Imprint Identities We Must Learn to Live With Than Without

There are days when I want to go up to that turkish server and start a conversation and ask him if they have this red lentil soup that I love, but when he finally asks me what I want to order, I resort back to my American english pointing to the mixed meat durum that I shall have with a diet coke. When someone asks me what nationality I am, I give the standard expected answer of "Chinese". Then they go, "oh your english is so good", then I go "well it should be pretty good since I grew up here". Then there's an awkward "oh, that's good" and the unsure-what-else-to-say so look-away-at-something-else-so-it-doesn't-get-more-awkward moment happens until I find something else to distract them from the loaded answer I didn't need to give.

Then there are times when I start talking to someone on Match or another swipe-to-date app who happens to be of Indian-origin and asks me how I know so much about Indian-ness, and I give them the even more awkward answer, "oh I was married to one". And the awkward begins all over again.

For me this is the typical life of someone who looks Chinese, feels Chinese at heart, but knows I'm better than that because I'm American-raised, but then feels a little bit Turkish and Indian at the same time. How can this be, you say? LIFE. We are not just born into the bodies we are presenting to the world as we were born to be, we soak up others' cultures, others' values, others' like/dislikes, others' preferences for things, and when we are taken out of that "otherly" context, we feel lost and naked and unsure who we are anymore. I feel that every, single, day.

I was born in Beijing, then moved all over town between my parents' friends flats and between my different grandparents' homes, and then my parents had gotten housing from their work and we finally had our own place when I was around three or four. Then it was time for school, we lived in a terrible school district. My parents wanted me to go to the "best school" so they make it look like I lived with my maternal grandparents near East District of Beijing, a few blocks from the famous Fu Que, a school that have been around educating royalties and ministries since the Qing/Ming Dynasties. During my first interview with the school admissions staff I told them the truth, that I lived an hour away up north by the then famous 1993 Asian Olympic Village, way outside of civilization at the time. I remember this as a 4 year old vividly because right after this interview of the adult I had gotten one of the worst beatings of my life with a belt for screwing up my admissions process. Eventually someone in the family pulled some strings and I got another interview and this time I knew the right answers. I got in.

I wasn't the best or smartest student, I got meh grades and I was harassed and manipulated by classmates in 1st grade. The multicolored crayons my dad had gotten me from Hong Kong and numerous other cool gadgets were stolen right from under my desk. Those days we had a cubby right underneath our desks where we kept books and personal belongings as students while in class. My mom had crocheted a red wool scarf and hat, which was taken and tossed out in the garbage bin for the sake of revenge by one of the girls. In my vague memory of this incident I was pushed, shoved, and my stuff was thrown out by the most sinister girl I've ever met. My parents got involved and my girl cousin, who was one year above me in the same school, had to get her big sister classmates to stand up for me. Other than that, I was a tom-boy who pushed boys to the wall and got into wrestling fights with them, and was somehow always in trouble with something.

I spent my summers and spring break in Hong Kong with my dad, climbing on monkey bars and apparently speaking fluent Cantonese to other children I played with in the Taikoo Village residential high-rise tower community playground. Hong Kong had the best pork and fish burgers from McDonalds Happy Meal and I had a best friend named Zhang JiHang. I don't actually have memories of him but there are pictures and I've seen enough to find that I can't tell if I have real memories or if those were just my mind rendering real memories with photos I've seen. We'd go to the beaches together with our parents and play arcade games, which is pretty much all I can remember. I also have flashes of Shenzhen and maybe the photos helped to piece things together over the years, that I had spend a good chunk of time there as well as a child. Then one summer, I was in Johannesburg, South Africa, hearing a kid and his brother talk about cadillacs and munching on biltong. I distinctly remember going to this theme park called "Gold Rift City" where they pour a brick of gold right in front of the audience during the show, and right after it cools, the audience is invited to pick the brick up with just the thumb and index finger. Whoever can pick it up gets to take the gold brick home! So much fun! We also drove ourselves into a natural preserve with lions, ostriches, and giraffes roaming about freely without a care, while us tourists took endless photos with our film cameras. Then we were driving to a casino with flashing lights and a car rotating on display over slot machines and then a magical place called "table mountain" in the far distance. I didn't know what I was doing there, I thought it was just a fun trip, until years later I asked about that memory with my parents. Apparently that summer was a "test immigration" for us to see if we could move there permanently. Good thing we didn't get very comfortable in the 4 bedroom ranch home and swimming pool with two servants of a house we had been living in while at Johannesburg. Then I was back in school in Beijing.

One day in 3rd grade, in the public girls bathroom, the vice principal happened to be doing her business as well and we started a conversation. She asked me how I felt about going to America and I didn't know what she was talking about. My memories after that were a blur, from finding out in a school bathroom that I was going to immigrate to the US to the plane ride over to San Francisco International Airport. I do remember that my dad and I got luckily upgraded to the second floor of the 747 we were flying and that I watched several movies on the way over on the big projector screen and offered gum (that was in a pink beeper case) to my seat neighbors in front of me. Then we were in Albany, California.

[I'm going to write my story in several posts and perhaps over many days/weeks/months... but this was my early childhood of pre-America] ... to be continued

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Later that year I wrote this one

Corpuscularianism and Artificial Intelligence

Modern day corpuscularianism takes on the views of Harre’s Principle of Structural Explanation. He says that everything in the world that we know of can be reduced down in terms of “relations among a small number of elementary units” (Harre 164). In other words, everything that we perceive and experience in the world such as taste, smell, or observations in any other way would all come down to a change in the direction or degree of motion of the basic elements involved. He also suggests that there are two relationships between properties of parts and properties of the whole. One says that the property of the whole is the sum of the properties of individual parts within the whole. Moreover, he states that another relation between parts and the whole is emergence, in which aggregates have properties that are not properties of the individuals from which it consists. These emergent properties are usually “explained by characteristics of the structure, not just by the components that enter into the structure” (Harre 145). For instance, if we were to relate the behavior of a crowd to the behavior of its individual members, the characteristics of a crowd would not be the additive functions of the characteristics of its members.

Contemporary corpuscularianists believe that structure is responsible for the explanation of properties of an entity. If an alien, whose brain is systematically different from ours, and a human are both put in a state of pain causing each to experience “distress, annoyance, and practical reasoning aimed at relief,” then a functionalist would suggest that even though the alien’s internal makeup may be very different from that of a human’s, the alien’s state of pain would nonetheless be identical to a human pain state (Churchland 36). In this situation regarding the alien, corpuscularianists would say that the pain state experienced by the alien is completely different from that of the human’s because their physical structures are dissimilar, thus these two views are inconsistent. Turing-machine-functionalists believe that since any given mental state cannot be broken down to the physical mechanism that causes it, then mental states must be something more than the merely physical. Furthermore, it also implies that “mentality is not the matter of which the creature is made, but the structure of the internal activities which that matter sustains” (Churchland 37). For instance, human mental states are not restricted to human biological systems like our brains, instead to, but not restricted to, feelings and the state of being we experience under certain conditions.

In his The large, the Small and the Human Mind, Penrose argues against Turing-functionalist view that the human can be modeled by a Turing machine. He generalizes various viewpoints which one can take about the relationship between conscious thinking and computation into four categories: A, B, C, and D. Type A simply states that all thinking is the carrying out of some computation, and if you carry out the appropriate computations, awareness will result. Type D eliminates all such possibilities and says that awareness cannot be explained by physical, computational, or any other scientific terms. Types B and C are defined to be somewhere between the extremes of A and D (Penrose 101). Turing is a type A person who must have believed that mathematicians are essentially computers while carrying out algorithmic procedures in order to ascertain mathematical truth. He holds a view similar to the computational theory of mind which states that if something can perform the functions that depict a person, then it must be a person regardless of what its structural makeup is. Penrose says this is simply unsound because “one should not be concerned with how one might get inspiration, but how one might follow an argument and understand it” (Penrose 112). Furthermore, Penrose believes that consciousness is something global, thus any physical process responsible for consciousness would have to be something with global characteristics, such as large-scale quantum coherence, and for it to be possible, it needs a high degree of isolation. For that reason, he speculates that there must be some type of quantum oscillation of isolated mass taking place within the microtubules of neurons (Penrose 131-33). On the whole, I think Penrose does not give up Harre’s Principle of Structural Explanation because he does think that the cause of consciousness is the result of something elementary that goes on at the quantum level, although he does also speculate that whatever is responsible for this consciousness must be somehow isolated from the rest of the brain.

The Principle of Structural Explanation states that for everything that goes on, we can break it down and explain it in terms of the most basic “bits and pieces” of it’s components and from there moving upward from micro-kinds to chemical kinds, to biological kinds, to neuro-kinds, and then all the way to mental kinds of state. Alternatively, downward causation leads us into thinking that supervenience exists both on the upward supervenience and a downward causal order starting from the mental kinds. Returning to the functionalist’s experience of pain, if one accidentally received a paper cut, first the sensory quarks and neurons would fire upwards to reach the mental state until one feels the emotion of pain, this then may in turn emergently cause the person to experience annoyance, which is another emotion. This time the mental-kinds will downwardly cause the lower levels to experience pain. I believe downward causation is very real and for it to exist our brains must have the ability to run in reverse so-to-say, so the physiological components can carry out all these procedures. An example of downward causation in everyday life is stress or nervousness being experienced at the mental state; as a result you may get an upset stomach or increased heartbeat, or even cold sweat without any justifiable physical cause for them.

In the movie Artificial Intelligence, Dr. Hobby suggests that by mapping the impulse pathways in a single neuron one can construct a MECA who can love. If this is true, then it does support the contemporary corpuscularianism because it talks about supervenience from the movement of a single neuron to a complicated emotion called love. I believe this approach to replicating someone who can love is slightly nonsensical. Love is an emotion we learn through our existence on earth by growing up and interacting with friends, family, pets, and our significant others. It is not a code in some set of complicated algorithm that you would be able put into a machine to generate love. Even if one could come up with such a code, persons love in different ways. I believe that no two people can possibly experience love in the exact same way, and no two can love the same exact way, and thus such a code can not be generated.

Churchland, P. Matter and Consciousness, revised ed. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988.

Harre, R. The Philosophies of Science. London: Oxford University Press, 1972.

Penrose, Roger. The Large, the Small and the Human Mind. London: Cambridge University Press, 1999.

Film: Artificial Intelligence. Director Steven Spielberg.

Paper I wrote in 2004

Logical Positivism and Cosmological Argument in Proving God’s Existence

A classical definition of empiricism in its early stages can be summarized with the claim that the only source of knowledge is experience. According to this view of logical positivism we cannot know anything about the world except through direct experience with our senses. What we cannot know from experience and our senses we can speculate and theorize by observing the patterns from our past experiences, but they are not guaranteed to predict the future. David Hume’s inductive skepticism suggests that even the best kind of evidence we can find for scientific theory is not completely decisive and that error is always possible. Science can never reach absolute certainty based on the beliefs of logical positivists. Hume thought such things as analytical and synthetic distinctions of language are very important. Analytical truth is simply whether the sentence is true or false based on the meaning of the words, and synthetic in itself includes analytical and must be true in the way the world is; in order to know such truths we must go back to experience and our senses.

Logical positivists believe that our theories of unobservable entities such as atoms and electric fields are simply theories that scientists have concluded based on the gathering of patterns through past experience and data collected from scientific experiments. Logical positivism came to be an uncompromising form of empiricism, mainly focused on the theory of language. In Godfrey-Smith’s book Theory and Reality he states that “Scientists use terms like “electron” or “gene,” they act as if they are doing more than tracking complex patterns in the observable realm” (Godfrey-Smith 36) as a means to state the obvious about the misinterpretations of language today. Operationalism, developed by Percy Bridgman, states that “scientists should use language in such a way that all theoretical terms are tied closely to direct observational test” (Godfrey-Smith 30). This was expressed more as a proposal in order to tighten up the use of the scientific language. According to Hempel, logical positivism holds that the sole purpose of science is to draw conclusions based on patterns in experience. For logical positivism, when a scientist tries to describe unobservable entities in the world that results in what we see, the scientist must instead be seen as describing the observable world in a special, abstract way, or by useful fiction. I think this method of dealing with such theoretical entities is quite adequate for the current level of technology we have today. I agree with the views of logical positivists in that we can only know about the world through our interactions and senses; this is the world we know and the only world we can know through experience. It is only through the patterns that we collect of our past experience can we then try to predict the future, with little or no guarantees.

The cosmological argument states that there’s a cause to everything we experience, nothing can possibly give cause to itself, and that there is no infinity of causes. Given these, there must be a cause to start the entire process of causes; therefore in turn this proves that God exists. This view on the existence of God is derived from the Principle of Sufficient Reason: every true proposition, or at least every contingently true proposition, must have an explanation or cause. In our lives, we acknowledge this reasoning and even use this in our everyday language by asking the question of why to each proposition that we experience. The Principle of Sufficient Reason simply puts this in more specific terms to cover the world in a broader sense. This would be included as an example of synthetic truth in that it would be true based on the sentence’s own premises and the state of our world observed through experience. It would be incorrect to say that we can know the Principle of Sufficient Reason on the basis of reason alone without factual interactions with the physical world. There needs to be knowledge of the world before asking the question of why the world is the way it is, and furthermore conclude that the First Cause must be God, therefore He must exist. I agree with Immanuel Kant who developed the view that “all our thinking involves a subtle interaction between experience and preexisting mental structures that we use to make sense of experience” (Godfrey-Smith 36). He exemplified that space and time cannot be derived from experience but in contrary mathematics can give us real knowledge of the world but does not require experience for its justifications.

Logical positivists believe that mathematics is purely analytical due to the fact that it made mathematics into an empiricist framework. “Mathematical propositions do not describe the world; they merely record our conventional decision to use symbols in a particular way” (Godfrey-Smith 26). To have truth based solely on reason alone one need to disregard the way the world is. The definition of synthetic truth is truth that can only be true if it is both valid and sound according to the way the world is, therefore there cannot be synthetic a priori knowledge without experience.

Godfrey-Smith, Peter. Theory and Reality. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.

hehe....