truth or dare - readers' answers

1/Jul/97

The murder case by the alleged Japanese 14-year-old boy is a rebellion against the education system. True or false?

2/Jul/97

The photograph of the alleged Japanese 14-year-old murderer must not be published in order to protect his human right. True or false?

False. The photograph must not be published because he does not have his full human right, being a minor. We cannot force someone who are not granted his or her full human right to be responsible. It is not fair.
Kenji

3/Jul/97

You can re-experience events from the past from any viewpoints you would like. True or false?

Not evey event can be re-experienced this way, but recently I have been noticing two historic events reported on TV over and over from different viewpoints: HongKong's returning to China and Mars Pathfinder's landing on Mars.
Kenji

4/Jul/97

We cannot save Earth. True or false?

True. The Earth doesn't need our help. It will survive. We need to save ourselves.
Kenji

5/Jul/97

It is unlikely that extra terrestrials will invade Earth. True or false?

True. Invading is a terrestrial human idea, which will be performed only when human reasoning proves it to be beneficial. Human reasoning says that is not the case.
Unless, of course, part of us will become extra terrestrials in future and decide the terrestrial resources to be useful for their benefits.
Kenji

6/Jul/97

Software is almost alive. True or false?

True. Life is by definition not hardware. Life is something which utilizes the hardware and spread its being.
Kenji

7/Jul/97

A ghost is a human. True or false?

True. A ghost is, like a robot, an abstraction of a human and shows how we understand other human beings.
Kenji

8/Jul/97

Intuition is a good tool to understand Nature. True or false?

False. Our intuition, through the process of natural selection, is designed to be useful to understand humanity and its surroundings. It is no use at all when we try to understand anything that does not match our scales of time and space, and we always have to come up with some metaphor to overcome the problem.
Kenji

9/Jul/97

Information is an important source of creativity. True or false?

False. Most information will end up with becoming distraction. Information, however, obtained during teens seems to be most useful.
Kenji

10/Jul/97

Insanity is contagious. True or false?

True. Insanity is an idea. To be precise, it's a set of ideas not compatible with that of majority of people. Any idea is contagious because it can be communicated via languages, and so is insanity.
Kenji

11/Jul/97

History gives us answers to most of our current problems. True or false?

True, as there are only so many human problems, and human hasn't changed for at least the last ten thousand years.
Kenji

12/Jul/97

Mars should be inhabited by human in future. True or false?

False. I would rather prefer different beings there.
Kenji

13/Jul/97

Mass production means less interesting ideas. True or false?

True. Interesting ideas tend to be understood mostly by a small number of people. If there are less expensive ideas, albeit less interesting, it will do better in mass marketing.
Kenji

14/Jul/97

Everything we do is music. True or false?

True. The most prominent characteristic of music is variance over time. Which is in everything we do.
Kenji

15/Jul/97

Human right should be granted to a cat with a human mind. True or false?

True. The cat wouldn't have been said to have a human mind if it were not so detected by people. It means that the cat could socially communicate with people, and that is what being human is all about.
Kenji

16/Jul/97

The school system restricts you. True or false?

True if the school is located at the centre of my reality. But students should know they always have life outside their schools.
Kenji

17/Jul/97

A dead body is a good start to understand life. True or false?

No objection for that.
Kenji

18/Jul/97

The education system is designed to produce sadists and masochists. True or false?

True. In Japan, it is apparent that the system enforces to students a form of social bondage. However, in any community, the education system is an institution of bondage because hundred percent autonomy is never granted to the students. The students are in any case under control of teachers for certain extent. It is therefore natural for those students to become company employees to keep being under control. This is the way of primate life.
Kenji

19/Jul/97

Love is destructive. True or false?

True. Love is to externalize what your brain sees as something or someone ought to be, and in effect it will try to change destructively the surrounding environment.
Kenji

20/Jul/97

A dead body is a relief. True or false?

True. It makes our physical basis very clear, and leaves us with less confusion.
Kenji

21/Jul/97

Humanity is opposite to life. True or false?

True. Life requires killing and exploiting others because it is a survival game.
Kenji

22/Jul/97

People tend to get stupider as generations go by. True or false?

True, yet it may sound strange. If you focus on certain aspect of civilization, people tend to lose their understanding of the reasoning behind it over generations because they don't have to think about it anymore. Although the economy of thought is important to save the learning time, there is danger in it.
Kenji

23/Jul/97

Wherever a human goes, there is another human there. True or false?

True. A human brain is good at working with humans, and in fact, it tends to project humanity onto non-human beings. In effect, even if a person goes where he or she will be alone, the person will inevitably see something in his or her environment as a human companion.
Kenji

24/Jul/97

An organization refusing to be restructured has no hope to begin with. True or false?

True. It means that a fair number of members of the organization must be refusing the idea of restructuring. Now what are those people like? They don't sound like they are confident in their roles in the organization, and they sound like they are afraid that they are the ones to be got rid of when restructuring begins. How much chance does an organization full of these people have of survival?
Kenji

25/Jul/97

There is life after death. True or false?

True as long as there is a human to observe the life. That life will continue within the mind of the observer.
Kenji

26/Jul/97

Semen is more real than blood. True or false?

It depends on the level of one's exposure to these two fluids. Things feel more real when one is more exposed to it, because it is so wired in our brains.
Kenji

27/Jul/97

Life can continue to be until the universe ends. True or false?

I think it's possible, although it cannot be this particular chain of life which began on this planet, which requires some molecular activities to go on. The life existing when the universe ends must have a smaller unit of activities.
Kenji

28/Jul/97

Music is a prosthesis of your mind. True or false?

False as I don't feel either complete or healthy when I listen to music. There's much more pathologic about music, and at the same time it's very pleasant.
Kenji

29/Jul/97

The world resembles your brain. True or false?

True. For example, if you enforce some idea in a society for long enough, it would become part of the reality there, as if the society has learnt something. Of course, that is true because a society practically consists of brains. The world is full of brains, and its behaviours are derived from them.
Kenji

30/Jul/97

Economy is a psychological entity. True or false?

True. It is not a physical existence because nothing is affected by it without human intervention. Except maybe vending machines, but they are implementation of human value system.
Kenji

31/Jul/97

A well-written computer software can be a human. True or false?

True, or at least the source code represents human brains. A program is said to be well-written when someone other than the author of the program can read and understand the source code. In order to make the source code easy to read, the author has to divide the whole problem into manageable pieces. This division must conform to a certain standard methodology, like structured or object oriented programming, so that others can follow the programmer's logic. These methodologies themselves have been developed in accordance with how people usually think, making the source code a representation of how a human understands the problem. In other words, it's an externalised brain. Since a human can be defined as something in which humanity is found, I think the source code can be called a human or at least a human imprint.
Kenji