Lawful

"The law isn't justice. It's a very imperfect mechanism. If you press exactly the right buttons and are also lucky, justice may show up in the answer. A mechanism is all the law was ever intended to be." - Phillip Marlowe


I've noticed lately I've been blogging about my life too much. I want to take some blog posts to step back and look at some broader issues in the (first?) world today. I think this is a good idea for two reasons. For one, I seem to care more about my thoughts than wishy-washy feelings and two, I think it is probably more interesting to other people and if this blog can get even one person thinking, I've done my job.

I was talking to a close friend yesterday about a topic I distinctly remembering blogging about before - the law/justice system. We both agreed that the role lawyers played in the course of justice was definitely unfair. In that, a "good/component" lawyer could mean the difference between a person going to jail/being committed of a crime when in reality the outcome should be intrinsic to the deed that the accused committed. However, in many cases, it /seems/ like it could be quite subjective.

I don't want to make big claims here, because in reality, I don't have any statistics or knowledge about how big of a difference having a "good" lawyer makes in terms of perhaps, someone going to prison for life, or what not. I do know, however, that having a sibling in law school who I am very close with has taught me that the law/court system is more than just fancy speeches and big revelations like we are so often led to believe in today's television courtroom dramas. However, just the fact that the outcome of justice depends on something other than the actual event seems enough for this issue to warrant concern.

But that brings me to my next point. A while ago I blogged about this issue, I suggested, drawing inspiration from a sci-fi novel I had read once, that what if we simply built a super-computer AI/software entity who could "judge" us? By this I mean, it would observe our actions and evaluate our actions impartially on a certain scale (lets say 1-10) and then decide the outcome based on the score. It could take into accounts all the parameters of the situation (self-defense etc) probably more "fairly" than humans or a jury ever could (of course we'd program it...somehow). Would this theoretically be a better option?

In my last blog, 3 suggested people would not like this. Because deep down, perhaps humans realize they only liked to be judged by others because they are just as flawed as they are. In a way, machines are perfect. They have the ability to obey rules all the time - even if an algorithm has a sort of "random" factor intrinsic to it...that factor is still /known/ to be there. Also, I used the idea of a machine but I could have just as easily used the idea of an omniscient god, which perhaps, more people would be comfortable with. I have no idea why however, as personally, I don't see how we could ever connect with such a Being - is "love" or any human emotion so powerful that it could bind those who know nothing and those who know everything?

Err...Anyway, I'm sort of digressing. But my point is, that this seems to just be another catch-22 about humanity. We want the law to be as just as possible but yet it also has to conform to our innate randomness/feelings/wishy-washy part of being human or else it just seems so removed and unnatural. As such, we are simply stuck as a society. As the quote at the beginning of the post suggests is the mechanism of the law more important than what really happens or what those laws really are? Is it perhaps right to say that we want to be metallic, soulless robots, but at the same time we also want to feel and remember who we are. How can we move on from this?

Turbulence

I've been gone on quite a long hiatus for blogger the past few weeks. I think this might have been the longest I've gone without writing a blog for a very long time. But nonetheless, here I am.

There's been a lot of ups and downs in my life since my last post. However, I sometimes wonder if these ups and downs look like nothing but turbulence in the grand scheme of things. I imagine if I could plot my happiness on the vertical axis with time on the horizontal how my life would look on a plot. Would it simply be a straight horizontal line from a distance, but when you zoom in there are a multitude of variations? Or would there be some events which truly stand out - is my life one continuous function or just the sum of tiny piecewise events? Can we accurately compare happiness in one moment with that which we felt in another? In my opinion, I think humans are pretty terrible at that.

To be more specific the ups and downs in my life have mainly been the usual stuff. For example, not receiving some awards/jobs I think I deserved or receiving marks higher than I expected. I realized in some ways that I am pretty selfish in that I would rather feel better if no one got something that I wanted rather than a peer receiving it. But, like so many things in life, I've gotten over it (I hope!) and I am trying to learn from it and become a better person. OK, maybe I just typed that line so it sounds like I believe I care about changing more than I actually do. But it is something I should work on and I definitely don't want to go through life being secretly bitter at others over trivial things.

I think lately its been difficult not to compare myself with others in many regards. In terms of where I want to be in the future, where I am now (jobs, school etc), and who I was before. Again, I have come to realize there is a very fine line between individuality and maintaining relationships to satisfy the need for social interaction that we all have. On a vaguely related note, I've also thought about, for the umpteenth time, how I just can't possible study/do everything interesting in life. One needs to make decisions at one point or another and hope they end up on a path which is makes them happy.

It seems like just yesterday I was talking to Heinz about how one day I feel like I'll just blink and be 60 or something. I don't think I'd mind too much. In the simplest sense, I just want to go through my life being reasonably content - it doesn't matter if I'm married, have lots of friends, have a well-paying job or not. I just want to go through life knowing that I'm content with who I am and what I'm doing/where I'm going. While it'd be great to have a positive impact on others and accomplish something which I internally can be proud of, I'm not sure if that will realistically happen.

The last thing I just briefly wanted to mention is about high school. Recently on facebook someone posted a video from our graduation. It made me feel pretty nostalgic but I realized I couldn't really remember what it/felt/ like to be in high school anymore. It was like...I couldn't even think of what it'd be like to go back or think like how I use to think back then. Perhaps this is true for all memories...eventually, after some point, our sensations about an event seem to dull and we are only left with memories here and there which puncture our thoughts once in a while. For example, I can't even imagine what it would be like to go back to that kind of high school environment again. It's like a friend who I met in first year said how you can only miss something for so long before it just becomes a good/bad memory. I think I really do understand the significance of that statement now.

Oh, one last thing I wanted to mention. I guess lately I've been more wary about when others are being "phony" or when they really mean things or not. In fact, sometimes I feel like even /I/ know when I'm sounding phony, but all I can really tell someone to reassure them is that I genuinely mean what I say. Perhaps, like Holden in Catcher in the Rye, our need to separate the world into black and white kind of views such as when Holden assumes that all adults are phony stems from a need to just model the people of the world in a simpler way. If we didn't make initial judgments on others based on information we could quickly gather about them then how would one sift through all the plethora of people they interact with on a daily basis and decide who they should pursue trying to get to know or what not? I guess, in the end, we all need to start somewhere - perhaps arbitrarily but it makes more sense to be based off our beliefs?