paragraphing. you know like if u’re not gonna “tab”, then u shld leave a line between paras. if u’re gonna “tab” then don’t need.

maybe it did sound anal, huh? it’s kind of weird, if i had done this instead -

ziLin: mr chan so loving! lol. but you need to learn paragraphing. you know like if u’re not gonna “tab”, then u shld leave a line between paras. if u’re gonna “tab” then don’t need. hahahaha!

then it won’t sound so anal. but i think there won’t actually enough characters. but oh wells. i think it’s somewhat like the usual things that i say to mr chan just to suan him, but i guess it’s easy to misinterpret.

yawn. i think if people want to say bad things, at least leave a name! i won’t attack you or anything, but at least i know that i should step on your toes less. yeah.

why i am not a philosopher

a few weeks back, i saw jiin holding a book entitled “why i am not a christian” by betrand russell. i thought the title was kind of cool, so yeah, i thought after doing not so well for ki, i should actually write about “why i am not a philosopher”!

but the thing is, after considering the title, there can be 2 ways to write about “why i am not a philosopher”. i can write about the bad things of being a philosopher, but i can also write about how i am not cut out to be a philosopher. i assume that betrand russell probably wrote about the.. “senseless-ness” of being a christian, rather than why he wasn’t cut out to be a christian. cause that will seriously be weird. i don’t think you need any skills or abilities to have a religion. oh wells.

so, why am i not a philosopher?

oh it’s always good to start with definitions first.

philosopher -noun

a person who offers views or theories on profound questions in ethics, metaphysics, logic, and other related fields.

this definition seems a bit loose, it seems like anyone who shares these views would be considered as a philosopher. oh wells. here goes.

well, firstly, a person can’t be a philosopher through and through. a philosopher is internally consistent. it’s just like hume’s mitigated scepticism, when you keep questioning about the world and how it might not exist at all, but you turn around and eat all the food in the world so that you can live till to the next day.

yeah sure, you are not actually saying that the world does not exist, you’re just saying the the world may not exist. but one goes from the world may not exist, to the world exists at every breath one takes. (literally, cause you are breathing in the existent oxygen.) since a person cannot be a consistent philosopher, i guess i cannot be a philosopher then.

secondly, a philosopher is not useful. all they have are questions, and more questions, and answers that they give can never be proven, nor justified. for example, prove to me that we actually have mental templates, a.k.a SAPs according to Kant. experiments on a random sampling of the population can only do so much, and experiments are all about interpretation, which is terribly open. furthermore, these experiments to gain knowledge raises similar criticisms present while discussing about the philosophy of science.

so, what is the point of raising so many questions when you cannot answer them? the world needs answers, not questions! if answers given cannot be proven, and people are still convinced to accept these answers, how different is it from dogma? i think religions have already covered that domain very well. of course, the questions can be used to sharpen one’s mind, but so do lateral thinking and critical thinking exercises.

now this begs the question, why should i care whether i am useful or not? hm. that is a good question. i would think that people prefer to be useful most of the times. i guess if one is not going to be useful, then it doesn’t really matter what you are going to be. so why choose to be a philosopher over being a hawker? (hawkers are kind of useful though.) so well, i am simply not a philosopher because i want to be useful, or have some kind of contribution to the world. 

this brings me to my third point, that philosophers seem to be arguing among themselves all the time, till the application of philosophy seems limited. Universal consensus is something which can never be reached. it just seems like a high class debate with no resolution. 

as a philosopher, one is limited by language, and the expression of one’s thoughts to another person completely is actually impossible. everyone has unique experiences, changing connatations to every word in the language. the sender’s message is changed the moment it reaches the receiver. if one’s thoughts and theories are really only being contained within oneself, then no one can actually be a philosopher, since we cannot actually share our views.

yes, we could attempt to share part of our views, but the entire picture would not be present in the other person’s mind, and the gaps will just be filled up by the other person, till the point that the ideas or theories are basically, the person’s own ideas. so can anyone still be a philosopher without being able to share and convince anyone of his views? anyway, that seems to take away the point of being a philosopher. the philosopher spends much time and energy developing his own theory and idea, and every time he tries to share it, it gets mutilated.

yeah anyway, i guess all the reasons above answers why i am not a philosopher.

oh wells according to plato, philosophers are supposed to be the guardians of society, since they are the ones with somehow the highest level of thinking and can appropriately guide us towards the flourishing of our society. but in recent times, the more apparent trend seems to be of many different philosophers raising many different theories with no conclusion in sight. are we diluting the significance of being a philosopher? or really, has anyone actually been a philosopher?

i had an interesting thought while writing about why i am not a philosopher. actually, the construction of philosophical knowledge doesn’t seem that different from the construction of scientific knowledge.

philosophers generate theories answering profound questions of many fields, and these theories are generated by observing the world around them, and with a spark of creativity. scientists generate theories answering questions of naure, and these theories are generated by observing nature, and with some wild imagination.

these theories (philosophical and scientific) are based on some kind of context, or framework, as in Kuhn’s definition of paradigm. i read in the nietzsche book some days back on how in modern times, philosophers seem to be more inclined towards nietzsche’s views, and philosophical theories tend to start resembling and echoing his thoughts.

actually, i also have doubts on how deductive philosophical knowledge is. it seems to me that many philosophers base their theories on their observations. for example, ethical systems are based on studying human behaviour. for example, contractualism was conceived most likely through the careful study of how humans think and work, and utilitarianism works on the principle that maximum happiness is always desired by humans. hedonism, where people gravitate towards pleasure and avoid pain, is also based on observations of human nature!

if these theories were conceptualised by the study of human nature, that would make these theories inductive, since the philosopher only has a small sampling of the population and obviously made his conclusions from his study of this small group of people. isn’t that inductive as well, just like experiments done to prove scientific theories?

so why is philosophical knowledge still prized, held high above scientific knowledge? especially when scientific knowledge has much more use in this world. are we really sure about what we know in philosophy anyway? there is as much certainty in philosophical knowledge as scientific knowledge, it seems.

i remember mr jarrod lee saying that philosophical knowledge is “up there”, high above scientific knowledge, but seriously, why do we say that? they don’t seem that different afterall.

please excuse my ignorance, though.

on a side note, i forgot to write about the aspect of not being cut out to be a philosopher for “why i am not a philosopher”. i’ll put it simply -

1. i didn’t do well for ki.

2. i’m probably not very critical and logical.

3. i don’t write good essays.

anyway, “why i am not a philosopher” was really a thought experiment for me, i feel. i still love philosophy to bits, i guess i was just trying to see how hard it was to argue for “non-philosophy”. yep. no personal attacks! 

it is now 3.49 am.

got the stone to pick up

my family and i went to the parkway parade giant yesterday! then there was this super cool problem that my sister and i were faced with! and i was really wondering about how other people would react…

no, we weren’t on candid camera (:

okay basically, we were at the frozen foods section, and then there was a counter selling the CP shrimp wanton. so uh, some people have been saying that the shrimp wanton is very nice, and the advertisement also makes it look like it’s really good to eat. so my sister and i agreed that we should buy some to try.

and the problem arises!

the brilliant CP had two different packaging for the shrimp wantons. there was a small bowl thing, and a rectangular box thing.

okay here’s the deal.

the rectangular box thing says that there are 12 shrimp wantons, the net weight is 144g and it costs $4.60.

the small bowl thing doesn’t say how many shrimp wantons there are inside, the net weight is 145g, and it costs $2.80.

… like what the heck? how come the heavier one costs less? and packaging does not affect the net weight of the product. and especially due to some hearsay, i heard that the small bowl thing only has 3 or 4 wantons. that’s another question, cause how come less wantons = more weight?

so anyway it was really confusing, till the point that we had to ask our parents to come over to guess what’s wrong with CP. but my dad and mum also don’t know what’s going on.

anyway the point being, which one should we buy?

my dad and i thinks we should buy the small bowl, my sister thinks we should buy both, and my mum thinks we should buy none.

hahaha, but in the end my sister forced my dad to buy both. and so i told my sister,

“ah cheh, the smart person would buy the small bowl, the stupid person would buy the rectangular box, and the stupidest of them all will buy both the bowl and box.”

hahaha. but now after thinking it over, i think the smartest is to buy both, cause or else we would never find out how come it was priced and packaged the way it was. and yes, we did find out!

but no, i’m not going to reveal it =P

seriously though, to each of its own.

a coin, two heads.

i was talking to my sister today after sending my brother to his hostel at nus. today, we were out looking at cars as my sister has decided to purchase her first car and perhaps that got me thinking about my future career once again.

at this age, there are many people around me who are thinking about their futures, which courses they intend to take up in university, what occupation they are going into, and of course, how much money they want to earn. i do admit that all these are questions which have always been running through my head. cause i guess we still think that the courses you take in university do somehow determine your whole life.

yeah, as my friends know, i have two ambitions, the first of which is to be a dj, and the second is to be a teacher at a school for the autistic children. the first, well, it’s really an interest, and the second is something that i feel strongly about. but both of them have one thing in common, that i am definitely not going to make much money out of those two careers, except maybe when i do both of them together. but i’ll just die if i do that, so that’s out of question.

so, my sister told me some things that i never really bothered to think about, even though i have really thought much about things that i want to do in the future. and i realised how immature i have been.

i do suppose that most of you have thought about your future careers and your ambitions, and the question ringing in our heads is always “what do i intend to do in the future?” and immediately following this would probably be “will i enjoy doing this job?” and of course, then “how much money can i earn from doing this?” and “will it be enough for me to buy all the stuff that i want?”

i guess this is all very natural. i don’t think my point is put across yet, but i’m getting there. this is all very natural, cause we are wondering about our own lives. they are the type of lives that we intend to live in the future. so it is nothing weird when all the questions really pertain to us, and us alone.

but stop. my sister reminded me, what about your parents? what about your family? they are going to get old someday. how are you going to provide for them?

all along, i have been thinking about whether what i am going to do would be my passion, and something that would interest me. all along, i have been thinking about whether the job would provide me with sufficient money to survive. and that was how i got to the conclusion of the two ambitions of mine. even though they are low-paying jobs, i felt that i was comfortable, especially since i think i would have very little commitments, since i have no intention of getting married, or like owning beautiful clothes and shoes.

but then now i realise, it is not going to be comfortable. i forgot about my parents. am i able to take them for holidays? what if they get sick? (touch wood.) will i be able to afford their treatments?

i realised how immature, and how ungrateful i have been. my dad has always been very “relaxed” about my decisions. he encourages me to do whatever i want, like my jobs and stuff, as long as i am able to face the consequences. and that is what i have been doing. he told me, “it’s up to you.” and i really took that at face value. if it’s up to me to decide, and as long as i can live with the consequences, then it should be alright, right?

but now i realise, my parents gave me the choices, and i am choosing an option without considering them and their futures.

i guess when children go to like rgs and rjc, parents would have greater hope that their children would be successful, and yeah, successful would mean money.

but yes, i have asked my dad before, and he said that of course he would want his children to be successful. but he doesn’t really define “success” in terms of money. he felt that as long as we are comfortable, then it is okay. and once again, there i go, feeling that as long as i am comfortable, then it is okay.

your parent’s expectations rise when you are able to enter good schools and such, and i guess it’s not really a good thing when you cannot reach their expectations because you choose your passion.

but being parents, they would want you to be happy, and happy would mean choosing your passion and doing something that you would be happy about.

sigh.

i think…

it’s a good thing to be living for yourself,

but do not forget,

the ability to live for yourself came from your parents,

and maybe it is time to start living for them as well.

finally it burns

i’m looking for someone!

if your name has 6 letters,

and you read my blog,

please tag! (:

*no js, i’m not looking for you =P your name only have 2 letters! haha.

crawling in the mud hole

to me,

the worst feeling?

disappointment.

sleeping on the thick book

“Oh yea another thing. Why do people always have to stress the fact that they are well, alone or they don’t know themselves, or they are losing themselves in emo entries? It sort of pisses me of because what do you mean by alone? Well I think that everyone is alone. Nobody leave the world in pairs. That will be terrible because you have to be worried about 2 people’s death instead of one. and I think if you know yourself, then you must be a pretty shallow person so that is actually a good thing. How can you lose yourself? You are not a watch or  wallet or a handphone. You always have yourself. You can lose your hope, your direction whatever. It is not possible to lose yourself. that in itself is contradictory.”

- js’ blog

hm i just had to quote this, cause it seems not such a long way back when i was talking about how i was not the person whom i thought i was and stuff like that. but it is kind of different since i did not literally say “lose myself”, so yeah.

anyway what i had to say to js:

hey js! with regards to the “losing yourself” thing, a bit reading too much into the definition of the word and using the definition to argue that the other person is wrong. i mean, most people don’t mean it literally… in most cases they don’t mean anything at all in emo entries. but yeah.

anyway in my opinion, many people do have some idea about who they are like, according to some of the actions that they perform, and this faint idea does actually guide them along in performing future actions. don’t ask me why, but there’s always the “how would i act in this situation?” if you did not have the faintest idea about yourself, life will be tough cause you cannot put yourself in hypothetical situations to see your reactions and check the consequences. and more importantly, you can’t do personality quizzes.

so when people say they have lost themselves, they probably mean something along the lines of losing the person that they “thought they knew”, in which case “person” means like a certain thing that holds a specific personality.

yeah, so i guess we shouldn’t be so… uh, stringent on the word use, and take “losing yourself” metaphorically, and it doesn’t really show that the person is shallow i guess. haha. oh wells (:

white man spotted

rjc open house today. even though it was really quite busy, i still managed to pick up certain issues to ponder upon through my observations today. it is really quite interesting how mundane actions can make you question what the underlying purpose is, and is there really an more important issue to address which is being disguised by that mundane action?

for today, i thought about atmosphere and individual actions. is there really a relationship between the two? i used to think that those people hired to bring up the atmosphere (what are they called? can’t remember. read it somewhere in the news months ago.) are really quite useless. it’s just like how for council, we always try to get people in the mood to cheer, but it does not really make a difference, cause they will start cheering when they see the need arises.

oh, but this reminds me that it can still be considered as competitive atmosphere. so i was more like talking about enthusiastic atmosphere that apparently hopes to cause people to act in certain ways.

i don’t know, today after mr hodge’s talk, everyone was pumped up i think. everyone was constantly reminded that we are bring visitors into our school, be friendly, be nice, don’t say mean things and so on.

and the thing is people were actually starting to be excited. the moment the lt doors open, my gosh. you could see everyone smiling like they have never before, ready to welcome all the visitors into our now brilliant school.

everyone smiled,

and smiled,

and smiled.

they said their hellos, goodbyes and “welcome to rjc!”.

it was great, the school’s enthusiastic atmosphere was there, and everyone was trying their best to keep it alive. they took visitors around everyone, tried to address to every need and concern they might have, and of course, not forgetting to bring them to the milo van!

but soon after,

the ”gong” sounded.

not the one for the opening ceremony, but the one for the closing.

almost immediately, you could sense the difference.

by the time i was leaving school after all that shifting and stuff,

walking down the corridors by myself,

i could acutely feel the difference in atmosphere.

rjc had once again returned to its cold and clinical culture,

where did all the friendliness go?

i don’t know, it just makes me feel, weird. like it seemed that during the open house hours, things were really quite different. people talked to strangers, smiled to strangers, and even danced for strangers!

are our individual actions really so affected by the atmosphere surrounding us?

personally, i think it is, but i wouldn’t want it to be.

it’s just like how i would really like to join in the listening of some rock band show, and if the people surrounding me go like “oh, don’t go, that’s like so immature!” and i would agree and forget about it. oh wells. it’s not a very nice thing to do to yourself i think.

but then again, this atmosphere has to start from somewhere right? so is it like many random people doing same random stuff that leads to some atmosphere? or is it only one person?

how come there are people who find it so easy to get people to follow what they are doing, while others can only play mere followers?

does it have some kind of relevance to like leadership?

the carrier of atmosphere - the leader.

i think a leader with that kind of abilities will really be successful. i mean afterall, you’re trying to get the followers to follow you.

anyway, i’m tired. shall sleep. i think mr jarrod lee is an interesting future ki teacher. he reminds me of mr chua, my ultimate favourite philosophy teacher (: yay!