Reason, Mathematics, Art, and More

Some things can't be explained by reason, for reason has its limits: "Why is there anything at all?" is one of the questions that reason cannot answer; the answer is "because there is." Reason requires assumptions, states, experiences, and if you assume none, then you get none. I am a person who loves reason, loves mathematics, and loves the arts. I love asking the question "Why?", but this doesn't mean that I worship reason, or worship mathematics, or even worship the arts. I am a learner, a teacher, a creator, and I feast on being, creating, connecting, and understanding.

I believe that the universe has purposes, has rules, and has soul, and therefore I seek it, I seek the underbelly, I seek perspectives. In mathematics, if you asked me, "What is a number?" I could not give a simple answer. I could give you the standard definition found in set theory, but I could also define them using Conway's surreal construction, I could describe them as a count or measure of something, or I could consider them as actions in a group. I understand numbers so well, my answer would depend on the situation, my mood, and the person who asked.

I feel like some people think that reason is the only way to determine truth, and while with assumed assumptions it's not that far off, I dislike that belief. We're more than just things of reason, we are more than just facts and machines—we're agents who can make goals and can use our minds and bodies to try and achieve them. We know and learn from experience, we make our beliefs and actions with experiences and intellect. It is misleading to assume that all truth is determined by reason, and it's misleading even in the context of reason to assume all statements are true or false—black or white.

Perfectionism is one of the strangest attitudes I've come across. It's strange because perfectionism does two things: 1) It makes doing anything harder. 2) It often makes the quality of things worse. I know a lot of people who are perfectionists in something, and some mistake me as one, though I push back on that notion. I might correct you for being slightly wrong on something I know really well, but that's because I want you to correct me when I'm slightly wrong. I might be skillful in a thing, but I claim no perfection or genius in almost anything, and though I love being as correct as reasonably possible, if I make a mistake it's not the end of the world—it's a teaching moment, a moment where I can improve. Perfectionism does the opposite, so I shall avoid it.

I love finding commonality with others. People aren't that different, but people are also extremely different. I hate straw-manning someone: it's pathetic and shows a lack of fortitude in one's own beliefs and positions. I prefer steel-manning people because it makes me empathize and understand them more, and it helps me learn more about myself. How can people be not so different and yet extremely different? It's because of how we learn: we build our knowledge, beliefs, and actions mostly on our experiences that often vary wildly. If we treat each other with respect and avoid hostility, then our diversity would make us better. I see so often in politics, people straw-manning or simplifying problems. There are many cases where I feel both major sides are wrong, because one side ignores one half of the problem, claiming it doesn't exist, and the other side does the same but with the other half—foolishly calling the other side evil for it. It annoys me when I hear the same issue from both sides and both miss the mark, talking past each other, sometimes using the same flawed reasoning.

I love mathematics. It's not because it's logical, nor because in mathematics you can prove and know things for certain—which isn't actually true in mathematics—it's because it's a powerful creative medium and tool. It's like another avenue, another wilderness, another world to explore and understand. One thing that's more fun than learning or understanding more of that landscape is teaching it and exploring it with others. It's too bad the school system teaches the subject so terribly that most people don't actually understand the creativity and artistic aspects of mathematics, and too often learn to hate it. It's quite a sad sight to witness, because I know people who would love it if it was taught differently.

I love drawing, I love singing, and I love witnessing people's creations. One of the songs I've been thinking about recently is "Hellfire" from Hunchback of Notre Dame. When I was a young child, the song and visuals scared me, and I could tell that the old man was rotten—but I didn't have the experience, nor language, to understand quite what he was rotten with. Frollo is corrupted with two things: self-righteous, prideful blindness and a "burning desire." My natural disposition makes it hard for me to have that self-righteous, prideful blindness, no matter how many times people call me things like "too good for this world." I internally and non-verbally scoff at such things because I know my faults, and even then the world could use more good in it. But a "burning desire" I understand, and I can empathize with Frollo, despite believing him to be an extremely evil, hypocritical monster. His terror of doing something wrong, his anger about desires he doesn't want, and his begging and praying—it's deeply uncomfortable and relatable, but it isn't justifying. When the self-righteous pride and the burning desire conflict, burning and freezing him alive, instead of looking inward and recognizing his fault and repenting, he looks outward and blames God for "making the devil so much stronger than the man," blames the innocent girl of being "the witch who set this flame." And after all of that, when the two conflicting beliefs collide, he twists his deeply flawed definition of righteousness to make the desire compatible with his blindness. His logic and reason is extremely faulty, but he cannot reconcile otherwise without repentance. When God takes away Frollo's object of desire, it's too late—because Frollo had already made his choice and won't take no as an answer. This is Disney's best I-want song, adding all the conventional aspects of an I-want song while giving a polar opposite emotional effect. It humanizes the villain while condemning him, and does not justify him at all.

There is so much beauty to be found, even in the darkest of times. It is always possible to find a teaspoon of hope. To be clear, you cannot avoid reality, but you do have the ability to frame it, to act on it, and to seek things from it. There is a saying that if you seek opportunities, then more opportunities will come, and it's true. When you carry yourself mentally seeking for something, it becomes easier for things like it to be visible and accessible to you. If you seek signs of hatred, hostility, and failure, those things will be easier to find and access, and others will slowly recognize them in you. On the other hand, if you seek signs of compassion, commonality, success, and hope, those things will be easier for you to find and access. You cannot ignore reality—so don't. Use it as a tool instead. That advice is older than written history. I believe that your mind is intelligent enough; I believe you can do hard things, and that you can use the materials you have to make a better tomorrow.

I love playing chess, I love the rules, and I love programming chess engines, but I am terrible at playing it. Of course, I usually don't care about winning or losing in games. I usually just care about how interesting the game session was. As any good mathematician or game developer, I figured out the rules and asked a simple question: "What if I change a rule or change a goal?" I do this to most games I play. The first version of this was about a decade ago. I wanted to play chess, but the goal was to lose, and if you could capture, you must capture. I've done similar things with other games, adding, removing, or modifying a rule to see how the gameplay changes. I recommend people do this more often. For, as any good mathematician knows, math is a game with a set of rules. Rules that you can follow and rules that you can change.

There are two things I feel are very similar and yet could not be more different: something I'll call naïve optimism—which I'll define as the belief that all things in life will turn out good, and that people's intentions are good—and something I'll call cynical pessimism—which I'll define as the belief that things in general will turn out badly, and that people's intentions are purely self-interested and selfish. I find them very similar because, to me, neither of them makes sense with my experiences and the evidence I've seen in life. I'm not purely self-interested and selfish, nor am I also purely selfless and pure, even if I lean more towards being selfless. With everything I've seen in my relatively short time and everything I know from the remains of history, the almost all things turning out good in the end, and almost all things turning out bad are both observably false. I do find it true from my experience that "The world is [currently] awful. The world is much better [than before]. The world can be much better [than it is now]." To me, naïve optimism and cynical pessimism make the same mistakes, looking at some data and ignoring data of the opposite. Some naïve optimists are naïve because they haven't experienced a lot of bad and harmful experiences, and some cynical pessimists are also naïve because they haven't experienced a lot of good and loving experiences. I believe people can be good and bad, that it changes from time to time, and that people are not unchanging objects. I think we're agents who can choose how we act, can choose how we think, and can choose to change.

I've been thinking about one of my favorite movies that came out this year. I watched it during a rare moment of time where my family had a Netflix subscription and I was bed-bound. K-pop Demon Hunters—even though there are a lot of plot holes, I would recommend it to almost everybody. It's a story about how to deal with shame. What is shame? Shame is, from my understanding, unproductive guilt; guilt that lingers, sometimes guilt that isn't deserved. Guilt isn't a bad thing necessarily, just as pain isn't necessarily a bad thing. Pain tells your mind that a part of your body is damaged or needs attention, and guilt serves a similar purpose, telling you that part of your behavior or thinking is damaged or needs attention. Neither are necessarily bad, but excess or long-term of each can be terrible. "Guilt tells you that you've made a mistake, but shame tells you that you are the mistake." Gwi-Ma feeds on shame, and shame grows when isolated and reinforced. The demons sang "I'm the only one who'll love your sins"; they don't love you—they love your destruction, your shame built off of guilt. They sing "Don't let it show, keep it all inside, the pain and the shame, keep it out of sight, your obsession feeds our connection, give me all your attention." This is a common manipulative practice: isolating the subject of the manipulation, trapping them in the bands of shame and lies, and pretending to be their savior—or, as the demons say, they'll "be your Idol." They separate the victim. "No, I'm the only one right now," "Keeping you in check, keeping you obsessed, play me on repeat in your head," "Don't you know I'm here to save you." And when the mask is mostly uncovered, they make the victim feel trapped with no escape. "Living in your mind now, too late cause you're mine now, I will make you free, once you're all apart of me." "No one is coming to save you." Manipulators like this aren't that uncommon; they are empty and feel a kind of high from taking control over others. Whether the shame comes from manipulators, addictions, confusion, or from past guilt, the most common lie is "don't let it show, keep it all inside." That lie traps us and damns us like a dam damns water. In the movie, Rumi—who's struggled with shame coming from her parents since the start of the film—enters right before the crowd gets swallowed by the flame Gwi-Ma, interrupting the demons' song. Rumi comes in, her demon half visible, and Gwi-Ma taunts her with truths. She doesn't deny any of what he says, but she denies his framing, breaking the bands of shame she has had throughout the entire film. She started with "I tried to fix it, I tried to fight it, my head was twisted, my heart divided, my lies all collided, I don't know why I didn't trust you to be on my side." She hid things she was ashamed of—her heritage, her markings, her secrets—and didn't trust her closest friends with that knowledge, and made them feel betrayed and hurt. It was all due to her shame and fear. She continued, "I broke into a million pieces and I can't go back, but now I'm seeing all the beauty in the broken glass, the scars are part of me, darkness and harmony, my voice without the lies, this is what it sounds like." She broke and made mistakes that she can't come back from. There isn't an undo button in life, but what she can do is grow and learn from them, and try to make things better for herself and for others around her. This breaks her friends out of the trance they were in, and they start to join her. Her friend Zoey starts singing, "Why did I cover up the colors stuck inside my head?" and Mira: "I should have let the jagged edges meet the light instead." Rumi then asks them, "Show me what's underneath, I'll find your harmony, the song we couldn't write, this is what it sounds like." Of course, Gwi-Ma tries to stop this, because it takes away the power he has over others. Their singing helps transform the shame into something better, something he can't use. The girls start to sing as they fight: "We're shattering the silence, we're rising, defiant, shouting in the quiet, 'you're not alone.'" This breaks the first part of shame—"keep[ing] it out of sight"—"we listened to the demons, we let them get between us, but none of us are out here on our own, so we were cowards, so we were liars, so we're not heroes, we're still survivors, the dreamers, the fighters, no lying, I'm tired, but dive in the fire and I'll be right here by your side." This broke the other part, where we ignore the shame and damn ourselves from growth, through isolation or through giving up. They break it by connecting to others. We all have darkness and jagged edges, and when we accept them and bring it to the light, we can finally heal—just like the song invites us to do: "Get up and let the jagged edges meet the light instead," "Show me what's underneath, we'll find your harmony, fearless and undefined, this is what it sounds like." Together we can do hard things more easily. We're so much alike, and our diversity, our strengths, can be used to make a brighter future for all of us.