I was a teenager in 1986 when the first Edsa "Revolution" erupted. The sound of this "eruption" for me was the murmer of a crowd queueing at a fishball stand or playing pusoy dos with their pals on a sidewalk while smoking Marlboro "Blue Seals". An anticlimactic account, yes, but the thing about the first Edsa "revolution" was that it came together spontaneously as ordinary people milled rather than massed into Edsa as what was to become the seminal event emerged from the collective stand . Indeed, back then the stand was clear, the phenomenon was emergent , and the sponteneity was very evident. That phenomenal nature underpinned by such clarity cannot be replicated -- specially if the attempt is engineered by people with top-down agendas (as what's happened since). For the first Edsa revolution was, at its most fundamental, a bottom-up movement.
The bid for amnesty of mutiny plotters Antonio Trillanes and Danilo Lim now hinges on the politics that surround their case -- the childish whims of an adolescent President and the brownie-points-sniffing people's "representatives" in Congress. Isn't this ironic? These are the very sorts of Pinoy-style politics upon which Trillanes and Lim justified the banditry they exhibited in the Peninsula and Oakwood.
The last several weeks had seen many high profile crimes make headline news, tweeted and re-tweeted on Twitter. From thence the characteristic teeth gnashing and talking-out-loud public introspection that modern "social media" had all but commoditised today pervades the national chatter. Much of the perception that we are now leading dangerous lives in a crime-gripped society runs counter to statistical data pointing to an actual reduction in the country's crime rate . However, as the Inquirer.net Editor himself observed , it's not facts, but perceptions that drive action...
Do we really experience reality? Think about it. Where does our personal concept of reality really exist? We think that we are in touch with our surroundings through our senses. That is of course true -- up to a point . Without minds that have been honed by years of experience turning nerve and neural signals (generated by our thought processes and our five senses whenever these capture external stimuli; i.e., light, vibration, texture, etc.) into mental constructs, there would be no experience as we, well, experience it now. Indeed, our minds piece together mental models of the world based on how it interprets data , and we "experience" those models as proxies of the real world.
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