7th april 2007 has it really been a year already?

today really will be one year since i entered NS. but everything aside, its really just a date, a formality devised by man to keep track of things. but then again, sentiments kick in and i wonder about everything since a year ago - or at least thats what some people will be expected to do...

its a wonderful saturday, and it'll be devoted to the pursuit of books, simply because the screening timings of sunshine is so off, and because there's no one to watch it with... alas.. so enlightenment and renaissance, here i come!!

anyway, i thought about the consilience concept again, and i thought about the "theories of everything" - the thing most sought after in physics, though of course i am referring to entirely different things altogether. my version would be very different - it would be the 'theories of everything that we know' - in effect, 'theories of human knowledge'. it would reduce essay-writing economists to number crunching economists. all the arguments, all the essays would ultimately be judged using the scientific method of hypothesis, prediction, experiments. yes, it would cause the social sciences to really become like sciences... in time, the social sciences would see the withering away of the 'standard social science model' as a new generation of social scientists see the ultimate connection between human evolution and human behaviour, and building on these things, provide more accurate models on human behaviour, and predict with better accuracy, the effect of economic policies. or at least thats a dream. no, it won't be that everything be reduced into biology, chemistry or physics - thats simply too simplistic. but there will be levels of argument, and explanations up to a certain level would be sufficient. because its simply unhelpful to explain how decisions are made because of the flow of electrons in certain neurotransmitters in the brain... in that time, i think university departments will gradually move to interdiscplinary research, if they haven't done so already. they will establish departments to allow the interconnected areas of knowledge to come together, allowing psychology to work with life sciences, complexity researchers working with economists working with game theorists working with everyone else. or at least these are just dreams of a better future...

then again, all these things could become null if universities decide to keep on specialising in narrow myopic visions... which might undo this wonderful human endeavour, and forever submit the advance of knowledge to the shackles of ... self-interest?

i wonder, which is more important to universities - the patronising of governments and corporations, or knowledge for its own sake? i suspect that universities, in ensuring the former, neglect the latter. but thats the real world. oh well...