This may be one of my more unhinged posts, but I just needed to get this thought into words somehow. I was thinking about how most martial arts styles teach the use of conventional weapons (insert My Chemical Romance joke here) like swords and knives, but I want to see a style that’s based around using random everyday objects you find lying around. In a way, it would be similar to Miss Tatsu’s Beast style from Yakuza 0. For those who haven’t played that game, Beast style is a hyper aggressive fighting style you can play where you pick up the nearest object and use it to beat up your enemies. The Yakuza game series isn’t known for its realism, but I think the concept can be applied to real life martial arts. Obviously you can apply the same skills from using conventional weapons to most items you’d find lying around, but I feel like there would be a lot of situations where you’d have to get really creative and use something like a frying pan which doesn’t have the same balance as something like a dagger. Going back to the Yakuza 0 example, there’s a bunch of techniques in that game centered around using unconventional weapons in unique ways, like using a bicycle to knock down opponents or using a portable stove to burn an enemy that gets too close. Obviously these moves don’t require martial arts skills and are just general improvisation, but I think they can be taken further with martial arts principles.
I’m thinking, if I ever decide to start a martial arts school, I’d teach a style based around the use of unconventional weapons like this. It would obviously have to be based on a solid foundational martial art based around weapons like Kali, but the school would have more focus on understanding the physics of the weapon to better understand how to apply the knowledge to objects that are not meant to be weapons. So back to the frying pan example, you can hold a frying pan like you would a dagger or baton, but you obviously wouldn’t be able to use it in the same way, at least not effectively. We’d probably teach how to adjust for unbalanced weapons like that so that students can understand how to improvise when forced into a situation where they need to use one against a trained opponent. And then for something really unconventional, we’d teach how to use a flat, rigid object as a weapon, like a door or a book or a laptop or even a baking pan (actually, this whole train of thought started when I was in the kitchen earlier and wondered how I’d use a baking pan as a weapon haha). Now I’m no martial arts expert, just a guy who’s really into it, but I’d imagine for this style of weapon, it would be like that scene from Everything Everywhere All At Once where Evelyn used a riot shield like a spinning arrow sign but probably adjusted for different sized objects. See what I mean? There’s no conventional weapon I can think of that’s used in the same way so most martial artists probably wouldn’t really know what to do if they need to use something like that so I think it would be useful to have a fighting style that encompasses all sorts of unconventional weapons so you’re never in a situation where you don’t have a useable weapon.
All that probably sounded either absolutely insane or complete genius and I’ll have no idea until I wake up tomorrow. Maybe both. Who knows? Most of my ideas with a lot of things sound insane at first until they somehow work. But yeah, that’s it. Any martial artists who read this, please reach out to me and tell me I’m crazy.
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!
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!
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.
Edge of Eternity Poem (Trigger warning: Themes of suicide)
Posted By :
liamjtolentino
25 Jan
