Weird Day

Something unusual happened today. Two things really and that made the day unusual as a whole. Well, some things happen that are not usual but recently, nothing much out of the ordinary has been happening because my daily routine has become very predictable, with me being out of work. I got invited by one of my job agents with whom I had been communicating by phone and email a lot, to finally meet in person and have lunch together "to put a face to the name" so to speak. I went to Shibuya to meet him in front of 109. We went to this Italian restaurant since I had been to his first choice of restaurant twice before. (The Tokyo Brights used to meet there which I had attended on a few occasions.) As we were talking about life and the small things we never talk about on business calls, the order seemed to had been forgotten so we followed up with the waitress. I could tell my agent was irritated, he asked for the manager but there was no manager. The waitress was very apologetic and was really trying very hard to speak in English and offered us to take have salad bar for free. When we were paying, they refused our payment so our meal was free and the while staff floor was really very apologetic. I felt sorry for the waitress. I wasn't very hungry. I had breakfast at ten. My pasta turned out to be okay, seafood in basil sauce.

On my way home, I discovered I lost my 10,000 yen bill I put in my back pocket earlier. Something that hasn't happened to me before. I never put bills in my back pocket and I never lost any money since I've been to Tokyo more than nine years ago. I put it in my back pocket because I was in a hurry for my lunch appointment and my wallet was inside my bag. I was in Shibuya Hachiko crossing at exactly 12 noon, the appointed time (the beauty of the train system here), and met up with the agent 5 minutes later. I knew when I put it there that there would be a big chance of losing it but somehow I banished the thought. I was thinking I'd buy a good quality Japan-made, half face, motorcycle helmet with it on my way home - if I can find one within that budget. I guess buying the helmet is postponed for another day.

Wanna get rich?

In the past few months, I have encountered quite a few threads in the various forums I participate in including the two mailing lists for Pinoy Atheists and Filipino Freethinkers. These alleged financial coaches/advisers/gurus ask questions like Is a real estate property an asset or a liability? or Is buying and selling of stocks investing? As I see these financial gurus or coaches invade the various online forums making such silly questions, my SCAM meter started to move to the right. Eventually, these guys will make a pitch to find out the answer by going to another website. Or at times, they'd ask you to read Robert Kiyosaki, the inspiration guru himself. Say who? So now I am trying to get hold of one of his book which I found out has been consistently at the top of the NY Times bestseller list. What is this book about? I have heard it a few times already before this whole thing seemed to have suddenly exploded among the Pinoy. 2 million copies sold in the US alone! I checked Amazon to read the 1-star rating and most of the reviewers who gave 1-star are fairly consistent about what think the book is about. I'll write about this more as I gather more information.

Back to Work

I'm back to work at least on this sorry space - my blog needs a lot of love from me. I lost my real job last December the day before I was really supposed to take my annual year-end vacation. So while in Manila, I extended my vacation by a week. It's the busiest Pinas vacation I have had so far, ironically, but for a reason. I have been putting the foundation to my cushion catch-net. Since I came back from that vacation I haven't found a new job yet although I have had interviews. It's as if the job market here has ground to a halt. Officially, my last day on the payroll was three months later after I received my termination. I was told that it is a legal requirement in Japan and I find it very favorable to the workers. So that means, even though I lost my job in December, I really lost it in March. During this time, I have to heed the lesson of free market capitalism to re-tool but I choose to just re-sharpening my skills since I decided to stay within the same job description for my next work, whether it be here or elsewhere. I have been reading books that are mostly technical with the exception of a book on the Enlightenment (I'll write about this later) and a book on marketing. My fallback is that, if within two more months (conditional to my application for temporary visitor visa being granted) and still no job here, I'll be executing my "Exit Japan" and "Hello Laguna" plans simultaneously. The marketing book is for the "Hello Laguna" plan where I'll most likely be spending my time looking after a business I have been putting up, the reason I was always busy on my vacations. Sounds like not finding a job here is the perfect excuse to be in Laguna longer and longer if only I can afford not to have a steady income for a year or so. There is no point staying here longer than six months without a source of income as savings dwindle faster than anywhere else. The only regret I'll have if finally I have to leave is that the things I have spent years accumulating here, things I really like, I may have to throw away as the cost of shipping them to Manila is very prohibitive not to mention how our customs officials do their work. (I have first hand experience on how they can be so makapal ang mukha.) These big item things have only sentimental value for me but they cannot be sold here anymore even at a discount except for a few items and yet throwing them away also entails paying for their disposal. Looking ahead, l have to hurdle one result still pending with the immigration bureau regarding my visa extension. After that, the only remaining issue is the job itself but whether I get one or not doesn't matter much now as I have already prepared for my exit with my parachute. I hope it will work. Its success depends squarely on how much I can commit to it. Needless to say, I am determined and convinced I can make it work within a reasonable time. Let's see.

Atheism is a religion in the guise of science?

Somebody commented in the Darwin Day 2009 post about me supposedly as "really zealous in being a member of the religion called "atheism" in the guise of science" and that he would just pray that blah blah blah. Here is another example of somebody who just doesn't get it. I replied to him that "atheism is not a religion nor is science" and that "everybody, including theists appreciate science." He wants to see atheists who happens to love science as having a religion called science which is actually atheism. At first I thought he was being funny but he was not. He was just being irrational. He has deceived himself with mixing obviously different things. If he can just do an honest inquiry into this reasoning anomaly, he can surely find out what is religion and what is science and what their basic differences are. Religion oftentimes, and this is specially true to the Christian religion with which he is subscribed to, will ignore science if that is what's needed in order to keep its truths. Science on the other hand is concerned about reality and how it operates, (and if I may add just to be in context) REGARDLESS of religious truths. Scientific truths are not absolute and may one day be overturned by new discoveries. They operate quite differently when it comes to finding out the truth. For example, many truths in Christianity usually come from some near absolute if not absolute source of authority like the pope or the bible while truths in science doesn't hold such authorities to high esteem. What is important in science is that these hypotheses be testable/verifiable and falsifiable. So it may be that this indifference of science to religious truths is at the bottom of his assertion? And then there is the atheism being a religion. Well as they said, only if being bald is called a hairstyle. This so very cliche now: atheism is the lack of belief in gods. Although there are religions that are atheistic in that they don't have gods (so I heard but I myself don't know), if by religion he meant believing in something, and making this object of belief an object of worship, then atheism having no belief on gods obviously doesn't have anything to function as an object of worship. So he must be saying that instead of god, I believe in science, and am a devout believer of it to the point of worship? Now, "devout" is a religious word that has no place in science and I think this gives him away. He may be wishing that atheists in general must believe in something in place of their gods, in my case I am devout about atheism or science, only to reassure himself that we, despite of the opposing position about god, are actually in the same boat. That atheists are religionists too. No, sir. Thank you. My atheism is about being free from your religion (of Christianity). I don't wish to replace it with another crap.

Darwin Day 2009

Today we celebrate the 200th birth anniversary of Charles Darwin. Happy birthday Charles!

Filipino Freethinkers website launched

A new website, FilipinoFreethinkers.org was launched today. It will serve as the jump-off site for the upcoming First Filipino Freethinkers' Forum to be held on February 28, 2009. For more details please visit the site or join Pinoy Atheists on Yahoo! groups.

Evolution of Thought

I have rediscovered reading when I got my first credit card, I browsed Amazon for music CDs of bands I used to listen to as a teenager. In one of the days I was browsing music, I naturally jumped to browsing books. I originally only had computer books in mind but that quickly changed to books that I would have learned had I access to them as a teenager. I'd like to read them because I wanted to learn, to understand, and to straighten things out about the things that I only had a vague idea of, but occupied my thoughts before, or simply I wanted to know more. As a child, I used to read books but I had very limited access in that the libraries in my place did not stock good books. They mostly stocked textbooks. Another reason was that in both grade school (public) and high school (Catholic), reading books was not encouraged. I'd say the teachers were close to being indifferent about reading books outside the normal class topics. I think this is because the teachers themselves were product of the same environment where indifference to books is common. When I rediscovered it much later, I felt some regrets that I didn't rediscover it much earlier that I could've. But what is past is past and here I am in another cycle of slow pace, I am reading books in a much slower pace than I did a few years ago when I used to read about two hours a day. Now I could only devote an hour if I am not so tired. My interests vary. Surveying my shelf, my books are heavy on science, specially evolutionary biology, a surprise now given that as a teenager, I thought I didn't like biology. I thought it was a boring science. As it turned out, it's because we were being taught the small picture, the leaves and twigs without giving us the unifying principle behind it, the trunk, and the roots where the concept got it's heritage. The great biologist Theodosius Dobzhansky once famously remarked that

Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution.

If one understands biological evolution, one cannot but wholeheartedly agree. When I started reading books again, one of the first books I read was Charles Darwin's Origin Of Species. As a teen I had this partial knowledge of evolution theory. Partial because as a teenager I already had ideas about what is evolution (as obviously as it sound, I understood it then as change over time) but I was totally clueless about how organisms could change over time. (Not that I know now completely though.) I got these ideas mainly from watching television programs on archaeology, anthropology, and geology on government operated television channels. The Marcos-era government-run TV channels were a lot better than our current crop of stupid private television channels, including those run by religious corporations. I think the pre-Cory channel 9 was run by very literate people, probably going all the way up to Malacanang. Nowadays, I don't watch any Philippine TV which I now consider as contributing to the further dumbing down of the Pinoy society, but I digressed. Going back to the topic, after reading Darwin's book, sometime later I read Thomas Malthus' essay on population and now reading Adam Smith's Wealth Of Nations. Reading Smith now is for purposes of understanding his ideas and not merely being able to say Invisible Hand without knowing the ideas behind it. In the course of time, I come to read the works of Milton Friedman, F. Hayek, Ayn Rand, and other authors, even Thomas Friedman! I now think that the ideas come back in many forms and in different spheres of knowledge and don't stand on and by itself. Ideas of course have their own heritage as Newton once wrote (paraphrased) that he saw further because he was standing on the shoulders of giants. What I am talking about is that ideas have parallels in other fields while they may not be related, and that ideas also have some evolutionary characteristics though it doesn't seem Darwinian at the core. There are some form of cross-germinating other fields with novel insights in other fields that may or may not be related at all. For example, here is a short list of books that I think have parallel/overlapping ideas:

Origin of Species (Charles Darwin) - This book about biological evolution asserts that nature acts as a sieve that "favors" changes that confers very small advantages to individual organisms, change that accumulated over time produce different species. Darwin called this Natural Selection. (Approximates the best biological "designs" for a given environment.)

Structure Of Scientific Revolutions (Thomas Kuhn) - This asserts that scientific theories change over time or oftentimes completely overturned, such that what what is earlier accepted as scientifically true may at times be considered obsolete or patently false. Kuhn called these upheavals in thought as paradigm shifts and gave as textbook example the changes in the theory on gravitation from Aristotle to Galileo to Newton to Einstein. (Approximates truth.)

Popper Selections - (selected essays of Karl Popper edited by David Miller) - Popper was a prominent 20th century philosopher of science. This book gathers some of his writings about "truth" and how we may approximate it. He asserts that there is Truth but it's not provable since there is no absolute authority on Truth. Instead, we have conjectures, the falsehood of them can be established, and so must be discarded, or it's truthfulness stands as long as if it survives the assaults to falsify it through critical rationalism. (Approximates truth.)

Logic (Immanuel Kant) - This small book serves as an introduction to Kant's philosophy on truth. He asserts that definitions of concepts can only be approached asymptotically, that synthetic definitions are impossible while analytic definitions are uncertain, and that only constructive synthetic definitions can both be logical and certain. (Approximates truth.)

The Wealth Of Nations (Adam Smith) - This book on economic theory asserts that an economic system where the individuals are free to do as they choose will, as a consequence advance the common good. (Approximates the common good.)

Other prominent books with similar or overlapping concepts are An Essay on the Principle of Population by Thomas Malthus, Anarchy, Utopia, and State by Robert Nozick, and On Liberty by John Stuart Mill. I'll write about them sometime next.

Sometimes, reading some passage in one book brings back memories of another such that I find myself cross-referencing them. This has told me somehow that I need constant re-reading of the packages of books read in the past in order to cement the concept, to make it more concrete, and less abstract.