f = ma

That's the first thing my high school physics teacher did drawing on the blackboard to start our study on Newton's Laws of Motion in class.

"'f' equals 'force', 'm' means 'mass', and 'a' is 'acceleration', force is the product (mathematical multiplication) of mass and acceleration." 

He went on to draw more definitions (1 Newton = 1 kg • m/s², a "Newton force" is the amount of force required to give a 1-kg mass an acceleration of 1 m/s² speed gain...) and formulae (Vf = Vi + a • t, final velocity is the initial velocity plus the product of time and acceleration...), then lots of "real world applications" where he showcased the many ingenious ways math and these formulae could be used to solve the problems...

I was baffled, not much by the parlay of formulae and math and their clever applications, but more by the very first definition of the law. So, this thing we called "force" in the universe, something I thought I knew–a punch on my face, a tow truck pulling stuff on the road, or, even more dubiously, something I didn't know yet, was product of two numbers, one representing mass (what is that anyway), the other acceleration (that I could comprehend)... Where did all this come from?

Humankind have been trying to understand the world they live in since the day they first gazed at the stars above and looked at the rocks and trees around and wondered what they were and how they came about. At first they assigned spirits or anthropomorphic beings to them so perhaps they could share some emotional binding with them, or they conjectured an "ultimate cause" that gave meaning and purpose to all things existing and happening so they all made sense.

Then came the Enlightenment, when new "natural philosophers" such as Galileo and Descartes established a new way of understanding the physical world by replacing purposive strivings (what Aristotle had called "final" causes) with mathematically formulated laws framed exclusively in terms of mechanical, "efficient" causation. That effort culminated in Newton's Principia Mathematica (Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy) where he laid out his laws of motion that formed the foundation of classical mechanics that high school kids like me were required to learn.

But it is just one beautiful, elegant mathematical model that tries to explain the world in an intelligible way, not anything magical or mystical, that my poor puberty head couldn't wrap itself around at that time.

We thought we understood the world pretty well with Newtonian Mechanics then, until we delved into the sub-atomic world where Newtonian laws don't apply any more. So we invented another physical-mathematical model–Quantum Mechanics–to explain what we observe (or cannot observe) there. But then who really understands a world that's made of "quantum entanglement" (spooky action at a distance), "uncertainty principle" (now you see me, now you don't), and particle-wave duality? We are now again awaiting another beautiful, elegant, hopefully "unifying" physical-mathematical model that will explain both macro and micro worlds in words we can understand, if that's possible.

Other than math and logic and geometry, are there ways to understand the world?

Yes, say the theologians/spiritualists: Read the Scriptures, meditate on His words, and the Truth will be revealed to you. Fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.

Yes, say the artists: Look at the beauty in the world, and the secret lies right before you. Ask not "what is the meaning of the world" but "where can I find beauty in the world?"

Yes, say the phenomenologists: We are self-manifesting beings, what we see is manifest to ourselves and our seeing it can be manifest to us. Intellectuality and intelligibility are one and the same, when I view a spider, my mind takes on a new type of being that has the intelligibility of the spider in it, for example.

Is understanding the world such an important thing?

Nah, say the lovers in love to each other: "You are the world to me, that's all I need to know!"

Nah, says Confucius: "Better liking it than knowing it, even better loving it than liking it!" (知之者不如好知者， 好之者不如樂知者). A twisted interpretation, mind you, but you don't need to understand how an internal combustion engine (or Tesla's electric motor) works in order to drive a car or enjoy the ride, do you?

Nah, say I, time to go to bed, a good night's sleep is more important than anything else in the whole wide world, I heard!

and three social enterprises

For this discussion forum titled "Who's Afraid of Citizen Society'' I didn't mess up with the location or the room, as it was held at the one and only conference room in the basement of a well marked building (a university extension) in mid-town Taipei that's just a few minutes' walk away from the subway station I got off.

As I signed in and entered the room, a young lady was standing at center stage explaining how her organization uses a two-prong approach to help farmers in Taiwan: Setting up farmer's markets and online stores to sell farm products, and a news medium devoted to protecting and promoting farmers' rights that are constantly being violated and ignored by various interest groups in the island.

​Some ironies she observed and shared with the audience in reviewing her work through the years since she started the organization in 2011: Political allies that used to fight with them turned into enemies once their party got elected and became in charge of government agricultural policies; the gravest threat to farmers today comes from the green energy industry, whose cause she supports, but who, with the help of the government, is fast taking over and converting precious farmlands into solar fields that wreak havoc on the environment.

The next presentation was from a young man who went back to his hometown at the far-flung corner of metro Taipei and has built a self sustaining micro village that includes a folksy restaurant, an organic tofu factory, a travel service, art studios, a tutoring house, and a job training school over a ten-year period.

​"Education is the key: Many young people today return to their hometown with great dreams and passion to transform the community, only to find they can't even survive there themselves, while local youth continue to leave town because they can't find worthy jobs to keep them there."

"Our tutoring house, job training school, and art studios combine to provide year-round care and develop practical skills for the underprivileged children that prevent them from falling through the cracks, while helping to preserve local artisan traditions such as woodcrafting and metalworking for the community."

​​

The third presentation was from an even younger man whose non-profit organization is dedicated to helping migrant workers–there are over 700,000 of them from Southeast Asia currently in Taiwan–adapt and advance their lives and livelihoods in Taiwan and beyond. They provide Sunday schools and online teaching for language, communication, and even business skills so migrants can start sustainable businesses when they return to their home countries, cultural events to facilitate mutual understanding between migrants and local people, and legal counsel and public advocacy for migrants' rights.

"Migrants help build our infrastructure, give care to our elders, and provide comfortable living to many in Taiwan. They are not just laborers, but also individuals who live in Taiwan alongside us."

"Social progress depends on how we engage people with different ethnicities, languages, cultures, and backgrounds. Let's make every migrant's journey worthy and inspiring in Taiwan!"

​

Aren't you proud of these young men and women and what they are doing?! 

* Taiwan has been the second time in a row ranked the top performer among 18 Asian economies in providing enabling environment for philanthropy and private social investment by the Centre for Asian Philanthropy and Society, an independent non-profit research organization based in Hong Kong that promotes positive system change in the social investment sector across Asia, in their biennial "Doing Good Index" report:

two and a half philosophies

It was one of those rare sunny days in Taipei, I took the subway to a suburban university that I'd been to a few times before for some philosophical topical discussion forum that I signed up a couple weeks ago but now didn't have the faintest idea what it was except for the location and the fact that I was already half an hour late. 

I rushed into the library-classroom where the event was supposed to be, where an old gentleman was talking with a dozen young people listening and found a side chair to settle in. Everyone turned their eyes on me, and the old gentleman stopped his talk, and asked:
 
"What are you doing here?"
"I am just here for listening, may I?" (True, I always start my attendance to any topical discussion with pure listening)
"It's the end of the semester already, isn't it a bit too late for that?"

Now I realized this was not the forum I was going to but a regular classroom session and after some students realized my situation they told me the venue for that discussion forum had been changed to a different location and suggested I find the new one at the department office.

I apologized for the disruption and left the room and started looking for the department office, but then saw a lit room with a young man speaking in, with text projection on the board and a couple people listening. Quite a small crowd, I thought... could it be the one I was after? But after peeking and listening at the door for a couple minutes I decided to move in and participate for whatever it's worth anyway.

It was a study on some German sounding author's book "System of Ethics", and though the writing was a bit dry and drab, the ruminations were elaborate and repetitive I got the gist of it (that human feelings and drive for self-interest are natural and subjective but the will and freedom to act morally are self-determined and objective) and even asked the speaker some question of my own after listening for about half an hour.

Then came the break, the speaker left the room and I chatted with the three young men sitting close to me.

"You guys are students from the Philosophy Department, I suppose?"
"Oh no, we are from the Law Department," one of the young men said,
"I am here because I signed up for some philosophical seminar a couple weeks ago," I kind of explained myself, in case my appearance here seemed odd to them.
"Oh you mean that seminar on Phenomenology? This is not it, it's the one downstairs at the end of the hallway."

Oops, wrong room again! I bid them farewell and went downstairs to the end of the hallway, and there it was, a big easeled poster at the door of a packed room with the title of the discussion forum that I knew was exactly the one I signed up for two weeks ago!

I slipped in after checking my name at the registration table, and was immediately pleased by what I heard: a clear, succinct talk by a young woman (an associate professor from another university, I learned later) of the thoughts of a famous French philosopher (Henri Bergson) on time, movement, intuition, art, etc. A couple of key points I took from her presentation:

"While Intellect provides access to what is already known through symbolic systems like language and mathematics, Intuition is the mode of perception that can directly know what exceeds the current grasp of our language and is more important for creativity and human development in general."

"Reason, reasoning on its powers, will never succeed in extending them. Thousands and thousands of variations on the theme of walking will never yield a rule for swimming: come, enter the water, and when you know how to swim, you will understand how the mechanism of swimming is connected with that of walking."

After the lunch break (yes, free lunch for all who attended), another interesting topic presented by another scholar, titled "vague essence and material essence". To speed you through such "philosophese" wonderland I'll use an example:

Imagine doing carpentry work with a handsaw (or dissecting a cow with a carving knife, like the famous 庖丁解牛 story in Zhuangzi's): your hand movement, along with the saw, and the wood it cuts through, form a "material essence" that flows through a "vector stream" (or call it "force field" if you like) toward an end production that is never to be of "ideal" shape or form, but a "vague essence" that is created by the material essence of this world.

One may then postulate, that all our geometrical theorems come from the doables and imaginables–the material essence–of our perceived world. For example, to prove that the sum of the interior angles of a triangle is 180 degrees, we imagine a line passing the top of the triangle in parallel with the bottom line of the triangle, as below:

We have ∠DBA≅∠A because they are alternate interior angles and alternate interior angles are congruent when lines are parallel. Therefore, m∠DBA=m∠A. Similarly, ∠EBC≅∠C because they are also alternate interior angles, and so m∠EBC=m∠C. m∠DBA+m∠ABC+m∠EBC=180° because these three angles form a straight line. By substitution, m∠A+m∠ABC+m∠C=180°.

Such proof is possible because we can imagine and actually draw the line crossing point B in parallel to line AC, and see the shape and the angles, on a two dimensional paper.

Imagine, then, in a three dimensional world, you start walking from the North Pole of the Earth, straight to the Equator, turn 90 degrees right (west), walk one quarter of the Equator line, turn 90 degrees right (north), going all the way back to the North Pole where you started. You have just created a triangle whose sum of the interior angles is 90+90+90=270 degrees, not 180!

I would like to continue attending the remaining sessions of the day and its final discussion, but decided not to, because there was another discussion forum I had registered and liked to attend somewhere else, so off I left.

-----  to be continued ----- 

g0v

 In 2012, four "civic hackers"–that is, politically minded computer programmers with an activist ethos–in Taiwan built a citizen auditing system for the government's annual budget. They made data from the Accounting and Statistics Office accessible, easy to understand and interactive. The public could rate and comment on every item in the budget. This became the foundation of the g0v (“gov-zero”) movement, which is now one of the world’s most active civic-tech communities.

On March 18, 2014, hundreds of young activists, most of them college students, occupied Taiwan’s legislature to express their profound opposition to a new trade pact with Beijing then under consideration, as well as the secretive manner in which it was being pushed through Parliament by the Kuomintang, the ruling party. Shocked by such unprecedented, spontaneous eruption of anti-government sentiment by young people–which came to be known as the Sunflower Student Movement–the government came to g0v for cooperation. Several contributors from g0v responded by partnering with the government to start the vTaiwan platform in 2015. vTaiwan (which stands for "virtual Taiwan'') brings together representatives from the public, private and social sectors to debate policy solutions to problems primarily related to the digital economy. Since it began, vTaiwan has tackled 30 issues, relying on a mix of online debate and face-to-face discussions with stakeholders.

All told, there are currently over 600 projects on g0v platforms under discussion, modification, and being executed. Some exemplary cases this year alone include:

* Map systems showing mask availability in pharmacies over the country
* An agricultural land protection and factory pollution reporting site
* Dictionaries for Taiwanese dialects and aborigine languages
* A fact checker app and website  
        ...

Besides online events, g0v hosts bimonthly "hackathon" workshops that are open to all to come to share ideas or look for partners for their projects in person. g0v also works with businesses and government agencies to evaluate and award funding for projects deemed most impactful and sustainable for society.
 
All these are run by a group of less than ten young men and women, all but two of them on volunteer basis. I went to one of their weekly meetings the other day, and met Isabel, a cheerful lady in her late 30's whose career as a lawyer specializing in innovation and intellectual property started with the involvement of the open source movement in the early 2000's; Ronny, a software engineer who once obtained political donors information from the government and published them all–tens of thousands of names and numbers and links–in one day through the code he wrote that "outsourced" the data punching work to the public; Chewei, a spatial designer who coordinated with the City of Taipei to build a website listing all the vacant lands the city government owns for the public to inquire and make usage suggestions about; Sean, another software engineer with artistic and environmental design background, was creator of the "Watch Our Rivers" campaign that visualizes and publishes river cleanup contracts the government doles out to contractors for all to access and monitor; Bess, a young woman with nearly 10 year experience working with non-profit and cross-domain organizations, and Ichieh, another young lady in her mid 20's who joined the team right off school, were the only two full-timers there.

They started their meeting by each sharing one impressionable thing that came to their mind in the past week... Ichieh said she saw news of a new video hosting site that won't arbitrarily suspend access to videos people upload that she thought might be worth considering as a backup site for g0v's videos; Chewei mentioned an idea he heard that in some countries corporations are required to plant trees to compensate for the carbons they create when they hold physical conferencing events; Sean shared an aha moment he got while sitting in traffic on how to solve traffic problems with strategies he uses in one of the video games he plays... They bantered, they joked, they laughed... then they moved on to discuss the coming hackathon event in January, a tutorial workshop at the end of this month (December), people to invite, places to set up, software to fix, projects to coordinate, etc., etc.  Again, good naturedly, they riffed off each other's ideas, threw in witty remarks, made light-hearted complaints... No hardship looks on their faces, they were having a good time doing what they chose to do.

"g0v is not anti-government, just anti-cynics," (g0v不是反政府，而是反酸民) "Don't complain there's nobody doing anything, admit you are that nobody," (別再抱怨沒有人做，因為你就是“沒有人”)... are remarks seen on g0v's website and literature. Indeed g0v is a decentralized, grass root movement that puts together ordinary people who want to do good for society with innovative but practical ideas and digital technologies, and has affected tangible changes in societies over the past eight years. I hope and have pledged my support for it to go many more years and do much more good for Taiwan and the world. I hope many will do the same too.

​g0v manifesto:
We come from everywhere
We are a polycentric community of self-organized contributors
We are citizens collaborating to bring about change
We live open-source
We have fun and want to change the status quo
We are you

g0v 宣言：

我們來自四方
我們多中心運作、打造自主貢獻文化
我們實踐公民參與，創造改變
我們成果開放，取之開源，用之開源
我們很歡樂，也想改變現狀
我們就是你

Related news articles:

Wired Magazine:

Taiwan is making democracy work again. It's time we paid attention

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania: 

Taiwan’s Tech-savvy Citizens Helped Flatten Its COVID-19 Curve

quarantine

Because of Covid-19, all visitors to Taiwan are required to self-quarantine in designated hotels or secluded residence for 14 days. This is how we went through it Oct 14 - Oct 28.

A certificate was sent to our phone to be shown to the Immigration officers after we filled out a health questionnaire 48 hours before arriving in Taipei:

A "home quarantine pack" that included thermometers, masks, trash bags--we got two sets of each for two people--was hand-delivered to us after we arrived at our apartment in Taipei:

and two bundles of cookies, cereal, peanuts...

crackers, candies, drinks, cup noodles, etc.

We were instructed not to step outside our apartment (they could track us through our phones' GPS), so my sister, who lived in the same building as we, brought us meals every day. This is some dim-sum she bought:

Bento sets:

Sushi & roast fish:

View of the world outside from my study:

The “Neighborhood Watch Officer" (里幹事) sent daily "how are you doing" (are you healthy?) greetings to us, one in the morning, one in the afternoon/evening:

So did the Taiwan CDC, texting us every morning:

They would arrange garbage pickup for us too:

Our quarantine ended on the same day Dodgers won the World Series; I kept my weight in check, gaining only 0.2 pound through 14 days of delicious food and no workout. The secret: skip the dinners:

We went for a walk in the park, a hot soy milk breakfast and fresh sandwiches on our first day out:

And a real dinner at a nice restaurant the second day:

As of end of October, Taiwan (pop. 23 million) has reported no new Covid-19 cases for more than 200 consecutive days since April 12.

sunny

Sunny and I were elementary school classmates from grade three through grade six. He was a typical bouncy perky kid of his age, if a little more on the wild side, with a mother who's a bit on the over-worried side, that a well behaving, good grade earning kid like me became a "role model" she wanted her son to "hang out" with, in today's term, which he did, as he genuinely liked and admired me, even though he later confessed in our adult years that there were times he told his mother that he's with me just so she wouldn't worry when he's actually out somewhere else playing.

We went to different high schools and universities, but stayed in touch as occasions kept us to. One such occasion was when I asked him to be my courtesy door-knocker before I started dating my future wife who happened to go to the same department/university as he. He did it and would be forever claiming credit for the pivotal role he played in the successful union between me and my wife!

He came to the US about the same time I did, went back to Taiwan after finishing his study, then back to the US again a few years later and settled down not too far from where I lived in South Orange County. He told me he was doing well working for one of those up-and-coming furniture companies in Taiwan until he realized there were irreconcilable differences in business thinking between him and his boss/owner of the company that he decided to come to the USA to strike out on his own .

Strike out did he! From a humble home office with phones and fax machines pre internet times, he built a multi-million dollar business empire that owns factories and offices in China and Vietnam, Taiwan and US, in a short couple decades right in front of my eyes!
 
He's not your typical Fortune 500 slick talking CEO, but an old fashioned head-of-the-family boss that took care of his workers and they in return stayed loyal to him. The lady secretary he hired when he started his home office is still with the company, so are managers of the factories he took over decades ago.

Once he overheard a customer talking abusively to one of his employees and he grabbed the phone and told the customer if he continued to talk like that they didn't want their businesses.

He had a trademark sunny smile that lit up the room and charmed the people he met, and a pair of sparkling eyes that seemed to reveal where his artistic furniture design ideas and business smarts came from.

He spent almost half his time overseas, but we managed to stay in touch throughout the years: Winter mountain outing with his wife and kids when they were little, birthday/Christmas parties, golf rounds, country club dinners, or just some happy hour drinks at his office when he had long stay in Southern California.   

He was diagnosed with terminal stage brain cancer about five years ago. Though it came as a shock initially, with the extraordinary care of his super wife and top notch surgeon doctors, and their strong Christian faith, he made it through two major surgeries, various therapies and treatments, and had a miraculous recovery when doctors projected he had only three months to live after his second surgery more than four years ago.

He'd lived a healthy, functional life for the past four years. Even though in a wheelchair, he traveled to his factories in Vietnam for year-end celebration banquets, his son's graduation in San Francisco, and daughter's wedding in Italy.

He donated more money and sponsored more Christian ministries, including setting up summer camps in his factories in China and Vietnam for his employees and their families to spread the Gospel and be its witness.

I got to meet him more often, at the monthly women's ministry his wife organized and my wife helped out at his office in Irvine, and functional/fundraiser meetings for the ministry we both sponsored.

His smile was as sunny as ever, if not warmer and gentler, with an avuncular ring to it.

His cancer relapsed early this year, and he passed away just last week here in Taipei.

Farewell Sunny, my dear childhood friend forever... You've become the role model for many... See you on the other side.

free will

Do we have free will or it's all just an illusion? Modern sciences would like to tell us it's the latter. Your body and mind are just one big complex machine that acts according to the laws of physics, the neurons in your brain were fired up long (nanoseconds) before you think of an idea or make a move, the end result of a long chain of events that trace back all the way to the day the universe started.

But like the behavior of flowy water cannot be described by the particle-like movements of its atomic components, and deterministic events in microcosm do not transpire to deterministic outcome in a "chaotic", complex system (having full knowledge of all the meteorological parameters does not guarantee accurate predictions of the weather, for example), such reductionist deconstruction of human psyche is fallacious and even unscientific.
 
The philosophical determinism and religious predestination theory, on the other hand, are more about fancy thought-play and mystical after-the-fact statements than honest reporting of human state of mind as it happens.

Free will, in common sense term that you and I can understand and experience, is the capacity to weigh different options and make decisions without coercion (such as someone holding a gun to your head), to do things we desire.

A sovereignty that some may prefer not to have, for some reason. In a psychological experiment, one group of people were asked to read a passage arguing that free will was an illusion, and another group to read a passage that was neutral on the topic. Then both groups were subject to a variety of temptations and observed their behavior. What researchers found was, with the opportunity to cheat being equal, the former group took more illicit peeks at answers during a math test and took more money than they should from an envelope of $1 coins than the latter.

  

So, if you are free, what will you do?

President Eisenhower once quoted a Stoic-ish statement in one of his State of the Union addresses that "Freedom is the opportunity to do the right thing;" ancient Greek philosophers--Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle--believe that seeking truth is the same as seeking good, helping people becoming virtuous in the process. 

And devout believers seek God's will to replace their own; contemplative "deep silence" prayers try to will nothing but hold an implicit intent to be in union with God during meditation; naturalists think they see the Creator's will everywhere or nowhere in the world.

Flipping the coin to the other side, free will could be hijacked by the basest of human instincts--aggression, possessiveness, self-aggrandization--to an abysmal end as deep as their superego would take them. All the ruthless rulers and mad men in history...

Free will may be overrated, after all. As relational creatures living in an interconnected world, none of us has absolute freedom but all depend on the freedom of others and the complex makings of a fragile world for our well-beings. Instead of insisting "my way or highway," "your wish is my command" may be a wiser approach to harmonious living.

Your good will will always trump my free will, that is.