Ultimate Goal in This Life

The last few weeks have changed my perspective on things in general. For one, I'm no longer at looking at things in a purely technical way—I find that I'm also rather interested in the human side of things too. As much as coding is concerned, it would appear to be the case that I try to write less code as oppposed to before, where I actually liked writing more.

One might say that perhaps I have turned into a different kind of me. The me that has probably been lying latent for so long, suppressed due to the environment and even perhaps the people. The me that is essentially a human, not some silly machine that can only spew code and pure geek talk all over the place.

Of course, like all things that I say, I always maintain some sense of a skepticism. Maybe all these are but dreams, and that all these new-found interests in life in general are mere manifestations that do not have any long term effects. I will probably not know about this, but in the meantime, I'm just happy being the way I am.

Life is getting more interesting, probably due to the fact that I'm not taking that many technical courses this semester (I still need to clear all the general education stuff like philosophy-like, psyhology-like and sociology-like classes) and that I'm being exposed to a whole new dimension of things. Suddenly, my world does not consist of just computer programs and more computer programs—there are economic models, theories of ethics and process consulting helping real people solving real problems.

That's where my interest lies—helping real people solve real problems. I knew from the onset that I didn't really like purely theoretical stuff that has no application whatsoever; let's just call it the engineering blood in me talking. I like solving problems; I am a creative thinker. And to top it all off, I have enough charisma and varied experience to be able to pull things off. Does this mean that I no longer like doing research? No, on the contrary, it gives me even more interest in research. Prior to this semester, I've always been in a rather nebulous state of what kind of field that I should be doing research in. I envy my colleagues who have seemingly clear senses of what they would like to research upon, be it theoretical physics, immunology, or even astrophysics. Yet, whenever I ask myself the [rather] simple question of "what is my research focus", I cannot seem to come up with a coherent enough answer that satisfies myself.

I love computer science—that's something that almost everyone who has ever met me will automatically realise. But computer science is too vast a field; and the world being the way it is, there is a need for me to just narrow down my specialty to a single part of computer science. I surveyed the field; I read the literature. I looked at myself, and reflected upon my abilities and short-comings. And I realised that being a pure theoretician is not the way that I should be pursuing what I love. I hereby choose machine learning.

Machine learning is awesome. It gives the computer or computing machinery a rather potent way of being able to come up with its own judgements of things, based literally on what it has seen before. It doesn't require the programmer to sit down and design a program that steps through all possibilities, neither does it require someone to sit there and literally train the computing machinery what is "right" and what is "wrong" for a given situation. At my very heart, I'm a knowledge gatherer—I am addicted to knowing things, which explains why I read all kinds of arcane (read: non-specialty related) texts like pathology, metallurgy, romance and even history just for fun. And after a while, I realise that my mortal mind isn't really capable of retaining all that I might have seen in my lifetime. I assume that among all the other mortals like me, they all have similar problems. If machine learning can be improved to the point that it can make the machines become powerful-enough data classifiers, it will relieve scientists in all fields of the need to memorise voluminous facts, and instead allow them to do what scientists do best—designing creative solutions.

Maybe I'm not smart enough to make a really ground-breaking discovery that will revolutionise the world, but I guess I'm smart enough to be able to apply what I have learnt from such diverse fields and of machine learning to do something that people can actually use to help themselves in life in general. If that can be done, then I guess that I should be rather happy about things, and my job in my professional life will be done.

Force of personality—I think I have neglected that aspect of mine for quite a while ever since I became an official scholar. For too long I have felt threatened by the glamourous fields that my colleagues are involved in, like neuroscience and cancer-research. But now, I just feel somewhat content with my lot. I have a strange talent that even I don't really have a full grasp of, and perhaps this is that extra special something that sets me as being different from the rest of the folks. Comparatively, I'm probably not as smart as many of them, but then again, I'm not as dumb as I seem. An extravert on the outside; an introvert on the inside. There is perhaps more to me that I know little about, and as time goes by and I age ever so frequently, the hidden sides of me are starting to reveal themselves to me in time.

I was not born into a family of great repute nor wealth, nor was my family ever gaining great repute and wealth. I have nothing more to upkeep other than my own ethos; and that has been building itself up rather steadily as time goes by and I slowly seek myself. To be bound in reality, yet free in the mind; a seemingly paradoxical goal, but one that I seem to be striving towards. Reality and abstraction seem one and the same, and I am slowly feeling more at ease at both. Perhaps when I return for the summer, I'd appear to be a much different person than before—I'm not surprised. My world used to be full of shadows of blacks and grays, but today as I stand here and look out of the window, soft pastel colours dominate the landscape.

If I were to die some day, I want to be able to say in my dying breath, that I had, indeed, lived a good life. That is perhaps the ultimate goal in this life.