Life

Ah, life. Full of interesting things to think about, wonderful people to hang out with and that special someone to hold close and just curl up with. Am I less of a pessimist now? Perhaps, since my temperament has changed somewhat given that my life circumstances are slowly getting better.

It is strange to note that this time last year, I was in a situation that was pretty sitheremilar. Except that the feeling was somewhat forced. I'm grateful for what I have now, and especially who I have now.

I used to think that life was all about logic and axioms. But as time went by, I realised that it was just impossible—there's more to life than just a deterministic outcome. It pains me to see people who think that life is all about logic and just fail to comprehend that life is more than that. There's this side of life that involves feeling, that involves rational thought, that involves empathy. Empathy and feeling are things that are uniquely human; these are what separates us from any other logical system. I'm sure that some purists might argue that it is possible to codify all these feelings and empathy into some logic framework; I'm positive that it would probably work out provided one uses a good encoding scheme. But we're not computers, so why should we reduce ourselves to just logic processing machines? What kind of life it is for a human if we live it out like a machine?

I used to be a logic machine of sorts, trying to hide my feelings and humanity away from it all, and survive on a cold, intellectual exterior. But as time went by, all these hidden away emotions and humanity started manifesting themselves as uncontrollable manic/depressive episodes. But of course, the terms "manic" and "depressive" are nothing more than placeholders for the extreme mood swings that I'm referring to—they probably do not correspond to the standard clinical definitions.

But after some help from several people, I start to realise that there is more to life than just solving equations/problems using logic—one must look beyond the logic framework to understand more about the world. Last semester, I took courses in technical consulting, ethics and economics, and the truth is, I actually enjoyed the lessons that they teach. Granted, they are mostly not too relevant to my core of Computer Science and Machine Learning, but they provide a rather interesting way of viewing the world at large. Technical consulting taught me how to apply my problem solving ability to the outside world where there's more than just the best technical solution there is; there is a need to consider the human aspects of technology as well. Ethics brought up more viewpoints that I can take, other than the "cold and intellectual" utilitarian perspective that I tend to adopt in real life. And economics just proved that many of the activities that humans engage in can still be analysed from the perspective of some semi-universal law or hypothesis.

So, what's all this rant about? I actually have no clue... perhaps this is one of those "memory purge" things that I engage in to sort of put my life into perspective of sorts, and perhaps to act as some non-subtle commentary of some people's lives that I know.

Till next time.