Favourite Memory

10 Jul 2020

A short poem.

To my favourite memory (lovely, beyond)

To my favourite memory (lovely, beyond),
your eyes open on the pillow (moist, mahogany)
in the morning song (tender, embrace)
fill the ocean I crossed (a moth, a flame)
with the word that begat the world (encourage, mint) and became its destroyer (odi, amo).

To my Alabama (to my key lime pie),
lovely, beyond.

Void and Seasons

24 Jun 2020

More poems.

Mountains

The mountains wait for sin

A Sun rises in the east
bearing fruit and wine and glory.
The mountains scoff,
Sun, you terrible pest.

The days come and go.
The rivers flow.
The grasses bring flowers.
The village brings towers.

The mountains cry,
Sun, you terrible pest!
You bring these fools–
This sordid flesh and endless flora.

The Sun is patient,
The Sun is kind.
And when the mountains sleep,
A dawn breaks.

And the Sun also riseth.

Heart

My heart
and blisters
My head
and whispers

The blood and thought of wolf and lamb
In holy mountains, spread like dawn
Amongst the grey of fallen flesh

My heart
and grace
My head
and space

Void

No words to write
No darkness to light

No death to mourn
No lover to scorn

No snake and no dove
No hate and no love

No sound and no fury
No judge and no jury

No pity and no spite
No may and no might

Morality in the time of coronavirus

24 Mar 2020

There is nothing over which a free man ponders less than death; his wisdom is, to meditate not on death but on life. – Baruch Spinoza

Out of the Frying-Pan, into the Fire. – Aesop

You’ve probably heard of the trolley problem: a runaway train is about to hit a family of five, and you happen to be walking past a lever that, if pulled, diverts the train onto a track where the train will hit a single person. One can ask the question: would you pull the lever? Or the related normative question: would you condemn someone who does nothing? Or the more concrete legal question: should one be prosecuted if they choose to do nothing?

Even if you consider this to be a trite thought experiment with little bearing on reality (I do not), I think it is a useful lens through which to see politics. In this view, politics is not choosing option a because all the experts agree option a is clearly superior to option b (if that was the case, what use is there to politicians at all? Just poll the experts on every issue). It is instead, deciding what to do when one expert says a > b and another expert says b > a.

Let’s say you’re a politician deciding on what to do in response to COVID-19: you have an epidemiologist and an economist in a room. The epidemiologist says: shut down all businesses and use all measures possible to ensure people stay home for at least 30 days. The economist says: a complete worldwide peacetime economic shutdown is unprecedented and could have many unforeseen consequences on the poorest strata of society, even with substantial government aid. The epidemiologist retorts: if we don’t do this, millions may die unnecessarily over the next six months. The economist responds: if we do do this, even more millions might die unnecessarily, but it will happen slowly, over decades.

What would you do? I certainly have no answers and I don’t envy our political leaders. I do, however, think there are a few things that are important in these considerations that seem to be lost in the current pandemonium (especially in the online rhetoric). First: our world is a fragile interconnected place and the economic ramifications operate on a much longer timescale than those of a viral pandemic. Second: the government and the military, the power plants, the farms, the transit systems, the grocery stores, the hospitals, the sewer plants, and everything else ‘essential’ to modern society is made up of and run by people just like you (perhaps you are one of these people) and me. If these people feel unsafe to go to work, shut downs will be very different. Third: overreacting may be worse than doing nothing. That does not mean we should do nothing. However, let’s not be so quick to relinquish basic freedoms, liberties and democratic principles just to `do something’.

To borrow a phrase from sports psychology, let’s be quick but let’s not hurry. One of the many tragedies of this pandemic is that it, by its nature, draws people apart. We must find ways to pull together lest we let a few powerful people pull levers that may eventually draw us even further apart.

In search of elegance

16 Mar 2020

The following appeared as a coda in my Ph.D. dissertation.

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The phenomena of the world which have to be explained present countless ends to us, of which one only can be the right one; they resemble an intricate tangle of thread, with many false end-threads hanging from it. He who finds out the right one can disentangle the whole. – Arthur Schopenhauer

Looking back on my academic journey, I see a path from a fascination with the possible applications of autonomous systems to a fascination with autonomy in-and-of-itself. As a budding researcher, I saw robust, accurate perception as a means towards an end. An end which entailed truly autonomous systems ‘perceiving’ and ‘interpreting’ their surroundings with the goal of exploring distant planets and navigating busy urban streets. Now, however, I see perception as an end in itself with a plethora of fascinating mathematical, philosophical and ethical challenges that can be tackled in light of, but not subservient to, the potential goals of some grander autonomous system. Throughout this transition, I have become more interested not only in the flesh and blood of perception systems, but also in the spirit of them. If perception is one of the bridges we must build to reach the land of autonomy, I am concerned not only with the structural integrity that lets us cross it today, but also with an elegance and rigour that lets it serve as a model for posterity.

With this in mind, I want to address a concerning shift that has occurred in the research community throughout my academic career. Many researchers who work on algorithms that enable autonomy (not only in perception, but also in planning and controls) have given up on the dream of modelling the world with the tools of Euclid, Newton and Euler in favour of methods that rely on exemplary data to ‘train’ arbitrarily complex predictive black-box models. In my estimation, this shift has brought with it a certain sense of resignation to the overwhelming complexity of the world. We are often content to use vague notions of complexity as reason to avoid building analytic models. Instead, we turn to crude, inscrutable surrogates of our own brains to model what we do not want to. This, I believe, is a tempting mistake. Although these solutions may serve as useful tools to temporarily bridge gaps in our understanding of the world, we will inevitably deplete the low-hanging empirical fruits that they can bear, and we will be left with a deep sense of dissatisfaction that only elegance can fill.

I am certainly not the first or the last person who has taken issue with data-driven methods. Noam Chomsky gives the following critique of purely statistical approaches to science. Consider the study of bee colonies. In order to to extract interpretable models of their behaviour (e.g., there is a queen bee, there are worker bees, etc.), one has to observe these colonies meticulously over generations. So why not avoid that entire endeavour and use a data-driven approach? We could set up a camera to observe a bee colony and collect data over several years. By tracking each bee, we could use the tools of modern machine learning to construct and train a large parametric model of each of their positions. Once complete, we could then query this model with a new image from our camera and recover, with extreme precision, the predicted location of each bee. This may allow us to improve honey production, but what have we learned? Is this an elegant model of bee behaviour? Have we not just transformed the problem of understanding the bees into one of understanding this surrogate model? Now consider doing the same with celestial objects–Kepler be damned!

Some may argue that the entire goal of science is predicting the future states of nature, so elegance is irrelevant. I vehemently disagree. I would rather have an interpretable model that is wrong during specific situations (where I can verify that certain assumptions are violated), rather than an obfuscated model which has vague limits to its predictive power.

If history is any judge, the models that stand the test of time are ones that are born out of our meticulous labour and enlightened insight to extract salient principles out of the complexity of the world. The hope that this labour can be replaced with black-box surrogates that indirectly learn these same principles is troubling and, in my view, unnecessary. No matter how much anthropomorphic language we use to describe these surrogates (endowing them with ‘understanding’, ‘attention’, and ‘forgetfulness’), they will always be limited by our own ability to collect sufficient data, and by our ability to craft them in such a way as to consume significant amounts of training exemplars without `overfitting’ to them. What’s more, if these models have any interaction with the world, they will also affect the world, and we are committing ourselves to an endless game of cat-and-mouse. Although it may seem that our time is best spent crafting ever-more-clever surrogates, we will soon reach a point where we would be better off using the time and resources towards studying a particular problem more directly.

I do not want to cast aspersions flippantly. The transition to data-driven approaches in computer vision happened for good reason and with much hesitation. The elegance of analytic models has historically only been exceeded by their inability to model the often inelegant ‘real world’. At the turn of the twenty-first century, roboticists were joking that the dirty secret of much of computer vision is that it doesn’t work. Recent efforts into combining the connectionist ideas of the 20th century with the computational power accessible in the 21st have undoubtedly created systems that do attain impressive empirical results, and there is a constant stream of new theoretical insights into the types of structures and optimization methods that work well in a given domain.

However, as the world becomes more connected and complex with every passing day, I think it is of utmost importance that autonomy researchers are not tempted to focus solely on empirical results at the cost of elegant solutions. It is now well-accepted that data-driven methods are not the panacea (like it might have seemed for a brief moment a few years ago) to all problems in autonomy. However, this passive agreement may not be enough. Instead, we need to actively suppress the urge to try and solve a problem first through general ‘learning’ methods that are becoming more and more easy to implement and less and less easy to understand. We do not need to relinquish the dream of understanding the world and relegate ourselves to simply predicting it by any means possible. We can instead strive to simplify it and interpret it. If after significant effort we fail at that goal, and only then, should we turn to data-driven learned models to fill in the gaps in our understanding.

Lunar, Transcendental, Pale

26 Aug 2019

Three poems with titles.

Luna

Oh, moon
Whose light is
Not of your dominion
Oh, moon
Whose light is
Soft and shy
Oh, moon
Whose craters
Tell of distant chaos
Oh, moon
Reveal your obverse,
Light the darkness
And flood the earth!

Transcendental

Numbers
Vast and dense
Spread the line
Whose markings
Tell of simpler times
Where finitude
Was King
And the transcendental
Was the Joker
Who cast a shadow
On the soul

Unafraid

The final Horseman
Leaves a pale wake
That blinds and shatters.
Yet I am Man
Who domesticates the Wildebeests,
Declaws the Lions,
And eats the tender flesh of Youth.
I fear You not;
Roam free,
And find me when You will.

A Letter from John Haynes Holmes

22 Aug 2019

In 1930, Will Durant wrote a book called (somewhat heavy-handidly) On the Meaning of Life. In it, Durant starts with an ‘anthology of doubt’ that contains a scathing and provocative take on the current age as a decadent, God-less maelstrom devoid of purpose and full of mindless drudgery. He summarizes this in the form of a letter to several ‘famous contemporaries’ (e.g., George Bernard Shaw, Gandhi) and asks them to respond with some notion of what keeps them going in light of this, and where their ‘treasure lies’. The entire book is fantastic, but this response in particular resonated with me. It is written by John Haynes Holmes, a Unitarian minister and co-founder of the American Civil Liberties Union. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

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Dear Mr. Durant,

What keeps me going? – Something within me that burns like a consuming flame when I see falsehood, hypocrisy, injustice, and evil-doing; something without me that pulls like the attraction of love when I catch a glimpse of what this world might be, and may yet be if we try hard enough.

There was a time when I expected to accomplish something before I died – to see this world changed somewhat because of what I said or did. I cherish this individual expectation as little now as I do the cosmic expectation that this planet will endure beyond a few more million years. No, my eyes will close some day upon the same world upon which they first opened, just as in due time the world itself will end as it began. But meanwhile the universal creative Life has been moving on like a river to some far end unseen, undreamed of, and my life – not a bit of debris but a constituent drop in the great flood – has been bending its impulse to the onward sweep of mystic destiny.

I think it is the sense of my creative capacity, matching however microscopically the creative capacity at the heart of the universe, that gives me strength to live – and great good cheer in the business, too! I try to think when I have felt most happy because most alive. Surely, in the experience of love; surely, also, in hours of crisis, when I have cast all on some great hazard; again, in some swift moment when a “concourse of sweet sounds” in symphony or opera has caught my soul and taught me to relive the emotion of the composer in his original conception; again, when I have myself conceived, in a sudden instant, some vision of the spirit and seen it clothe itself in words upon my startled lips; still again, when I have thrown myself into some cause of justice and the right, and fought to victory or defeat; most of all, perhaps, when I have prayed, or tried to pray, and heard faintly within myself some answer. These are all experiences of creation – of action that brings order out of chaos and beauty out of order, and thus, within its compass, “makes all things new.”

It is in such instants that I have felt life in its raw state, so to speak, and therewith, I believe, seen God. It is this that keeps me going – the knowledge, vouchsafed in passing moments when we are lifted beyond and above ourselves, that we are an essential part of a creative process – that we ourselves, with God, are creators, and thus makers of some great cosmic future. What if I cannot see that future, or even imagine it! Such ignorance, frankly confessed, fades like darkness before light in the actual sense-experience of having lived to “vaster issues.”

John Haynes Holmes

Liberty, Chaos and Solitude

20 Aug 2019

Three poems on liberty, chaos, and solitude.

Poem 1

To the forgotten fruit
Of times immemorial
To the blood red mulberry
the lunar currant
the vermiculated gooseberry
Whose drops of sour nectar
Drip and dry
In the summer air
Whose aroma of solitude
Desiccates the mourning
For a sweet night

Poem 2

Oderr tou
of oaChs
atuyBe
fo soCha
uBeaty out
Order uto
of soaCh
Beauty tou of Order
Order out of Chaos;
Beauty
out
of
Order

Poem 3

Give me liberty
Or give me life
Whose river
Knows no tributaries
But sheer force of will
And serendipitous
Serenity

Two More Short Poems

29 Jul 2019

Poem 1

Dance aurora, dance!
Melt the corporeal amber
And burn the cardiatric kindling
To turn the aged wax
Into forms anew

Engulf the petrified abyss
With light and shadow
Make haste!
The dawn is near

Poem 2

The augusta gorge
Weaves its way through
Painted corners and
Forgotten flora
The musk and dirt and chaos
beat with the fervour
Of lives unsullied
And life set free

Three Short Poems

09 Jul 2019

Poem 1

In howling storms
And silent meadows
In dawn perennial with its dusk
And sun eternal in its firmament
In darkness and in light
There lies my love for you
My shade, my warmth
My strength and sorrow

Poem 2

You ooze like honey
in the evening light
Seeping into every crevice
of my saccharine mind

The eastern rays
dissolve your sickly shadow
And flood my veins
with the world unseen

Poem 3

What is the flower?
Without the frost
An everlasting symbol
Signifying nothing

Meaningless
Utterly meaningless!
We are eternally good (you whisper)
Yet great awaits

What is the winter?
Without the bud
A frozen vanity
Rife with matter
Yet numb to glory

Beyond the western rim
Where spring begins
Yet winter chills
I love you still (I whisper)

Autumnal Epicureanism

26 Oct 2017

There is something about the crisp, cold autumnal air that awakens a deep, often-suppressed joie de vivre inside me. It is the type of feeling that brings an overwhelming sense of meaning. I think of Sartre and his essay, Existentialism is a Humanism. In it, Sartre presents the core problem of existentialism in a famous three-word phrase: ‘existence precedes essence’. We are thrust into existence without a purpose - and we are ‘condemned to be free,’ - to choose our own meaning for our life.

It’s an appealing premise, and one that I cannot deny during the lazy days of summer. But when the autumn arrives and the faint aroma of a distant campfire pierces through me, I think: is this essence? For some fleeting moment, this entangled existence of aroma and my perception of it seems to exist in-and-of-itself, and I do not feel independent of it.

Perhaps this is what Epicurus meant by the ‘pleasure’ that was the greatest good. Or, perhaps, I am describing some superficial hedonism? I say ’seek out the cold, ephemeral spice of fall as it is constantly chased away by polar winds,’ and you quip, ‘cut the romanticism - you think meaning of life is eating smores in October?’

I respond, ‘maybe - depends on how much you enjoy smores.’ I certainly don’t know what it is that puts you into that state. But what seems clear to me is that there are certain moments, certain states of being that bring upon a feeling of completeness. A sense that my current existence requires no further justification, apart from whatever qualia I am submersed in.

The Myth of Sisyphus and Bob Dylan

13 Oct 2016

On the day that the Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan, I want to dedicate my first essay to something Bob Dylan dedicated his life to: ideas. His musical compositions were simple, his voice was never powerful, but his words affected a generation. If you’ve paid attention to modern-day gospel about what you should do with your life or your career, you’ll constantly hear: ‘good ideas are a dime a dozen, but it’s all about execution.’ Ideas don’t make you money, execution does. Execute, execute, execute. Push, push, push. But what are we pushing for?

In his 1971 paper, That’s Interesting!, Davis Murray argues that ‘Interesting theories are those which deny certain assumptions of the audience.’ So here’s my interesting theory for you: great ideas are everything. Great execution is deceiving; it can prop up mediocre ideas and make them look worthwhile while distracting us from seeing other better ideas. A great idea is timeless, while great execution is ephemeral - living and dying with every generation. Great ideas give us purpose, while execution just fills up our time. If you are looking for what to do with your time, pursue interesting ideas, not well-executed institutions.

Ask yourself this question: would you rather live in a world full of terribly executed great ideas, or well executed mediocre ones? Me, I choose the former. I choose the world where great ideas spread like wildfire; where we’re constantly struggling to implement any of them. I choose the world where we have a whole network of roads and highways all paved to hell with good intentions. Because then at least we tried - and in the long run, that is what will matter.

In some way that is already how Nature works. Ideas are the chance gene mutations that occur during mitosis - once they exist, they will inevitably affect the entire species. Maybe not with the first member, but eventually. If you do not have the mutation, you can compensate with great execution, but not forever. Eventually, the idea will win out and the species will evolve.

Perhaps one of the most famous philosophical essays of the last 100 years is Albert Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus. In it, Camus likens the human condition to that of Sisyphus, a Greek king who was forced to roll a boulder up a hill, and watch it roll back down, for eternity. Camus argues that in order for us to be at peace with our own condition, we must imagine Sisyphus as being happy. For what is life but a sequence of boulders that we must push up a bunch of arbitrary hills?

Great ideas are what let us stop and wonder about other hills. About higher and higher mountains that lie beyond the horizon, and about the rolling stones that make life worth living.

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N.B. Things that are immediate follow-ups that I haven’t mentioned but thought about: patents (ideas for money), Hegel’s triad, Plato’s idealism, communism.