Ramadhan First Week Varia

We have gone past a week of fasting in Ramadhan. Update on my brother, Ahmad Tajuddin in UMMC: still no changes from the previous condition.

I spent my first day of fasting in the office in campus. Was having terrible back pain that day and I had to take pain killers after breaking my fast. My eldest son came back on the first day of Ramadhan, since he has resigned from the company he was working with, in the hope of getting a better job. I was glad he was able to spend Ramadhan (and God willing, Eid) with us. Have not seen him ever since the second MCO.

That week was a bit busy with me reading for my presentation at our QuEST weekly meeting. Initially I wanted to do something for Quantum Day that was declared to be on the 14th April. However the announcement does not seem to attract much attention locally and I have already my presentation on the 15th April. So it went past uncelebrated. It saddens me a little that quantum science is not receiving the attention as it should here (unlike our neighbouring countries). My talk at QuEST was prompted by the fact that we (our group) had not given much attention to functional-analytical aspects of quantum theory. So I thought of giving some ideas of it in the meeting. The talk is entitled "Under the Rug: Functional Analysis and Operator Theory in Quantum Physics"and it is available here.

That talk also had me pondering on what I have been doing all these years. Deep down, I knew I have not achieved what I wanted to do academically here and was looking for a breakthrough that I needed like everyone else in research. I was trying to make peace with myself on the matter. I have to stay happy with what I have and what I have done so far because I can't change the past and there is very little time left for me before retirement. Part of me has grown tired but I will try not to stop pursue my scientific interest. I figured I still need to find another job even after the retirement and to keep moving. Will certainly pray for the best this Ramadhan.

Perhaps I just need to do something different. In a previous post, I did mention I had started reading George Zarkadakis' book "In Our Image". My reading was a bit slow since I'm juggling with various different readings; it took me roughly two weeks to finish my first reading of the book. A couple more weeks was for writing notes of what interests me (took a second speedier reading). The notes I took was 30 pages long condensing over 350 pages of the book. Essentially the book is on Artificial Intelligence (AI) and problems and fears associating with progress on the subject. It gets philosophical in many places, some are known to philosophy readers but I may have not pay attention to them. The theme of dualism runs throughout the book; that of Plato with the world of forms and Aristotle with empiricism as well as Descartes' mind-body duality that has direct bearing on the notion of intelligence. What got me hooked initially to the book is how it begins with the big bang of brain development via the development of language from its social form to a general-purpose one. It also mentions art (first artform found was Hohlenstein Stadel lion-man) as signifying the progress of intelligence in the minds of early human. I recalled Snowden mentioning about arts developing before language and by that I think he meant the general-purpose language. For some twisted reasons, I had an interest in language much due to my difficulty in mastering my own mother-tongue language but also due to my reading of Bohm's popular book Wholeness and the Implicate Order where he mentioned about rheomode and Semitic language as one language that emphasizes verbs instead of nouns (to which Arabic belongs to). Another theme in the book surrounding language, was the use of metaphors - I recalled a debate I had trying to dismiss their use, only to be reminded how important they are in knowing the unknown. This brings me to foreseeing possible future research on natural language as pursued by Bob Coecke on pregroup grammar and Matilde Marcoli's geometric models of linguistics. At least I wish I could.

The book also discusses about the apocalyptic view of AI that has always captured Hollywood's attention. It is amusing to see how the book ends. The author had speculated the development of AI along the lines of evolutionary biology and the possibility of neuromorphic computing. Somewhere at the end of the book, the author mentions about how intelligent machine are modelled to be like us but instead it may end up transforming us to be like them (having Asperger syndrome is one of them). A particular interesting notion that arises at the end of the book is artificial consciousness as a practical (limited) means of understanding natural consciousness in the same way as AI did for intelligence. All these are speculative of course but they do make us wonder what the outcome would be.

Back to real life. We had sent our cat Lily (my other half's favourite) to the clinic after she showed inactivity and not taking her food as frequent as she used to. The clinic told us that she was indeed having kidney problem and she was on drips there. When she was back from the clinic, she was really weak (see pics below).

We changed her food to the one for cats with kidney problem (see below). She seems to be slightly better after a few days, to the relief of my other half.

My youngest son Izzuddin has finally finished his last SPM paper on History paper III on Monday. This was a paper he was supposed to sit for, during the quarantine period he had earlier, after somebody in the class caught Covid-19. Fortunately he was negative as reported earlier. A day after, he began to work in a nearby McDonalds eatery and he seems happy about it. Signing off for another 8am lecture.