[[*---Virtu contro al Furore---*]]

Wednesday, November 10, 2004

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Yawn... just finished painting my bro's room after coming back from an awesome surprise birthday party for cyn! Well must say it was quite well planned so thanks to all the organisers for a great time - we had the best time ever!
So well naturally me shiv and cyn went into lame mode... And of course much of the speculation about shiv and kal... and yes they DO have extremely long eyelashes, must be something in their indian genes or something? Haha...
Debate camp starts tomorrow. More fun and games! And Sentosa was really fun too, and now with today cyn has officially progressed from butter to sand.. congrats! Haha...

4am now. Choices choices. Go to sleep and try to drag myself out after 3 hours, or just stay awake the whole time and crash out in RTC? Not sure...

Still reading Orwell's 1984, and it's rather thought provoking. For some reason, obscure or otherwise, 1984 reminds me of the battle between the schools of thought of Immanuel Kant and John Locke, whether empirical data is to be trusted on or not, and whether said data can be taken as a true representation of reality, or simply a skewed perspective on what really is out there. Priori Vs Posteriori, Noumena vs Phenomena, etc. Oh well. A little fatigued to be typing out a whole argument here, especially also since i've not read finish 1984... hope to do so by the end of debate camp! Oh and Mario Puzo's The Godfather is really good, can easily see how it became a classic; one of those books that create their own world which yet ties in with reality.

remind me if buggy html keeps popping up. Aside from that, Sentenced is a really good band, another excellent example of the unknown latent skills in finnish rock/metal bands... Must go visit there sometime during their summer or sometime when i get enough money.

[Edit]
It's 4.30 now so i guess i'll choose no sleep. Shall go make a nuclear coffee, bathe, and pack whatever soon. Also, decided to stick with a blogger template because the netscape/int explorer incompatibilities bug many templates except those designed by the blogger team...

As for that debate, why not.
I suppose many would already know what kinds of philosophy Kant and Locke each advocated. Anyway, in my simplistic understanding, Kant advocated that everything we experience now is just a representation of the actual event. When we experience something, each of our senses translates that experience into a separate experience, and the brain will then put all of these representations to form a picture of the actual experience. But, just as the old chinese proverb "mang ren mo xiang" (blind men feeling an elephant) goes, each blind man has a different representation of what he thinks the elephant is like. One who feels the tail thinks that it is like a rope, the other who feels it's side thinks that it is like a wall, and so on. To these people, the real form of the elephant lies outside their possible perception. It lies in something called the noumenal reality, which holds all the true forms of everything and all our experiences. In the same way, we may be able to experience something, but we have to admit, our senses are not only a mere representation of the actual experiences, but also that they are limited. Mantis Shrimps see in 16 different base hues, instead of our red blue yellow. Sharks can sense the electrical impulses running through our body, and can smell stuff a few kilometres away. Heck, even snakes can sense in infra-red. Thus, each of these creatures has a representation of reality very different from human perception, though the actual event, from an outsider's point of view, may be exactly the same. Thus really, our senses can only represent the actual experience, and not recreate the essence of that experience. This lies in the noumenal reality, the true forms of things (yes i know this sounds like plato) and this noumena cannot be accessed by our limited human perception. Thus all we experience, called the phenomena, cannot be trusted absolutely to be the truth, or even near the truth.

[Edit Edit] (was too sleepy beforehand)
John Locke on the other hand was described as the ultimate empiricist, taking things at face value, and that since whatever noumena is not accessible to our common experience, we should just discard it. basically, it is really useless to talk about things that we cannot even grasp and experience (occam's razor to some extent) so therefore that's why all that we can experience in our perception should therefore compose our entire reality... Well haven't read up on this that much so i may resurrect this debate again some other time...

Guess that's about it for now. Catch y'all after debate camp.

[[ Sagacious Musings ]]*|3:31 AM|

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