Tan Wah Pheow Quotes 10

"Any ideology that is unmoderated by commonsense will just end up in the realm of extremism."

Seriously, you cannot make this up.

As a teaching assistant for undergraduate courses, I have noticed that there is always a correlation between the death of a family member with test/exam dates. Although the instructor allows the students to take make-up exams without ever verifying their excuses, there are just some excuses that are, well, too lame to even consider.

These two are my favorite:

(1) (Student telling professor eight weeks before the final exams) I'm sorry, I can't take the final exam because I have to attend a funeral.

(The professor had a witty come-back though: I feel so sorry for whoever is going to die in eight weeks time).

(2) I have to miss the final exam because I am accompanying my mother for a vasectomy operation.

研究物语

(刊登于联合早报2007年1月28日)

每当朋友得知我从事有关工作记忆 (Working Memory) 和选择性注意力 (Selective Attention) 的研究时，他们接下来都会问类似 “研究这些东西对日常生活有什么帮助” 或者是 “研究这些东西可以找到什么工作” 的问题。换句话说，我所从事的研究到底有什么经济利益？

虽然每次我都以人因工程学文献里的标准例子回应朋友的疑问，声称我可以从事人与机器、环境的相互作用及其合理结合的研究，帮忙设计出适合人类生理和心理特点的机器和环境系统，以提高生产中效率与个人安全和舒适，并且指出我的学长在某间国际产品公司的研究部门受聘的例子，不过我在内心深处其实很想回答：“我也不知道这些研究有什么经济利益，反正我只是对这些问题感到兴趣”。

就如同我还是大学生时，指导教授曾对我说过的一句话：“你的研究将不会拯救世界或者带来世界和平，只能满足你个人的学术好奇心罢了。或许五十年后有人会利用你的研究成果为这个社会做出某些实质的贡献，不过那也只不过是个遥远的或许。”

近来，美国约翰霍普金斯大学校长威廉·卜罗蒂教授 (Prof William Brody) 在本地媒体指出新加坡的研究机构对于研究的思维应该有所改变，不应该只以经济利益作为科研工作的推动力和应该避免衡量科研工作的短期经济效益。他认为本地的研究机构不应该只用专利权和执照来主导研究，而应该着重于研究人才的训练。在应用科研和基础科研之间，卜罗蒂教授显然认为只有从事后者才可以在长期培养更多本地科研企业。

对于卜罗蒂教授的看法，我虽然无法完全赞同，不过在某些程度上了解他的理念。历史上有许多例子显示许多看似毫无经济用途的基础科研最后为人类带来意想不到的后果。例如法拉第 (Faraday) 在从事电学、磁学、磁光学、电化学等研究时，绝对没有想到收音机和发电机等发明。或者是孟德尔在观察豌豆的性征时大概也不会想到自己的观察会在一个半世纪后演化成许多国家希望透过干细胞的研究取得医药专利权的局面吧。

然而，基础科研可以转换成实际用途的可能性终究还是很低。就如卜罗蒂教授本身所说，基础科研很多时候是必须失败的，要不然就无法取得突破性的成就。换句话说，基础科研可算是高风险的投资，因为你不会知道研究的成果在未来是否有任何实际用途。反之，虽然应用科研也许不能取得任何惊人的突破性成就，不过却可算是较稳扎稳打的低风险投资。对于因为特殊的文化背景而一向来就不善于冒险的新加坡，或许应用研究是理所当然的选择。或者说，对于天然资源原本就不丰富的国家而言，一开始就没有太多承受失败的缓冲空间。

当然，以上言论并不是对基础科研的否认，也不是认为本地的研究机构就只需要着重于应用科研。基础科研和应用科研同样重要，因为两者很多时候都彼此辅助。不仅如此，很多时候要区分两者也并不容易。本地的研究机构也只是因为现实的局限而倾向于某种做事态度罢了。只要有关当局不要因为执著于此做事态度而把基础科研和应用科研变成某种二选一的抉择，拥有对科研工作的实际评估指标其实也无妨吧。

Painting on the Street of Taichung

Piled Up Snow

Steven Pinker's Article in Times Magazine

This is an article published in the newest copy of Times Magazine. Steven Pinker is one of my favorite popular science writer, and in this article he succintly talks about consciousness and why one should exorcise the concept of a 'soul' from our understanding of the world. I posted this up in reference to an earlier critique to my short stories, in which the critic got it all wrong by subscribing to the premise that there is a non-material soul. I am a materialist and I believe that nothing else exists outside the material brain, and hence I would encourage those, who have read that story and thought I was talking about the cheapening of the soul, to read this article and re-read that short story again to see if you really get my point.

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Friday, Jan. 19, 2007

The Mystery of Consciousness



By Steven Pinker

The young women had survived the car crash, after a fashion. In the five months since parts of her brain had been crushed, she could open her eyes but didn't respond to sights, sounds or jabs. In the jargon of neurology, she was judged to be in a persistent vegetative state. In crueler everyday language, she was a vegetable.

So picture the astonishment of British and Belgian scientists as they scanned her brain using a kind of MRI that detects blood flow to active parts of the brain. When they recited sentences, the parts involved in language lit up. When they asked her to imagine visiting the rooms of her house, the parts involved in navigating space and recognizing places ramped up. And when they asked her to imagine playing tennis, the regions that trigger motion joined in. Indeed, her scans were barely different from those of healthy volunteers. The woman, it appears, had glimmerings of consciousness.

Try to comprehend what it is like to be that woman. Do you appreciate the words and caresses of your distraught family while racked with frustration at your inability to reassure them that they are getting through? Or do you drift in a haze, springing to life with a concrete thought when a voice prods you, only to slip back into blankness? If we could experience this existence, would we prefer it to death? And if these questions have answers, would they change our policies toward unresponsive patients--making the Terri Schiavo case look like child's play?

The report of this unusual case last September was just the latest shock from a bracing new field, the science of consciousness. Questions once confined to theological speculations and late-night dorm-room bull sessions are now at the forefront of cognitive neuroscience. With some problems, a modicum of consensus has taken shape. With others, the puzzlement is so deep that they may never be resolved. Some of our deepest convictions about what it means to be human have been shaken.

It shouldn't be surprising that research on consciousness is alternately exhilarating and disturbing. No other topic is like it. As René Descartes noted, our own consciousness is the most indubitable thing there is. The major religions locate it in a soul that survives the body's death to receive its just deserts or to meld into a global mind. For each of us, consciousness is life itself, the reason Woody Allen said, "I don't want to achieve immortality through my work. I want to achieve it by not dying." And the conviction that other people can suffer and flourish as each of us does is the essence of empathy and the foundation of morality.

To make scientific headway in a topic as tangled as consciousness, it helps to clear away some red herrings. Consciousness surely does not depend on language. Babies, many animals and patients robbed of speech by brain damage are not insensate robots; they have reactions like ours that indicate that someone's home. Nor can consciousness be equated with self-awareness. At times we have all lost ourselves in music, exercise or sensual pleasure, but that is different from being knocked out cold.

THE "EASY" AND "HARD" PROBLEMS

WHAT REMAINS IS NOT ONE PROBLEM ABOUT CONSCIOUSNESS BUT two, which the philosopher David Chalmers has dubbed the Easy Problem and the Hard Problem. Calling the first one easy is an in-joke: it is easy in the sense that curing cancer or sending someone to Mars is easy. That is, scientists more or less know what to look for, and with enough brainpower and funding, they would probably crack it in this century.

What exactly is the Easy Problem? It's the one that Freud made famous, the difference between conscious and unconscious thoughts. Some kinds of information in the brain--such as the surfaces in front of you, your daydreams, your plans for the day, your pleasures and peeves--are conscious. You can ponder them, discuss them and let them guide your behavior. Other kinds, like the control of your heart rate, the rules that order the words as you speak and the sequence of muscle contractions that allow you to hold a pencil, are unconscious. They must be in the brain somewhere because you couldn't walk and talk and see without them, but they are sealed off from your planning and reasoning circuits, and you can't say a thing about them.

The Easy Problem, then, is to distinguish conscious from unconscious mental computation, identify its correlates in the brain and explain why it evolved.

The Hard Problem, on the other hand, is why it feels like something to have a conscious process going on in one's head--why there is first-person, subjective experience. Not only does a green thing look different from a red thing, remind us of other green things and inspire us to say, "That's green" (the Easy Problem), but it also actually looks green: it produces an experience of sheer greenness that isn't reducible to anything else. As Louis Armstrong said in response to a request to define jazz, "When you got to ask what it is, you never get to know."

The Hard Problem is explaining how subjective experience arises from neural computation. The problem is hard because no one knows what a solution might look like or even whether it is a genuine scientific problem in the first place. And not surprisingly, everyone agrees that the hard problem (if it is a problem) remains a mystery.

Although neither problem has been solved, neuroscientists agree on many features of both of them, and the feature they find least controversial is the one that many people outside the field find the most shocking. Francis Crick called it "the astonishing hypothesis"--the idea that our thoughts, sensations, joys and aches consist entirely of physiological activity in the tissues of the brain. Consciousness does not reside in an ethereal soul that uses the brain like a PDA; consciousness is the activity of the brain.

THE BRAIN AS MACHINE

SCIENTISTS HAVE EXORCISED THE GHOST FROM THE MACHINE NOT because they are mechanistic killjoys but because they have amassed evidence that every aspect of consciousness can be tied to the brain. Using functional MRI, cognitive neuroscientists can almost read people's thoughts from the blood flow in their brains. They can tell, for instance, whether a person is thinking about a face or a place or whether a picture the person is looking at is of a bottle or a shoe.

And consciousness can be pushed around by physical manipulations. Electrical stimulation of the brain during surgery can cause a person to have hallucinations that are indistinguishable from reality, such as a song playing in the room or a childhood birthday party. Chemicals that affect the brain, from caffeine and alcohol to Prozac and LSD, can profoundly alter how people think, feel and see. Surgery that severs the corpus callosum, separating the two hemispheres (a treatment for epilepsy), spawns two consciousnesses within the same skull, as if the soul could be cleaved in two with a knife.

And when the physiological activity of the brain ceases, as far as anyone can tell the person's consciousness goes out of existence. Attempts to contact the souls of the dead (a pursuit of serious scientists a century ago) turned up only cheap magic tricks, and near death experiences are not the eyewitness reports of a soul parting company from the body but symptoms of oxygen starvation in the eyes and brain. In September, a team of Swiss neuroscientists reported that they could turn out-of-body experiences on and off by stimulating the part of the brain in which vision and bodily sensations converge.

THE ILLUSION OF CONTROL

ANOTHER STARTLING CONCLUSION FROM the science of consciousness is that the intuitive feeling we have that there's an executive "I" that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion. Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.

Take the famous cognitive-dissonance experiments. When an experimenter got people to endure electric shocks in a sham experiment on learning, those who were given a good rationale ("It will help scientists understand learning") rated the shocks as more painful than the ones given a feeble rationale ("We're curious.") Presumably, it's because the second group would have felt foolish to have suffered for no good reason. Yet when these people were asked why they agreed to be shocked, they offered bogus reasons of their own in all sincerity, like "I used to mess around with radios and got used to electric shocks."

It's not only decisions in sketchy circumstances that get rationalized but also the texture of our immediate experience. We all feel we are conscious of a rich and detailed world in front of our eyes. Yet outside the dead center of our gaze, vision is amazingly coarse. Just try holding your hand a few inches from your line of sight and counting your fingers. And if someone removed and reinserted an object every time you blinked (which experimenters can simulate by flashing two pictures in rapid sequence), you would be hard pressed to notice the change. Ordinarily, our eyes flit from place to place, alighting on whichever object needs our attention on a need-to-know basis. This fools us into thinking that wall-to-wall detail was there all along--an example of how we overestimate the scope and power of our own consciousness.

Our authorship of voluntary actions can also be an illusion, the result of noticing a correlation between what we decide and how our bodies move. The psychologist Dan Wegner studied the party game in which a subject is seated in front of a mirror while someone behind him extends his arms under the subject's armpits and moves his arms around, making it look as if the subject is moving his own arms. If the subject hears a tape telling the person behind him how to move (wave, touch the subject's nose and so on), he feels as if he is actually in command of the arms.

The brain's spin doctoring is displayed even more dramatically in neurological conditions in which the healthy parts of the brain explain away the foibles of the damaged parts (which are invisible to the self because they are part of the self). A patient who fails to experience a visceral click of recognition when he sees his wife but who acknowledges that she looks and acts just like her deduces that she is an amazingly well-trained impostor. A patient who believes he is at home and is shown the hospital elevator says without missing a beat, "You wouldn't believe what it cost us to have that installed."

Why does consciousness exist at all, at least in the Easy Problem sense in which some kinds of information are accessible and others hidden? One reason is information overload. Just as a person can be overwhelmed today by the gusher of data coming in from electronic media, decision circuits inside the brain would be swamped if every curlicue and muscle twitch that was registered somewhere in the brain were constantly being delivered to them. Instead, our working memory and spotlight of attention receive executive summaries of the events and states that are most relevant to updating an understanding of the world and figuring out what to do next. The cognitive psychologist Bernard Baars likens consciousness to a global blackboard on which brain processes post their results and monitor the results of the others.

BELIEVING OUR OWN LIES

A SECOND REASON THAT INFORMATION MAY BE SEALED OFF FROM consciousness is strategic. Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers has noted that people have a motive to sell themselves as beneficent, rational, competent agents. The best propagandist is the one who believes his own lies, ensuring that he can't leak his deceit through nervous twitches or self-contradictions. So the brain might have been shaped to keep compromising data away from the conscious processes that govern our interaction with other people. At the same time, it keeps the data around in unconscious processes to prevent the person from getting too far out of touch with reality.

What about the brain itself? You might wonder how scientists could even begin to find the seat of awareness in the cacophony of a hundred billion jabbering neurons. The trick is to see what parts of the brain change when a person's consciousness flips from one experience to another. In one technique, called binocular rivalry, vertical stripes are presented to the left eye, horizontal stripes to the right. The eyes compete for consciousness, and the person sees vertical stripes for a few seconds, then horizontal stripes, and so on.

A low-tech way to experience the effect yourself is to look through a paper tube at a white wall with your right eye and hold your left hand in front of your left eye. After a few seconds, a white hole in your hand should appear, then disappear, then reappear.

Monkeys experience binocular rivalry. They can learn to press a button every time their perception flips, while their brains are impaled with electrodes that record any change in activity. Neuroscientist Nikos Logothetis found that the earliest way stations for visual input in the back of the brain barely budged as the monkeys' consciousness flipped from one state to another. Instead, it was a region that sits further down the information stream and that registers coherent shapes and objects that tracks the monkeys' awareness. Now this doesn't mean that this place on the underside of the brain is the TV screen of consciousness. What it means, according to a theory by Crick and his collaborator Christof Koch, is that consciousness resides only in the "higher" parts of the brain that are connected to circuits for emotion and decision making, just what one would expect from the blackboard metaphor.

WAVES OF BRAIN

CONSCIOUSNESS IN THE BRAIN CAN BE TRACKED NOT JUST IN SPACE but also in time. Neuroscientists have long known that consciousness depends on certain frequencies of oscillation in the electroencephalograph (EEG). These brain waves consist of loops of activation between the cortex (the wrinkled surface of the brain) and the thalamus (the cluster of hubs at the center that serve as input-output relay stations). Large, slow, regular waves signal a coma, anesthesia or a dreamless sleep; smaller, faster, spikier ones correspond to being awake and alert. These waves are not like the useless hum from a noisy appliance but may allow consciousness to do its job in the brain. They may bind the activity in far-flung regions (one for color, another for shape, a third for motion) into a coherent conscious experience, a bit like radio transmitters and receivers tuned to the same frequency. Sure enough, when two patterns compete for awareness in a binocular-rivalry display, the neurons representing the eye that is "winning" the competition oscillate in synchrony, while the ones representing the eye that is suppressed fall out of synch.

So neuroscientists are well on the way to identifying the neural correlates of consciousness, a part of the Easy Problem. But what about explaining how these events actually cause consciousness in the sense of inner experience--the Hard Problem?

TACKLING THE HARD PROBLEM

TO APPRECIATE THE HARDNESS OF THE HARD PROBLEM, CONSIDER how you could ever know whether you see colors the same way that I do. Sure, you and I both call grass green, but perhaps you see grass as having the color that I would describe, if I were in your shoes, as purple. Or ponder whether there could be a true zombie--a being who acts just like you or me but in whom there is no self actually feeling anything. This was the crux of a Star Trek plot in which officials wanted to reverse-engineer Lieut. Commander Data, and a furious debate erupted as to whether this was merely dismantling a machine or snuffing out a sentient life.

No one knows what to do with the Hard Problem. Some people may see it as an opening to sneak the soul back in, but this just relabels the mystery of "consciousness" as the mystery of "the soul"--a word game that provides no insight.

Many philosophers, like Daniel Dennett, deny that the Hard Problem exists at all. Speculating about zombies and inverted colors is a waste of time, they say, because nothing could ever settle the issue one way or another. Anything you could do to understand consciousness--like finding out what wavelengths make people see green or how similar they say it is to blue, or what emotions they associate with it--boils down to information processing in the brain and thus gets sucked back into the Easy Problem, leaving nothing else to explain. Most people react to this argument with incredulity because it seems to deny the ultimate undeniable fact: our own experience.

The most popular attitude to the Hard Problem among neuroscientists is that it remains unsolved for now but will eventually succumb to research that chips away at the Easy Problem. Others are skeptical about this cheery optimism because none of the inroads into the Easy Problem brings a solution to the Hard Problem even a bit closer. Identifying awareness with brain physiology, they say, is a kind of "meat chauvinism" that would dogmatically deny consciousness to Lieut. Commander Data just because he doesn't have the soft tissue of a human brain. Identifying it with information processing would go too far in the other direction and grant a simple consciousness to thermostats and calculators--a leap that most people find hard to stomach. Some mavericks, like the mathematician Roger Penrose, suggest the answer might someday be found in quantum mechanics. But to my ear, this amounts to the feeling that quantum mechanics sure is weird, and consciousness sure is weird, so maybe quantum mechanics can explain consciousness.

And then there is the theory put forward by philosopher Colin McGinn that our vertigo when pondering the Hard Problem is itself a quirk of our brains. The brain is a product of evolution, and just as animal brains have their limitations, we have ours. Our brains can't hold a hundred numbers in memory, can't visualize seven-dimensional space and perhaps can't intuitively grasp why neural information processing observed from the outside should give rise to subjective experience on the inside. This is where I place my bet, though I admit that the theory could be demolished when an unborn genius--a Darwin or Einstein of consciousness--comes up with a flabbergasting new idea that suddenly makes it all clear to us.

Whatever the solutions to the Easy and Hard problems turn out to be, few scientists doubt that they will locate consciousness in the activity of the brain. For many nonscientists, this is a terrifying prospect. Not only does it strangle the hope that we might survive the death of our bodies, but it also seems to undermine the notion that we are free agents responsible for our choices--not just in this lifetime but also in a life to come. In his millennial essay "Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died," Tom Wolfe worried that when science has killed the soul, "the lurid carnival that will ensue may make the phrase 'the total eclipse of all values' seem tame."

TOWARD A NEW MORALITY

MY OWN VIEW IS THAT THIS IS backward: the biology of consciousness offers a sounder basis for morality than the unprovable dogma of an immortal soul. It's not just that an understanding of the physiology of consciousness will reduce human suffering through new treatments for pain and depression. That understanding can also force us to recognize the interests of other beings--the core of morality.

As every student in Philosophy 101 learns, nothing can force me to believe that anyone except me is conscious. This power to deny that other people have feelings is not just an academic exercise but an all-too-common vice, as we see in the long history of human cruelty. Yet once we realize that our own consciousness is a product of our brains and that other people have brains like ours, a denial of other people's sentience becomes ludicrous. "Hath not a Jew eyes?" asked Shylock. Today the question is more pointed: Hath not a Jew--or an Arab, or an African, or a baby, or a dog--a cerebral cortex and a thalamus? The undeniable fact that we are all made of the same neural flesh makes it impossible to deny our common capacity to suffer.

And when you think about it, the doctrine of a life-to-come is not such an uplifting idea after all because it necessarily devalues life on earth. Just remember the most famous people in recent memory who acted in expectation of a reward in the hereafter: the conspirators who hijacked the airliners on 9/11.

Think, too, about why we sometimes remind ourselves that "life is short." It is an impetus to extend a gesture of affection to a loved one, to bury the hatchet in a pointless dispute, to use time productively rather than squander it. I would argue that nothing gives life more purpose than the realization that every moment of consciousness is a precious and fragile gift.

Steven Pinker is Johnstone Professor of Psychology at Harvard and the author of The Language Instinct, How the Mind Works and The Blank Slate

Acorn in the snow

Footsteps in the snow

低等动物

词：黄伟文

喉咙很干,所以爱上你的吻.
嘴唇需要,觉得曾被谁期待过.
身体空虚,所以爱上你拥抱.
胸膛需要,记得也被怀念过.

何必需要动心,我只要相信我本能.
需要就是原因,我是人!

因为野性,所以爱上你指尖.
胡渣需要,觉得曾被谁驯服过.
因为寂寞,所以爱上你肌肤.
体会需要,记得也被承受过.

留不住你的心,我只要留住你的人.
留不住你的人,也留住一吻.
擒住你的肉身,不需要俘掳你灵魂.
像个 低等动物 ,那么天真.

两个人互相的欣赏,爱情不过是这样.
给欲望找个对象,本质上都是一样.
不要想得那么抽象,爱情不过是这样.
做起来我们还不是,一样!

谈情不错,不过还有事要做.
身体需要觉得,没被冷落过.
说得太多,没有动作.
为什么我等你,
你等我,就不算罪过.

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I like this song by Eason. I think the lyrics speaks to a lot of people who are lost and do not know what love is. Isn't it easy if love is just reduced to biological needs? That will solve a lot of problems and make life easier.

Tan Wah Pheow Quotes 9

The only difference between religious stories and fantasy stories is that the latter is more interesting.

山重水复疑无路 ——陈华彪的心路拼图

(This was a critique of a short story I wrote and which was published in Lianhe Zaobao on Jan 15 2007. The author is 林高. Actually he was talking about three different short stories he read in the past two months in Lianhe Zaobao, and mine was one of them. So I'll just post his critique to my piece here.)

The original story can be found here:

http://birdsdontshit.blogspot.com/2006/11/blog-post_29.html

陈华彪的小说《空间转换机的故障事件》发表于去年11月28日的《文艺城》 ...... 穿梭于太空的惊悸 ...... 读罢，笔者独乐乐之余，在心路上自设驿站纳凉回望，只见斜阳在风雨飘零间，所以也便夫子自道一番，或可引领众乐乐。

{1}异化

　　陈华彪的科幻小说写的是未来世界。未来的悲哀警诫的是现代的悲哀。小说里的空间转换机无疑是一项伟大的发明，可是高科 技却证明了，人的生存状态已充满荒谬性。所谓空间转换机是利用复印机的原理，以接近光的速度把人传递到星球上的另一台机器，再拷贝出来。这样做可以省下建 造太空梭，以及把太空梭送到星球上去所需的大笔资金，完全符合经济效益原则。因此，尽管哲学家反对，因为这无异于蔑视与暗杀灵魂，“地球的政府”却批准了 空间转换机的使用。

　　意外发生了，空间转换机的拷贝与删除的技术发生状况，俊义一号和俊义二号互相指责、嘲讽，自称自己才是本体。人呀， 只把矛头向外，怨恨科技、商家、政府是一丘之貉、狼狈为奸，为什么不反躬自省，自己愚昧不愚昧，自己是不是让科技给奴役了？尽管形势比人强，人权、尊严、 自由仍在自己的掌控中。

　　形势的确严峻。作者不期待读者惊讶于现实的丑恶：整个“故障事件”原来是个预谋。空间转换机的企业集团主席李辉 生在两年前输入病毒，等待故障的发生，他预料各国政府会随即禁止使用，集团的股票大跌，然后他廉价收购，轻易得到集团的控制权，再推出新产品，仍然以光速 把人送到星球去。“人们还得在星球之间来往吧？谁也不会想坐在花上一个星期才能抵达火星的太空梭上吧？”李辉生的聪明才智充分掌握市场需求原理，老于耍诈 以谋取高利。而各国政府紧急开会只是“政治频道”换汤不换药的连续剧。独立调查委员会主席是李辉生之好朋友纵然发现作弊也懂得怎么做人。虽然客户协议书言 明不赔偿，李辉生的“作秀意识”决定给“受害人”一笔钱以收买人心。弊案做得无隙可击。

　　作者当然也不要读者满足于小说的诡异想像，以及 结局时峰回路转所产生的心理震荡，而是关注科技影响经济的发展速率与走向、生活方式之后，生命也终于商业化；灵魂、生命的终极意义，除非能转化为可形塑的 物质，有奇货可居的商机，不然谁去理会生命何价，尊严何在？科学家、企业家、世界各政府，这些创造未来，指引迷津的精英，最终要把人带到哪里去！众生任其 摆布？

Subtle Reminder From Irritated Resident

Band Of Brothers @ CK's Wedding

Common Sight In Taiwan

未来学校

(刊登于联合早报2007年1月7日)

记得掌上电脑 (PDA) 刚面世时，我的朋友就很兴奋地去买了一台来使用。她使用了几天后，就一直推荐我也应该去买一台来使用，因为她声称掌上电脑非常方便，不仅可以当成日记、笔记本、记事本、电话簿等等，还可以设定它在特定的日期提醒自己在那天该做什么事。

尽管多功能的掌上电脑听起来非常棒，而且当时拥有一台可算是走在科技的尖端，不过我却始终没有购买一台，因为只要有一本笔记本和铅笔就可以取代掌上电脑的基本功能，而掌上电脑的价格也不便宜。更何况，笔记本和铅笔不会因为电脑病毒或者电源不足而瘫痪。再说，我每次都半开玩笑地对朋友说假若过于依赖掌上电脑，搞不好会导致脑力退化。

最近教育部决定于2008年设立一所符合 “未来学校” 蓝图的小学，其重点放在如何把最新的资讯科技引入课室，好让学生更有效地应付被资讯科技主导的未来世界。校园里除了引用智慧卡、笔记型电脑、数码教材和虚拟实验室外，还会鼓励师生尝试各种不同的新仪器以使教学更加有趣。

虽然此主意不错，不过当我读到此报道的第一反应是：有必要吗？除了价格昂贵的器材或许会间接导致该小学成为变相的贵族学校外，更重要的问题是此政策到底对于教导小学生到底会有多大的帮助呢？如果所谓的未来学校只是利高科技的仪器来教导学生的话，那么在某种程度上不就等同只是用包装更漂亮的课本来教导学生吗？难道这就可以确保学生更有效地学习吗？如果可以的话，有关当局不是应该确保所有的课本印刷商都设计出色彩鲜艳的漂亮封面吗？

如果说把最新的资讯科技引入课只是为了让学生熟悉最新的科技，现在的校园里不是已经有电脑室了吗？更何况，科技的步伐日新月异，所谓的 ‘新科技’ 很快就被淘汰了。就拿随身听来说，过去十五年就历经了卡带、激光牒和MP3的进化。学校也没有教导我们如何使用这些新仪器，不过大家都可以适应新的科技吧？难道有关当局认为本地的学生这么不长进，只能够在课室里才能够学习如何应付新科技吗？如果学校使用的科技日后变得落后，你还害怕学生们不会适应吗？拜托，手机的款式和功能不断在更新，也不见得大众突然都变得无法使用手机了。

与其担心学生无法跟上时代步伐而引进昂贵而且非常有可能在不久的未来过时的科技，为何不要把有限资源投资在教育学生一些不会因为时代的步伐而淘汰的知识呢？例如正确的语法和语音学，或者是打好数学和科学的基础。我在中学时期的电脑课学的MS-DOS现在也没有人在用了，不过我还经常利用小学所学的语音学来为不熟悉的英文单字拼音。换个方向来思考此问题，就算中学时期没有学习过使用Windows XP或者 IPod，我现在依然会使用电脑和MP3播放机。因为这些东西并不是火箭科学。

当然，我绝对不是个勒德主义者 (Luddite)，反对学生接触新科技。我也不是传统崇拜者，认为什么东西都是按照传统的做法最好。我只是认为有关当局此政策未必是最有效，而且甚至过于奢侈。如果花这么多钱引进最新科技，所给予学生的增值只是多那么一点点的话，那么这算是有效的投资吗？

兄妹

词：林夕


对我好对我好好到无路可退
可是我也很想有个人陪
才不愿把你得罪于是那么迂回
一时进一时退保持安全范围
这个阴谋让我好惭愧
享受被爱滋味却不让你想入非非
就让我们虚伪
有感情别浪费
不能相爱的一对
亲爱像两兄妹
爱让我们虚伪
我得到于事无补的安慰
你也得到模仿爱上一个人的机会
残忍也不是慈悲
这样的关系你说多完美
眼看你看著我看得那么暧昧
被爱爱人原来一样可悲
为甚么竟然防备别人给我献媚
不能推不能要要了怕你误会
让我想起曾经爱过谁
我所要的她不给好像小偷一样卑微

============================================================

Was at Eason Chan's 2007 Singapore concert. This was one of the few songs that touched my heart as it brought back a lot of memories. I thought this was one of the best lyrics that Lin Xi has written. Actually I was kind of hoping that Eason would sing 低等动物, but he didn't sing that song. I thought maybe the latter song would have suited me much better, but in retrospect, this was the more fitting song......

Graffitti On The Floor, Taichung

终于我们都寻找到自己

他们说你已经离开这城市，也不再属于那城市

他们说你已经离开这些人，就不再属于那些人

终于我们都寻找到自己

终于我们都寻找到自己

--- 陈升

Old man at Ximending, Taipei