The cane that drew the Ghost away.

This was when i was in a hostel during my school days.

On my very first day i was told that one of the dometaries was haunted. And as i hurdled up the heiarchy of classes, in two years time I landed in the notorious dometary (Dom). Me and my dom mates took the extra precautions. We bought our beds closer to each other. We made sure that the torches always had charged baterries. The odd ones also had pictures of Dieties posted in their cupboards.

Then one of us had the sighting. While going to the wash room late in the night he saw faint white figure resembling a women on the other side. He was terrified and ran back. I still dont figure out how he was able to control the urgent call till sunlight. But his next visit to the loo was only in the morning ant that too not alone.

Soon he wa not the only one who had seen the presence. Then came my "Day of the encounter". I dont no what woke me up in the middle of the night and with rubbing eyes just looked around. And there it was. Just near the cupboards, thirty odd meters away i saw the white thing. I did not know what to do. I was shocked to a state i could not describe. And doing what a pigeon would do i covered my self with the sheet and started my prayers. I did not know when i slept off.

We talked a lot about our distress and the word spread and somehow reached the house warden.

So one day on the notice board came a message that the boys who had had the sightings to assemble outside the mess after dinner.

A proud bunch of us were there. Then came the warden."Bend Down Every one". A swing of cane on each one of our bums. (the instant pain that a cane gives you cannot be described you have to be caned to know how it feels.)

But after this there were no more sightings, no more stories, no more ghost talk. As days passed by we even became brave enough to go to the loo alone at night.


Guess what the cane drove away the ghost (from our minds)

The Story of 'The missing Rib'

A girl in love asked her boyfriend...

Girl: Tell me... who do you love most in this world..?
Boy: You, of course!
Girl: In your heart, what am I to you?
Boy: The boy thought for a moment and looked intently in her eyes andsaid, "You are my rib. In the Bible, it was said that God saw that Adamwas lonely, during his sleep; God took one of Adam's rib and created Eve.Every man has been searching for his missing rib, only when you find thewoman of your life; you'll no longer feel the lingering ache in yourheart . . ."

After their wedding, the couple had a sweet and happy life for a while.However, the youthful couple began to drift apart due to the busyschedule of life and the never-ending worries of daily problems...theirlife became mundane. All the challenges posed by the harsh realities of life began to gnawaway their dreams and love for each other.. The couple began to havemore quarrels and each quarrel became more heated.

One day, after the quarrel, the girl ran out of the house.... At theopposite side of the road, she shouted, "You don't love me...!"

The boy hated her childishness and out of impulse, retorted, "Maybe, itwas a mistake for us to be together..! You were never my missing rib...!"

Suddenly, she turned quiet and stood there for a long while.... Heregretted what he said but words spoken are like thrown away water,you can never take it back.

With tears, she went home to pack her thingsand was de! termined in breaking-up. Before she left the house, "If I'm really not your missing rib,please let me go..... She continued, "It is less painful this way... let usgo on our separate ways and search for our own partners..."

Five years went by....

He never remarried but he had tried to find out about her lifeindirectly...... She had left the country and back.... She hadmarried a foreigner and divorced..... He felt anguished that she neverwaited for him. In the dark and lonely night, he lit his cigarette and felt thelingering ache in his heart. He couldn't bring himself to admitthat he was missing her..

One day, they finally met....

At the airport, a place where therewere many reunions and good-byes.... He was going away on a businesstrip. She was standing there alone, with just the security door separatingthem. She smiled at him gently.

(b): How are you?
(g): I'm fine. How about you... Have you found your missing rib...?
(b): No.(g): I'll be flying to New York in the next flight.
(b): I'll be back in 2 weeks time. Give me a call when you are back...You know my number...Nothing has changed.

With a smile, she turned around and waved good-bye..

"Good-bye . . ."

One week later, he heard of her death. She had perished in NewYork. In the event that shocked the world..Midnight..... Once again, he lithis cigarette..... And like before, he felt the lingering ache in hisheart.... He finally knew, she was the missing rib that he had carelesslybroken . . .

"Sometimes, people say things out of moments of fury..... Most oftenthan not, the outcome could be disastrous and detrimental.... We ventour frustrations 99% at our loved ones.... And even though we know thatwe ought to "think twice and act wisely", it's often easier said thandone. Things happen each day, many of which are beyond our control. Letus treasure every moment and everyone in our lives. Tomorrow may nevercome; give and accept what you have today . . . "

The Matrix is a film that astounds not only with action and special effects but also with ideas. This writing is dedicated to exploring some of the many philosophical ideas that arise in both the original film and the sequels.
Before breaking out of the Matrix, Neo's life was not what he thought it was. It was a lie. Morpheus described it as a "dreamworld," but unlike a dream, this world was not the creation of Neo's mind. The truth is more sinister: the world was a creation of the artificially intelligent computers that have taken over the Earth and have subjugated mankind in the process. These creatures have fed Neo a simulation that he couldn't possibly help but take as the real thing. What's worse, it isn't clear how any of us can know with certainty that we are not in a position similar to Neo before his "rebirth." Our ordinary confidence in our ability to reason and our natural tendency to trust the deliverances of our senses can both come to seem rather naive once we confront this possibility of deception.
A viewer of The Matrix is naturally led to wonder: how do I know I am not in the Matrix? How do I know for sure that my world is not also a sophisticated charade, put forward by some super-human intelligence in such a way that I cannot possibly detect the ruse?

And yet firmly implanted in my mind is the long-standing opinion that there is an omnipotent God who made me the kind of creature that I am. How do I know that he has not brought it about that there is no earth, no sky, no extended thing, no shape, no size, no place, while at the same time ensuring that all these things appear to me to exist just as they do now? What is more, just as I consider that others sometimes go astray in cases where they think they have the most perfect knowledge, how do I know that God has not brought it about that I too go wrong every time I add two and three or count the sides of a square, or in some even simpler matter, if that is imaginable? But perhaps God would not have allowed me to be deceived in this way, since he is said to be supremely good; [...] I will suppose therefore that not God, who is supremely good and the source of truth, but rather some malicious demon of the utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies in order to deceive me. I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colours, shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment.

The narrator of Descartes' Meditations concludes that none of his former opinions are safe. Such a demon could not only deceive him about his perceptions, it could conceivably cause him to go wrong when performing even the simplest acts of reasoning.

This radical worry seems inescapable. How could you possibly prove to yourself that you are not in the kind of nightmarish situation Descartes describes? It would seem that any argument, evidence or proof you might put forward could easily be yet another trick played by the demon. As ludicrous as the idea of the evil demon may sound at first, it is hard, upon reflection, not to share Descartes' worry: for all you know, you may well be a mere plaything of such a malevolent intelligence. More to the point of our general discussion: for all you know, you may well be trapped in the Matrix.

Many contemporary philosophers have discussed a similar skeptical dilemma that is a bit closer to the scenario described in The Matrix. It has come to be known as the "brain in a vat" hypothesis: You do not know that you are not a brain, suspended in a vat full of liquid in a laboratory, and wired to a computer which is feeding you your current experiences under the control of some ingenious technician scientist. For if you were such a brain, then, provided that the scientist is successful, nothing in your experience could possibly reveal that you were; for your experience is ex hypothesi identical with that of something which is not a brain in a vat. Since you have only your own experience to appeal to, and that experience is the same in either situation, nothing can reveal to you which situation is the actual one

If you cannot know whether you are in the real world or in the word of a computer simulation, you cannot be sure that your beliefs about the world are true. And, what was even more frightening to Descartes, in this kind of scenario it seems that your ability to reason is no safer than the deliverances of the senses: the evil demon or malicious scientist could be ensuring that your reasoning is just as flawed as your perceptions.

As you have probably already guessed, there is no easy way out of this philosophical problem (or at least there is no easy philosophical way out!). Philosophers have proposed a dizzying variety of "solutions" to this kind of skepticism but, as with many philosophical problems, there is nothing close to unanimous agreement regarding how the puzzle should be solved.
Descartes' own way out of his evil demon skepticism was to first argue that one cannot genuinely doubt the existence of oneself. He pointed out that all thinking presupposes a thinker: even in doubting, you realize that there must at least be a self which is doing the doubting. (Thus Descartes' most famous line: "I think, therefore I am.") He then went on to claim that, in addition to our innate idea of self, each of us has an idea of God as an all-powerful, all-good, and infinite being implanted in our minds, and that this idea could only have come from God. Since this shows us that an all-good God does exist, we can have confidence that he would not allow us to be so drastically deceived about the nature of our perceptions and their relationship to reality. While Descartes' argument for the existence of the self has been tremendously influential and is still actively debated, few philosophers have followed him in accepting his particular theistic solution to skepticism about the external world.

One of the more interesting contemporary challenges is not so much to defend our ordinary claims to knowledge as to question whether the "brain in a vat" hypothesis is coherent, given certain plausible assumptions about how our language refers to objects in the world. Consider a variation on the standard "brain in a vat" story that is uncannily similar to the situation described in The Matrix:
Instead of having just one brain in a vat, we could imagine that all human beings (perhaps all sentient beings) are brains in a vat (or nervous systems in a vat in case some beings with just nervous systems count as ‘sentient'). Of course, the evil scientist would have to be outside? or would he? Perhaps there is no evil scientist, perhaps (though this is absurd) the universe just happens to consist of automatic machinery tending a vat full of brains and nervous systems. This time let us suppose that the automatic machinery is programmed to give us all a collective hallucination, rather than a number of separate unrelated hallucinations. Thus, when I seem to myself to be talking to you, you seem to yourself to be hearing my words…. I want now to ask a question which will seem very silly and obvious (at least to some people, including some very sophisticated philosophers), but which will take us to real philosophical depths rather quickly. Suppose this whole story were actually true. Could we, if we were brains in a vat in this way, say or think that we were?

A surprising answer is that we cannot coherently think that we are brains in vats, and so skepticism of that kind can never really get off the ground. While it is difficult to do justice to this ingenious argument in a short summary, the point is roughly as follows:
Not everything that goes through our heads is a genuine thought, and far from everything we say is a meaningful utterance. Sometimes we get confused or think in an incoherent manner -- sometimes we say things that are simply nonsense. Of course, we don't always realize at the time that we aren't making sense -- sometimes we earnestly believe we are saying (or thinking) something meaningful.

Just as I might say a sentence that is nonsense, I might also use a name or a general term which is meaningless in the sense that it fails to hook up to the world. Philosophers talk of such a term as "failing to refer" to an object. In order to successfully refer when we use language, there must be an appropriate relationship between the speaker and the object referred to. If a dog playing on the beach manages to scrawl the word "Ed" in the sand with a stick, few would want to claim that the dog actually meant to refer to someone named Ed. Presumably the dog doesn't know anyone named Ed, and even if he did, he wouldn't be capable of intending to write Ed's name in the sand. The point of such an example is that words do not refer to objects "magically" or intrinsically: certain conditions must be met in the world in order for us to accept that a given written or spoken word has any meaning and whether it actually refers to anything at all.
The claim that one condition which is crucial for successful reference is that there be an appropriate causal connection between the object referred to and the speaker referring. Specifying exactly what should count as "appropriate" here is a notoriously difficult task, but we can get some idea of the kind of thing required by considering cases in which reference fails through an inappropriate connection: if someone unfamiliar with the film The Matrix manages to blurt out the word "Neo" while sneezing, few would be inclined to think that this person has actually referred to the character Neo. The kind of causal connection between the speaker and the object referred to (Neo) is just not in place. For reference to succeed, it can't be simply accidental that the name was uttered. (Another way to think about it: the sneezer would have uttered "Neo" even if the film The Matrix had never been made.)
The difficuly in coherently supposing the brain in a vat story to be true is that brains raised in such an environment could not successfully refer to genuine brains, or vats, or anything else in the real world. Consider the example of someone who has lived their entire life in the Matrix: when they talk of "chickens," they don't actually refer to real chickens; at best they refer to the computer representations of chickens that have been sent to their brain. Similarly, when they talk of human bodies being trapped in pods and fed data by the Matrix, they don't successfully refer to real bodies or pods -- they can't refer to physical bodies in the real world because they cannot have the appropriate causal connection to such objects. Thus, if someone were to utter the sentence "I am simply a body stuck in a pod somewhere being fed sensory information by a computer" that sentence would itself be necessarily false. If the person is in fact not trapped in the Matrix, then the sentence is straightforwardly false. If the person is trapped in the Matrix, then he can't successfully refer to real human bodies when he utters the word "human body," and so it appears that his statement must also be false. Such a person seems thus doubly trapped: incapable of knowing that he is in the Matrix, and even incapable of successfully expressing the thought that he might be in the Matrix! (Could this be why at one point Morpheus tells Neo that "no one can be told what the Matrix is"?)
The argument is controversial, but it is noteworthy because it shows that the kind of situation described in The Matrix raises not just the expected philosophical issues about knowledge and skepticism, but more general issues regarding meaning, language, and the relationship between the mind and the world.