it’s a fish floating on the river

last day of 2006, and i shall have to make this post.

the happiest thing that happened to me for 2006 is that i had a great, productive and meaningful year end holiday, something that i will never regret. and that, despite the fact that i had a grand total of one weekday where i woke up later than 10 am. looking forward to another day like this on the 1st of jan. certainly hope i will get it. oh wells.

anyway the hole in my blog was cause my thoughts for the last 2 months largely involved my pathlight experience, and of course that can’t be published, so i have been writing my thoughts in a separate document. 

but i realised that writing reflection in microsoft word is like… dry. maybe it is cause i am used to writing reports on microsoft word, and it just does not allow me to randomly plug in my thoughts in a word document. (haha the paper clip goes like – ‘hey, i do not process your thoughts. further information please.’ right.) so i would need to explain how the thoughts occured and this probably leads to the need to mention a thousand other series of events which led to the thoughts.

so duh it becomes a report and reflection combination.

uh oh! maybe two months back, i was wondering about why some philosophers claim that we do not have free will. determinism seems to be the popular reason i think. i realised that our actions seem to be largely due to our circumstances, like how people of authority always say ‘good job! you are excellent at adapting to the situation!’ so like circumstances and situations are out of our control, and these circumstances and situations lead to our actions, which yeah -surprise!- are not up to us to decide, and well, we do not have free will.

however, it seems to me that it is a possiblity that we do have free will (nope! it’s not an illusion.) but we are ‘robbed’ of our free will due to our survival instincts. choosing against circumstances, or setting ourselves against circumstances almost always work against us, and we incline towards the action that the circumstance “requires”. it is kind of like a loaded question, except that it is not a question.

like there is always a better choice, so why choose against it?

and taking it further, it might be that even our survival instincts are beyond our control, such that seemingly our actions are not due to our own free will. but i see it in this way – we have free will, yet we don’t. we always get to choose, but there is always a choice that we are inclined towards.

i think that provides another explanation as to why we do have the illusion of free will, and the idea that we get to choose, since actually, we do have free will, but we pseudo-exercise it, but the choice has already been pre-determined by some event or another.

well yeah. i can’t express it like now, it’s like floating in my mind and i think my argument is hardly convincing. oh and it’s so ironical that i started with that sentence. but oh wells, it is for future triggering of my mind and i might think more about it when i read this entry ten years later.

on other thoughts, can you ever get what you want if you don’t make a move for it?

oh anyway i have been reading a great book called The Art of Murder. it is like really good, but yet i can’t like recommend it to anyone cause it has lots of references to nudity in art. so it will be like totally weird if i told my friend, “hey you gotta read this, it is damn good.” then like they read and it mentions like… female and male stuff, then they will be so like “what’s wrong with zi lin?!”

but anyway the main point being that the story is not about art nudity, it is a murder mystery. and it is really cool cause it writes about this future world where paintings are no longer on canvas, but rather on human bodies. some humans literally become canvases that artists paint on, and they are really viewed as canvases, not humans. they stay in the position decided by the artists for six hours plus without moving like a single inch cause they go into a state of quiescence.

one of the things that struck me was how one of the characters was saying that in the past, paintings are valuable because they are eternal. they are scarce, so they become valuable. this is quite econs right? scarcity like leads to higher prices? but never mind i don’t take econs.

but in this world that the story is set in, for things to be valuable they have to be scarce, so like to make bad stuff valuable, all you have to do is make it rare. so anyway this young 14 year old girl gets murdered, and she is a piece worth 50 million euros, and it creates a big hooha not because she was a young girl brutally murdered, but because she was a 50 million masterpiece that got destroyed.

cool right! at first i was totally not used to the idea of that, but after reading the book for a while i got more used to it and it’s really interesting, the thought of that. and i am only like 1/3 of the book!

yeah it is a good read, and it is going to be a good read (:

turn of tides

my dad visits youtube!

COOL.