Humans are weird 2

(I have to break up the post into 2, blogspot won't let me post one long entry.)

We also do self-mutilation, or self-inflicted violence as some would call it. What's the deal? Who the hell will want to slash their own arm? [Link]
No animals would do that. The concept would be too strange for them to understand.

We not only like to hurt yourself, we also like to hurt other people( not to mention animals). We call it torture. And we are very good at it. [Link] It take thinking to come up with so many different sorts of tortures. The Chinese were surprisingly very good at it. The Roman were petty creative. I hear a good torturer can keep you alive for months, even years.

It's not all in the past though. WWII would see some outstanding examples in the use of tortures. Cambodian recent past can gives you a few pointers. All these happens not too long ago, less than 50 years.

And for the toture-inclined but in a hurry kind of guy, you can consider human sacrifice. Popular in almost all major religions in the past and still happens more often than you think till very recently. South East Asia was filled with human sacrifices. And then that's the problems of deciding if witch-burning is a form of human sacrifice. Oh well.[Link]

You know what's really really weird? Necrophilia. Fucking a corpse. Again it happens more often than you think. It's happening right now. Only a human, with all our intelligence, can look at a dead body and think of fucking it. No animals would do that. The thought would not even occurs to them.

Only humans, who is superior to all other animals, could have done any of the above things. Can anyone explain to me why?

Humans are weird

No doubt about it, we humans do some strange things. Things no other animals do.
You know what's interesting? Suicide. There are over 1 millions suicide a year and many more attempts. That's about one every 30 seconds. But the time you read till here, another guy have bite the big one. I said guys because more guys die in suicide than woman, although the woman attempt more. We are better at it. If girls want to talk about equal abilities, more woman have to die in suicide. The rates are rising, it's a fact, check it out yourself: [Link]

And we are the only creature to do than. Have you seen any animals jumping off down a building? Or lying down in front of a train? Or hanging itself from a roof? No. Only human.

And if it's not enough than we kill yourself, we kill other animals too. Not for food. But for fun. That's what hunters do nowadays. The thought of hunting for fun would never occurs to a tiger or a lion. Hunting is hard work.

And if's not enough than we kill other animals, we kill other people too. Murder. Now that's a human concept. As society progresses, murder is considered bad manners, so we change it to assassination. A new name.

And when we do it in huge numbers, we call it genocide. Happens more often than you think.

And when both side kill each others in huge numbers, we call it war. Oh yeah.

Now if you combine killing yourself with killing other people, why you are a probably a suicide bomber.

Suicide bombers. Now that's a strange concept. I mean what's your excuse? "Because God tells me to"?

Religion. The big one. We can convince ourselves that there is a man (clearly a man because only a man can be so egoistic) in the sky who sees all and hears all, and spend his time listening to all our problems and from time to time fixes them.

Now, the man has a list of ten things we cannot do and if we did any of them, we will go to a place of flames and fire and torture and pain and suffering and damnation for ever and ever and ever.

And you know what, the man loves us. Oh yeah.

Continue on next post...

Strange world, no?

It has been a while, and I must utilise my time-tested excuse of heavy schoolwork, as my reason for not posting. This Chinese new year break is the only time I had for a long time to gather my thoughts and focus my attention onto something other than school.(No idea whatsoever, of course.)

Anyway, Chinese new year is a time where you can observe who is the leader in the beverage industry. You know, with all the people you have to meet everyday, and all of them holding a drink; you can tell roughly what's popular and what's not by what are snatched up and what are left untouched. From my unscientific observation, pokka green tea is leading the pack. I would say well ahead of cola and F&N. That's no question, I like it too.

An interesting and unexpected discovery I made from this study is that most of the major players in the drinks industry, make their orange and lemon drinks totally from syrup. Yes, not a drop of real juice. It's all artificial favors, all of them! Now, I know that you won't find this shocking nor interesting, and neither do I.

But! Consider this. I have right now, siting on my kitchen sink, a bottle of dish washer, that claims that it's made out of REAL lemon juice! Why, oh why, do we use real juice to make dishwashers and uses artificial favours for our drinks?

And to drive the point further, in my showers, there is a shower gel (brand name is a name of a bird) which states that it contains no less that 1/4 hydrating milk! I guess the world is divided between people with not enough food and people who showers with 1/4 hydrating milk.

Scotts has a funny blog on North Korea vs capitalism.

So we figure it’s better to send them money in return for – and this is the genius part – North Korea NOT doing something.
We’re pretty smug about our capitalism, where we exchange actual goods and services for money. But I think you’d have to agree that the North Korean system of agreeing to NOT produce any goods and services, in return for massive amounts of money, is a better way to go.

Remember Alice in wonderland? Where down is up and up is down?

Is metaphysics possible?

In metaphysics, we did Aristotle's statement:

"There is a science which takes up the theory of being as being and of what "to be" means, taken by itself." -Metaphysics, Book Gamma, section 1

We talked about the presupposition that the structure of our language reflects the structure of our thinking, and that the structure of thinking reflects the structure of reality and we were tasked to post an answer to this question:

What reason do we have to believe that the structure of language and thought reflect a 'structure of reality'? If there is no such correlation, or if we cannot prove that there is, does that mean metaphysics is impossible? If this is the case, there is a further question. If mathematics is a language the structure of which reflects that of a certain category of thought, if physics and the natural sciences depend heavily on mathematics (as they seem to), does the hypothesis that there is no correlation between language and thought on the one hand, and the structure of reality on the other, also render the natural sciences impossible? Or is there a difference between these sciences, and a 'science of being qua being' that makes a difference here?

I have no idea.
Anyway, This is my post:

The relationship of thought and language is, in itself, a sticky chicken and egg dilemma without the added complication of them reflecting the ‘structure of reality’.

I think what we can all agree on is that language has evolved to allow us to communicate with each other and each of our languages is influenced by our different culture. Take for example, the old saying that Eskimos has 100 words for snow. Well, if you live in a place where you have an urgent need to know the different between “snow that is melting”, “snow that is moving”, and “snow that is going to kill us”, it make sense to have a large vocabulary for snow.

Taken in this sense, language is simply a toolbox of labels that we use to share information. It doesn’t really matters what colour the screwdriver is, as long as it gets the job done. Shakespeare seems to agree when he wrote “A rose by any other name, will smell just as sweet.”

But now the chicken and egg game has 2 different players, namely thought and reality. What evidence do we have that our thought structure reflects or is even capable of comprehending reality? Take for example, Einstein’s general theory of relativity, it turns out that space and time are variable and interchangeable. The faster you go, the slower time goes for you, and matter causes a “dent” in space-time? Now these are really weird ideas, and honestly, it’s not a concept you can explain and understand using words.

But the fact that this theory and many others have been discovered shows that our minds can comprehend the working of nature that we don’t even have words or pervious knowledge of. And the fact that this knowledge has proven true over repeated experiments is a clear sign that our understanding of the universe is ever increasing and evolving.

Professor Richard Dawkins sums up my point beautifully with his “middle earth” analogy. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4676751.stm)

Our brains had evolved to help us survive within the scale and orders of magnitude within which we exist, said Professor Dawkins. We think that rocks and crystals are solid when in fact they were made up mostly of spaces in between atoms, he argued.

"Are there things about the Universe that will be forever beyond our grasp, in principle, ungraspable in any mind, however superior?" he asked. “Successive generations have come to terms with the increasing queerness of the Universe."

"Middle world is the narrow range of reality that we judge to be normal as opposed to the queerness that we judge to be very small or very large." He mused that perhaps children should be given computer games to play with that familiarise them with quantum physics concepts.

Human beings need some methods of making sense of this huge world that lies outside the narrow range of reality that we are used to seeing; which brings us to the problem of mathematics and reality. Let me share my view of mathematics and why it does not render knowledge impossible.

Personally, I’m torn between the Platonist views that these objects do exist - just not as part of the physical universe, but as part of a separate universe of abstract objects; and that Mathematics is simply a story with certain constraints, written by human, just like in Sherlock Holmes.

My personal view is that universal ‘laws’ (for a lack of a better word), certainly exist. Like 1+1=2 and so on. So the laws are real and plentiful. We can observe these laws in action in our realm of reality, through experiments and so on.

Now mathematics is simply another toolbox, constructed as a proxy, for us to interact with and comprehend these “laws”. As they as modelled and build from the “laws” that we know of from experiences, they naturally reflect reality. In fact, their sole purpose is to reflect reality in a way we could understand.

If you look at the history of mathematics, we have constantly build upon the know rules and invented new methods of doing things. Mathematics is in essence a toolbox that has been put together by us who need to solve certain problems. If we came across a problem that we cannot solve with our current tools, we upgrade the toolbox, take for example, algebra.

Taken in this context, there seems to be no conflict between the “laws” of nature and the laws of mathematics. Our comprehensions of nature shape our rules of mathematics.

Yah, I was making it up as I go along.

Our evolutionary direction?

I was walking back home when an idea struck me (got to be careful, those buggers are everywhere) that human evolution may ceased to be influenced by nature selection. With all our break through in medical sciences and our mastery of our environment, we have transcend the limitation of nature. All the conditions and circumstances that have driven our evolution has ceased to be applicable to us. Nature selection for human has reached a new epoch. What will be the driving factors in the next phrase of human evolution?

In other words, what factors will give one human advantages over another in passing on his or her genes to future generations?

Is it looks? Wealth? Social Classes? Intelligence? Or maybe, has human overcome our age-old instinct to reproduces as many copies of our genes as possible? After all, sex is now more for enjoyment than reproduction. If so, how will human change? Will we instead of improving, fall back down a slippery slop, since there are no evolutionary pressures?

I don't really have any answers here, I'm just recording down what I'm thinking about.

Link: Is human evolution finally over?
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