Yearly Archives: 2025

Posted By : liamjtolentino 20 Feb

Mahjong, Chess, and the Certainty of Choices and Consequences

Those of you who know me well might know that I have recently developed a fixation on the game Mahjong, specifically Riichi Mahjong, the Japanese style of the game. The more I learned about the game, the more I started to see how much the choices in Mahjong reflect the choices we make in our own lives. It also got me thinking about Chess again and how both games provide different perspectives on life choices. Before I continue, I would like to say that you do not need to know much about Mahjong or Chess to keep up with this discussion; however, I may make some references to certain actions that can be done in both games. I will try my best to explain them, but ultimately, I don’t think knowledge of these games is necessary to get my message.

In most versions of Mahjong (at least the ones I researched), you begin with a hand of 13 tiles and your goal is to draw and discard tiles until you reach a point where the next tile you draw completes a 14 tile hand of a certain pattern. That is perhaps the simplest way to summarize it as there is obviously a lot more to it than that and it varies between versions, but it describes pretty much every game of Mahjong. Much like in real life, you have no control over your starting hand. You may start with a very lucky hand allowing you to achieve a lot more earlier on, but at the same time, you may also start with a very unlucky hand that forces you to work much harder just to catch up to everyone else. Even then, unexpected things can occur throughout the game and a person with a lucky start may end up at the very bottom while a person with a terrible starting hand may end up on top. Still, that does not take away from the effect that skill has on the outcome. As I played more Mahjong matches and learned more patterns, I started to see that what may seem like a bad starting hand is actually really good and I just needed to learn new patterns that I could not recognize before. This is reflective of real life where learning new things can open up a lot more opportunities for you that were always there but you just couldn’t see them until you learned about them. For example, let’s say you were learning a musical instrument. At first, you may see very limited options of what you can play as you might only know a few notes or chords. However, as you study the instrument more, and maybe even a bit of music theory, you start to notice certain patterns that allow you to find notes that sound good together. Suddenly, a world of possibilities starts to open up and before long, you can play any song you want and even other instruments are a lot easier to learn now that you can notice the same patterns appearing. Much like with a starting hand in Mahjong, you have all the same tools and choices available to you, but now you are able to do a lot more with what you have.

Let’s take a step back and talk again about the luck aspect of the game. I mentioned before that sometimes, unexpected things may happen that are outside of your control. Does this mean that your choices don’t matter and it’s all just a coin flip or a roll of the dice? Not exactly. Much like in real life, in Mahjong you have to prepare for things to suddenly go wrong or right. From the games I played, I found that the best moves are the ones that open up the most opportunities for you. I’ll elaborate a bit more to paint a better picture. In each turn, you draw a tile and then choose whether to discard this tile or to discard a tile already in your hand. Usually, you’d want to choose to get rid of a tile that doesn’t contribute to the winning hand, but other times that decision is not so simple and you may have to even take a risk and choose a move that might give you more choices down the line or play it safe and choose moves that won’t necessarily win you the game but will guarantee that you won’t be completely screwed over by random chance later. That’s just life. Sometimes we have to make choices that keep us on a stable path, but other times, we may get opportunities to take a huge risk that pays off even more. Things can and will go wrong, but as long as you are able to make choices that leave more choices open, you will most likely find a way out.

Eventually, you reach a point where choices become limited but much simpler. In Riichi Mahjong, there is a state called tenpai or ready hand in which you only need a certain tile to complete your 14-tile hand so your only choice is to keep discarding the tile you drew until you draw a tile that completes your hand. If the game ends in a draw, you still end up winning some points afterwards. Still, much like the rest of the game, there remains a huge risk of everything going wrong like if an opponent manages to complete their hand before you. This is like in real life where things may seem like smooth sailing until something happens out of nowhere and ruins everything. However, we still keep going. Life isn’t about keeping things perfect; it’s about being ready for when things inevitably go wrong, even when it seems that everything will be alright in the end. The best choices aren’t guaranteed to be the perfect choices, but we always need to be ready to make the right ones.

Now let’s talk a bit about Chess. Unlike Mahjong, a Chess game always begins the same way, and even if it’s Fischer random, the opponent still has the same starting position as you, so the outcome of the game depends entirely on the skill of the players. What’s more is that there is absolutely no randomness in Chess, so with every move, a good choice will always be a good choice and a bad choice will always be bad. It’s a system that rewards good decisions and punishes bad ones. In some moments, you will encounter some unexpected consequences, but those will always be due to player oversight like if you successfully capture the opponent’s queen but completely miss the checkmate you granted to them. Chess is a very complicated game, but it is still predictable and every move has complete certainty in which position it will result in.

To me, Chess represents what we expect life to be like. It’s complicated and difficult to learn, but we expect things to always turn out in our favor when we do everything right. They say a game of Chess in which both players make all the perfect moves will always end in a draw, and a lot of times we expect life to be like that, to be played so perfectly as we expect. But most of the time, life is not like that. A lot of times, you’ll do things right, but then something happens that you didn’t prepare for, like if you spent months studying an opening but then your opponent plays a variation you never looked at and it doesn’t matter if that move was good or not because it throws you off balance. Or even worse, you might play a move that seems brilliant but it either turns out to be a huge blunder or it forces you into a position where none of your available moves seem right, not even the one that wins the whole game. However, with Chess, you can always learn from all these. When things play out the same way as before, you learn from your mistakes and know exactly what moves are right and wrong. Most of the time, life is like that. We make mistakes and keep learning from them until we learn to play effectively.

Unfortunately, there are times in life where it goes from a game of Chess to a game of Mahjong. You play all the right moves, you make all the right choices, you do everything completely right, but all of a sudden, because of random chance, something completely out of your control, it all falls apart. You can try all you want to prepare for these things, analyze every move, every position, every possibility, but nothing within your power could have prevented tragedy from striking. You can only move on and hope to recover. To me, that’s what Mahjong represents. If Chess represents our illusion of complete control, Mahjong represents the harsh reality of the universe: that we have no control. Even a lot of professional Mahjong players admit that even with all the skill involved in the game, you will always be at the mercy of random chance. Does that mean our choices don’t matter and that we have no free will in the universe? Not exactly. To me, it just means that we should not expect the right choices to always have ideal consequences. We can make the best choices to make sure the outcome will more likely fall in our favor, but ultimately, we can never really set the chances of failure to zero. We just have to keep trying and keep getting better.

I have quite a few friends who started university relatively recently. When I hear about their plans, it sounds to me that they are approaching this stage of life like a game of Chess, expecting the right decisions to have positive outcomes. It’s always good to have a plan and even a backup plan, but that isn’t always enough, so I always tell them not to worry too much about things falling apart and that it’s best to be prepared for a change of planning rather than planning ten steps ahead. Always have a goal, but don’t be too focused on your path to that goal. Going back to Mahjong, I play in a similar way in that if I see a possible hand I can go for, I try to go for it, but I always make sure my hand is ready to do something else in case things don’t go my way. For a more specific example, sometimes I’ll have a white dragon in my starting hand and keep it there in case I get the chance at yakuhai, but I make sure that if I see two white dragons on the discard area (meaning I can’t get yakuhai), the rest of my hand is still good enough that I can get rid of the first dragon and still have a chance of winning. We can’t always prepare for when things go unexpectedly wrong, but we can always keep ourselves open to change directions.

At the same time we need to prepare for when things go wrong, we also need to be ready for when things go right and make the most of that positive opportunity. ^{(Side note, at the exact moment I was typing this paragraph, I received an email about getting an interview for the internship I applied to which is such perfect timing for the point I’m making)} Going back to the Mahjong example, I once spectated a game from another beginner, and I got frustrated when I saw him blunder a winning opportunity. He drew a second East wind tile, and since he was sitting on the East seat and on an East game, he could have gotten 2 Han for simply picking up a third one, but he instead discarded the piece. With the way the rest of the game played out, he wouldn’t have won either way since most of the opponents won essentially by random chance, but it frustrated me every time he made a move that took away any chance of winning.

Obviously this was just a simple Mahjong game so it’s not that serious that he blundered the chance of winning since he could do better in another game, but I think it’s a good representation of a lot of life opportunities. I had the chance to get certified as a life insurance agent, but I completely blundered it because I could not schedule my days properly to make time for it. I had the chance to graduate with my bachelor’s one year early due to my high school AP credits making up my first year of uni, but now I’m graduating much later just because I got a bit greedy and tried to force a larger workload on myself to graduate even earlier. Experiences like these are why I’ve been trying to make myself recognize opportunities and make the most of them. I’m obviously still learning and still stumbling, but I think I am getting better. I’m playing this game of life a little more carefully now, but I’m back in uni studying again and applying to multiple jobs while also giving a bit more focus on my physical and mental health. Maybe I lost a few rounds, but just like in Mahjong, in life you can always make it back to the top. You just need to make the right choices and be patient and prepared for when the opportunity comes back.

Posted By : liamjtolentino 3 Feb

Equilibrium

Balance. It’s a common lesson I’ve been taught throughout my life, yet only recently I’ve been starting to fit into my life. Some of you know I have been conditioning my body to get back into doing martial arts, and a huge part of my new training involves balance, both figuratively and literally. In the literal sense, I have been training balance by just doing some basic exercises and stretches, mainly hoping to eventually achieve the kind of Taekwondo high kicks I was doing as a kid, but also to understand my body better and bridge that connection between my mind and physical form. Since the last time I did any athletic activity (which was an eternity ago), my body has gone through quite a lot of change, from my weight gain during the pandemic to my strength gain in the previous year of weight lifting. With such physical change, I understood that I needed to change mentally and spiritually as well to make sure all aspects of myself are aligned and balanced. I don’t want to push my body too hard, but at the same time, I want to find consistency again. It’s this balance that I’ve been struggling to maintain, this balance of life. I am in perhaps the busiest year of my life and I need to be able to keep everything in check or else I’ll stumble and fall again like a few years ago.

Let’s talk a bit about that mental and spiritual balance I mentioned. Those of you who have known me a long time might know I have a bit of a past. If you didn’t, that’s good. I wasn’t a criminal or anything like that, but there are parts of me that I wish I could leave behind. The thing about the past is that no matter what you do to erase it, it will always follow you. You can choose to let go, try to burn it, kill it, make it go away, but the past will find some way back to you. It always does. It doesn’t define who you are now, but it does tell everything you did to get there. This is something I have struggled with for many years and still do. Luckily, most people I know see me in a mostly positive light, so most of this struggle is internal, but then how do I extinguish a fire that persistently burns within me? What I’ve learned recently is that I don’t. I should make peace with it. Making peace does not mean it goes away, but rather I find a way to make it not hold me back anymore. It’s like that scene from Mulan (1998) where she uses the weights to wrap around the pole so that instead of weighing her down, they help her go up. That’s how I’m trying to approach all that pain, all that rage, all those negative feelings I tried to hide away for years. I keep it in and let it out when I need it most. I turned it into a weapon, but not in the same way I did before, instead using it to push me through life but at the same time balancing it out with my more positive and peaceful thoughts.

The hardest part about balance is that the scales will tip back and forth a lot before they truly settle. That’s where I’m at right now. I’m at that point where I’m trying to find my center of gravity and I won’t be sure until everything stops tipping back and forth. See, I’m not even sure if my approach to life is that balanced at all. Sometimes you’ll think you found the balance point only for everything to tip one way. That’s okay. We keep trying. This is not a battle I can win through persistence and sheer force of will but with patience. When you block an attack, you don’t just try and push through; you reposition and find a new opening. That’s life. It’s not about pushing myself till I break like I once thought. It’s about knowing when to push and when to hold back. I’ve been trying to incorporate this into my own kinda fighting style using calmness and peaceful thoughts in my defense and the painful thoughts mentioned before to power my strikes. It’s become more of a meditational practice for me than a martial art because I use it to explore my inner turmoil and try to find balance rather than as a self-defense or fighting tool (though that is still part of it lol). Still then, it’s all about trying to tip the scales carefully. Too much rage in a punch may leave me blind to a counterattack, but too little and all that energy would be wasted on a weak attack. Too much tension in a parry can leave me too stiff to reposition, but too little and the opponent’s strike will take me down. It’s all about those choices, and I want to apply them to my everyday life.

This whole thing has mostly been me rambling with no clear direction or thesis, so I’ll try and share how I’m trying to apply these lessons in my own life. More directly, I’ve been both voluntarily and involuntarily using Wing Chun moves to do stuff like opening doors. I don’t have a wooden dummy to practice on, so sometimes I’ll just find myself doing some of the moves I learned years ago (I forgot all the names lol) on random things. More indirectly, I’ve been trying to find balance in the way I approach things in life. I don’t want to be so locked in and hyper-focused to the point that I become blind to everything around me, but at the same time, I don’t want to be so relaxed that I lose track of where I’m going. I’ve learned to take a step back every once in a while to regain my perspective, but I try to make sure I can always return to where I’m meant to be. I’d go on with more examples, but I honestly forgot 💀.

Perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned about balance is that being balanced does not always mean being still. A spinning gyroscope or even a Beyblade can stay upright and balanced by spinning consistently. A juggler on a unicycle can’t stay balanced by staying still at the equilibrium; they have to constantly adjust their position to stay upright. Two people slow-dancing must keep moving with one another to stay balanced and on the beat of the music. See, it’s not always about finding that equilibrium; it’s also about maintaining it. Like with my workout routine I mentioned, I need to keep it consistent even after I’ve achieved the results I want, otherwise I’ll start to regress.

I have honestly lost track of what my main point in all of this was, but I hope for you, my dearest reader, this all meant something to you. Perhaps you may find your own lesson that I missed in all of this.

Posted By : liamjtolentino 24 Jan

The Essence of Self and the Pain of Loss

I don’t remember too much from my Philosophy class in university, but I remember a huge discussion about what defines the self. What makes you you and what makes me me, etc.? Are we defined by our physical form or is there something more to the self? There is obviously a lot to talk about here, but for now, I just want to talk about my current thoughts on it and how it relates to the pain of loss.

Firstly, let me show you this video here:

You don’t need to watch it, but I think it will give a lot of context on my thoughts. For now, I’ll begin from the Philosophy class I mentioned.

So a bit of background first: I took Philosophy in the spring of 2021 during the Covid pandemic, so attending class in-person was optional, and only a few weeks into the semester, it was just me and one girl in the class. Why is this important? Just to explain why there was only one other student in the discussion. That’s it.

Anyway, we discussed the thing about the essence of self and we shared our own beliefs. The other student, I’ll call her Flower since she’ll come up later, said she believed that it’s the consciousness that defines the self. I stated that we are defined by our actions and the consequences we have on the world and that the self lives on even after the body and the consciousness fade. Four years later, I look back on this discussion and I both agree and disagree on these statements. A lot has happened in my life since then and I think that shaped my thoughts and feelings on this topic.

Let’s start with Flower’s statement about the consciousness. Firstly, is the consciousness/mind bound to the physical brain that contains and processes it, or is it much like software that can be replicated and copied to another form? What then happens if you transfer it to another body, via a brain transplant, telepathy, whatever? More importantly, what if it is a completely different body? From the video linked above, it’s clear that even just losing a limb is a drastic and terrifying change of self, so being placed in a completely different body would be an existential nightmare. That’s why I don’t fully believe that the mind alone defines the self because the body plays too big of a role in a person’s sense of identity. I guess it’s kind of like a ship of Theseus situation because at what point is a change too big of a change to still be considered the same as before? Okay, maybe I’m getting too carried away, so let’s move on.

My statement from that class discussion is one I still kinda agree with but I still ponder on it. Some time ago, I formed a bit of a thought experiment on this. Imagine I wanted to live forever. Let’s say in this hypothetical, I had no records of my DNA, fingerprints, anything to confirm my body as my original. So now imagine I found a perfect body double. He’s ten years younger than me but still looks identical to me that people in my life can’t tell the difference. Now, I have him fake his death so then I can train him to eventually take my place. I teach him all of my mannerisms, all of my thought processes, philosophies, everything that people in my life would know about me and he perfects all of them to the point that no one can tell the difference. Now, I disappear from everyone’s live and have my double completely taking over my life, living exactly the same way such that no one can tell the difference. I, the original, can simply pass away with no one knowing, and this younger replacement can continue living as me without anyone having a clue. Ten years pass, and he then does the exact same thing with another body double that’s ten years younger than him and this goes on for several iterations. Of course, slight changes will occur over time, but if the changes between the two physical persons remain smooth and continuous as possible (I wanna make a calculus/differential equations joke here but nah), no one will ever know that I’ve died many times and they’ll think I’m immortal and only the people in on it, the people who are “me” will know about it. So then, are they still me, or is it something more?

Those with similar movie tastes to mine may draw comparisons to Dread Pirate Roberts from The Princess Bride and yes, that was the inspiration. But let’s step back and think about this. What does this say about the self? Because in this thought experiment, the person that’s me is just the concept that lives in everyone’s minds, the impact I had on their lives and not my physical form. But does that mean that we are all just defined by what other people think of us? Honestly, I don’t think so. This version of the self, I like to call it the other because I’m bad at naming things. Okay but seriously, I think it’s important to make this distinction because I think the self includes the other and a lot lot more.

So what is it that I think defines the self now? There’s obviously a lot to discuss, but let’s go back to the bit about the body. Now, like I said before, the physical body still makes up the self as much as the mind and soul. When a person loses a limb or organ or whatever, they lose a part of themselves and depending on the situation and stuff, this can lead to not just physical pain, but emotional pain of loss. And there we go, we’ve reached the second part of the title.

The pain of loss is usually associated with losing someone in your life, most often death. We feel that pain almost like losing a part of our body and even if we heal over time, the grief remains present and we only learn to live with it. We can never get them back, but they remain as phantom pain ^{(insert MGS joke here)}. This is why I think that people in our lives make us who we are and should count in the essence of the self. When we lose someone, it feels like we lose a part of ourselves because we do. In fact, I think we’re all basically a part of each other, forming a huge network of connections like a massive organism. Those closest to you will feel the most painful to lose, much like losing a whole organ, but those who drifted away from you over time to the point that you forget each other, may feel like less of a loss, much like a hair falling off because you know deep in your heart that at some point someone may take their place or maybe you don’t need them anymore, kinda like baby teeth.

It’s at this point that I’ll be sharing a bit of my own personal experiences, so you can stop reading here if you don’t wanna hear me yap about my pain and what I consider to be my own self, but I might add a bit more worth mentioning. But anyway, I want to start from March of 2023 when I heard the news about my old friend passing away. I hadn’t spoken to him in 5 years so he was not a part of my life for a long time, but even then, losing him felt like losing a part of myself. It made me away of how much time had passed since the last time I saw him and losing him made me more aware of what else I lost. It’s painful to talk about this time in my life, but I should mention that all this happened when I was perhaps at my lowest point (second only to another moment in my life that I won’t get into here unless I wanna torture myself with more traumatic memories). This was the time when I had completely burned myself out with academics having failed enough classes to hold me back a year so I took a gap year to reassess my life. I felt done with everything I used to care about: programming, poetry, music, etc. so I made the decision to spend that year working as a tutor so I could take time figuring out who I am. Losing my friend made me notice just how much of myself I had given up. I was not me anymore; I was someone else. However, unlike a limb or a friend, I could always get those parts of me back and regain my passions, my ambitions, my loves. In honor of my friend, in fact I’ll say his name: Brandon Po, I decided to get my shit together and find myself again. Unfortunately, this part also involved cutting out another person in my life.

Remember earlier I said Flower was gonna come up again later? This is later. To sum it up, I kept in touch with Flower long after that class ended and we became incredibly close. I won’t go too deep into the details and nature of our relationship, but the important thing to note is that by the end of 2023, the same year that Brandon passed away, I decided to cut Flower out of my life. To this day, I’m still unsure of that decision, and I won’t get into the reasons behind it since it’s extremely personal, but basically, this loss was almost as painful as losing Brandon. Not quite the same, but it still felt like I lost a part of who I am. However, this time felt more like removing wisdom teeth or some other vestigial organ. It may have been painful at first, but in the end, I found I never needed Flower in my life to begin with. Sure, I’m still happy with all the good times we had, but in the end, I could live without her.

That following year, 2024, was honestly probably the best year I’ve had in a long time. Without getting too specific, I got back into university, back on track to getting my degree, I got a new job that earned me a lot more than my old one, and I reconnected with a lot of people I haven’t connected with in a long time, including myself. Those who are close to me know that I don’t look fondly at my old self. I look back on how I used to be and openly despise that person. However, that’s not who I’m talking about when I say I reconnected with myself. What I mean is the glowing brightness hidden in all the darkness from before. I see now that the negativity that I thought defined me back then was actually a shell hiding my true form, the person I’m meant to be. Now I’m writing poetry again, not out of pain and frustration, but out of love and hope for the future. Now I’m practicing martial arts again, not to express my physical anger and frustrations but to find balance in myself and to reconnect my mind and body which have so long lost touch with each other. I’m doing all the things I used to do but now I have a new positive perspective on life and I don’t want to waste it. I want to make Brandon proud by making myself proud and if there is a life after this one, I hope to see him there and tell him all about it.

So now we’re here, what then defines the self? Is everything that we feel as loss a part of the self? See, the beauty in the question is that no answer will fit it perfectly. What defines the self depends entirely on how you approach life. I no longer consider my negative thoughts and actions from the past as a part of myself, but I still acknowledge that they once were. And I know that one day, what I consider an essential part of me will no longer be and I will live on. Damn idk how to end this, but yeah, go on and find yourselves!

Posted By : liamjtolentino 14 Jan

Vectors

I got thinking about how people often refer to their significant other as their other half, or sometimes their better half. It is kinda cute, I’ll admit, but for me, I just don’t like how it implies that we are all incomplete halves until we find the other half to complete us. I do believe that the right people can complete a part of you, but just something doesn’t sit right with me about the idea of being incomplete without another person. I like the way it’s phrased in the song “By Chance (You and I)” by J.R. Aquino with the lyric below:

“Could you be the other one so we’d equal two?”

Here, it implies that both parties are complete on their own, but together they become something more. I personally find that approach more meaningful, that we’re all whole, but we can add another person and become more than what we began with. That brings me to vectors.

To any readers who have not learned about vectors in a maths class or have forgotten about them, I’ll try my best to explain. Vectors are quantities that have both direction and magnitude. Basically, they can be visualized as arrows in space. When you add two vectors together, it’s like putting the start of the second arrow onto the end of the first arrow and then drawing a new arrow from the start of the first arrow to the end of the second arrow. When both vectors are facing the same direction, the magnitudes add up like scalar values in normal maths (1+1=2), but in most cases, the magnitudes won’t add up that neatly. In fact, if say both vectors have a magnitude of 1 but point in opposite directions, they add up to 0.

I like to imagine relationships between people, whether romantic or otherwise, as vector addition. With the right people, you’ll both or all face the same direction and add up to something bigger. Each person is a complete and whole value, but together, they add up to something greater, maybe not always 1+1, but they still add up. However, sometimes you’ll meet someone who will subtract from you, a vector pointed in the opposite direction. Maybe they won’t be pointing in the exact opposite direction and make you zero, but you still subtract together. What then? I think that’s where we symbolize the relationships that don’t work out, like an old friend from high school pursuing their dream in an opposing direction to yours or your significant other becoming more of a negative impact on your life or a family member going down a path you can’t follow, etc. In life, we’ll find people who will point us in the right or the wrong direction, and it’s up to us to choose whom to add or subtract from our lives.

So then, as some math nerds reading this might thing, what of the vectors that don’t necessarily add or subtract but instead come out with a magnitude still close to 1? This is where I think the analogy starts to get interesting beyond love and romance. The way I see it, I find these vectors to have the most significant effect on our lives because they can turn you towards a different direction without taking away from your magnitude or adding to it much. These are the people in life you may encounter with whom you have little interaction but these interactions can lead you to where you need to go. Still following? Because the analogy is starting to break down and become more abstract, but I’ll try to keep it together.

In my own life, I can likely name a few people who pointed me in a different direction without knowing it. Some of you reading this, especially the ones who were sent the link to this blog early on, might even be those people. In time, I would find my arrow aligning more towards those people, though turning away from those I haven’t seen in a while. These are the people that made me think more positively, opposite to how I was years ago when I was just a total bummer to everyone around me. I am infinitely thankful for the people who set me on the right path, and perhaps someday, I may find the other one who will add me up to two 🙂

There’s a lot more to this analogy I could add, but at that point, I’ll be talking about higher dimensional geometry and a bunch of other nerdy stuff that I don’t wanna bore you to death with, so I’ll end it here. Stay safe and happy, and I hope you too can find completeness!

Posted By : liamjtolentino 6 Jan

On the Edge of Eternity

Our unending search for meaning

A decade ago, I was enrolled in a summer camp for Duke’s Talent Identification program DukeTIP where I received a book called The Colossal Book of Mathematics. It was basically a massive compilation of a bunch of Martin Gardner’s works describing strange and complex math concepts. While I could talk for hours about the concepts in this book, the part I really want to talk about, and the part that stuck with me for ten years was the chapter on non-Euclidean geometry, specifically on hyperbolic space.

The chapter presents a hypothetical finite circle, shown below. The image is actually Circle Limit III by M.C. Escher, but most of what I learned about it was from Gardner’s book. Basically, within this finite circle that takes up not even half of the page in the book is an infinite universe. As outside observers, we can see and pinpoint exactly where the outer edge of the circle is. However, for the beings living within this circle, the edge could never be reached. As they approach the edge, space starts to bend away and the distance they have left to travel remains infinite. We see this in the artwork as the fishes getting smaller the farther they get from the center, but to them, it just seems like an infinite empty space.

It was this artwork, this concept that led me to write the poem I called Edge of Eternity three years later. I will paste the full poem at the bottom of this post for you, dearest reader, to read at your heart’s desire. Long story short, the poem is about my personal spiritual journey from my darkest hour to the moment I turned my life around. It may be difficult to see at first, especially with my writing style at the time, but the end of the poem briefly describes what the edge of eternity means, at least to me. It’s this idea of something that seems attainable and within your grasp but never can be because it’s never meant to be reached. It’s about things like heaven, eternal life after death, something we strive to reach even though we’re never meant to. We dream of achieving the impossible even when we know we can’t, but in the process of walking that endless road, we find something close. With each footstep towards the edge, the distance we cover means much less, but we still push forward. Why is that?

In my ponderings on this topic, I explored what it means to me spiritually. I mentioned eternal life earlier as the concept of heaven has always been prevalent in my life, growing up under the Catholic faith. The thing is, while I identify as Catholic, I consider it more relevant to my cultural identity than my spiritual identity. I engage in the traditions and rituals that come with Filipino Catholicism, but my beliefs and values don’t completely align with the teachings of the church. In prayer and meditation, I find my own way to God because I’ve never felt truly satisfied with most religious teachings as they mostly teach their way as the final answer to all things rather than chasing the edge of eternity. The fishes in the artwork may think they’ve found the edge of the circle, but there will always be more to explore.

I may expand more on my spirituality and religious beliefs in another post, but for now, I’d like to focus on the concept of heaven and eternal life. See, a lot of religious folk I hear talk about eternal life, but to me, they don’t seem to comprehend the full scale of eternity. They treat is as just the end, like a final level to a game or something. Once you reach heaven, that’s it. That’s never truly satisfied me nor does it capture the full reach of eternity.

I want you to imagine walking an infinite road. You’re trying to get somewhere: the end of that road. You can walk as long as you want, cover as much ground as you like. You can travel millions, billions, trillions, fucking duodecillion kilometers forward, but no matter how far you go, you’ll always be closer to where you started and nowhere nearer to the end. But you still keep going. Why? Your goal is to reach the end, but no matter how many steps you leave behind, the steps ahead never change. Still, even though the number ahead never changes, the number behind will always go up as long as you keep going.

To me, that’s what heaven, God, eternal life, whatever, means to me. It’s something that you know for sure will never be reached, but you still keep going. You’re not there to see the edge of eternity, you’re there to see how far you can get with your eyes fixed on the goal. A lot of people find fulfillment in believing there is a direct path to heaven by sticking to a way of life taught to them by a book that went through countless translations and editions over the millennia. That’s fine. I respect that. Hell, I envy being satisfied with a belief to stick to till the end of time. But that’s not me. I believe the way to heaven is forward, not sticking to a destination that I believe to be the end. To me, life isn’t just some test to see if I’ll be worthy to cross the pearly gates when I die; I find life to be a finite moment in an unfathomably infinite existence that will never return along the path and must be spent chasing the edge of eternity, the gates of heaven, whatever you call it, to make the most out of this short point in existence.

Honestly, much of my frustration towards most religious beliefs is the approach to death. The way I heard from most people, they seem to think that after death, eternal life in heaven makes the life we live on Earth seem meaningless and that we shouldn’t be too scared of crossing to the other side of eternity because we’ll be in a better place. I don’t quite like that. I never really have. I don’t like taking away the value of the life we lived on Earth just because we’ll have something better after. It just makes things feel meaningless, even though to some people, that’s what gives life meaning. Once again, I could talk more on this, especially considering my own relationship with the concept of death, but I’ll leave that to some other time.

Lastly, I’d like to talk about Turing machines and how a paper I wrote expanded on my thoughts on the concepts of infinity and the edge of eternity. At the bottom of this post, you’ll see a paper I wrote where I attempted to prove that the level editor in Portal 2 is Turing complete. I won’t go too in-depth on the technical details here as I’ll focus more on my points in the conclusion of the paper.

To begin, the Turing machine, or more specifically, the universal Turing machine, is not a real physical machine. In fact it is impossible for it to exist in its entirety in the real world as it is infinitely long. However, it is the basis for all of modern computing, even the very computer used to type this. How is that? How can something that can never exist possibly affect the real world to such a degree?

You see, dear reader, this is the point where I started to find a new approach to God and existence in general. As I explained in the paper, the way we were able to make the impossible possible wasn’t by directly bringing it into existence, but by taking steps towards the edge of eternity. If you look at the history of computing technology, you’ll see that with every innovation, every step forward, we start to approach the impossible, never getting closer, but getting much much further from where we began. We didn’t stop at ENIAC; we kept going and pushing the limits of what we can do in the physical world, to the point that we’re now pushing beyond classical physics into the quantum realm. We came so far and still continue to innovate, eyes locked in on this impossible theoretical concept of a machine that can compute anything. To be fair, the actual logical mechanics of the Turing machine have been built many times and even improved upon and the only thing that’s actually impossible is the infinitely long memory tape, but the concept is still there. And it doesn’t even stop there. Sticking to mathematics, we have digits of pi, large prime numbers, things that will never end but we still try to find them. The idea of innovating endlessly with eyes locked on an impossible yet comprehensible concept is what drove humanity so far.

So now, how does this relate to existence? I mentioned how such abstract concepts that could never exist physically still manage to affect everything in the real world. Remember those imaginary numbers you learned in high school that seemed pointless? Even though they couldn’t possible represent anything in the real world, their properties affect so much of the numbers that do represent something to us. Fictional characters also affect our real lives despite only existing as words on a page or pixels on a screen.

So if that’s the case, if the impossible can affect the possible, what even is the meaning of existence. To that, I shall repeat the words of Majin Buu from TeamFourStar’s Buu Bits:

“Existence is but a shallow question with no answer.”

If we try to limit existence to concrete answers, strict definitions, we will never truly solve it. But that’s the beauty of it. Much like the edge of eternity, the true definition of existence can never truly be reached because it was never meant to. We can think ourselves as the outside observers able to touch the outside of the circle on the page, but we’ll always really be the fish in the drawing, and I find there’s an unfathomable beauty to that.

And now, dearest reader, I hope you can start to see what the meaning of God is to me now. He’s not a physical, tangible entity that controls this whole existence. Even if tomorrow, they somehow proved definitively that there is no creator, I’d still believe in the concept of God. Because to me, God both exists and doesn’t exist. As in, he doesn’t exist in our physical plane of existence because he can’t and isn’t supposed to. But he still has an undeniable effect on everything, existing simply in the same plane as the previously impossible concepts like the full Turing machine, the final digits of pi, the largest prime number, the edge of eternity. He is the edge of eternity. With eyes locked in on the impossible concept of an all-powerful being, I strive to go forward and make him be as “real” as I possibly can. For what even is “reality” but another abstract concept that could never be answered? If I’m made in his image, that’s what I’ll strive to be. In that, I find heaven. In that, I find peace.

[FINAL] On the Turing Completeness of Portal 2Download

Posted By : liamjtolentino 5 Jan

Random Thought

I am unsure how this works, but I am giving it a try.