Starlight
When I opened the door to the night
The darkness rolled in and enveloped me
Outside, while the trees swayed and the wind yawned
A thousand pieces of stars came showering down
For each fractal cutting into the night air
Fire captured and floated in spheres
Rainbows caught in the moment,
Shining down—these ethereal creatures
A last good bye to the visionary
A sweet night befallen
Journey
Once upon a worldly time
She came into being
She sat at the bottom of the world
And saw nothing but the sun at noon
The sunshine told her that she could
One day embrace a better world
So she climbed and she climbed
And one day she saw the world
For the first time
For a while the sun did shine
And she danced on the plains
She yelled for joy
And sang the praises of the world
And one day
The mirror broke
A thousand pieces shattered before her
And she was back at the bottom as before
For an eternity she mourned her loss
And for an eternity she cried
Only after a flood of tears built up
Did she finally climb out again
But the mirror was broken
Things would never be the same
So she pieced together what was left
And said goodbye to the sun
She sits on the plains at night
Breathing in and out
And embraced the quiet moon instead
A Tantrum
One look at post-modern thinking
One more drink of beer for the day
They might argue for subjective truth
But what blasphemy they do say
One look at atheism today
One more hand to the head
How can anyone, let alone millions be like so
His atheism saw God as nature led.
One look at reality as conceived
The amount of shock on his face
How can there not be natural order
In this human race?
One look at learning and development
Besides the unheralded progression
Of learning for the popular masses
Surely, you must be joking of such regression.
One look at truth and epistemology,
Oh boy, he looks like he might cry
How can anyone know through senses
Only reason can prevail—oh my my!
One look at what some people want,
A destruction of the line between church and state
No—this is where I shall make my stand!
No intersection because that is what I hate!
One more look and I don’t think he’ll still stand
The modern world is just too much
And Spinoza is no fan
Poor Spinoza, dug from his grave
Says goodbye and jumps right back in
“There is no retribution enough to be saved!”
And out he goes—there are no more debates for him to win.
On Reality
When I drop a ball from a building, its acceleration would be around 9.8 ms^2. Is that an objective fact or subjective? Most people would say objective. I wonder what the opposing side would say. If reality is truly subjective, how could it be that gravity is different for everyone? Well—maybe there are some subjective elements that influence this fact’s existence. After all, the existence of this fact is based on a body of people, who are subjective, being specifically interested in the acceleration due to Earth’s gravitational pull. Bodies of scientists have continually updated the information we have found with substantial arguments and disagreements over time. Even though the fact itself may not be subjective, the surrounding culture and entities that study it and build off from it are, indeed, subjective.
This subjectivity is more prominent in the social sciences more so than the traditional “hard” sciences. It’s hard to disagree about the acceleration due to gravity, but it’s much harder to say there is one objective social reality. If someone experiences racism everyday as a black man, that is a different experience than a white man. Their sense of reality in social life would be quite different. The black man would feel degraded and threatened by the racism he faces while a white man may not even consider the possibility of being mistaken for a criminal and shot down.
Reality as subjective or objective depends on what subject area you wish to enquire about. Differences in social reality often come about due to structural inequities. While one may taken for granted being able to freely run down a dark street at night, another would consider it a death threat. Other information like the facts about gravity are less debated, but the true mysteries lies in between fields or the meta-level questions of science. Who gets to define what life constitutes? How are things categorized and why? What constitutes enough evidence for something to be considered true? All of these questions challenge us to think deeper about facts. There is more to the world than pure positivism.
On Free Will and Justice
The age old question of whether we truly have free will is a question that has many implications for criminal justice. If we are to fall into the deep hole that no one has free will, then what then of consequences? Every lawyer will just defend their client as having acted because of the collective past experiences of their life.
If free will does exist, how much can we ascribe to free will and voluntary decision making compared to decision making influenced by our environments or past? Can someone in a psychotic break be responsible for believing in delusions and sabotaging relationships? Can we see that those growing up in poverty are more likely to struggle financially because of their circumstances?
Regardless of what the neuroscience says about free will, the lack of existence of free will or the presence of free will both have an influence on criminal justice. They bring into question who can be held responsible if at all for their behaviors.
There is, however, an interesting result of how one thinks about consequences based on where one stands on this spectrum. For those who ascribe circumstantial evidence that excuses an individual, these people are probably more likely to think big picture. A person’s actions are moulded by others. It takes a village to raise a child so why not a village held responsible when a child does something abhorrent? What about all the other people in their life that could have intervened but did not?
This perspective can be more empathetic and understanding in certain cases, but it is also difficult to balance. On the extreme end, the consequences can be dire. If a lot of people are responsible, what are their consequences? It would be difficult to ascribe responsibility in an almost arbitrary manner. There would be many arguments going at once regarding who should face consequence and how. It would enlarge the bureaucracy and also prevent a fast and speedy trial as they are bogged down by the extraneous details.
It would, also, be considered deeply unfavorable by the general population and pose threats to privacy. Who is to say a neighbor is somehow responsible for a murder in the next house over when they did not know anything about it? They would need to invade privacy to “keep watch” like a guard to prevent negative consequences happening to them.
On the other hand, if one is very anti-deterministic, it might make one very harsh and leaning towards punishment. Why give anyone any leeway for their behavior when they should have known better? Doing wrong when one doesn’t need to days everything about the character of the offender. They would need to be locked up for possessing lesser than ideal character and continually tracked until the deficit is fixed. This perspective also has racist undertones as different races were once considered morally inferior. To feed into a punitive system would create a cycle of arrests and serve punishments that don’t deter crime but are given out as a consequence of not being “good” enough.
Of course, one can imagine a non-punitive system that is predated on free will, but it would still look away at systemic injustices and the big picture that influence one’s behavior. Would anyone dare say that a hungry man is not understandable to steal if they have no other way to eat? Even if the consequences are lenient, it misses out on the larger issues. The bigger question is: why is this person going hungry in the first place?
It is clear to me that taking the extremes of either side lead to short-sided thinking. It would be better to balance opinions on a case-by-case basis and not resort to extremes to solve the issue. The middle, however, is always murky and some people fall further to the right or to the left of the spectrum. Which is a better worldview largely depends on how people understand crime. Is crime largely motivated by past experiences or due to a character flaw? It is the position of the author that it is better to lean more towards past experiences as a large motivator for crime rather than a character deficit as the adage, better to let five guilty people go free than to imprison one innocent, is a similar logic to how I see it. It’s better to be lenient but fair with consequences and not ruin a life if the crime is largely redeemable. This means that the person shows remorse and genuine desire to own up their crimes. Those who show no remorse and no desire to atone are those who I believe it is better to be less lenient on as they pose an ever present danger of reoffending.
Connected
Life is a miracle, regardless of spiritual or religious beliefs. It baffles me how two cells can merge and eventually create a human life. As the cells divide and create more cells, each of them different and serving different roles that will eventually turn into the heart or the liver, I am caught off guard just how complex and beautiful that nature’s ever flowing river of creations just ended up becoming capable of creating life from so little. Bursting at the seams of these cells are the codes for an unique human being. Everything unfolds from them. Seeing the division only makes the awe even more visible.
Life is the product of biological soups that came together in just the right way and in just the right time. Evolutionary pressures took the original imprints and improvised thousands of different life forms in the process.
Death, on the other hand, reveals the limits of evolutionary miracles. For the religious or the spiritual, life goes on in the form of ethereal beings or souls that depart from the dead physical body. I know not what will happen to us when we take our last breathes. The only thing I know is that our bodies will one day return to the primordial soup of atoms and molecules, ready to be created into something new. Our skin, our hearts, our bones, our hair—all of it returns to the world from once it came from. In another life, we become other creatures or even a part of the very soil that cradles life. We become, once again, a part of the great exchange of resources. We become, through pieces decayed, a part of the whole that has existed since Time began.
Whether souls exist or not does not take away from the difficulties of goodbyes in our very human world, but I like to remember that we are already a part of something greater even as we exist right now. Everyday, our internal world exchanges with the world around us. Those who move on never truly leave us as they become apart of the wind, the water, and even a part of a new life form eventually. We’re always connected to each other in this way and our existence leaves a permanent imprint of ripples onto the surface of life that echoes forever and deep into the unknowns. No matter what happens, we are already a part of this world, engaged with each other in a multitude of possible forms. That is the beauty of life that is painted in stark contrast to the mysteries of the end.
Raisin d’etre
Fruits of all shapes and sizes are evolutionary products meant to be eaten. The seeds of the fruits become spread out as the animal digests and releases the seeds in their bowel movements. As animals are constantly moving, the release of seeds in new areas affords a lucky chance of growing in newer fertile lands, or if the seeds are unlikely, they might just end up in a sewage system.
Some fruits and vegetables are not meant to be eaten, but nature finds a way. The burn of spicy peppers may have been a deterrent, but it soon became a cultivated classic in human farms.
Other foods are seeds themselves that are eaten. They may have not originally been meant for digestion and was meant for passing down new plants, but again humans have used engineering and tools to harvest and eat such seeds.
Liquids, like milk, are specifically meant for consumption by the young, but cow milk has been turned into a dietary staple of many tables. It’s purpose is nourishment, but it is important beyond that of just feeding the young.
Meats, on the other hand, does not seem to suggest a ”want” to be eaten. As it is harvested through living creatures, it is unlikely meat would wish its own death.
Different foods can be seen as “wanting” to be eaten in that they were evolutionary cultivated for consumption, but whether or not food wants to be eaten like how humans wants to indulge in sensory pleasures like a beautiful dish of steamed fish or a hearty soup, is still in the air. If one believes all objects have a will and consciousness, then our next goal would be to find a way to communicate with food to interview their “wanting” to be eaten. I would be delighted to see such attempts to be posted in a weekly food digest magazine.
Lux Eternal
Have you ever just stared at the light refracted on the bottom of a pool or a beach and stood there, mesmerized by the lattice of light warbling on the surface? To see the light contract, expand, and bend to the physics of the water is a whimsical exploration of childhood awe. The woven mat dances like neurons in the brain—all tightly connected, endlessly communicating in a web of electricity, and constantly changing. Albeit chaotic and seemingly without any patterns, under greater scrutiny, one can tell it is organized by basic principles of mathematics and physics, hidden to the naively observing eye. The flowering and formation of such phenomena is like that of a Fibonacci sequence or like a fractal that evolves and rifts on rules that become expansive complexities, realized across vast time and space. To observe the natural world is to encounter such moments of quiet beauty every second and to recount them again and again in many different forms. If such simplicity contains within an infinity of nuanced complexity, that the collective shape of water is created and recreated infinitesimally, painting light as its most faithful and fluid prism, then I cannot even articulate how wondrous the great mysteries there are to enjoy in our world. From the tiniest of atoms to the largest of human communities, each curve of the continuous spiral that connects all of natural reality represents another measure of a fugue that is both mystifying and familiar. Each voice interlaced into the harmony, like the light that we see in the water, ripples upon each other until there is but one single vibrancy that we call the Universe and Reality itself. To understand is to sift through and listen to this most beautiful and profound melody born and developed from the beginning of Time and Space. Intricately, we wade through these notes, and engrossed, we serenade with the world. This is what I see when I see the light under the waters—look once more and tell me: how could you not love it so?