How backward is backward thinking?

Backward reading can be fun however pointless it serves. Backward thinking, on the other hand, is conflicting it makes investigating and experimenting the skills to hone.

What We Can Teach to the Children

This very inspiring story about  what we can teach to the children to become an effective leader that appreciates the difficulty and works to make things done for the benefit of everyone.

One young academically excellent person went to apply for a managerial position in a big company.

He passed the first interview, the director did the last interview, made the last decision.

The director discovered from the CV that the youth's academic achievements were excellent all the way, from the secondary school until the postgraduate research, never had a year when he did not score.

Humanism Way to a Better Us Explained by Experts

 

The video showcases reputable experts in their field from biology, psychology and philosophy and their take on humanism. Its introduction to humanism answers the questions on its importance, having life in the here and now, finding a way to live an ethical life, realizing the use of human's ability in discovering our nature and how can we use the understanding to our advantage.

Understanding is an effective way to better our standing as an individual immersed in diversity. This can be done by the habit of critical inquiry that changes mind when facts are presented. Scientific thinking hones this ability. The wonder, entertainment and thrill that science and scientific way of thinking serves, as Richard Dawkins enunciated, is a poetry of reality.

"It's up to us" summarizes it all.

Related articles

• What is Humanism? (stephenlaw.blogspot.com)
• Monday chat: Explaining humanism (tcpalm.com)
• Philosophy - Re: An introduction to Humanism (disclose.tv)
• Letter: Scientific thinking (independentmail.com)

How can I be the change I want to see the world?

Seeing the world with less misery has kept me dreaming. So in my attempt to make this dream come true, I have come up with what makes my life miserable and its resolution.

Pleasing Everybody. It is the easiest way to avoid conflict, earn validation, consume energy and time, and get disappointed.

Since I know how powerful mind can create thoughts and its ability to make it a reality, the tendency to be right is so convincing it makes you forget other minds. The good news is so as everyone else. Being kind to stupid idea, nice to useless thoughts, and pleasing to ignorance are conflicts to the ability of one's mind. To avoid conflicts, I tend to forget my ability to reason and to converse. It makes me miserable.

What now? I resolve to express what I contemplated as right and be accountable of the consequence.Just have to give my best shot hoping that it will not kill anyone. And remind myself that I can also get hit because I chose to be around.  Otherwise, stop finding sweet chili.

Sweet Chillies

chili peppers (Photo credit: marzbars)

Let's learn from this story:

A rich merchant saw a man selling a small green fruit which he had never seen before. The merchant was hungry and the luscious green fruit looked so fresh and appetizing and the merchant was tempted and curious so he asked the vendor,

“What is this...?”

“Chillies, fresh green chillies,” said the hawker.

The merchant held out a gold coin and the vendor was so overjoyed that he gave the merchant the full basket of chillies.

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Self-Awareness Sit-up

I would like to share this "meaningful" article. While mine is trivial, below are doable. So lets do our life's reflection sit-up and strengthen our self-awareness.

10 Ways to Live a More Meaningful Life  Written by David Loker 

1. Know What’s ImportantKnow what’s important for you. Write down your top 5 things that you believe are the essence of how you want to live life. This can include things like “family time,” or “sing every day.” It could also include more complex ideas, like “honesty” and “simplicity.”

Busy As a Bee

Well, not in pollinating way but in a rhyming way.


I have been busy with my other blog that I am not able to fulfill my everyday entry here. It doesn't mean that this blog will be forgotten or less to be attended to. It only means that with time comes a meaningful elaboration.


Asking the right question, finding answer to that and making sense of that Q&A is no easy task. It requires gathering information, being critical of those and courage to change your mind, if not others. But with practice, I am determined to do elaboration on topics that I perceive to be meaningful in one existence. 

Which Type are You?

Well, I guess the above image relates to writing activity. It's safe to be the average. But in a small organization finding its way to success, a strategist must be able to make plan long term goals by analyzing the risk, and be able to multitask in the balance in exercising risk-taking and cautious decision making to accommodate the task to be prioritized. 


Of course, we cannot find all those characteristics in one personality. This describes the role of these personalities in the success of an organization.


Which type are you?

If you can, would you?

Theirs is a life where an old, dirty ball kissing the dust is their only source of joy, where memories of their loved ones are their only possession, where their only hope is to have a food to be shared and wake up the next morning with body parts intact if not burned to death. This is the everyday reality of the children in South Sudan trapped in a war that gives meaning to Sam Childers’ life. His humanity made me watch the movie “Machine Gun Preacher” till the end. It makes me dwell on the question if I could, would I? 

Major Performance

Sixth Sense, as Wikipedia defined, is

• Extrasensory perception (ESP), commonly called the sixth sense
• Equilibrioception (sense of balance) and proprioception (sense of body position), commonly accepted physiological senses in addition to the usually considered "five senses"
• SixthSense, a wearable gestural interface

Above mentioned gadget is another means for humans to acquire knowledge crucial for decision making.  


"Minority Report"  featured this technology. In this movie, easy access to information through intangible interface prevented crimes to realize until its venal use.
In Hardwire movie, a chip implanted in the person's brain to set the stage of advertisements performed by projected actors in one's brain simulated a sixth sense activity. It is done to ascertain the effect of influencing a person to buy products. 


As depicted in the movie characters' performance, the desire to make right decisions should fuel the mass production of this wearable gestural interface.

Cognitive ability has helped humanity survived dangerous circumstance by foreseeing (weather forecasting, statistical occurrence). Interconnecting patterns raised by both intuition and acknowledgement of desire were utilized to improve lives: easy access to information, thus making intelligent acts. Its utilization to ensure the survival of the billion years of evolution is an appreciative gesture to the sacrifices made. Its the gesture that finds meaning in one's desire. 


Which desire to be met is a question of one's value system. 

Do we value convenience more than hard work to achieve knowledge to be able to choose? Do we value popularity more than accomplishing the task rightly? Do we value wisdom for using this sixth sense to promote informed choice rather than using it as advertisement to lure unnecessary consumption? 


A gesture is worth a thousand words. A minority report in a major performance.

Blow Up

"A child who burns ants to death with a magnifying glass simply for amusement may be called deranged. Substitute humans for the ants, and the child would be called god"-- Lindsey Brown

The image magnifies the idea of fun from malevolence to what is perceived to be having or being less.

First, my take on having fun for a wrong reason defines you as a person. A child being amused by killing is nasty. Killing a helpless ant is totally cruel. A parent that takes pride in the killing of a helpless ant is neither fabulous nor fun. It is insane.

Second, ant maybe helpless,less, for that matter, alone but its strength lies when with others. Ants can be envied for having fun and being productive with other ants but human find ways to CREATE his own amusement.

  

Being nasty to the ant that was deviated from the rest can be fun to a child because he doesn't know any better. And worse, fun derived from making the ant miserable denies one from being a better person. The fulfillment is not derived from intended fun but from "because I/we can" pun.


That third reason is my way of elaborating this:

Why?

The idea of having fun for the sake of it must be magnified. The fun derived from irritating others by showing off and be looked up to is an insane amusement.  


Human evolved from ant's social behavior. The fact that humans can do more than what ants can proves human can be better than bully an ant. 

I can be that child. But I grow up and magnify ideas instead.

Enough

Is enough something easy to quantify and hard to achieve? Or, is it something hard to quantity but easy to achieve?

People

Yeah, I can talk about people too. 

Got the idea?

Balanced

Knowing the right and the left makes way to a straight direction. 

Making Sense of It

Have you experienced that moment of bliss when all what you ever wanted comes to reality before your very eyes? And what you ever wish to do is to make others' life feel a fair share of how you feel and at least not to make other lives miserable?

I have until I see “Blindness”

An epidemic of Blindness struck a city with people of all walks of life gone blind with no apparent reasons. Suspected to be contaminating, those gone blind where contained in an old mental facility. With increasing number of victims and less support from the authorities, they started to lose their senses. 


They are blind and smell nothing of cleanliness and sanitation. They see only brightness and hear no angels. Their sight and taste elope to escape from feeling hopeless. Their common sense weakens when a narcissistic prick controls the food supply and slowly kills their appetite for sense of humanity, dignity and decency.


I feel for the congenital blind when given an opportunity to be great took advantage of the situation and in cahoots with the prick took over the distribution of food and obsessed on authority. When no more valuables to exchange for food, these lowlife creatures implemented exchanging the women to satisfy their flesh. I can only pity them.


I feel with the blinds standing in the dark where opportunist and users lurk around to attack what is left of them, their dignity. What do you expect from those miserable opportunist souls who have nothing but misery? They need company. 


I feel with the character of Julienne Moore who retained her sight despite being with the blinds and risk being contaminated to stand by her husband. It took her awhile to become really a ray of light to guide them to their freedom. She has to see the darkness first to make sense of it.


I guess, I don't have to be blind to see humanity. 

On lies

“This is just a set of rambling thoughts on the issue of the ethics and morality of lying.  In his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant discusses lying and calls it a moral wrong no matter what.  The example of the hostess who was a terrible cook asking her guest about her cooking, would have elicited from Kant the truthful reply: "Your cooking sucks".  Earlier western philosophers including Descartes and Hobbes were not as forthright as Kant, but in the penumbra of their works, it is clear they tended towards the same conclusion that lying is always wrong.

Why are our ethics so different today?  For example, if following a routine gene test of his pregnant patient’s blood, a doctor were to accidentally discover that the supposed father isn’t the father… is he obliged to tell her the truth?  No.  If an insurance company turns down a patient’s request for a life-saving procedure, can the doctor lie to the insurance company to get the patient the necessary procedure?  Yes.  Today’s medical ethicists in both cases have sent Kant packing.  They have no problem with the “compassionate lie”.

It seems we’re much closer today to the ancient oriental sage Confucius than to the relatively modern German, Immanuel Kant.  Take a look at this beauty from “The Analects” a compendium of aphorisms attributed to Confucius who preceded Christ by more than half a millennium:

-       The Duke of Sheh informed Confucius, saying, "Among us here there are those who may be styled upright in their conduct. If their father have stolen a sheep, they will bear witness to the fact."  

-       Confucius said, "Among us, in our part of the country, those who are upright are different from this. The father conceals the misconduct of the son, and the son conceals the misconduct of the father. Uprightness is to be found in this."

This flies in the face of conventional western philosophy that would not have countenanced such a thing.   So why this huge difference between eastern and western ethics on lying? 

Western ethics is based on Aristotle and his syllogism.  "If all A is B and all B is C therefore all A is C".  “All or none” have lain at the root of western thought for more than 2,500 years.  It is at the root of deductive reasoning and "Formal Logic".  Kant was the very apotheosis of this school, and his "Critique..." stands as the unscalable Everest of formal logic.

Two things happened in modern times (during and after Kant) that disrupted the western world’s ethical and moral self-confidence.  One was the west’s plunge into enormous evil in the name of good (i.e. the excesses of colonialism, the massacre of the Indian tribes, WW-1, WW-II, and the Nazis’ final solution) led by Das Sprach Zarathustra and his unintelligible gift to unprepared mankind of Ubermensch or superman.  This opened the way to a disintegration of western spirituality and a fleeing to the gurus of the east.

The second came from science.  The syllogism-based western thinking was failing science as it found enormous limitations with the absolutism of western formal or deductive rationality.  Formal logic is absolute, able only to deal with "all A's or "all C's".  It can't deal with concepts of strangeness, uncertainty, probability and indeterminism.  Even inductive logic started to fail science forcing the birth of Informal logic in the 1920s.  Most of informal logic’s rules were developed in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.  It's very, very new and generally untouched and unknown by western society except in the higher reaches of academia.

Science obviously needed to deal with "some".  We have "some" proof that Darwin was right but can we say " Darwin was right"?  We have some test proof that copper wires conduct electricity but can science say all copper wires conduct electricity?  After all, consider Bertrand Russell's chicken who looked forward to the farmer coming every morning to throw him food to eat?  Dare he assume the same will happen today?  What if this morning the farmer comes with an axe?

This is the dilemma science faced at the turn of the 20th century and this is what forced informal logic to get born.  A whole new paradigm came forth to illumine the darkness into which the west had plunged.  Absolutes were relegated by science to the dust heap… as just two points at either end of a long continuous string.  We have a preponderance of evidence that all copper wire conducts therefore all copper wire conducts.  Don't bother to test each wire before you install.  The same holds with Darwin and with global warming today.  There is a preponderance of evidence; therefore the main theses are true.

This revolution in thinking hit almost every aspect of life; including "lying”.  For example in the second example I gave about a doctor lying to the insurance company, despite the fact the law has stepped-in making such acts illegal and felonious, in surveys done, nearly 60% of American doctors admit having done so.  Ethicists call these “compassionate lies”.  They’re also called “good lies”.  As it has always been in the east, it also is now in the west. 

Kant’s harsh and absolutist opinion lies in the dung heap of history and in its place is another larger truth.  Academic studies show that lies are infrequent.  And modern ethics instruct that  when compassion is at the root then a lie is good…

"Shame on Me"

"Shame On Me" conceives vulnerability that gives birth to innovation, creativity and change.

Interesting talk for those who think "big" or actually "big' who do not want to be put on petri dish.

War Child

I am somehow directed to this website thru Brad Pitt's spiritual twitter account.

Most of the time, whenever I don't feel like being selfish, I imagine myself doing voluntary work for these survivors of war, the children. I am totally against conflict because as history shows us, it only creates more war freaks justifying the injustices they have incurred in war times. With that, peace will be elusive.

I salute this organization for keeping the "world peace".

And I need to learn to be unselfish more often.

Wonder Drugs

This is really funny. I wonder what dose of drug they took. :-)