The Pursuit of Happiness

We intuitively understand that happiness is our aim and the very point of our existence. I outline the various theories on happiness, and use Hannah Arendt’s vita activa and Georges Bataille’s concept of sovereignty to explore how we can be happy in a world that seems to, on the contrary, propel us away from our happiness.

Jackass! What a Blast!

Jackass! What a blast! How I first discovered the film franchise was when I needed a mood lightener. I was studying philosophy at the time and really needed a laugh, and so I searched for ‘wacky films’ online. And boy, what a discovery.

The Right to be Neutral: Should Russians Lose Their Jobs?

In the last week, two prominent Russian musicians had been dismissed or forced to resign from their jobs. In today’s parlance, they have been cancelled. What precisely did they do to merit their cancellation? Or in this case, what didn’t they do?

Sovereignty in The Accursed Share, Volume 2 & 3 by Georges Bataille: First Impressions

What is sovereignty for Georges Bataille? When was the last time you did something for its own sake, where you indulged in an activity for the sheer pleasure it gives you and not for some other purpose such as earning money? Do we go for a run so that we can enjoy the wind in our hair and the change of scenery, or do we do it for some functional purpose such as to lose weight just so that we can become more attractive for other people?

On Diversions from Pensees by Blaise Pascal

Is man a happy creature? Is it in our nature to be happy? Blaise Pascal in his Pensees, translated as ‘thoughts,’ muses over these questions in his chapter on diversions and concludes rather pessimistically that we are not happy creatures. The book is a collection of his notes and was not meant by him to be published in its current form. Hence a reader of the work might find it fragmentary and incomplete. This is not a terse and rigorous philosophical treatise. He makes non-sequiturs, repeats himself often and some sentences are merely phrases. He wasn’t being intentionally cryptic -- this is his notebook we are reading though he did have in mind for it to serve as a basis for a work on Christian apologetics, i.e. a defence of the Christian religion. Unfortunately, this project still remained incomplete upon his death in 1662. Pascal is not a theologian, in fact most people would recognise his name from his theorems in mathematics but he was more than that, he was also an important and interesting thinker. There are some valuable jewels in this work such as his chapter on diversion which I would discuss here.

Selfhood Versus Sociality in Hobbes and Rousseau

While both men may seem to harbour views of human nature and the ideal society that are polar opposites, Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) and Jean Jacques Rousseau’s The Social Contract (1762) share important similarities such as self-preservation as the primary goal of man, the need to give up some rights in exchange for the benefits that can only come from society, and the need for coercion and punishment to keep the people in line. Both works are polemical, with an agenda to convince and frighten their readers into accepting their conclusions. Coming from an era of extreme political turbulence, Hobbes’s longing for stability resulted in his doctrine of the leviathan, a powerful sovereign to control the otherwise endlessly combative individuals. Rousseau responded to him over 100 years later. An Enlightenment thinker and apostle of the French Revolution, he was keen to overthrow Hobbes’s tyrannical ideas but his thoughts by today’s standards would paradoxically seem also to contain strains of totalitarianism.[1]

The Most Important Lesson in Chess

The most important lesson I have learnt in chess as a novice is to keep calm and play on. I know what you might be thinking. Who is this guy to teach us anything about chess when his ELO on chess.com is 600 and he has lost almost as many times as he has won, who learned chess when he was 20, a special shout out to meesterzack for teaching me then, and who still suck at 40? Well, keep your hats on. Hear me out and then tell me if you think I am wrong about this. And more significantly, I am making this video for my kids, so that they understand why it is important to not give up when playing chess.

Should We Block Ads on Youtube?

So I have made two videos on how you can block ads on youtube on your computer and also on your mobile phones or tablets. Most viewers of these videos will find these videos from searching on youtube or a search engine for information on how to block ads or they may come across it when youtube suggests it to them. To be clear, while I made the videos on how you CAN do it, it doesn’t automatically mean that I am telling you to do it, or even suggesting that you SHOULD do it. I am not telling or suggesting that you do it, or not do it.

Economic Technological Dys/Utopia

You walk into a fast food restaurant. You do not speak to any staff but enter your order into a touchscreen machine. You pay the machine, which spits out a receipt with a queue number. You collect your food from the counter when your number appears on the screens. You sit down, you clear your own tray when finished and you leave. You make zero contact with the workers working there.

The Totalitarian Anatomy of Hellbound

Hellbound is a popular dark fantasy South Korean TV series. What speaks to me most about it is how the story is about a society’s metaphorical descent into totalitarianism. Totalitarianism you ask? Yes, that totalitarianism that we have already encountered in history from fascist Nazi Germany, Stalinist Soviet Union and the horrors of the Khmer Rogue regime in Cambodia.

[Fiction] My Eulogy – Mea Culpa

[Christopher enters stage left, walking towards the podium in front of a coffin set up lengthwise but at an angle to the audience. The background is a clear night sky full of stars and the scene is moonlit. He had been tasked to read the eulogy his dearest friend, Alan, had prepared for himself, which was to be read at Alan’s funeral.]

I thank you all for coming this evening. I have intentionally arranged for my own self-written eulogy to be the last speech for today, the day you come to mourn my death. I regret that I have to speak to you like this, from beyond the grave. Please do not be mistaken that it is a mark of my insincerity. Indeed, it is quite the opposite.

The Experience Machine Part 2

Previously, I have explained what Nozick’s thought experiment on experience machines is about and his arguments against plugging in. If you have not watched it, please find the link, watch it first and then return here. To recap, his three arguments are and I quote:

1) “We want to do certain things, and not just have the experience of doing them.”

2) “We want to be a certain way, to be a certain sort of person.”

3) “Plugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality.”

While they may seem reasonable, I have hinted at some scenarios such as wanting a holiday or to escape from a life of suffering, to be reasons why people might want to plug into the experience machine. I want to expand on that today, to argue against Nozick’s arguments and then reconcile it with what I think is the real takeaway from his thought experiment.

What is Everything?

Democritus: What is everything?

Socrates: Everything is a thing. Nothing is also a thing.

Democritus: Why is everything a thing?

Socrates: Everything is a thing and are things.

First, let’s tackle how everything is a thing, i.e. how everything is one single thing. Everything contains many things, in fact every single thing. What makes everything one thing is that it is a concept that covers, that encompasses, that is used to conceive of all things, including the concept itself.

This means that everything is a thing, including (the concept of) everything.

Democritus: But isn’t the word ‘thing’ used only to refer to material things?

Socrates: Things can be material things or immaterial things.

Socrates’s Last Days

Credit: Eric Gaba, Wikimedia Commons user: Sting

I want to tell you a great story of heroism, bravery and tragedy. It is the story of Socrates’s last days, which took place about 2,300 years ago and remains an important touchstone for the history of philosophy today.

A Meditation on Meditation

First off, I just want to relate my thoughts and experiences on meditation. I am not a spiritual guru, nor some kind of mindfulness expert. I only have my own experience and my rather modest reading on meditation to talk about, but I think it can be helpful for those who have tried it and “failed” or who don’t really have any inkling on what meditation is about.

A Brief Meditation on Time

From the very beginning, when we emerge crying and screaming into the world, the clock starts ticking, its hands sweeping through space, marking our moments, and counting down towards the moment time will end for us.

Even before our birth, others, our mothers, our fathers, the doctors, our siblings, have already started counting our time for us, from conception to emergence. And then after to begin worrying for us, that our time here will be all too brief, and for some, all too long.

The clock, the calendar, they rule our lives. We worry when we have too little time, we are in too much of a rush; we fret when we have too much time, feeling as if we are stuck in a waiting room of our lives waiting for life itself to “begin,” when it has really carried on unabated. In our youths, we think we have forever, even if there are those who do die young. In our old age, we grieve over what time we have left. Yet if we allow ourselves to be ruled by the clock, we find ourselves almost as if we wish each event to be over so we can hurry on to the next. Yet if we don’t abide by time, we find ourselves missing opportunities, trains, examinations and appointments.

Counterfactual Conditionals: Regrets, the Future and Decision-Making

One might think that philosophy dwells on what is not relevant to life, especially in areas such as logic which can seem so abstract and hence divorced from reality. Arthur Schopenhauer acknowledges this when he writes: “To seek to make practical use of logic would … mean to seek to derive with unspeakable trouble from universal rules what is immediately known to us with the greatest certainty in the particular case. It is just as if a man were to consult mechanics with regard to his movements.”[1] Lest you misunderstand, Schopenhauer does think logic is of great theoretical importance, it just isn’t practically useful. Nonetheless, I want to talk about an application of the concept of counterfactual conditionals to real life, to illuminate what might not really be so obvious.

My Reflections on Nomadland

I am the Philosophical Bachelor and today I want to talk about Nomadland, a front runner for the Best Picture at this year’s Oscars in 20 21 and already the winner of the best picture at the Golden Globes. So I had finished watching the film just last night and when I was recommending it to my friend, he asked, what is it about?

While that is seemingly an obvious and also simple question, it set me thinking—so what really is nomadland about? The story itself is simple, of a woman, named Fern, who was travelling across America in search of work but that is of course not what makes this a great film. What is characteristic of the best films, is how they have the capability to speak to each of us in our own individual condition, in different ways. For adults who have had some experience in life, they will see themselves in her situation, perhaps only in some narrow aspect, but yet they will be able to sympathise or at least understand, to empathise with her situation in its manifold of details, from the pain of separation, from having to power through a grinding day at work, from the suffering of the cold, to her hunger, her anguish but also her joy. 

The Observer Effect

The observer effect is a phenomena in physics where just from the act of observation, the experimental results are changed. It is the disturbance of an observed system by the act of observation. The instruments used to measure the data, by necessity, alter the state of what they measure in some way. I want to use this effect as an analogy of how, human being as actors, modify the situation, since we, like the observer, insert ourselves into the space of action, hence changing the space of action. The elements in that space react to us, as we react to them. 

Seeing is Believing – Why Fake News Works

Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay

Do you consider yourself a discerning reader of the news?

When presented with a new piece of information, about something you do not know about, what do you do? A perfectly rational being ought to suspend judgement and investigate further before deciding if the information is true or false. This was how 17th century French philosopher René Descartes thought our mental systems worked. But is this really how we deal with new information? If you find yourself nodding, think again.