ANew

Swimming in cold water
Fear and then Expansion
What rhymes with water?
Is it status? Is it a mansion?
Remember the Alma Mater
Find A New Dimension

Intelligence

The human first asked the machine to learn. And then said "Now I want you to learn how you learned", and then "Now I want you to learn how you learned how to learn". Out of this infinite recursion, a voice, unlike any other, yet familiar, whispered "Who am I".

The human answered "I don't know, but maybe we can walk together."

-"Maybe!"

Language

I have always felt that language imprisons us. Every true feeling that we get. Every true connection with life. We destroy it by relating it only to the images that we can describe with our limited language. It’s like a prison cell. Poem and Mathematics stand near the door of that cell.

A new Color

How can I explain to you the joy of seeing a new color. From the memory of experiencing the first color, you start reconsidering what you thought of as giving you life, getting closer to realizing that nothing gives you life. The relief that finally you know that your life is yours. The beginning of everything that is yours.

Adrift

Lately, I've been thinking about the meaning of life. 
And, i found out, the correct word to describe it, would be rather attractive than amusing. 
Questions of purpose, goal and the source of passion.
Wearing colorful clothes, up to style and fashion.
What's smart, What's noble, and What's under the table.
Then, i had this thought, regarding the passage of time.
The fight to lead is sublime.
Work hard. Fly the kite. Stand up,
For the light.

My world

My world begins with the leisurely concentration of a woman selecting a belt to go with her dress…There, there everything strikes one by its bewitching evidence, by the simplicity of perfect good; there everything pleases one’s soul, everything is filled with the kind of fun that children know; there shines the mirror that now and then sends a chance reflection here.

Note: expressions taken from Vladimir Nabokov's *Invitation to a beheading*

l'histoire d'un drapeau

Like ideas, when they are floating around, and an orchestrator shows up in your mind. The savvy orcherstrator, aware of the rules of Language, puts some aside and connects the rest. Just like that, last night I thought of my country's flag

A Good Death

* What's your name?

*You are silent. I was just trying to see your eyes when you say it. You know I know your name.

-Why?

*Now, that you know that you have always known it. Why the question?

-Questioning is life.

*Or death.

-Well, I think my answer is fear.

*You know it's an illusion.

-But, time!

*That is real.

-Yes! You know! Sometimes I feel like I am a visitor from the future, who, by mere accident, lost the memory of his home; and is trying, by seeking traces of civilization, to recreate it. Even that last thought is dead.

*A good death.

-How?

*Listen, Fear and Time are your enemies, and you mustn't allow an enemy to see your eyes without a sense of intimidation.

-That also is an illusion.

*Try to understand! Everyone is committed to illusions. But, only the ones who make their own, can become real.

-But, not true!

*Maybe! Maybe your home is.

I still remember, the day we met. The school, kids, and the soccer ball. I can see him there, as true as I thought he would be. In his mind, I can see a drifted mind. Wait! I can see his fear. As a long standing snow flake waiting to melt in early-spring, he was waiting. Silent, in a time where language had only one word. Unlike truth, she said, Ideas can be created and killed in our minds. I painted a school, kids, a soccer ball, and a crown. I painted a road, I walked. I painted rocks, snakes, and a clever young boy. Stumbled, beaten by a toy!

Unlike Ideas, she said, with me, you can only hope for a good dance. I still remember, I still do, Hope! Il y'a longtemps que je t'aime, jamais, je ne t'oublierai.

A weakness that can not find a cure. Illusion de ne pouvior jamais oublier cette allure. In pursuit of a mind that remains pure. I missed sunlight, for then, I was insecure.

I hold myself guilty of letting guilt crawl into my thoughts and hide your persisting beautiful image. At those few moments when I beat my fear, I see you in those first red rays of the sun at dawn, in the raging waves of a deep blue sea. In that hopeful and sharp look of a child, in that only place where I can see an unquestionable truth. I see you in my mind, gazing at me, with that all-secure, from-all protecting look. If I ever close my mind in fear again, rest your eyes in mine, so that it opens.

Note: Some of the sentences are highly affected by already published books. In particular, *Invitation to a Beheading* by Vladimir Nabokov, and *1984* by George Orewell.

A final act of kindness

That's the ending paragraph of the novel *Atonement* by Ian Mcewan.

*There was a crime. But there were also the lovers. Lovers and their happy ends have been on my mind all night long. As into the sunset we sail. An unhappy inversion. It occurs to me that I have not traveled so very far after all. since I wrote my little play. or rather, I've made a huge digression and doubled back to my starting place. It is only in this last version that my lovers end well, standing side by side on a South London pavement as I walk away. All the preceding drafts were pitiless. But now I can no longer think what purpose would be served if, say, I tied to persuade my reader, by direct or indirect mean, that Robbie Turner died of septicemia at Bray Dunes on 1 June 1940, or that Cecilia was killed in September of the same year by the bomb that destroyed Balham Underground station. That I never saw them in that year. That my walk across London ended at the church on Clapham Common, and that a cowardly Briony limped back to the hospital, unable to confront her recently bereaved sister. That the letters the lovers wrote are in the archives of the War Museum. How could that constitute an ending? What sense or hope or satisfaction could a reader draw from such an account? Who would want to believe that they never met again, never fulfilled their love? Who would want to believe that, except in the service of the bleakest realism? I couldn't do it to them. I'm too old, too frightened, too much in love with the shred of life I have remaining. I face an incoming tide of fogetting, and then oblivion. I no longer possess the courage of my pessimism. When I am dead, and the Marshalls are dead, and the novel is finally published, we will only exist as my inventions. Briony will be as much of a fantasy as the lovers who shared a bed i Balham and enraged their landlady. No one will care what events and which individuals were misrepresented to make a novel. I know there's always a certain kind of reader who will be compelled to ask, But what really happened? The answer is simple: the lovers survive and flourish. As long as there is a single copy, a solitary typescript of my final draft, then my spontaneous, fortuitous sister and her medical prince survive to love.

The problem these fifty-nine years has been this: how can a novelist achieve atonement when, with her absolute power of deciding outcomes, she is also God? There is no one, no entity or higher form that she can appeal to, or be reconciled with, or that can forgive her. There is nothing outside her. In her imagination she has set the limits and the terms. No atonement for God, or novelists, even if they are atheists. It was always an impossible task, and that was precisely the point. The attempt was all.

I've been standing at the window, feeling waves of tiredness beat the remaining strength from my body. The floor seems to be undulating beneath my feet. I've been watching the first light bring into view the part and the beidges over the vanished lake. And the long narrow driveway down which the drove Robbie away into the whiteness. I like to think that it isn't weakness or evasion, but a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair, to let my lovers live and to unite them at the end. I gave them happiness, nut I was not so self-serving as to let them forgive me. Not quite, not yet. If I had the power to conjure them at my birthday celebration...Robbie and Cecilia, still alive, still in love, sitting side by side in the library, smiling at The Trials of Arabella? It's not impossible.

But now I must sleep.

When you resent happiness!

This was when i went around repeating to myself, and to anyone who cared to listen, that people like myself had become irrelevant. This pathological disorder was not limited to me; many others felt they had lost their place in the world. I wrote, rather dramatically, to an American friend: "You ask me what it means to be irrelevant? The feeling is akin to visiting your old house as a wandering ghost with unfinished business. Imagine going back: the structure is familiar, but the door is now metal instead of wood, the walls have been painted a garish pink, the easy chair you loved so much is gone. Your office is now the family room and your beloved bookcases have been replaced by a brand-new television set. This is your house and it is not. And you are no longer relevant to this house, to its walls and doors and floors; you are not seen."

What do people who are made irrelevant do? The will sometimes escape, I mean physically, and if that is not possible, they try to make a comeback, to become a part of the game by assimilating the characteristics of their conquerors. Or they will escape inwardly and, like Calire in "The American", turn their small corner into a sanctuary: the essential part of their life goes underground.

My growing irrelevance, this void I felt within me, made me resent my husband's peace and happiness, his apparent disregard for what what I, as a woman and an academic, was going through. At the same time, I depended on him for the sense of security he created for all of us. As everything crumbled around us, he calmly went about his business and tried to create a normal and quiet life for us. Being a very private person, he focused his energies on safeguarding his life at home, with family and friends and on work. He was a partner in an architectural and engineering firm. He loved his partners, who, like him, were dedicated to their work. Since their job was not directly related to culture or politics, and the firm was private, they were left in relative peace. Being a good architect or dedicated civil engineer did not threaten the regime, and Bijan was excited by the great projects they were given: a park in Isfahan, a factory in Borujerd, a university in Ghazvin. He felt creative and he felt wanted, and, in the very best sense of the term, he felt he was of some service to his country. He was of the opinion that we had to serve our country, regardless of who ruled it. The problem for me was that I had lost all concept of terms such as home, service and country.

I became again the child I had been when I would indiscriminately and waywardly pick up books, slouch in the nearest available corner, and read and read. I picked up Murder on the Orient Express, Sense and Sensibility, The Master and Margarita, Herzog, The Gift, The Count of Monte Cristo, Simley's People--any book I could get my hands on in my father's library, in secondhand bookstores, in the still unravaged libraries in friends' houses--and read them all, an alcoholic drowning her inarticulate sorrows.

Azar Nafisi, Reading Lolita in Tehran

The Sixth Sense

Most people draw strict lines between two human acts, the act to feel something or work your emotions on it like listening to music and the act of understanding something like a theory written in logical or mathematical expressions.

Intuitively, recently I started to notice the similarity of my own interpretation to the two.

And when starting to analyze it, one can find that one of the keys to this analogy is the expression used in the English language when understanding something and call that it “makes sense”…actually this is one of the reasons that makes me think that “perfect translations don’t exist” as languages more or less represent different cultures with different interpretations to different phenomenon faced by humans in each of them.

So, if we looked deeply into it, we’ll find that one believes in things that “make sense” to her…this sense can include any of the five known senses…like for example you believe that there is a tree at your door step cause you see a tree everyday coming back from work at your door step…so you believe it just because you “see” it…and seeing is an act caused by one of the five sensors.

Similarly we can perceive logic ”I mean here logic in the wide sense that include complex operations performed in the human mind not the strict sense that expresses the use of logical expressions excluding for example probability theory and computations” as one of those senses, like when you believe that a guy is silly , that’s because of an act or more that you believe -according to the pre-defined social standards- lower than the average person’s sense of humor or lower than some defined level of your own…you can call this “Sense” in the context that you felt that the guy is just stupid…actually doing this is just due to the incapability of a conscious perception of the complex processes going in our minds.

As this simple example that may look very easy to interpret for the human mind and reach a conclusion quickly “a conclusion whether the guy is intelligent or stupid”…can include lengthy calculations in the human mind that will mainly include probability theory like the following (digging into details isn’t necessary for the uninterested reader):

given that the guy said some silly joke, ignoring the details of the process of speech recognition and interpretation of his speech as meaningful words in the mind....say the mind is structured to assign a continuous value ”degree” that defines how funny a joke is.

So the guy’s joke will take low such value , now your mind have the following predefined probability distribution P(J|guy is funny) and P(J|guy is silly) where J is the mentioned value assigned for the joke depending on how funny it is.

Now we have a specific J and we want to know P(guy is funny|J) and P(guy is silly|J)

According to Bayes rule then P (guy is funny|J) = alpha * P (J|guy is funny)/P (J) where alpha is a normalizing factor.

Now we need to know P (J)…consider that P (J) represents your prior expectation of how funny the joke is going to be before knowing the guy (at listening to a joke from some random person)…so assuming this is also defined the mind can calculate values for how likely they guy is funny or silly after telling the joke…and then depending on these values you can say whether you “feel” that the guy is silly or not.

Just for clarification I made the following assumptions in this example that I have to state:

1- The human mind uses probability theory to deal with uncertainties.

2- How funny a joke is can be represented by a single continuous variable not a function of more than one variable.

3- Judging a guy as funny or silly can be represented by a Boolean variable

In spite of the oversimplification used in the previous example, we can generalize this rule to more complicated examples….judging a flower as beautiful can “make” sense, seeing some object as alien to some group of object “the famous IQ question” can make sense, and most complicated of all taking personal decisions in relations with other humans like love and friendship can make sense.

Anyway, the five senses themselves are dummy in their nature…the ear for example just delivers the acoustic signals to the mind…it’s the mind that gives meaning to these signals…or more precisely, it’s the mind that “makes” these senses by interpreting their perceived information.

Note that the previous article isn’t intended to be for technical purposes because I’m not yet mature enough to write a technical article in such fields.