Meaning of Life

 The most important question is not "What is the meaning of life?" (sorry for my apparently misleading title). 

Instead, the most important questions are:

1) "What does the Universe want from me?" 

2) "Why am I alive, looking behind the eyes of this person in this life that I am living?"

To my knowledge, no one has ever asked these questions, and the closest has been Shakespeare in Hamlet.

Question 1: What does the Universe want from me? Well, to answer that, you need to look at the hard sciences and social sciences. Is any one person qualified to do that? No. Am I? No. Who am I? I am someone who dropped out of graduate school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, not because of grades, but because of budget funding and also I wanted to generalize rather than specialize. Anyone who's been to grad school and worked on a PhD will know that you have to specialize. "Be more specific!" "What do you mean?", etc., so I got an ABD in ling/psych cross study, left with just a master's (my second), and that's that. 

Basically the Universe wants us to be a part of society so that we can develop systems that become more complex. The most complex thing in the Universe it has been said by physicists is the human brain, which is far more complex than the inside of stars. No one knows about the inside of black holes. What is the endgame? Probably building some kind of artificial intelligence that can gather resources affect the space around us. For what purpose? Probably to create another Universe. 

Why do I think this? Because the Universe is not a closed system and thus the 2nd law of thermodynamics does not apply. It is a dynamic complex system whose purpose is to eventually reproduce. Perhaps the seeds of the Universe are not stars but black holes, which are also not closed systems as Hawking showed.

So the Universe wants you to do one of several things so that it can reach its ultimate goal of reproducing:

1) Carry on the human race and further the advancement of human technology so that we can put energy to work, smarter, smaller, faster and cheaper, namely through technology like making the cpus in computers smaller and smaller with quantum computing on the horizon. In effect, humanity is putting all of its information and complexity into smaller, faster, more efficient and more powerful thinking machines (I don't say computers because with the advent of AI, we add some features to the standard machine people now associate with computers).

2) So this means go out, have a date, have children, etc. We are a piece of the humanity puzzle that is ever moving forward. If you do not make cpus or AI, or other leaps in technology the Universe wants directly, then you likely propel it in other ways like supporting those who do carry this line of sacred work.

What are we humans programmed for? Social relationships. Homo sapiens sapiens (Humans) are probably the most social species on planet Earth. Over a period of 2-6 million years we quadrupled our brain sizes to handle social interactions and to pool our intellectual resources together to survive and thrive. We are not meant to live alone. Most likely we formed hunting and war parties which attacked each other, which is why we have modern sports today. The best teams "won" in the sense that they attacked each other and reproduced, not just survived the battles. The teams that communicated best were the ones that survived and reproduced. This is probably why human brain sizes increased so rapidly: there was a tournament going on all the time, winner take all in a sense (loser ends up a fossil).

There are so many implications to this across the fields of economics, sociology, psychology, finance, etc. If there's interest in the Internets to cover these things in more detail, I will. Am I qualified to talk about all of these fields and how they relate to my theory? Of course not. I am an expert in none of them, but here expert means a specialist in a particular area of a particular field. PhDs must delve into the specifics of thin lane of a field (and they teach the basics because they are assumed to have these covered). I do not, I believe, need to have very detailed knowledge of certain areas in these fields to grasp the bigger picture (though I think it would help).

I'll go onto question 2 in future posts...Please comment to let me know you're out there.

Thoughts on Trayvon Martin

I have experienced "racism" (or what we would consider it in this country) overseas where I was the minority. But you have to understand, there is none of the conceptions that we have here. Civil Rights laws, age, sex, etc. simply do not exist in most parts of the world. What happened to me may be perhaps as embarrassing as it was for the black soldier in your story. I put "racism" in quotes because today in this country it seems more a kind of unhealed scar that is often used to denigrate someone. Anything can be attributed to it, and the only proof needed is apparently two people of different races. Who really knows if there is a process in the brain that we can point to and call it "racist". Instead we have these imperfect notions that don't really seem to solve the problem. People do stupid things to other people, regardless of race.

We will never get beyond these complex problems unless we all have an honest dialog about race and race relations. In this case, it is possible that Trayvon Martin had his pride wounded because he thought that he was being pursued because of his race. "This guy is following me because I'm black," he might have been thinking. Pride offended, he may have chosen to confront Mr. Zimmerman--unwisely it turns out.

So what can we do? Well, first of all, let's shelve this discussion about racism and being "racist". Humans are designed to be racist--we separate and categorize individuals and make quick judgments (this goes back to survival in the wilderness, if we see signs of a lion hidden in the bush, we run before we fully realize what it is). We are all racist (black, white, etc.).

Without indicating race, why not report his death like this: Trayvon Martin was a high school student who was shot and killed by a neighborhood watch ...

There, we can all think of him as the kid next door--someone we might know. Then maybe we can figure out better ways of making sure the next Trayvon won't be shot.

BTW that "racism" I experienced overseas? Turned the other cheek and didn't remember it until now. It was just some idiot and in no way reflected the broader population there.

learning korean is as easy as singing underwater!

Yes friends, let's remember: there ain't no mountain high enough that can keep me from studying my Korean grammar. Unless, I fall asleep reading the language books. But I keep this blog do in between to keep my mind refreshed. But you may wonder, how does one learn a foreign language? Here's how i do it:
Korean consists of Hangul (Korean writing), a collection of radicals which combine to form different sounds. I learned this by memorization and practice. No mystery there.
But all the words I learned by calling my friend named Johny Mnemonic (did anyone see/like that movie?) who helps save the day. For example, there is the word Nampyion in korean which means "husband". I remember this by thinking " ...the guy she's married to is the Champion from Nam"= Napyion. There you go. How about this one: we lope da = "lonlely" in korean. Well i think about eloping. and eloping can be lonely. There we go, it sticks! Here's a little tidbit inside my dirty mind, ojone pronounced /OJOAN/ means "am" in Korean. Maybe I end up in bed with a girl named Joan in the morning. What's the first thing I say? " Oh , Joan!" . of course. Now you try!

Screw it, lessons learned and other happy songs

These songs sing about me all the time. Take my students: Those little angels found my nest of chocolate and made good work. I bought a good 20 dollar bag and mistakingly left it in my closet in the english room i teach in. There are several students who clean that room after school when I am gone. These same intelectually driven philosophers took no time to make short work of that bag i had saved up for the less chocolate lusty, more participate in class type students who had to work hard to get that chocolate: they had to speak in my class in front of 30 odd peers in a classroom rooted in a society which sees the teacher as the sunlight and the students the maggots crawling around silently. What a chore for them! Anyway, back to the choloate fiends; guess what they did to my bag of chocolate? A rabid pack of monkeys would be harder pressed to lick clean a jar of peanuts any better than my students did my chocolate pouch.
I got the criminals to confess; but only partially. They bought me some more chocolate (not nearly enough to cover my losses) and I grabbed each by the arm and said: you're a bad boy!
I can almost hear Arnie scrambling to get me to fix his California prison system as I write this entry.

The next song will be about how a love struck Don Juan tied the apple of his eye to a desk with her shoelaces forcing me to untie her (wasting ten minutes) all the while new students coming in for the next class. And dammit, it was the after i clipped my nails! I found and scolded the boy. But that was nothing: Korean punishment at schools is no Sally meets Daisy type picnic. Later, he had to do pushups with his elbows in what I call "the fun room" with a scary looking ajoshi (older man form of address in Korean) counting the beads of sweat on the boy's back among other things.

Beware the man with the black bag!

.. because he will walk through all the subway trains and swing that bag back and forth, hitting everyone along the way. Yes friends, he is real. I call him the Bag Dad. And he's not going to let junior who is sitting, facing the window, waiting for his stop, remain unmolested.

One day I feel a big shove from behind (think: a moose butt butts into you). I look back and it's this guy with a big backpack. Seemingly, he makes contact with just about every person he can come next to. now this isn't the first time this has happened (or i would just shake it off as the odd coincidence). but it seems that people walk through many of the trains, going through crowded aisles of people already squashed to the limits, swinging that heavy backpack to and fro. The reason, is anyone's guess. The result: something akin to what you'd see on WWF , except with folding chairs in stead of Bag Dad's favorite weapon. Go get em sailor, see what's on the next train with that big bag of yours!

Seoul Seraching

There is a smell which belongs solely to Seoul (the place I live in). It can be identified by it's ability to grab your mind's attention away form whatever it was that it was enjoying and immediatlely introduce itself again and again. It is a smell which never fails to make me melancholy. On the plus side, it is least potent in winter, perhaps because the chilly air neutrilizes any sense of smell to begin with: it is winter now. On the plus side if there is one, it conceals any attempts at breaking wind from other parties, which such odor is utterly lost in what can only be described as the Seoul's far stronger influence on your nostrils.

A birthday party

Well what do you know. Birthday parties can still be fun, especially when it involves fire breathing English teachers (from the blazing shots) and all night romps on the town. What a crazy time that was. A friend (another English teacher) decided to drink a vodka shot which was on fire without bothering to put it out. A burst of flame spewed from his mouth and gust upon his onlooking friends. It was a sight I don't think I can easily forget. The rest of the birthday party was mundane enough. We eneded up at a karoke place, but I opted not to go and instead headed home for a little rest.