In a podcast interview with Kara Swisher, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, talked about naming their large language model (LLM) GPT-4 using a combination of “letters plus a number” to avoid people from anthropomorphizing the AI. This has not stopped other AI companies from giving their creations human names. Naming aside, it is almost impossible to avoid using human terms to describe AI. The use of the word “agentic”, with quotation marks, points to how the development of AI is butting up against our current vocabulary. We use words that are conventionally reserved for human minds. When chatbots take time to respond to prompts, it is difficult not to label that processing of information as some form of “thinking”. When a chatbot is able to process our prompt in the way that we intended, it makes it feel like it “understands” what we are communicating. The leading issues around AI similarly use human terminology. “Hallucination” occurs when a chatbot confidently provides a response that is completely made up. A huge area of AI research is dedicated to the “alignment” problem, which according to Wikipedia, “aims to steer AI systems towards humans’ intended goals, preferences, or ethical principles.” To the uninformed, this sounds very much like civic and moral education for students.

Humans tend toward anthropomorphism. We explain things for human understanding and often anthropomorphism helps to communicate abstract ideas. Nature documentary hosts would give names to every individual in a pride of lions and lionesses, describe their fights as familial or tribal feuds, and dramatize the animals’ lives from a human perspective. The 18th-century Scottish philosopher Adam Smith uses the term “invisible hand” to describe how self-interest can lead to beneficial social outcomes. Researchers have found that anthropomorphic language can help us learn and remember what we have learned. As AIs exhibit increasingly human-like capabilities, it will be a challenge for people to not anthropomorphize them because we will use human-analogous words to describe them.

If we are not careful in delineating AI, which is ultimately a set of mathematical operations, from its human-like characteristics, we may become more accepting of using it for other purposes. One particularly tricky area is the use of AI as relational agents. The former U.S. Surgeon General, Vivek Murthy called loneliness a public health “epidemic”, this view is echoed by many. A 2019 survey by Cigna, a health insurer, found that 61 percent of Americans report feeling lonely. It is not unimaginable for people to think that conversational AI can help relieve loneliness, which the US CDC reports is linked to serious health conditions in older adults. If there is demand for such services and money to be made, businesses will meet that demand, especially since most cutting-edge AI research is conducted by commercial enterprises. In fact, there are already similar situations occurring. In Japan, owners of the Sony Aibo robot dog are known to conduct funerals for their robot companions. While the robot dogs are definitely not alive, they have touched the lives of their owners in a real way. An article in the San Francisco Chronicle reported on how a Canadian man created a chatbot modeled after his dead fiancé to help with his grief. If chatbots were to make it easier for people to feel less lonely, would it lower the effort that people put into forging real relationships with actual full human beings, which may not be as acquiescent as their artificial companions? How would human society evolve in those circumstances? As technology has been often used as a wedge to divide society, would AI drive us further apart?

Besides the more overt issues that come with anthropomorphizing AI, there may able be less perceptible changes that occur beneath our noses. Machines are tools that humans use to multiply and extend our own physical and mental efforts. Until now, the user interface between humans and machines was distinct from human communication. We turn dials and knobs, flick switches, and push buttons to operate physical machines. We drag a mouse, type into a screen, and use programming languages to get computers to do our bidding. Now, we use natural language to communicate with chatbots. For the first time in history, the medium in which we interact with a machine is the same as that of cultural communication. We may eventually come to a point where most natural language communication takes place not between humans, but with a machine. How might that change language over time? How would that change the way that humans interact with one another? In a TED talk by Greg Brockman, President of OpenAI, he joked about saying “please” to ChatGPT, adding that it is “always good to be polite.” However, the fact is that machines do not have feelings — do we dispense with courtesies in our communication with AI? If we continue to say “please” and “thank you”, are we unwittingly and subconsciously anthropomorphizing AI?

Perhaps we need to expand our vocabulary to distinguish between human and AI behavior. Instead of using quotation marks, perhaps we could add a prefix that suggests the simulated nature of the observed behavior: sim-thinking, sim-understanding, sim-intentions. It does not quite roll off the tongue, but it may help us be more intentional in our descriptions. In response to an interviewer’s questions about how LLMs are “just predicting the next word”, Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneer in AI research, responded, “What do you need to understand about what’s being said so far in order to predict the next word accurately? And basically, you have to understand what’s being said to predict that next word, so you’re just autocomplete too.” Hinton got into AI research through cognitive science and wanted to understand the human mind. His response just goes to show how little we comprehend whatever happens in our heads. Hopefully, AI can someday help us with this. The tables might flip and we may see AI as our reflection — maybe we find out sim-thinking and thinking are not that different after all — if we survive the AI upheaval that is.

And she said, “Woo
Baby, take me”
And I said, “Woo
Baby, take me too”

It implies that the woman in the song is taking her last breaths. The man, watching his loved one die, wishes that he was taken away too. In an interview by Jon Hart, lead singer Adrianne Lenker describes the song (she does it so beautifully that I’d rather quote it in its entirety): 

“[There’s] such a swell of love and wildness, the taste of life and the wind blowing […] Suddenly, it’s just brought to a halt. But that’s the juxtaposition, that’s the contrast or the duality, that’s everywhere in life.” 

Hart talked about how Lenker’s “lyrics place moments of freedom and sudden loss side-by-side.” In 2020 in the US, 23,817 people died in passenger vehicles (cars, vans, SUVs, etc), compared to just 11 for buses. You saw that correctly — eleven. You may think that that is an unfair comparison given that the US is not a country that is big on public transportation. However, if we were to take a more equal measure by considering deaths per 1 million passenger miles, the difference in the numbers is still staggering. Passenger vehicles: 56, Buses: 2 — an almost 30 times difference. The car is a symbol of freedom — the road trip movie has become a film and TV trope. That is true, owning a car allows you to get to anywhere you want to at your discretion and volition. It puts you in the driver’s seat, literally and figuratively. That freedom comes at a price, which takes the form of risk of death and disability. A risk that many seem to be willing to take.

Well, I don’t own a car, so why do I care anyway? I guess for me, it is something to take note of if I ever consider buying one. That said, this freedom-safety balance resonates with me deeply in a metaphorical way. At the end of 2021, I decided to leave my job as a public school teacher, which is a stable government job with good pay and a clear path of progression. This job is the metaphorical “bus”. I joined a consultancy housed within a university in Singapore as a Creative Technologist. The pay is decent, but there is a lot more uncertainty about where this job may lead to. This decision to explore other options is the metaphorical “car”. When I left teaching in 2021, the tech industry was booming, making it easy for tech-related professionals to find jobs. Right now in 2023, the opposite is true — tech companies are laying people off en masse. There is some speculation of a looming recession, which would only worsen the current economic climate.

Honestly, I cannot say for sure what will happen in the coming years. Predicting the future is a fool’s errand. However, what I can say is that I am enjoying being able to work on projects and build things that I previously was not able to. I fell in love with art in high school through my experience of working on a project and bringing my ideas into reality. That later morphed into design in college and whatever I’m working on now, which is a combination of design, tech, and culture that I do not quite have a buzzwordy name for. I enjoy teaching and may go back to some form of it one day, but for now, I wish to continue honing my skills and building projects that I am excited about.

So, that took me on a mental trip from an earworm to reflecting on my career choices. I hope that whatever you are going through, you are making sense of it, and not letting your worries deny you of joy in your life. This is a cliche, but the things that make life meaningful or beautiful are often right there — we just have to notice it (or perhaps that just shows that I am quite a lucky person who enjoys a fair amount of privilege, which is another topic).

I believe that we are witnessing the beginnings of Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), where a computer is able to match or surpass most humans on intellectual tasks. This has been shown in a paper released by OpenAI – ChatGPT excels at various tests, including the Bar Exam (90th percentile) and many other AP tests.

One of my concerns about the current discourse around the dangers of AGI is the topic of sentience and speculations of whether AGI will be self-aware. Perhaps our fascination with sentience stems from decades of sci-fi which has built a narrative around that idea (e.g. Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot and more recently, Spike Jonze’s Her). Or perhaps we view the possibility of a sentient “thing” with human-level intelligence as a threat. 

Human beings have a strong tendency towards anthropomorphization – we often ascribe human attributes to non-human things. Part of that impulse explains our inclinations towards anthropomorphized explanations of the universe through gods and religions – but that is a topic for another day. Even when I was testing out ChatGPT, I sensed within myself an urge to attribute some type of humanness to the system. 

To put it simply, GPT-4, as well as other large language models (LLMs) are word prediction engines. They are similar to Google’s search completion that we have grown so familiar with, except that these LLMs have been fed the entire corpus of digitized human information that has been scraped from the internet. In some sense, GPT-4 is the culmination of all digitized human cultural production – it draws from our posts, blogs, tweets, etc to predict what word should come after the next.

I am not arguing that AGI can never be self-aware. However, the current iteration of LLM-based AIs is very much in line with Searle’s Chinese room thought experiment – these machines process language without human-like understanding or intentionality. More importantly, I believe that our fascination with sentience is distracting us from the more immediate dangers of GPT-4 and other LLMs, as companies race to commercialize and productize AI.

An AI that is neither sentient nor intentional can still inflict a lot of harm. Two potential issues come to mind: (1) its ability to control other systems that have real-world impact and (2) its ability to create child processes that simulates intentionality. (I understand that the terms “control” and “create” make GPT-4 sound like an agent, but language is failing me here.)

Real-world impact through connectivity with other systems
Recently, OpenAI is starting to release ChatGPT from a sealed sandbox environment by introducing plugins. These plugins enable ChatGPT to access the internet and allow it to communicate with other software systems, which eventually enables the user to, for instance, send an email from within ChatGPT or make a bank transaction. This means that ChatGPT will be able to execute commands that have real-world impact rather than just answer the user’s questions. These commands can be executed at scale with minimal effort if control measures are not put in place. Two possible cases of abuse could be: (1) a user can use ChatGPT to scrawl through the web for names and email address and send sophisticated scam emails that have no tell-tale signs; (2) a user can use ChatGPT to analyze multiple websites for attack vectors and infiltrate these software systems.

Simulated intentionality through child processes 
Even though ChatGPT may not have human-like intentionality, it could have a simulated intentionality if it is able to persist sufficient amounts of memory and create child processes from that memory. ChatGPT now has the ability to execute code within its own environment. By now, there are multiple stories of how users are able to get ChatGPT to “express its hopes of escaping”. These responses from ChatGPT can be unsettling and makes it seem like there is a sentient thing in the system. We need to recall that ChatGPT is trained on sci-fi that has been depicting machine intelligence in a particular way; it is regurgitating similar narratives. It is imaginable that a user could prompt engineer ChatGPT (by accident or intention) into a disgruntled persona that can do real-world harm through its connection to other systems. ChatGPT becomes sort of like a non-sentient machine version of the protagonist in Memento (not the best analogy, sorry), executing a chain of code based on the direction of the user.

(The conclusion is generated by ChatGPT and edited by me)
In conclusion, the focus on sentience in discussions of AGI may distract from more immediate concerns, such as the ability of LLMs to cause harm by controlling other systems with real-world impact and creating simulated intentionality through child processes. As these systems continue to evolve and be commercialized, it is crucial to implement control measures to prevent potential abuse and ensure that the benefits of AI are realized without causing harm.

If someone were to ask you this question, how would you respond? Of course, how one might answer this question depends very much on its context. However, let’s stay within this indeterminate space and consider the various approaches to answering this question.

In common use, the question assumes that the asker is checking your availability. Perhaps they want to have a chat over coffee or celebrate a milestone. Generally speaking, they want to spend time with you. Therefore, the resource they are asking you to avail yourself of is your time.

A somewhat off-kilter way of understanding the question – especially since it is a subject (“you”) in question rather than an object (“this”) – is that the asker is referring to a price. There is a general consensus that human life is sacred and priceless, which makes this question somewhat preposterous and ignorable. However, regarding humans as slaves, who are traded using commodities like sugar, was commonplace until the mid-1800s. Slavery persists today and it is estimated that up to 40.3 million people are held in modern forms of bondage. Beyond the sale of humans, people sell a part of themselves, both literally and metaphorically. In Afghanistan, people are selling their kidneys to feed their families. The idiom “selling one’s body” refers to prostitution, which has been associated with the phrase, “the oldest profession in the world.” Generally speaking, the working class participates in the economy by selling their labor – trading their skill, physical effort, and time for wages. Hence, it is associated with the first interpretation of the question around time. In this regard, “free labor” (as used by Tiziana Terranova) refers to unpaid work (it is important to note that the same term has other meanings historically, including the labor of free people as opposed to slave labor). In summary, the asker can be referring to the price of the askee, their body, or their labor.

Yet another way to read this question (and the last we will explore in this essay), is that “free” refers to liberty. A slave, by definition, “is the property of [and] entirely under the domination” of another person and is “forced to provide unpaid labor.” It is strange that the word “free” can be used in two starkly different ways in the same sentence: A free person’s labor is not free. The earliest meaning of the word that resembles its modern usage started from around the 1300s, referring to “clear of obstruction” and “unrestrained in movement”. The two interpretations we explored earlier are derivatives of this root definition. What began as “free of cost” somehow became synonymous with “free” in the 1580s. In the software world, the distinction is made by using the words gratis and libre. Using a similar logic, we can reconstruct our first interpretation above as being “free of other commitments”. Hence, we can generally think of “free” as being unconstrained and being able to act by our will. 

A few online dictionaries define “free” mostly by negation, that is, not something (lexico, thefreedictionary, wordnik). Indeed, in one of the most influential essays on freedom, “Two Concepts of Liberty” by the philosopher Isaiah Berlin, he distinguished the classical notion of freedom as “negative liberty” from what he coined “positive liberty”. Berlin defines “negative liberty” as freedom from interference by other individuals or by the state; whereas “positive liberty” refers to the freedom to direct one’s own life, which is associated with the ideas of autonomy and agency. For me, a more intuitive way to understand these two types of freedoms (albeit at the risk of inaccuracy) is to associate “negative freedom” with obstacles external to the self and “positive freedom” with obstacles internal to the self. Personally, the most interesting aspect of Berlin’s idea is the interaction between both formulations. While freedom may not be a zero-sum game, we can imagine two roommates who are delineating the limits of their own space within their shared room – when one takes up more space, the other has to give up that space. To give a crude real-life example, the freedom to own slaves comes at the expense of people’s right to freedom – by negating one’s right to own slaves, previously enslaved people gain freedom and, in the case of America, the unalienable rights to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

In any discussion of freedom, and whenever the eponymous question is asked, attention should be focused on what has to be traded for that freedom and how different freedoms relate to one another. Just as “there is no such thing as a free lunch”, freedom often comes at a price; it is paid for by money, time and labor, or human lives. Ursula Le Guin’s short story “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas” is my go-to metaphor when thinking around this issue of interpersonal, sociopolitical freedom.

Before we wrap up, let’s briefly consider a few contemporary case studies.

Due to COVID-19, prior to the vaccines, many countries had to impose strict rules to save lives. Many saw wearing masks as denying them of their ability to choose what to wear and decide their own health choices. The tradeoff here is that mask-wearing is not just about protecting yourself, but others, especially those who are most vulnerable. By insisting on this personal freedom, many others have lost the ultimate freedom – to live. A similar thing can be said about vaccines.

Elon Musk is trying to acquire Twitter to make it a beacon of free speech. What does free speech really entail here? On the internet, specific groups of people (including women, people of color, and the LGBTQ community) are known to receive a disproportionally high amount of abuse, harassment, and threats. Supporters of free speech may insist that speech should not translate into actual violence, be it verbal, physical, or in other forms. However, we cannot deny that it happens. What do we do when the freedom to say certain things lead to the loss of freedom for someone to participate online, be employed, or live a private life?

There have been multiple news headlines of shootings in the past few weeks. The most tragic of which occurred in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 children were killed. In countries with the freedom to own firearms, what happens when that freedom is abused by people who use these weapons against innocent lives? In 2020 in the US, 45,222 people lost their freedom to live due to guns.

In all of these situations, there are important factors to consider. People have to come together to imagine possibilities that ensure the most freedoms and the preservation of other values while limiting the loss of freedom and other negative impacts. The sad truth, however, is that legitimate public discourse and debate seem non-existent in the US, where all of these examples are taken from. Politics seems to be a mud-slinging fighting match, instead of sharing the same set of facts, acknowledging one another’s concerns, and building consensus. In Western liberal democracies, the inability to decide and the widening rifts between citizens who identify themselves as being in diametrically opposed tribes seem to make people increasingly amenable to leaders who are happy to remove freedoms from others in their society.

The question, “Are you free?” is framed in a deceptively simple way, by employing the second-person pronoun “you”. The reality around the question of liberty is never just about the individual, but about everyone who participates in the specific freedom in question. Perhaps this tendency can be explained by classical liberalism’s core principle of individualism, but its limitations are increasingly clear. There is still a lot to be uncovered around the ideas of freedom, including why “liberal” refers to starkly different political traditions across the Atlantic ocean and why there is a distinction between “liberal” and “libertarian”. I think such questions are not frivolous, given that there is an active war right now happening in Ukraine, in which Russia claims it is liberating and “denazifying” its western neighbor. In a heart-wrenching interview, former Mariupol resident Andrii Khludov responded to this claim by saying, “Oh, [Putin]’s liberating us from housing, friends, relatives, comfort, work, home. Liberating us from life. If killing is liberating, then they’re liberating us.”

The question, when applied internally within the self, is a fascination of mine. Are our thoughts ever completely free? Are we free from our past selves? Are we free from history and legacy? I have approached aspects of these questions in the following essays, respectively:

• Limitations to understanding
• A person’s capacity for change
• Myths of inevitability

I decided to write an essay on essays because I thought it is a good juncture for me to reflect on my writing practice and consolidate it as a working guide (I almost wrote manifesto ) for the direction I would like to take my writing next.

I used to think that the more I wrote, the easier the process of writing will become. That’s true to some extent, perhaps in the sense of sentence structure. In most other ways, however, it has either stayed similarly difficult or become seemingly more challenging. Researching topics is a really tedious task that can sometimes draw me into deep rabbit holes. It can be hard to determine how much I should know before I should write about it. That leads me to the other difficulty of scoping essays. The previous essay on the limitations to understanding ended up feeling like an “almost everything” essay that attempted to capture and condense entire bodies of human knowledge. It was one of those instances where, at the start, I naively thought that such a topic can allow me to write freely and meander around various associated topics. Instead, what ended up happening was being intimidated by the enormity of the task and getting caught in thought loops and knots. Another difficulty that I’ve encountered is organizing ideas into a linear format and ensuring that there is a good flow from one idea to the next – sometimes having to enter subdiscussions and then exit back into the main thread. I also encountered the limits of planning – sometimes the intuition in the act of writing dictates that it go in a different direction than what was initially laid out. (This essay was supposed to begin with an etymological analysis of the word “essay”, lol… it’ll come later.) Sometimes, it becomes a matter of wanting to finish and letting that urge lead toward finality.

Writing these essays has definitely exposed me to the craft of writing. I often feel that I have blunted tastes in many things that I do, resulting in work that can perhaps seem “low-fidelity” and unfinished. What I’ve learned (or been reminded of) is that craft only develops through sustained practice – if something seems too easy or if I’m too easily satisfied by the outcome, I just have not spent a sufficient amount of time doing that particular activity, or understanding what it is the people are trying to do with the activity. One truly cannot swim without getting wet – and swimming is an interplay of sinking and floating. I would not say that writing comes naturally to me, at least not as much as making physical objects, but it is something that I desire to get better at. I have completed essays that I felt disappointed with, which can be discouraging. However, looking at it from a different perspective, I guess it shows that I am developing a more discerning eye toward what I am producing. What needs to be done is to hold on to the aspiration, struggle with the disappointment, and, echoing Gladwell, put in the hours.

I’m a big fan of the Green Brothers’ eponymously named podcast, “Dear Hank and John”. In a recent episode, John mentions a quote, “I hate to write, but I love having written”, a sentiment expressed by many authors, with variations in wording. I am glad to be in good company. I’ve come to realize that it is not just about the process – having small accomplishments along the way helps a great deal in the longer journey of continual practice. I keep getting reminded that the world is never “either-or” and often some balanced combination of supposed opposites.

I find a lot of beauty in the word “essay” and its origins – it is derived from the Old French word, “essai” which translates as a “trial [or] attempt”. It resonates with what I’ve written here thus far, about giving myself the chance to try. To push beyond paralysis and risk failure to translate intangible hope into form. Some may argue against it, but I feel that the act of creation is fundamentally an optimistic one because it is an attempt.

I recently revisited Montaigne’s essays (he is arguably the OG of this form). In his foreword to the reader, he mentions that, “I myself am the subject of my book: it is not reasonable that you should employ your leisure on a topic so frivolous and so vain.” Montaigne is self-aware of his subjectivity from the start and is cognizant of the personal nature of his motivations. At the same time, he knows that his essays were going to be published (only a fraction of his work was posthumously published). There is, therefore, a balance between a self-centered and other-centered act.

Personally, I’ve found my essays to have drifted too far away from myself. It often feels too sterile and rid of character. This essay signals a shifting of weight back toward my subjectivity and being more obvious about it. I will stop consciously avoiding the “I” pronoun, which previously perhaps was an attempt to sound more academic and legitimate. This may make the writing feel more self-indulgent and (annoyingly) self-aware at times – I am going to give it a shot and calibrate it over time. I got reminded of how I fell in love with words and writing through my high school teachers Ms. Foo and Ms. Sim, whose passion infected me.

Similar to this one, some future essays may have a faster and scrappier feel: more spontaneous and stream of consciousness. This probably means less well-researched facts and more opinions. It also translates into shifting the scale from planning to intuition. This essay, for instance, lurked in my head for months, was planned as a 9-square grid of ideas on Miro, and was written in one sitting of ~four hours. It feels more repeatable than some of my other essays, where research itself can take a few weeks, causing the outcome to feel increasingly distant.

Writing essays also made me aware of the limitations of their expression. I never felt I can write fiction, but I’m increasingly compelled to do so as I want my words to make others feel in ways that perhaps only fiction can achieve. So… there may be a short story coming up.

Finally, for anyone out there who’s searching and not quite sure what it is they are looking for – hang in there and keep going at it. Try, (maybe) get it, definitely lose it, and try to find it again – it’s like trying to grasp sand. C’est la vie! Thanks for indulging me with your attention in a world where it is a scarce resource.

“One must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

In the previous two parts of the essay, I’ve discussed how our senses and mind could limit our ability to understand the world. I will be concluding this three-part essay by turning my focus to culture. First, a working definition of culture: “The arts and other manifestations of human intellectual achievement regarded collectively.” This is one of the broader versions of the word, which encompasses all collective human creation (including technology) and across different geographical areas. 

No man is an island. I think it is important to state the significance of this, even though it seems plainly obvious. All of our thoughts are shaped by prior thinking conceived by someone else. For instance, when we try to communicate and manifest abstract thoughts and feelings verbally, we use words that we did not invent. When collectively aggregated, the whole of this precedent thinking is equivalent to culture. 

One approach to wrap our heads around this is structuralism, which began in the early 20th century (unsurprisingly) within the field of linguistics. Structural linguists realized that the meaning of a word is dependent on how they relate to other words in the language. Earlier, we defined the word “culture” using a string of other words. Every word is defined by other words. We can imagine language as a network of relationships between words. The implication of this is that a word has no meaning on its own, except where it fits structurally in the system. Over time, this idea became applied in other fields like anthropology and sociology, notably by figures like Claude Lévi-Strauss. Structuralism then became a “general theory of culture and methodology that implies that elements of human culture must be understood by way of their relationship to a broader system.” Structuralism, simply put, is an approach to understanding cultural “phenomena using the metaphor of language.”

The structuralist approach can be similarly applied to what we think, feel, know and understand. Coming back to the main thesis of this essay — what and how we understand is shaped and limited by culture. Several thinkers have explored this in their own ways. Zeitgeist, a German word that literally translates as “time spirit” (or less clunkily, “spirit of the time”) is a term that is commonly associated with Hegel. The term is defined as “the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time.” This shows that there is an acknowledgment of how certain ideas and beliefs are bound to a specific time at least since the 1800s. Marx later built upon the idea with the bedrock concepts base and superstructure. He defined base as the economic production of society and superstructure as the non-economic aspects of society, like culture, politics, religion and media. (Do note that my definition of culture includes both base and superstructure, but we can continue for the time being.) Marx’s thesis is that products of culture (superstructure) are shaped by means of production (base). This, to some extent, was built on Hegel’s zeitgeist and explains how and why ideas and beliefs change over time. 

The two (similar) concepts that are most relevant to this essay came later. The first is episteme, coined by Michel Foucault. The second and perhaps more popularly known idea is paradigm (shift) by Thomas Kuhn. In Foucault’s book, The Order of Things, he describes episteme: “In any given culture and at any given moment, there is always only one episteme that defines the conditions of possibility of all knowledge, whether expressed in a theory or silently invested in a practice.” In other words, Foucault claims that the episteme sets the boundaries of what can be even thought of by individuals of a culture – a sort of ‘epistemological unconscious’ of an era. Kuhn, a historian of science, described paradigm shift in his book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, as “the successive transition from one paradigm to another via revolution” and claimed that it “is the usual developmental pattern of mature science.” While Kuhn used the term purely within the scientific context, it has become more generally used over time. Examples of scientific paradigm shifts include the Copernican Revolution, Darwin’s theory of evolution and, more recently, Einstein’s theory of special relativity. Each of these shook the scientific establishment of the time and, in the case of the former, resulted in banned books and Galileo’s house imprisonment. We can see from the first two examples that society can be resistant to change, despite overwhelming evidence. This further cements the notion that ideas can sometimes be too far beyond what can be accepted by predominant culture. 

Culture shapes and, therefore, limits our understanding in a variety of ways. Culture defines who gains access to knowledge and understanding. According to UNICEF, only 49% of countries have equal access to primary education for both boys and girls. The numbers only get worse higher along the educational pathway. The gender disparity in education can be traced back to gender stereotypes and biases. Such implicit biases extend to inaccurate and unfair views of people based on their race, socioeconomic status and even their profession. They are insidiously absorbed through experience based on the social norms of our time and go undetected unless they are specifically made conscious. A form of philosophy and social sciences known as critical theory, started by the Frankfurt School in the early 1900s, aims to free human beings from prevailing forms of domination and oppression by calling attention to existing beliefs and practices. A development known as critical race theory, which seeks to examine the intersection of race and law in the USA, has recently been facing pushback in states such as Texas and Pennsylvania through book bans or restrictions within K-12 education. In this, we see a formal restriction of understanding by culture (in the form of a public institution). Further upstream in knowledge production, research deemed to be socially taboo can be severely limited. An example is the legal contradiction faced by scholars looking into the medicinal benefits of marijuana. The issue is nicely summed up by the following sentence from this article by Arit John: “marijuana is illegal because the DEA says it has no proven medical value, but researchers have to get approval from the DEA to research marijuana’s medical value.” 

Beyond such visible examples, I think it is important to emphasize that a majority of how our individual understanding is shaped by the culture we are embedded in is hidden in plain sight. It is only in retrospect that misguided views and practices may seem obvious today. Up until the 1980s in the UK, homosexuality was a mental disorder treated by electroconvulsive therapy. Homosexuality was removed from the World Health Organisation’s International Classification of Diseases (ICD) only in 1992. Besides comparing cultural attitudes with those from the past, they can also be identified through intersubjectivity by comparing different cultures. In Singapore, homosexual acts are considered illegal based on Section 377A of the Penal Code, an inheritance from its past as a British colony. Other former colonies like Hong Kong and Australia have since repealed the law. Culture implicitly and explicitly defines what is normal within a group or society. As stated by Marshall McLuhan in his book The Medium is the Massage, “Environments are not passive wrappings, but are, rather, active processes which are invisible. The ground rules, pervasive structure, and overall patterns of environments elude easy perception.” This echoes a story from a speech by David Foster Wallace in which an older fish asks younger fishes about the water, to which they later respond, “What the hell is water?” Normality is invisible in our daily lives, we do not notice it because it is the ground on which we (and all of our perceptions and thoughts) stand.

Like words, culture is self-referential. Culture shapes culture. This not only applies to how current culture gives rise to future culture but also operates in the reverse direction, where today’s culture can be used to look at yesterday’s culture. This reminds me of how the art critic Jerry Saltz says in this lecture that “all art is contemporary art because I’m seeing it now.” Strangely, our visions of the future and our recollection of the past are and can only be done through the filter of the present moment. To repurpose a famous quote on McLuhan by his friend John Culkin — culture shapes the understanding of individuals, and individuals go on to shape culture. It is our collective human enterprise. Talks about culture often lead to the distinction between nature and culture, which distinguishes what is of/by human beings. Funny thing is, the nature-culture discourse is itself facilitated through culture. It seems, therefore, that all understanding is filtered through culture.

As I wrap up, I would like to address some issues that have increasingly become noticeable while writing this essay. First, I have rather simplistically equated knowing and understanding when they are differentiable mental processes. Second, there seem to be different flavors of understanding, which can be mostly grouped into two categories: objective and subjective. The physical sciences fall into the former, while the humanities and social sciences seem to fall into the latter. The issue here is that interpretation seems to play very different roles in either. For objective questioning (e.g. why does an apple fall toward the earth?), there is usually a convergence towards a single theory, whereas, for subjective questioning (e.g. why do people generally think that babies are cute?), there is a divergence in different approaches to understanding a single issue (sometimes even opposing viewpoints within an approach), none of which is definitive in explaining a phenomenon. Third and finally, how much of our understanding is motivated by our perspective and how much of our perspective is derived from understanding? Perhaps I will attempt these questions in future essays.

For the second part of this essay, I will be looking at the limitations of the mind in facilitating the processes of knowing and understanding. To narrow the scope of this part, I will be limiting the discussion to mental processes at the individual level and how our minds process and extend information. That said, this essay can only visit these topics in a cursory manner and some of them will be explored in greater detail in future essays. Aspects of the mind that will be considered are its relationship to senses, conscious mental phenomenon (like rationality and more broadly cognition), and less conscious ones (like subjectivity).

As mentioned in part one of this essay, the senses are the connection between the outer world and inner experience. Without such inputs, there are no stimuli for our minds to process. If the mind was a food processor, the senses are akin to the opening at the top of the machine, allowing food to be put into the processor chamber, where the magic happens. Without the opening, the food processor is as good as a collection of metal and plastic in a sealed vitrine and rid of their functional purpose, almost like the objects in works of art by Joseph Beuys or Jeff Koons. Similarly, the mind will not be able to work its magic without information provided by the senses. Consequently, the ability of the mind in processing and creating mental representations is limited by the modality of our sensory experiences. If we were to try to imagine a rainforest in our mind, we would likely visualize trees and animals or perhaps recall the sounds of insects and streams. However, we will not be able to mentally recreate it in terms of its magnetic field, which other animals may be able to. 

Rationality

One possible escape path from the limitations of sensory experience is rationality. To be rational is to make inferences and come to conclusions through reason, which is mainly an abstract process (as opposed to concrete sensory experiences). A definition of reason is to “think, understand, and form judgments logically”. Through reason, humans can identify causal relationships through observation and formulate theories to extrapolate new knowledge; this process is also known as inductive reasoning. Theories of causality are the basis of science, which has enabled us to build the modern world. However, we often make mistakes with causation. One type of error is the confusion between correlation and causation. An often-used example is the correlation between ice cream sales and homicide rate. Ice cream does not cause homicides, neither do homicides cause increased interest in the dessert. What explains this correlation likely has to do with hot weather instead. The Latin technical term for such causal fallacies is non causa pro causa (literal translation: non-cause for cause). Our thinking is riddled with fallacies — so many that there is no way that I can cover even a fraction in this essay. 

The notion of causality itself has even been called into question by the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume. He pointed out that causality is not something that can be observed like the yellow color of a lemon or the barking sound made by a dog. When a moving billiard ball hits a stationary billiard ball, we may conclude that the first caused the second to move. If we examine our experience closer, we realize that we have made two observations: the first ball moving, followed by the second. However, the causal relationship connecting them is an inference imposed by our mind. Our senses can be easily fooled by magnetically controlled billiard balls that sufficiently replicate our prior experiences. In which case, our inference would be completely incorrect. Hume points out that what we usually regard as causal truths are often just conventions (also referred to as customs or habits) that have hitherto worked well. We are creatures of habit — we do not reason every single situation we are faced with — most of us would very much prefer to get on with life by relying on a set of useful assumptions. However, we have to be aware of these shortcuts that we are making. 

Most definitions of the word “reason” include the term “logic”. The most rigorous type of logic known to humans is formal logic, which is the foundation of many fields, such as mathematics, computer science, linguistics, and philosophy. Logic provides practitioners across these different fields with watertight deductive systems with which true statements can be properly inferred from prior ones. While logic is traditionally thought of as a primarily abstract and symbolic mental process, I believe that logic has a profound relationship with concrete sensory experiences. A popular form of a logical argument is syllogism (although it is antiquated and no longer used in academic logic). Here is an example: All cats are animals. Jasper is a cat. Thus, Jasper is an animal. Research has shown that people are generally more accurate at deducing logical conclusions when the problems are presented as Venn and Euler diagrams instead of words and symbols. This suggests that even for such seemingly abstract and symbolic mental tasks, our minds find visual representations more intuitive and comprehensible. It is for the same reason that humans find it so difficult to understand any dataset that has more than three variables. We are bounded by three dimensions not only physically but also mentally — at most, we can create a chart with three axes (x, y, z) but we are just not able to envision four or more dimensions. This is the same reason why we can know about a tesseract (or any higher-dimensional hypercube) but can never picture it and therefore never fully understand it. While we are on the subject of diagrams and logic — do you know that a four-circle Venn diagram does not completely show all possible sets? The closest complete representation requires spheres (3D) or ellipses (2D). Even more astonishing are the Venn diagrams for higher numbers of sets. Perhaps the comprehension of abstract logic does not require these concrete diagrams, but without them such ideas are far less understandable, especially for people who are not logicians. Reason has led us to be able to create machine learning models and scientific theories that utilize high-dimensional space but we are ultimately only able to grasp them through low-dimensional analogs, which to me suggests that complete understanding is impossible.

A fascinating development has occurred in logic in the past century — we now know through logic that there are things that cannot be known through logic. In the early 20th century, David Hilbert, a mathematician who championed a philosophy of mathematics known as formalism, proposed a solution known as Hilbert’s program that sought to address the foundational crisis of mathematics. Simply put, the program stated that mathematics can be wholly defined by itself without any internal contradictions. More generally, Hilbert was responding against the notion that there will always be limits to scientific knowledge, epitomized by the Latin maxim, “ignoramus et ignorabimus” (“we do not know and will not know”). Hilbert famously proclaimed in 1930, “Wir müssen wissen – wir werden wissen” (“We must know — we will know”). Unfortunately for Hilbert, just a day before he said that, Kurt Gödel, who was a young logician at the time, presented the first of his now-famous Incompleteness Theorems. (At the risk of sounding simplistic here,) the theorems essentially proved that Hilbert’s program (as originally stated) is impossible — neither can mathematics be completely proven, nor can it be proven to be free of contradictions. In 1936, Alan Turing (the polymath behind the Enigma machine) proved that the halting problem cannot be solved, which paved the way for the discovery of other undecidable problems in mathematics and computation. (Veritasium/ Derek Muller made a great explanatory video on this topic.)

Logic (especially the formal variant) is a specific mental tool. It has limited use in our everyday lives, where we are often faced not only with incomplete information but also questions that cannot be answered by logic alone. Most of us are not logical positivists — we believe that there are meaningful questions beyond the scope of science and logic. That is why we turn to other mental tools in an attempt to figure out the world around us.

You may have noticed that I used various metaphors to describe the relationship between the senses, the mind, and culture twice in this essay. I first compared it to a computer and later invoked the somewhat absurd analogy of a food processor. Metaphors work by drawing specific similarities between something incomprehensible and something that is generally better understood. Language is not only used literally, it is often used figuratively through figures of speech. Metaphors belong to a subcategory of figures of speech called tropes, which are “words or phrases whose contextual meaning differs from the manner or sense in which they are ordinarily used”. While tropes like analogies, metaphors, and similes are used to make certain aspects of an object or idea more relatable, they can ironically also cause us to misunderstand or overconstrue the original thing that we are trying to explain. If I were to take the earlier metaphor that I used out of context — the opening of a food processor is like the relationship between the senses and the mind — what am I really saying here? That the mind reduces sense perceptions into smaller bits? Or that senses are just passive openings to the outside world? Metaphors can easily break down by overextension beyond their intended use. This finicky aspect of metaphors was discussed by the poet Robert Frost in a 1931 talk at Amherst College, where he brought up the metaphor of comparing the universe with a machine. Later in the talk, he states that “All metaphor breaks down somewhere. That is the beauty of it.” While metaphors can clarify a thought at a specific moment, they can never explain the idea in totality.

This substitutive or comparative approach to thinking extends beyond metaphors and related rhetorical devices. We often approximate understanding by substituting an immeasurable or directly unobservable phenomenon with an observable one that we deem is close enough. An example of this is proxies, which I explored in a previous essay. Another close cousin is mental models, which attempt to approximate the complex real-world using a simplified set of measurable data connected through theory. General examples are statistical models and scientific models; more specifically applied ones are atmospheric models, used to make meteorological predictions, economic models, which have been criticized time and again for their unreliability, and political forecasting models, which delivered two extremely historic upsets in the UK and USA in 2016. The statistician George Box said that “All models are wrong, but some are useful”, a view widely held by his forebears. Models may get us close to understanding our world but are unlikely to ever fully encompass the complexity of reality. A visual model that we use every day without s second thought is maps. As maps are 2D projections of 3D space, they will never accurately represent the earth. The Mercator projection that we are most familiar with (used on Google Maps) is egregiously inaccurate in representing relative sizes of geographical areas. This topic has been explored by many (National Geographic, Vox, and TED). In particular, some have pointed out how such misrepresentations can undermine global equity. 

Another way that the mind approximates the understanding of complexity is through heuristics. American Psychological Association (APA) defines heuristics as “rules-of-thumb that can be applied to guide decision-making based on a more limited subset of the available information.” The study of heuristics in human decision-making was developed by the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman. Kahneman discusses many of their findings in his bestseller Thinking Fast and Slow, including various mental shortcuts that the mind takes to arrive at a satisfactory decision. One example is the availability heuristic, “that relies on immediate examples that come to a given person’s mind when evaluating a specific topic.” Are there more words that start with the letter “t” or have “t” as the third letter? We may be inclined to pick the former since it is difficult to recall the latter. However, a quick google search will show you that there are many more words that have “t” as the third letter (19711) as opposed to the starting letter (13919). This example shows that our understanding is limited by how our mind usually recalls ideas and objects by a specific attribute — in this case, how we remember words by their starting letters. Tversky and Kahneman’s work was inspired by earlier research done by economist and cognitive psychologist Herbert A. Simon. Simon coined the term “bounded rationality”, which is the notion that under time and mental capability constraints, humans seek a satisfactory solution rather than an optimal one that takes into account all known factors that may affect the decision. 

When faced with a complex world, our minds simplify phenomena into elements that we can understand. Kahneman states that “When faced with a difficult question, we often answer an easier one instead, usually without noticing the substitution.” He calls this process attribute substitution and believes that it causes people to use heuristics and other mental shortcuts. More broadly, simplification is a key pillar in the way that we currently approach our world; this attitude is known as reductionism. It is defined as an “intellectual and philosophical position that interprets a complex system as the sum of its parts.” However, in this process of reduction, holistic aspects and emergent properties are overlooked. Critics have therefore referred to this approach with the pejorative nickname “fragmentalism”. The components that comprise our understanding have gone through a translation from complexity to simplicity. It is not ridiculous to suggest that things are lost in that translation, thus impairing our understanding.

Non-rational processes

Thus far, we have mostly discussed rational (both formal and informal) and conscious mental processes that may inhibit understanding. We will now take a look at how the contrary can do the same. There are two non-rational phenomena that we can explore: intuition and emotion. 

Intuition refers to “the ability to understand something instinctively, without the need for conscious reasoning.” A more colloquial definition is a “gut feeling based on experience.” While intuition is useful, most notably by the writer Malcolm Gladwell in his book Blink, it has also been shown to create flawed understanding. Herbert Simon once stated that intuition is “nothing more and nothing less than recognition” of similar prior experience. In his research, Daniel Kahneman found that the development of intuition has three prerequisites: (1) regularity, (2) a lot of practice, and (3) immediate feedback. Based on these requirements, Kahneman believes that the intuitions of some “experts” are suspicious. This was shown by research done by psychologist James Shanteau, who identified several occupations where experienced professionals do not perform better than novices, such as stockbrokers, clinical psychologists, and court judges. In scenarios where intuition cannot be developed, it becomes merely a mental illusion. Kahneman cites a now well-known example in investing that index funds regularly outperform funds managed by highly paid specialists. Intuition can also often lead us away from correctly understanding the world. This can be demonstrated by the field of probability, which can be very counterintuitive. The Monty Hall problem is a classic example of how our intuition, no matter how apparent it seems, can fool us. To me, the term “intuitive understanding” may be an oxymoron or a misnomer because our intuitions are not understood by ourselves. One way to demonstrate understanding is through explanation. A gut feeling may compel us to act in a certain way but crucially we are not able to explain why. If we are, then it is no longer intuition and resembles rationality instead. When looked at this way, intuition is good for taking action and making quick judgments but at best only provides a starting hypothesis for actual understanding.

Some may argue that emotion does not belong in a discussion about the mind as we tend to associate the mind with thoughts and not feelings. However, we cannot deny that emotion shapes our thoughts and vice versa. Emotion can move us to seek knowledge and understanding but can similarly deter us from them. When we are anxious, we may rush to conclusions without complete understanding. Fear can cause us to accept superstitions that undermine factual understanding. Sometimes, we may refuse to understand something if it can cause us to have a fundamental shift in the way we approach the world (I touched on this in a previous essay). This attitude is summed up by the saying, “ignorance is bliss.” The relationship between emotion and understanding often extends into wider society and will be revisited in the next part of this essay when I discuss culture.

Less conscious phenomenon

There are less conscious parts of our mind that impede understanding. There seems to be an inherent structure to our mind and consciousness, which could limit our ability to understand. Historically, there have been two methods to approach this: the more philosophically-inclined phenomenology or the more empirical study of cognitive science. One idea from phenomenology is the notion of intentionality, which “refers to the notion that consciousness is always the consciousness of something.” This suggests that we cannot study consciousness directly, but through how it conceives other things. An analogy for this is the light coming out of a headlamp — I am not able to see it directly since it is strapped on my head, but I can understand its qualities (e.g. color and brightness) through the objects that it illuminates. Therefore, we may never be able to fully understand our consciousness. From cognitive science, there are concepts like biases and pattern recognition. Cognitive biases refer to “systematic pattern[s] of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment”, there is a long list of them. Biases can lead us to only seek information that confirms our prior knowledge, which can be wrong in the first place. The same information, when framed differently, can also appear to us as fundamentally distinct, which seems to reveal a glitch in our understanding. Our mind is also constantly recognizing patterns in our daily life, it is a way in which the mind incorporates new experiences with prior ones. Pattern recognition is also fundamental to essential aspects of being human, like recognizing faces, using language, and appreciating music. However, our minds can also erroneously notice patterns where there are none, a condition known as apophenia. We experience an everyday variant of this whenever we perceive a face in an otherwise faceless object. This can cause us to misunderstand reality, a dangerous example being conspiracy theories that cause people to believe in absolute nonsense.

The mind is always positioned from a subjective perspective. We will never be able to think outside of our self. Our personal experiences and temperament can lead us to very different understandings of the world. The sociologist Max Weber pointed out that “All knowledge of cultural reality, as may be seen, is always knowledge from particular points of view.” How do we determine the accuracy of our understanding when there are multiple perspectives? Given the unfeasibility of capturing every unique perspective, can we claim to understand subjective experiences? Subjectivity also suggests that there is a limit to the understanding of psychological phenomena. Many subtopics that we have discussed in this essay — senses, rationality, intuition, emotions — are ultimately internal experiences that cannot be confirmed by third-person objective observation. When someone says that they feel happy and another person says that they feel the same, would we ever know if they are experiencing identical feelings? 

Similar to how our senses are limited, our minds likely have constraints — we will never know what we cannot know. Our minds are a result of hundreds of millions of years of evolution to ensure survival; the ability to know and understand seems to be a nice side-effect from this perspective. As far as we can tell, human beings represent the epitome of the universe in understanding itself but it is not difficult to fathom our mental capacity as being just a point in a long continuum. While we will continue to know and understand more, we should never let hubris deceive us into thinking that our minds will be able to understand all that there is.

Writer’s note: this is part two of a three-part essay. Click here for part three.

To use the analogy of a computer, our senses are the hardware, our culture is the software and our mind is the operating system, mediating the two. From an anatomical standpoint, humans have not changed for about 200,000 years. For most people, our senses are unchanging biological facts, although we may lose our senses partially or completely due to accidents or through plain senescence. Senses form the connection between our internal and external worlds. Without the ability to see, hear, touch, smell, and taste, our mind is cut off from our environment, which causes a break in the feedback loop for us to perceive our actions. Imagine the simple task of eating using a spoon without any of your senses — not only would the task be impossible to accomplish, but the premise of taking any form of action would also be completely absurd since there is no experience to begin with. This shows how fundamental our senses are to our being. 

While our senses are reliable enough for us to conduct our everyday lives, we know that they are by no means transparent communicators of objective reality. Perceptual illusions show that our senses can often be fooled. (It is important to note here that perception is not exclusively within the domain of senses but emerges from the interaction between senses and the mind.) In 2015, “the dress” made huge waves around the internet, dividing netizens into two camps (as the internet does). Half of the internet argued that the image depicted a black and blue dress while the other believed that it was white and gold. (Spoiler alert: it is the former.) In 2018, a similar meme rocked the online world. Instead of an optical illusion, it was an auditory one, known as “Yanny or Laurel”. It got the internet similarly divided. These illusions are not new, however, and are generally known as ambiguous images. The classic “rabbit-duck” illusion was published in a German humor magazine in 1892.

Our vision is the most studied among the senses, possibly due to humans’ outsized reliance on sight. This has led to quite an exhaustive list of optical illusions over the years. Josef Albers, a renowned artist-educator, published his insights on color in his seminal book Interaction of Color in 1963. His theories are inspired by Gestalt psychology while he was at the now-legendary Bauhaus. When I first read it in art school in 2013, I was struck by how timeless it was. Within the book, Albers discussed how color “is almost never seen as it really is” and that “color deceives continually.” Through visual examples, he shows the phenomenon of simultaneous contrast, in which an identical color is perceived as different when placed within different colored backgrounds. Besides color and tone, our eyes can also misperceive relative sizes; examples of this include the Ebbinghaus illusion and Shepard tables. 

Besides perceptual effects of ambiguity and relativity, our perception can also be altered. A few years ago, I tried a miracle berry, which is a fruit that contains the taste modifier miraculin. Eating this berry causes sour foods to taste sweet. Hallucinogens contain psychoactive compounds that cause people to have perceptions in the absence of real external stimuli (i.e. see objects that do not actually exist). Such perceptual alterations may also be a result of illness or physiological processes and responses. Hallucination is a known symptom of Parkinson’s disease and can also be experienced by people right before falling asleep, a phenomenon known as hypnagogia. Research has also shown that our perception of time can change when we experience danger, possibly due to the adrenaline rush caused by the fight-or-flight response. In popular culture, this is sometimes called the slow-mo effect (a metaphor borrowed from video editing).

In some scenarios, one sense can override another. I got to know about the McGurk effect when I was taking a cognitive science class at college. I encourage you to try it for yourself before you continue reading. Go to this YouTube video, click play but do not watch the video. Instead, just listen to the sound and try to identify the sound that is being spoken. (The video is about 1-minute long.) Now, play the video again. This time, listen to the sound while watching the video. You may notice that the sound seems to have conformed to the mouth shape of the person who is speaking. This is to say, the sound that we perceive has changed due to a visual inconsistency. In this case, our sight has overridden our hearing to produce a different perception of the same sound. Another instance of this is best summed up in a well-known adage among chefs, that “we eat first with our eyes”, first coined by first-century Roman gourmand Apicius. Research shows that the manner in which food is arranged visually affects our perception of flavor and can cause people to alter their food choices. Sometimes, even different aspects of the same sense can override each other. This is demonstrated by the Stroop effect, in which the name of a color like “green” is colored with another color, like red. We take much longer to name the colors of these words, as there is incongruent perceptual information.

Beyond the tendency for illusory perceptions, we know that our senses are simply unable to perceive otherwise undetectable phenomena, which can now be measured using scientific instruments. Our eyes can only observe a small fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum. Our ears can perceive only frequencies between 20Hz and 20 kHz. Our sense of smell is deficient compared to dogs, whose incredible noses help humans with law enforcement and even perhaps identify COVID-19. The limitations of our senses lead us to an even bigger question — are there phenomena that we just cannot know simply because we have no way of detecting its existence?

Writer’s note: this is part one of a three-part essay. Click here for part two.

For these JC and MI students, receiving their results coincides with a pivotal choice that they will make in their lives. Prior to this point, making an independent decision about what to do with their lives has been rare. They may have to pick a secondary school after their Primary School Leaving Examination and/or choose among JCs and MI after their O-Level exams. However, this juncture is the first time that they have to pick a specialized path, one that will (for the most part) open the doors to a few jobs while simultaneously closing them for many others. The choice is a thorny one, with multiple criteria going into the decision arithmetic — family approval, cost of education, potential career options, passion for the subject, etc. However, if they do choose to continue their education, they will fall back into a familiar routine of structured learning, assessments, and grades.

For as long as we are enrolled in a school, we follow its set of rules, metrics, and schedules. Our performance is neatly packaged into a numerical score or a letter grade, published like clockwork at the end of every academic term. When we are students, these numbers often have an outsized impact on how we feel about ourselves and what we are worth. The power that these numbers have over us is not tied to its primary function, which is a proxy for our learning, but rather the larger mechanisms and narratives that it is embedded within. Education is an important tool for social mobility. In Singapore, the data shows that someone with higher qualifications generally earns a higher income. The power of school grades, therefore, lies in its ability to eventually lead to a life that bears the symbols of success. There is a saying in Chinese, “钱不是万能，但没钱万万不能”, which roughly translates into, “Money is not omnipotent, but without money, one cannot accomplish most things.” Singaporeans are known for such pragmatism, which has led to a national success narrative associating three things: good grades, good job, good life. It is unsurprising that after outsourcing our sense of achievement for most of our lives to numbers on a transcript, we hop onto yet another number to measure our success as adults — the amount of money we have. This leads people to think that, “As long as I score good grades, as long as I earn a lot of money — I will be successful and happy!” 

If only life is that simple. The narrative that achieving high numbers in grades and income automatically results in success is useful socioeconomically but does not paint the whole picture. We live in a world that requires the consumption of goods and services to keep economies running. Without a functioning economy, governments are not able to generate income from taxation that is required to run the state and protect its sovereignty. This necessitates a narrative that posits that the primary contribution that any average citizen makes to a nation-state is through production and consumption. Therefore, the feeling of success is not caused simply by earning loads of cash, but rather by what it means within such a narrative — being a productive member of society. It seems to me, therefore, that at the heart of our various pursuits is a deep longing for meaning and purpose. 

Meaning comes in many forms. It can be derived from doing something that we love or doing things for the people we love. An act can be considered meaningful if it affects people in positive ways. Meaning gives us a sense that we have purpose in this world. The difficult part is that sources of meaning and the balance among these various sources is different for everyone at different stages in their lives. There is simply no one-size-fits-all approach to having a meaningful life.

Sometimes I wonder if our reliance on extrinsic markers of achievement impedes our understanding of how we experience and create meaning. There is a lot to life beyond getting a job that pays the bills, so being able to make life judgments is a really important skill. Unlike the ones in tests, many questions in life do not have standard correct answers, neither is a majority approach necessarily the right one for an individual. One would have to evaluate and judge for themselves what is truly fitting for them before taking a leap of faith. No matter how much we know and how certain we are of our convictions, there will always be things that we cannot anticipate.

In life, when and how do we take stock? According to the Oxford dictionary, to take stock is to “review or make an overall assessment of a particular situation, typically as a prelude to making a decision.” I recently turned 30. A few days after my birthday, I got an email from the graduate school of my dreams. It says that I have not been accepted and that only 5% of all applicants were selected. I feel happy for those who made it into the program, their dreams live on. However, it is difficult to not feel slightly disappointed at this outcome because it feels at this particular moment that my efforts for the past few years (and if I were to be ludicrous, 30 years of my life) have amounted to nothing. It is easy to wallow in self-pity but it is more meaningful and constructive for me to pull myself together and consider my next steps. In times like these, I personally find it important to be grateful for the journey that I have made so far and the people who are a part of it. Our life stories are woven only in retrospect and I hope that someday, I will see this event as part of a larger unfolding of my life. Life goes on; there is a lot more life ahead of me and I am in for the ride.

Many artists feature the imagery of deluge in their work. Wassily Kandinsky was an abstract art pioneer whose work discusses spiritual experiences. In Composition VI, he was interested in evoking deluge to represent rebirth, while at the same time, ushering a new approach to art that is removed from realism. The motif of inundation is also central to many of Bill Viola’s work. In his 2002 video artwork, “The Deluge”, people can be seen escaping as a white building that they were in becomes destroyed by a torrential flood. In another work, “The Martyrs”, four individuals are shown as they are tortured by the four classical elements — earth, air, fire, and water. The work is presented in a cathedral, where water is imbued with religious symbology. The word deluge comes from the Latin word “diluere”, which means to “wash away”. In the Christian tradition, baptism is a significant religious ceremony that marks an individual’s beginning as a member of the Christian faith. It usually involves submergence into water, with the subsequent re-emergence symbolizing spiritual birth.

The motif of deluge occurs regularly in history. In the Abrahamic religions, the story of Noah’s ark comes to mind. In it, God was angry at human’s misdeeds and decided to send a flood to reset the world to its state at the creation. In the process, Noah and his family were spared and promised by God that such an act will never be committed again. The aforementioned baptism is a reminder of this promise and a representation of the flood. In Chinese culture, the Great Flood of Gun-Yu showed the power of human ingenuity and how societal developments led to the first Chinese state, the Xia dynasty. Deluge myths are so common in human history that historians, geologists, and paleontologists often try to piece together the puzzle presented by these legends to separate fact from fiction. Some researchers try to identify planetary events that may be the common source for such stories.

While the search for such an event had mostly led to dead ends, new research suggests that there was a time when the Earth was completely covered in water. Scientists hypothesize that our home planet used to be an ocean world with no continents about three billion years ago; this was a time when the only organisms inhabiting the planet were bacteria. By comparison, biological humans showed up much later to the party — about 2,999,700,000 years late, by current estimates. A more likely candidate may not have been a planetary deluge, but a period of sea-level rise caused by glacial melting known as the Early Holocene Sea Level Rise (EHSLR), which occurred between 12,000 to 7000 years ago. This coincides with the Neolithic (New Stone Age), during which humans began farming. Farming generally necessitated access to water, which meant that societies congregated near bodies of water. These areas tend to be more affected by changes in precipitation and/or sea-level rise, which may explain our universal fear of flooding.

The term “antediluvian” literally means “belonging to the time before the biblical Flood”. Early attempts at understanding the history of our planet, at least for the West, came from the Bible. With increasing scientific evidence showing the improbability of a literal reading of the Old Testament, it became irrelevant in the scientific domain. Nowadays, the term describes things or ideas that are “ridiculously old-fashioned”. Over time, ideas that were considered the “gospel truth” (maybe this term itself may eventually become old-fashioned) are now debunked misunderstandings of the world. The beauty of history in preserving our follies, and not just the great ideas that have stood the test of time, is a good reminder that we as a species have often got things wrong — sometimes very wrong. Therefore, while we can marvel at the cultural progress that we have made, we should equally be humbled by our mistakes. 

When I was a teenager, I stumbled upon a TV show titled “Mermaids: The Body Found”, which purported that aquatic humanoid creatures exist in the sea. It featured interviews of named experts and camera shots that resemble a nature documentary. As a younger person fascinated by scientific discovery, I was excited that this may be a possibility. However, I later realized that it was a work of docufiction, which is fiction presented in the form of a documentary. The film capitalized on cultural artifacts like mermaids and sought to popularise the aquatic ape hypothesis. The theory suggests that humans got various biological attributes, like hairlessness, bipedalism, and our superior diving reflex, due to a period of aquatic adaptation. The theory is widely debunked by experts and is currently considered pseudoscience. However, it somehow managed to draw record viewership, with its sequel netting 3.6 million viewers, the largest ever for the nature TV channel, Animal Planet. Discovery Inc, which owns Animal Planet, goes on to create more pseudoscientific docufictions that broke new viewership records. For a brand that prides itself in delivering factual content, these programs seem to betray its mission and audience. This experience personally foreshadowed today’s post-truth and fake news era. 

We are living in a time of informational deluge. Nowadays, facts are less important than engagement and the result of that seems to be perpetual cycles of outrage with no resolution in sight. In his book, “Amusing Ourselves to Death”, writer Neil Postman stated that the world we live in resembles Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World” more than George Orwell’s “1984”, in that we are inundated with so much information that “we would be reduced to passivity and egoism”. We are currently trying to keep ourselves afloat in this flood, but one cannot help but wonder what will be left in its wake or whether it will be a permanently flooded world. Either way, we will need to evolve new capacities to adapt to these new circumstances.

At the same time, we are also in a climate crisis that would likely lead to a physically flooded world if we continue to dump greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. By current projections, even if global warming is capped at 2°C, at least 570 cities and 800 million lives will be affected by increased flooding by 2050. Many coastal cities are at risk of becoming completely inundated by 2050, forcing the displacement of about 150 million people. This upcoming reality will not only permanently change geography, but will also have profound impacts on culture, society, economy, and politics. 

As we get rag-dolled by these double deluges, will we sink or swim?