A garden of forking paths

        In Jorge Luis Borges short story “The Garden of Forking Paths”, Borges narrates (through a story in the story) of a man named Ts’ui Pên who set forth to write an infinite novel, an intricate labyrinth. When Ts’ui Pên died, his heirs found no labyrinth, only chaotic manuscripts. An Englishman named Stephen Albert was able to draw meaning out of Ts’ui Pên’s confusing works upon discovering a fragment of a letter. In that letter, Ts’ui Pên wrote “I leave to the various futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths.” Albert realized that the garden of forking paths” meant Ts’ui Pên’s disordered novel, and the “various futures” meant a forking in time. According to Albert, Ts’ui Pên did not believe in a “uniform, absolute time” but rather in “an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke off, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time.”

        Borges short story was an early exploration of the many-worlds hypothesis in quantum mechanics, in which the universe forks into parallel copies, with each copy corresponding to a different outcome of quantum measurement. In Borges short story, reality forks at every decision, with each branch corresponding to a particular outcome of that decision. Much like those Choose Your Own Adventure books except that all possible outcomes occur in parallel with each other.

        As of this moment of writing, I am at an internet cafe. There is then a reality where I am doing overtime work at the office. There is also a reality where I am at home watching Heroes and a reality where I am watching Toshokan Sensou instead. These realities are all centered on my decisions but what if your decisions were taken into consideration? There is thus a reality where I am writing this entry and you are surfing the Internet. There is also reality where I am watching Heroes and you are working overtime. If all factors, of which there is an infinity of them, are to be taken into account, then the combination of these factors would also be infinite! A garden of forking paths indeed!

How do you see an elephant?

        There are many angles to a story. The number of angles, perhaps, would correspond to the number of characters in that story, as each one of them sees the story through different eyes.

        A good example of contrasting views would be the poem The Blind Men and the Elephant by John Godfrey Saxe. The poem begins:

        It was six men of Indostan
        To learning much inclined
        Who went to see the Elephant
        (Though all of them were blind)
        That each by observation
        Might satisfy his mind

        They thought the elephant is like a wall, a snake, a spear, a tree, a fan, or a rope, depending on which part of the elephant they touched. This ensued to a heated discussion among them:

        And so these men of Indostan
        Disputed loud and long,
        Each in his own opinion
        Exceeding stiff and strong,
        Though each was partly in the right,
        And all were in the wrong!

        The poem concludes:

        So oft in theologic wars,
        The disputants, I ween,
        Rail on in utter ignorance
        Of what each other mean,
        And prate about an Elephant
        Not one of them has seen!

        I think it is the same with life. Like the blind men, we grope around certain issues, our elephants, and judge it to be this and that, according to our differing worldviews, or personal biases. And then like the blind men, we would fight because everyone would claim that they are right.

        In Matthew 7:3-5, Jesus said “Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” Could it be that when Jesus spoke these, he used a plank in the eye to illustrate our biases? Certainly, a plank in the eye would be an obstruction to vision, that is why He said that it should be removed first so that one can see clearly.

The Pokemon pantheon

        In The Kingdom of Loathing, there is a quest where one has to retrieve an amulet from the ruins of a hidden city. In those ruins were altars built for ancient deities: Charcoatl, Pikachutlotal, Bulbazinalli and Squirtlcthulli.

        Charcoatl is a reference to Charmander, a fire pokemon. The “coatl” is a Nahuatl word for “serpent” and can be found in the names of several Aztec deities such as Quetzalcoatl.

        Pikachutlotal is a reference to Pikachu, an electric pokemon, and to the Aztec deity Xolotl, who is associated with lightning.

        Bulbazinalli is a reference to Bulbasaur, a grass pokemon, and to the Aztec deity Macuilmalinalli, who is associated with grass.

        Lastly, Squirtlcthulli is a reference to Squirtle, a water pokemon, and to Cthulhu of Lovecraftian lore. Cthulhu is associated with water.

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        The Kingdom of Loathing is a fun text-based online RPG. Gameplay aside, I enjoy it for its witty and humorous writing and for its references to popular culture.

        Information regarding the references to Pokemon and Aztec/Lovecraftian deities have been taken from the KoL wiki.

Echo, my voice is an echo of places I don’t know and stories I’ve been told

        I noticed that for quite some time now, I don’t get to talk much on weekends. My average weekend-day word count would probably be less than a hundred (or fifty even) if talking to one’s self and singing would be excluded. Unless I meet with friends, the only time I could speak is when I take public transportation or buy stuff. Then, I could say things like “Plete palihug” or “Lugar lang” or “Two-pieces burger steak with extra rice. Pineapple juice ang drinks“.

Six degrees of separation

        I was reading about graph theory earlier, particularly about the shortest path problem, when I came across the concept called six degrees of separation. According to Wikipedia, it refers to the idea that, “if a person is one step away from each person he or she knows and two steps away from each person who is known by one of the people he or she knows, then everyone is an average of six ’steps’ away from each person on Earth.”

        This idea was first proposed by social psychologist Stanley Milgram. In his experiment, participants were asked to forward a package to certain people. If the participants knew the intended recipient personally, they can forward the package directly. If not, they can forward the package to someone else whom they think knows the recipient. On an average, it took six links to deliver the package to the recipient. Milgram’s experiment, however, was criticized for being conducted on a small population. Furthermore, a lot of those who received forwarded packages refused to forward it further.

        Since Milgram’s experiment, similar experiments have been performed. In 2001, professors at Columbia University conducted a large-scale version of Milgram’s experiment, involving over 60,000 participants from 166 countries with email as a medium. The result is a median chain length of between five and seven people.

        The concept, however, is still not without criticism. For instance, critics say that it would be improbable to find a chain to anyone belonging to isolated populations that has no contact with those from outside their culture, such as the recently discovered tribe in Brazil. Such populations though form only an estimated 1% of the total global population and thus the six degrees of separation would still be possible.

        Scientists have a particular interest in the six degrees of separation, and social networks in general, because it could provide a clue, for instance, on how disease is spread, or how a criminal can be caught. I think the six degrees of separation also goes to show how much impact one person could make. “Save the cheerleader, save the world”, as one TV show would say.

        Juan Guare, an American playright, in his play Six Degrees of Separation, which is based on the concept, wrote, “I read somewhere that everybody on this planet is separated by only six other people. Six degrees of separation between us and everyone else on this planet. The President of the United States, a gondolier in Venice, just fill in the names. I find that extremely comforting, that we’re so close, but I also find it like Chinese water torture that we’re so close because you have to find the right six people to make the connection. It’s not just big names — it’s anyone. A native in a rain forest, a Tierra del Fuegan, an Eskimo. I am bound — you are bound — to everyone on this planet by a trail of six people. It’s a profound thought. . . How everyone is a new door, opening into other worlds.”

撮影

        I decided to start a photography blog. I actually started it some months ago but I thought of abandoning it and just post photography related stuff here. However, there will be more of those posts in the future and this blog is starting to become a champloo of sorts, so I think it’d be better to have a separate blog for it.

        Anyway, do visit it here: http://satsuei.wordpress.com.

Where does this ocean go?

        For Illustration Friday.

        This week’s theme is “worry”.

On dreams

        I have accumulated a lot of text files in my laptop. Some text files contain notes regarding a variety of things, some contain fragments of poetry and prose, and some contain blog entries that, in the end, I have decided not to post. So I was browsing each file trying to find out which ones to delete when I came across one titled “dream”. It was an attempt at keeping a dream journal, the idea I got from Ghost Hound. It was an unsuccessful attempt though as I only got to write two entries:

10/29/2007

        We were standing outside holding hands, trying to brace the coming catastrophe. Meteors fell from the sky and we ran, dodging each celestial rock. And then it rained. We searched for shelter but the rain was ceaseless. The flood levels increased and we fled to the highest floor of a building. After the rain stopped, almost everything was submerged in water. We realized that we had to find food.

10/30/2007

        I had an epiphany why Kei of Ghost Hound is wearing perfume. She said she isn’t wearing one, perhaps it’s her shampoo. But she was definitely wearing one. She was hiding something behind the scent. I cannot remember what.

        I guess what makes documenting dreams difficult is that they are easily forgotten. We wake up from a dream remembering most, if not all, of the details but as time passes, the dream becomes more and more vague. There are dreams though that leave an impression. I can even remember a dream from childhood although I no longer remember everything that transpired in that dream.

        There is a theory that posits a relationship between dreams and memory, that dreams are the mind’s way of processing memories. I have always likened dreaming to Window’s disk defragmenter. In the one that’s bundled with Windows 98, there is an animation that is played when the drive is being defragmented: a block of computer memory explodes and the bits are gathered to form a new block only to explode again. This goes on and on until defragmentation is completed. Perhaps when we dream there is something like that happening in our mind.

        The mechanism of dreams are not yet fully understood and there have been different speculations regarding them. Famous of which is Freud’s which hypothesizes that dreams are a manifestation of one’s subconscious desires. Then there are some who believe that dreams occur for no purpose at all.

éléphant

        I decided to participate in Illustration Friday regularly. I think it would be a great creative exercise.

        This week’s theme is “wide”. Elephants came to mind.

        Experimented with using type for texture.

… as a lamp in daylight