Sometimes, I wonder if exposing emotions is a weakness. I feel it's a male weakness in the rendition of one's soul, yet isn't it something all too human ?



But what if I'm not ? Would you call me stoic ? Stolid ? Apathetic ? Phlegmatic ? Callous ?



I was surfing Yahoo! to research things for my English Language tutorial tomorrow, and looked for "Coffee Grounds (name of NUH Cafe)". It's about the play on words of the language. I clicked on the third link after typing in "NUH Cafe" in the search engine, without even reading carefully that it actually read "A Journey of Faith: New Trial@NUH".


I read through the entry, which wasn't the latest, before reading the title description.



http://jokwan.blogspot.com/2007/05/new-trial-nuh.html



I haven't had that teary feeling in my eyes for a long time, and tonight's the first in a while. Now I ask myself, if God was taken away from Alex, what would be left of him ? The painful burden of that knowledge is indeed poignant and grievous.

It affects me deeply tonight. I don't know what to think of anymore.

And so here we have now, the inevitable conundrum (so far two lecturers, one from political science that I crashed, and the otherfrom my english literature's, have managed to widen our vocabulary by spilling the word out. It's pronounced Kuh-Nun-Drum. Some say a more profound replacement for "problem" or "enigma", but since it's been overused, I don't think its a better word than its two cousins):






Why are we here ?






















So why are we ? Someone fucking tell me why ! WHY WHY WHY !

On a separate but not completely unrelated note, I'd also like to ask why we're restlessly drawn to questions like why are we here ? I'd dedicate an entirely different entry for it, but I don't want to, because somehow you'd find it's actually quite related...................











The purpose of life. Some are born to scour the streets for the brief omnitude of their lives. Some are born to take the reins of leadership and absolute power to continue bringing security and strength to those born of lower social status. Some are born for the sole purpose of afflicting others with utter pain and tormenting misery, like in the case of a school bully. Heheheh...

What I'm leading up to is that governments and ruling orders of civilisations of the ancient past, which would be a mere few thousand years back, came up with their unique answers, or did they ? Back then they didn't understand that the very planet that sustains us revolved around the sun, which in turn sustains our planet. they didn't have the Playstation 3, nor did they have the Nintendo Wii. Nor did they have gene splicing, nor did they even understand that we're really outer shells of armour for our genes. Oh sure, they had advanced technologies for-their-time like intricate pipes that led to every single household in an entire city, or the ability to amalgamate metal so that the alloy produced would last longer. They did not, however, know that the metal such as Tin that make up the alloy Bronze has the highest number of stable isotopes, and that the different forms of the element can have varying atomic mass. They didn't realise that the molecule known as h2o, or water, was a byproduct of the formation of stars. No. They did not understand a great many things, so much greater than we do not now. So then comes the God, or Gods, hypothesis. This really depends on what religion we're speaking of. (think about The Race for God, by Brian Herbert)

So... we have the case of Intelligent Design, or colloquially known as God. It is very evident in the 3 huge huge huuuuuuuuge books known as the Christian Holy Bible, Islamic Qu'ran and Hebrew Torah. Three divided religions linked fundamentally through a couple of books universally agreed upon, though later varying in various ideologies and teachings. That is how our ancestors came up with the answers. The human beings of old knew that water was essential to survival, and that we needed to drink it to continue our meek existence, and that tin and copper could merge into a stronger metal, bronze, but that was pretty much all there was to it, to them. They knew the whats, but not the whys. They understood the peripheral hows, but never realised the essence of them all. To fill this gap came the one answer to all answers: God. God created this. God created that. He empowered Moses so that he could miraculously part hundreds of thousands of million tons of water so that the tiny, favoured group known as the Hebrews could escape from the not-so-favoured Egyptians. Polygamy is acceptable, too, in the case of its cousin religion, and Alexander the Great is a prophet. This was their science.




Okay, so we fast-forward from these ancient times to more familiar grounds. Now. And another question persists, can Science come up with an answer ? Prima facie, Very, very, VERY presumptous, as it challenges and shakes the foundations that supports the vast majority of religious followers in the world. I do truly believe we, however, can obtain the answer with Science.




One might ask, "what IS science ?" To comprehend this HUGE HUGE HUGEEEEEEE word, we must know what it is. Science is the systematic study of the structure and behaviour of the physical world, involving experimentation and the measurement and the development of theories to describe the results of these activities.




About one and a half centuries past, the answer to our question had finally taken a huge step forward, from made-up mythical stories to a fundamentally sound scientific explanation. Not speculations leading up to speculations, but concrete observations to extremely developed, working results. In 1859, Charles Darwin published the Origin of Species.



We must realise that at that point of time, this was as daunting as any task could get. But so firmly entrenched in his believes that Natural Selection was the true way that he went with it anyway, BUUUUUUUUUUUUT before we go on, one must also realise up till this point of time, it was still widely believed that the world was less than 10,000 years old. The Victorians must have had a terrible time coming to terms with Darwin's book.



But these days, we're more willing to teach our younger generation that we have really descended, and most importantly evolved, from apes. We are apes, even though our cousins are a lot stronger and hairer than us, but a lot less intelligent.



Before Darwin, no one knew how animals could be so complex. To have a better understanding of this, one could read up anywhere on, say, the human eye, or how a bat's sonar works. Then come back and tell me if you're truly amazed at how incredibly complex just one entity in this world is. You could check up The Blind Watchmaker on how a bat locates its food. But let's not delve into these. I'm not confident to elaborate on the complexities of these. Let's speak of tinier things, even tinier than lillyputians, things that make up even lillyputians. Let's speak of.................................................................

Deoxyribonucleic acid, or more widely known as DNA. A DNA molecule is a long chain of building blocks, which in turn are called nucleotides. Having trouble ? Remember in secondary school biology, how we're taught (or so I think, if I remember correctly) that protein molecules are actually chains of amino acids ? Similarly, DNA molecules are chains of nucleotides. These nucleotides come in 4 different kinds. Note that this is the same for ALL plants and animals. What the difference is is the order of which they are put together. Just remember that DNA is like a blueprint, a set of instructions on how to make a body.

There are billions of cells that make up our bodies, and most (if not all) of these cells contain a complete copy of our individual body's DNA. DNA molecules do two very important things. First of all, they replicate. Remember when your mom first conceived you, and that you were just a mere spec known as a cell. Within this single cell there lies a copy of your entire body. This cell then splits into two, and each of the two cells receives its own master copy of the body's plan. Then you have 4, then 8, then 16, then 32, then 64, then.... you get the idea. Then you get about a couple of billions of cells in a completely developed human body. In each of these tiny cells there contains a master copy of the body's blueprints. The nucleus of each cell has 30 times the capacity to store information that of the entire Encyclopaedia Britannica.

The second important thing that DNA moledules do is that they indirectly supervise the manufacture of a different kind of molecule : The protein. Proteins might not constitute much of the physique that is our human body, but they exert control over ALL the chemical processes inside the cell, selectively switching them on and off at precise timings at precise places. Genes do control the manufacture of bodies, albeit indirectly, and it is a one-way process. That is why no matter how knowledgeable a man is, your children would not inherit even a smidgen of wisdom from you. A body is the genes' way of preserving the genes unaltered ! Acquiring characteristics are not inherited. Remember this, too.


Here's another. Muscles, and muscle contractions. What Richard Dawkins has so brilliantly pointed out is the idea of how muscle contractions are timed. Think of machines. How a simple sewing machine has a needle perfectly timed to puncture and release and puncture again. Easy comprendo ? Now let's move on to brain cells, or neurons. Neurons are highly sophisticated biological units, and each individual unit might have thousands upon thousands of connections to other neurons. There are thousands of millions of neurons in the human brain. (Equally as interesting a little of how the brain works is taught in the exposure module of Psychology here in NUS) The wires that connect these individual units, neurons, are called axons. they may be microscopic in width, but some are many centimetres long, gargantuan in comparison to width. With these thousands of millions of neurons, the Brain is formed. The fundamental function of the brain, which is ultimately to survive the body containing genes, is to coordinate and control the contraction of muscles, and the only efficient method of preserving genes is the timing of muscle contractions to bear relation to the timing of events in the outside world. Like how prey escapes from a predator, or how the nerd avoids being mauled to death by the school jock.

For this reason, natural selection favoured animals, which includes Man here, which became equipped with sense organs, devices that would aid them in survival. Think of the "eye" example, the one on bat sonar. I didnt go into detail, so once again I ask to check it out AND understand, please.

What is more profound of evolutionary science is the ability to remember, the beauty of memory, especially in the case of us humans. We do not delve solely into our past, we try to speculate the future as well. Hence, we LEARN. It is a theory that our long term memory is abysmal, though we can hardly prove it wrong, since we haven't discovered the elixir of life yet. And with this, comes life's apparent purposiveness. The creature with the closest analogy to this apparent purposiveness is the Human Being. Say, a male child is 12 years old and he is deeply affected by the sight of a voluptuous young lady of the highest pulchritude. He stores this within his mind, and in time through puberty and finally reaching adulthood, seeks a mate such as the one he visualises and remembers as a 12 year old. This is really a joke. Ha ha ha. Please, do laugh. What this apparent purposiveness has become is what we call Consciousness. It's easier to understand when we compare man and machine. Machines are known to be programmed by us and thus have an apparent lack of free will. Man, however, does have free reign of his own being, and as such is "conscious".

I shall make an illusive skip, and speak of how genes control the behaviour of their survival machines. We are the survival machines, our physical bodies, us. Not directly as a nerd would program his robot to direct his vengence onto the school jock, but indirectly like how a human programs chess moves into a computer. Simply put, the genes set up before hand, and when the programming is done, they sit back and just wait inside our bodies. The brains will then take the reins of control for the next couple of decades, at least in that one human body till it is deceased. Why are they passive then, one might ask ? The answer is because of time-lag problems.

Genes work by controlling protein synthesis. It is painfully slow, especially so when put into our human context. (Our perception of how long or short a time period is is within our human context. If a living entity lived for, say, a million years, it would probably count short distanced timings as we would count every individual generation in our family lines) Manipulating and pulling the protein strings takes months just to build an embryo, where as by comparison physical behaviour on the outside is a lot faster. This is a comparison of many months with that of minutes or even fractions of a second. Genes can only do best in advance by building a fast executing biological computer (at least fast enough to match the speed of that from the interactive outside world), much like how we humans can do best and hope by inputting chess moves into a computer, and programming it in advance with rules and advice to cope with as many possibilities and eventualities as it can. This is prediction. Why can't genes then offer all the solutions ? This is for the reason that, like chess, in life there are far too many possibilities to anticipate. Genes thus have to perform tasks analogous to prediction. Genes take gambles, though sometimes they pay for mistakes too. Genes don't have rules or guidelines for everything. Sometimes it's simply this: avoid bad things, but come into contact with good things. No one in the right mind would walk up to a kitchen stove and say, "Hey, I'm putting my head there," and does just that. Everyone would walk up to a nice piece of chocolaty mudpie and grab a bite out of it. However, as I put again, there are no direct guidelines. Some of us go crazy and put our heads into microwave ovens, while others like me overeat. Sexual reproduction is one thing, but we go overboard into masturbation, cunnilingus, or fellatio.





What I'm trying to put is that the control of genes, though indirectly, is very powerful. It really makes sense. By dictating how we, the survival machines, and our nervous systems are built, genes ultimately exert power over behaviour. But the moment-to-moment decisions are made by our brains. AND SO here we have it: Genes are the primary policy-makers, and our Brains execute them. Then, as our brains become even more developed, taking over more and more decisions, the next possible destination in evolution might be that they would tell our Brains to do this: While I sit back and wait, just do whatever it takes and it is that you think best to keep the both of us alive.



That is what life is. Our purpose in life is simply survival. We have known this since the dawn of human consciousness, yet we have not fully acknowledged this. It is inevitable that science has carved its path across religion, and it doesn't look like it can stop now. The Vatican has made one too many mistakes over the ages trying to restrain it, but now we all know that the earth is really much older than the biblical suggestion of 6000 (or was it 10,000?) years old, and that no human should deserve the right to rule because of a "mandate of heaven". The beauty of life is knowing that we're all too human, that we ARE human, the most intelligent species on this very planet we call home to. Our capacity for knowledge is insatiable, cherishing every single moment that we encapsulate in the future as our past, knowing what intelligence can afford us and how love fulfills our deepest vacuities... that, my friends, is Life.



--------------------------------




I must admit, I am borrowing heavily from my inspiration, Richard Dawkins, the one who has truly inspired me to understand what science really means. A variety of sources, mainly from the Selfish Gene, are from him. He is a realist, and he knows his limitations. He expounds his hypotheses and derivations from his own profession, ethology. He does not talk about physics, because he admits he is not a specialist in that field, and that is indeed respectable, because he does not talk rubbish of things he does not understand intimately. If one were to read C. S. Lewis, a man of intellectual capacity that few would doubt, and Mere Christianity, one can only ponder how intelligence could actually hit a brickwall. The mention of evolution and natural selection in the final chapter of the book is similar to a neanderthal's understanding of nuclear physics.









All my life I've been living a sheltered existence, but I blame no one for my parents chose only the best for me. Parents are closer to what we know as altruism more than most. I can only blame myself for immaturity and a lack of fire and passion. What people don't understand is THIS is one of my passions, to comprehend the meaning of life, in ways that I cannot explore in my studies now. If I could make one change in my entire life with a time machine, that would be to send myself straight back to '99, where I could start anew with mathematics and science.

Religion is an intrinsic fallacy, at worst a nugatory entity known as a meme (check this out, too), and at best pedagogical subjects of romantic literature.

It is now the twenty-first century, the year 2007. About a century ago, Man has been constantly whipping himself on the back to drive the machineries known as science and technology, and it's not going to stop now. In fact, we're steam-rolling our way through the unpredictable future, and with a completely free-willing, unrestrained and unbigoted mind, the Human Being that is the diamond-in-the-rough will indeed be moulded and shaped into a many-faceted jewel that would take us one colossal step closer to Perfection.

School school school.



Once again, I've got to be in school tomorrow for.......... nothingotherthantheohsoexcitinginvigoratingclimatic reason that is........... school.



Btw, the last post was just finished a minute ago. I left it hanging for about half a month, till just now. Anyways, this one's nothing much either. More of like a reflection of the past couple of days...



Rag's finally over. Suffice to say, a gargantuan of an effort was made by everyone (perhaps except for me, and I'm pretty ashamed of that) and though we ended up not winning anything, I did have fun. I truly did. Knowing the faculty seniors and freshmen was a bodacious and an enduring experience, one that is unforgettable. Thank you... (sleeping along marina bay beside the padang was another. it's nice to have breeze and feeling chilly when you wake up. and also to have japanese tourists stare at you. very cool.)





But I'm sad that I haven't been there for Aaron. I realise I've been so caught up in my new world that I've been neglecting my pals. And I know you'd say it's understandable that at our age we travel different paths, Josh, but I'm not making the effort to catch up either. I'm tired now, so I'll just make it short. Here's a few mid-August resolutions:


1. I'll mug and bring my GPA to a minimum of 3.5 by end of Sem 1
2. I'll spend as much time as I can with my bros : )
3. I'll read more, been neglecting my books for the last couple weeks




Just for the record...........................




It's great hanging out with a friend sometimes too. You don't have to travel to sentosa to kick sand at each other, or race one another in the sea (which of course the obvious victor would be ME. Josh, you can't swim man, till you learn to kick properly. HAHA !) Talking over a glass of oreo frappe for an entire evening's good for me these days.

Driving back, collected my bottle of baileys from natalie. Really sweet of her to buy it for me. I didn't drive straight out to yio chu kang road, I made a mini detour to Lilac Drive. The lane was so narrow, everyone parked their cars on both sides of the road... when I got to 29, all those memories just hit back. Reminiscence is such a sweet, puissant thing. Not cloying, I smiled (albeit like a fool) when I just stared at old number 29 before I U-turned and drove off. I miss those times when I'll just run outta the gates, the playgrounds, the lanterns we'd hang in the gardens during the lantern festival, crashing my crash dummies into the wall beside the stairs. Man, I could still see those stairs from outside...








Aaaaaaahhh well. It's tuesday already, can't wait to see my friends, both old and new : )