commencements

It's the graduation season again. Here are excerpts of some recent commencement speeches posted on New York Times that I find interesting...

Steve Ballmer
Chief executive, Microsoft 
University of Southern California

People think passion is something you either have or you don’t. People think passion is something that has to manifest itself in some kind of explosive and emotional format. It’s not. It’s the thing that you find in your life that you can care about, that you can cling to, that you can invest yourself in, heart, body and soul. Finding passion is kind of your job now.

Toni Morrison
Nobel Prize-winning novelist 
Rutgers University

I have often wished that Jefferson had not used that phrase “the pursuit of happiness” as the third right — although I understand in the first draft it was “life, liberty and the pursuit of property.” Of course, I would have been one of those properties one had the right to pursue, so I suppose happiness is an ethical improvement over a life devoted to the acquisition of land, acquisition of resources, acquisition of slaves.

Still, I would rather he had written “life, liberty and the pursuit of meaningfulness” or “integrity” or “truth.” I know that happiness has been the real, if covert, goal of your labors here. I know that it informs your choice of companions, the profession you will enter. But I urge you, please don’t settle for happiness. It’s not good enough.

Personal success devoid of meaningfulness, free of a steady commitment to social justice, that’s more than a barren life; it is a trivial one. It’s looking good instead of doing good.

Daniel F. Akerson

Chief executive, General Motors

Bryant University

I do have a few final bits of advice:

Acknowledge your mistakes, learn from them and move on.

Don’t be afraid of new ideas; be afraid of old ones.

Be faithful to your family and friends. You’ll get the same in return.

Tell the truth and always play by the rules.

If you think nobody cares, try missing a couple of payments.

It’s cool, again, to buy American!

Happy Commencement... of Summer!

a matter of mind

What is mind, and what is matter?
How free is free will?

When traditional (classic) physical laws can no longer explain how elementary particles behave in sub-atomic world, a new set of physical theory--called quantum mechanics--takes its place. It states that in sub-atomic world, the elementary particles (electrons, protons, photons, etc.) can behave like waves and their location is no longer deterministic but only describable through probability, and is affected by the behavior of the observer. 

Just what does this mean? Physicists use the "double slit" experiments to explain it:

In these experiments they try to observe particles of light (photons) fly toward a screen, one at a time. The screen has two slits. If each photon goes through one slit (particle-like behavior), they form two bright spots on the blinds beyond the screen. If each photon somehow goes through both slits (wave-like behavior), however, they form black-and-white stripes when they land on the blinds. Physicists have found, as the experiments show, if they put a device to observe the slits, bright spots appear in the blinds; but if the observation device is taken away, the blinds show the black-and-white pattern. It is as if the particle is aware it is being watched or not, and decides to behave particle-like or wave-like, respectively.

Elementary particles thus appear to possess a certain degree of "intelligence" and awareness of the environment. Some scientist, such as renowned plasma and particle physicist, David Bohm, thinks "In some sense a rudimentary mind-like quality is present even at the level of particle physics." Some go even further, suggesting since the elementary particle's behavior is in direct response to the experimenter's (to observe or not to observe), it actually has the same "free will" as the experimenter's. ("If experimenters have a certain freedom, then particles have exactly the same kind of freedom," wrote mathematicians John Conway and Simon Kochen, of Princeton University in New Jersey, in a paper published in Notices of the American Mathematical Society last year.)

Flip the coin to the other side, let's examine the physiological center of human consciousness--the brain. It is consisted of billions of nerve cells with their axons (output fibers) and dendrites (input fibers) being linked together into complex networks. An electrical impulse travelling onto a dendrite makes a cell "fire" and send an impulse out along its axon so setting some other nerve cell into action. Though the attempt to explain the human thought, feeling, intuition and complex behavior with a picture of a web of axons and dendrites of the nerve cells interacting with each other has been abandoned as too simplistic, it is becoming recognized that these events on the membranes of nerve cells are often triggered by shifts in the energy levels of sub-atomic particles such as electrons. In fact, at the root of such interactions lie quantum events, and the central point within our consciousness can now be seen as an entity that can work to control quantum probabilities. 

Thus it can be postulated that our consciousness at times musters energy to align the particles in our nerve cells to a temporary quantum state that together manifest a thought, emotion, etc., before it is forced to jump and move to other regions of the brain. This explains why our thinking is fleeting and indiscernible at its most infinitesimal level, as quantum mechanics laws dictate minuscule particles to behave, while at a grander level our thoughts can have all the qualities of predictability and solidity, as classical mechanics laws allow things of larger scale to be.

So, what is mind and what is matter, and how free is my free will?

Sometimes when I travel, I look down from the plane and see all the cars moving on the roads, smooth and orderly, going high speed when the road is straight and wide, slowing down when the road curves or narrows, like well behaving physical objects. If I didn't know better, or if I were a physicist out at the N-th dimension observing this physical experiment of mine, I would most legitimately call these "lifeless particles behaving perfectly according to some pre-defined physical laws..." Yet, there are human beings inside each and every one of these physical objects, each with his/her own consciousness, emotions, thinking mind, and yes, free will...