club vraifaux - truth or dare

truth or dare - readers' answers

1/Jun/97

Tamagocchi is beneficial for our society. True or false?

True. Our future depends upon whether we can feel reality in virtuality or not, as more and more part of our lives gets wired to the net. Tamagocchi, except that it can be reset, gives children a good training to empathize with virtual beings.
Kenji

2/Jun/97

Print Club is a more advanced personal medium than WWW. True or false?

I'm not sure if it is advanced in every respect, but at least it is more friendly to our physical environment, as stickers can be put anywhere and it doesn't require any devices to look at. Stickers are probably easier to collage than web images. Faces are one of the most personal properties of ours.
Kenji

3/Jun/97

Capitalism makes a government fail. True or false?

True. The principle of capitalism is local optimization. If it is applied in a government (a democratic one for the sake of argument), a representative of a locale will act for the benefit of the locale because he or she was elected there and it wouldn't help them if they don't. This is not necessarily beneficial for the whole country as globally optimal solutions will often be missed this way.
Kenji

4/Jun/97

Democracy is also violent. True or false?

True. The power of mediocre majority is so strong that others are often hurt.
Kenji

5/Jun/97

Being digital is inherently more inexpensive. True or false?

True, because digital is an approximated nature.
Kenji

6/Jun/97

The world is accelerating. True or false?

True in a way, as when I saw the special version of STAR WARS the film looked rather slow in its tempo.
Kenji

7/Jun/97

Evolution causes extinction. True or false?

False. Extinction causes evolution. That is the whole principle of natural selection.
Kenji

8/Jun/97

A magic is alsways visual. True or false?

It shouldn't be, and other forms of magic should be explored.
Kenji

9/Jun/97

You look genetically ill from the eyes of a chimpanzee. True or false?

True, if I focus on the fact that human and chimpanzee are genetic variants of each other, but in a precise sense, I don't think chimpanzees regard any diseases to be genetically oriented.
Kenji

10/Jun/97

There is no clear distinction between human and non-human. True or false?

True. Being human is a fuzzy idea and cannot be defined clearly even by a genetical method because of variants. For example, there are people who have extra gender chromosomes, and they appear just the same as other people. On the other hand, some human cancer cells behave as if they are independent life forms outside their original bodies. These cells are one hundred percent human genetically speaking, but nobody would agree to give them human rights.
I think that what constitutes a human being is that other human beings regard the being as human, and that is a sound and complete definition.
Kenji

11/Jun/97

You are a cyborg. True or false?

Not as much as you are, but I think my being has already been instrumented with all these computing devices and home appliances. We have already discussed that there is no clear boundary between our bodies and machines.
Kenji

12/Jun/97

You are addicted to sleeping. True or false?

I suspect that the mechanism of sleep is similar to that of narcotism. In this respect, I think it may be true.
Kenji

13/Jun/97

Daylight saving time should be introduced to Japan for protecting children from darkness. True or false?

False. Although introducing daylight saving time will have econimical effect in Japan, it will not protect children from darkness as they spend time in juku or cram schools until very late anyway.
Kenji

14/Jun/97

Gambling is inevitable for human brains. True or false?

True. For one thing, it is essential for a human to try to predict the future, and for another, it is compulsive for it to consume.
Kenji

15/Jun/97

In general, people in Southern Hemisphere are more knowledgeable of the world than those in Northern Hemisphere. True or false?

True. As the main stream of human culture has been that of Northern Hemisphere, Southern Hemisphere people have been forced to know what people on the other side of the world perceive the world to be, and at the same time have to deal with their own reality. For example, Norhern Hemisphere people can easily mistake what "Water in March" is about, but Southern Hemisphere people are capable of understanding "White Christmas."
Kenji

16/Jun/97

When an 8-month-pregnant woman dies from an accident that means one person is dead. True or false?

I tend to believe it's false.
Kenji

17/Jun/97

There is no question against the fact that human is a kind of mammal. True or false?

False. There is a question, for example, when energy consumption rate of a human is compared with those of other mammals. It is extremely greater. I believe that a human civilization has deviated from being a group of mammals, and became a new form of life, although an individual human biologically remains to be a mammal.
Kenji

18/Jun/97

Our visual reality is distorted. True or false?

Compared with what?
Kenji

19/Jun/97

Astrophysics is not applicable to daily life. True or false?

False. Astrophysics is a study which shows how we understand the behaviours of heavenly bodies, for it does not deal with anything inconceivable by a human brain. The models and principles which appear in astrophysics therefore can be the ones we also apply for the phenomena of our daily life. In fact, I think most of them should be, because our brains are not designed for dealing with phenomena happening millions of light-years away in the first place.
Kenji

20/Jun/97

You are anthropomorphizing other people. True or false?

True. The only example of a human which I can extensively understand is myself, and anyone else is understood by me based on my understanding of myself. In other words, I am projecting my understanding of one particular human to others when I try to face them. This is very similar, if not equal, to anthropomorphizing.
Kenji

21/Jun/97

Your imagination contradicts with your reality. True or false?

False. My imagination only can be my reality, because my reality is something I perceive through my senses which won't let anything beyond my imagination actualize.
Kenji

22/Jun/97

Human race was manufactured by someone. True or false?

True. Human race was manufactured by human. In other words, the concept of human as species is a human invention, which results from a pattern in human cognition and categorization.
Kenji

23/Jun/97

You have experienced a mental illness. True or false?

False, as an illness is a state defined by medicine and I have not yet been treated medically about my mental states.
Kenji

24/Jun/97

There is a language in a restaurant about which you cannot talk in a restaurant. True or false?

True. For example, I cannot refer, by a demonstration, to the gesture of asking for a bill in a conversation I have in a restaurant, otherwise a waiter or waitress would indeed bring me a bill.
Kenji

25/Jun/97

You will be no longer human when you lose your language. True or false?

True, as people expect interactions from other people, and losing my language prevents me from interacting with others. Being human is a state which holds only when other people regard him or her so.
Kenji

26/Jun/97

A natural language is less versatile than a machine language. True or false?

False. Both natural and machine languages are human inventions, and show how abstractions work in our brains. In this respect these languages are as versatile as each other.
Kenji

27/Jun/97

It is universally wrong to steal. True or false?

It must be false because the reason behind the fact that in many societies stealing is considered wrong is that our bodies get extended to give us the concept of possession. Since this extension is originated from the wiring of our brains, where this particular wiring is missing, there will be no concept of possession, and therefore the act of stealing becomes pointless.
Kenji

28/Jun/97

Laughter is stronger than nuclear weapons. True or false?

True. Any weapon is not lethal unless it is used, and it is usually human who uses it. Laughter is capable of deactivating people's hostility, in which sense it is stronger than any weapons on Earth.
Kenji

29/Jun/97

Stupidity is power. True or false?

True, but only in a stupid world.
Kenji

30/Jun/97

Your sanity is not inside you but distributed over your society. True or false?

True, because what is and is not sane thing to do is defined by the society.
Kenji

the same world, a new reality
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