Tuesday 16 April 2013

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
I am the captain of my soul.



Sunday 27 January 2013

On the craft of morality


Each one of us has a set of beliefs and there are many aspects of these beliefs that quite often go unchallenged, unquestioned. For example, most of us, if not all, see kindness and sympathy as a virtue. Most of us think that freedom is better than slavery, or equality is better than inequality. These are the beliefs which we never question, challenge or ponder over. The line of thinking that involuntarily comes to mind is that how could inequality be better than equality. Such line of thinking, to our psyche, persistently appears so obvious, rational and therefore, unshakable. 

But nothing could be farther from truth. In On the Genealogy of Morality, Friedrich Nietzsche argues that all moralities are designed and they serve the purpose of those who created that morality. There are fundamentally two types of people who create moral values: masters and slaves. According to Nietzsche, in ancient Greek and Roman societies, the predominant morality was that created by the masters. In those societies, the elites or aristocrats, in accordance with their practical circumstances, valued “nobility, strength and power” over “weakness, cowardice and timidity”. They considered it a good thing to perform their duties to their equals only. They found it derogatory to help those who were weak, inferior and oppressed. Instead, they inspired fear and inferiority in them to gain power over them. In time, the superior persons in the society shaped a moral code that made strength a good thing and weakness a bad thing. And this entire conferring of honor on things was based on a simple sentiment: what is good to me is good in itself and what is bad to me is bad in itself. If you lived in such society, you would probably have believed slavery to be a natural order or equality to be "a collective degradation of men".

When the masters created their own morality, the slaves retaliated by what Nietzsche called slave morality. It was a reaction to the master’s oppression. It villainized the oppressors and gave birth to the concept of evil. It intended to make the master feel guilty about himself because he oppressed the weak, the needy and the unemancipated. It brought warm heart, obliging hand, humility, charity and pity to honor. It valued those qualities which highlighted the plight of the sufferers. In other words, the slaves chose humility and sympathy to be moral virtues because this suited their own position and because it demonized the masters whom they hated. The moral values were made moral in an attempt to conceal the creator’s selfishness.

According to Nietzsche, in the struggle to power, the slave morality triumphed the master morality. This was because the powerful were few in number compared to the masses of the weak. The weak corrupted the strong into believing that “good” means “tending to ease suffering” and “evil” means “tending to inspire fear”. This was the most intelligent revenge designed by the weak. Nietzsche considered the biblical principle of turning the other cheek and kindness towards fellow humans as the manifestation of same slave morality. Religion was, to him, just a tool of the dominant class to indoctrinate the society in such a way to best serve their own interests.




In the same way, he considered the rise of democracy as a part of the same emasculating ideology. Democracy seeks to offer everyone freedom and equal representation which is exactly what the weak wanted. The predominant belief in our society that democracy is better than dictatorship is a testimony to the victory of the slaves over the masters. This old invention of the weak has permeated into every part of our socio-economic lives. We can't help but see the ideas like utilitarianism, liberalism, and communism in the same light. Their "priestly vindictiveness" has conquered the psyche of a modern man.

So, what we consider as a moral is not actually moral in literal sense. These morals are good not because of their inherent goodness, but because of their usefulness to those who believe and act according to them. It is equally good or equally wrong to help others. Find who you are because depending on your position, your weapon of morality should change. If you are the one in need of help, your morals should be pity, kindness, friendship etc. If you are the one who has a command over the one who needs help, your morals could be power, strength and even cruelty.

P.S. I have skipped the part where Nietzsche argues in favor of master morality on very rational grounds. Personally, I still don't endorse the concept of "the higher path" for higher individuals at the cost of lower individuals, but it makes me reflect upon my own morality and its true identity. While it does not change the basic tenets of my moral thinking, it sure provides a new perspective, a new way of looking at it.

Tuesday 15 January 2013

The Alchemy of the Reality and the Self


For a major portion of my life, I have found the world a regular and sensible place. This state of mind has, since childhood, provided a sense of meaning to my own existence and a sense of identity to everything around me. I have, inadvertently and involuntarily, felt ‘accustomed’ to the status quo. Everything I have experienced, thought, and done has added up to an eloquently usual picture. And since there was no aberration or bizarreness, such a picture of the world has always appeared to me so elegant, so beautiful and so majestic.

But in the last few years, the world has started to look an unusual place to me. In a state of confusion and bewilderment, I have made a naïve attempt to dissect things into more fundamental level just as a kid makes an attempt to dismantle a toy he is puzzled by. I thought that I could make sense of the toy by understanding its constituents, its inner parts. But ironical as it may seem, things turned out exactly the opposite. Before I could have realized, I had ventured into a brave new world where most of the things were, at best, absurd and, at worst, meaningless. As I painfully figured out to my surprise and shock, my own endeavors had shaken the very foundations of my world. I realized that all my life was a lie and even my thoughts had betrayed me so far. What was earlier an axiomatic truth, a usual course of event, and an absolute order- was now something else entirely. I realized that I was just a pawn in the bigger scheme. I found my conclusions wrong not because I concluded wrongly but because the assumptions behind those conclusions were, in the first place, fallacious. The deep-seated beliefs, the long-held observations, the indoctrinated thoughts had left my side when I needed them most to put sense to my world. Like a lone wanderer gets lost in an unknown desert, I had gotten lost in the desert of what we fondly call reality. Or probably, I was just coming to senses that I was lost.

In these dark times I saw my theories change, ideologies mutate, and view-points modify. The thoughts of the old times … well …became thoughts of the old times. The ‘person’ in me changed forever. And climactically, this metamorphosis was not such a pleasant experience as I thought it would be. The normal world was beautiful while the new unusual world had no concept like beauty. The old values were full of charm, optimism and hope; the new values were devoid of any such thing. The old perspective had the bliss of ignorance, it had ways to deal with the fundamental questions; the new perspective had the curse of wisdom which was all too murky inside its boundary and which simply denied any explanation to the deeper questions with sheer nonchalance. The old life was an exciting, enthusiastic existence; the new one a mere mindless, relentless game. But for me, the greatness of the old had given way to the mundaneness of the new. In a short span of time, I had taken an irreversible, and detrimental, leap of shift from elegance to inelegance, grandness to ordinariness, and excitement to boredom. And there was no coming back to the old world because although it was persistently beautiful, it was still an illusion, a hypnosis.

And it is perhaps the value of ‘truth’ which singlehandedly outclasses the virtues of the old world. The pain of being wiser is not as hurtful as the pain of being under deception of the greater scheme. Even though I have not lived long, I seem to have seen enough of the commonsense feelings and the mainstream reality. Grown weary of this "fake sense of the sensible", I place the highest value on truth and, truth alone. This blog is simply a testimony to this feeling and this feeling is solely mine. And at no cost should such feelings be forgotten or lost because if they are lost, so would I be.

Therefore, I write this blog to remind me in future that when I finish off my duel with evolution, when I meet life beyond the borders of right or wrong, when I chase away the darkness of a subjective, ego-centric human life and when I have nothing to care about in this whole world except the profoundest reason and abyssal mystery, I, my true self, would have to set out on a journey which is so ironical in nature that it may lead me nowhere or perhaps everywhere, that it may be utterly meaningless or perhaps full of meaning or, that it may be  very important or perhaps very futile. Last it may for a fleeting second, such a journey, such an experience of the unattainable, such a moment of true romance would be more fulfilling than a lifetime spent in the awe of the old world and in the glitter of an illusive existence.

Monday 3 December 2012

All the World's a Perspective.

I read these lines somewhere:

There is beauty... in sky and cloud and sea, in lilies and in sunsets, in the glow of bracken in autumn and in the enticing greenness of a leafy spring. Nature, indeed, is infinitely beautiful, and she seems to wear her beauty as she wears color or sound. Why then should her beauty belong to us rather than to her?

These lines portray an exquisitely beautiful picture of nature and expound the idea that nature, by itself, has certain inherent properties and intrinsic values. Like blueness is inherent to sky and redness to rose, there are some facts and properties which are obstinately integral to nature and its underlying reality. But does the reality indeed have an objective value or is it a subjective response of the human mind? Does it perpetually exist independent of an observer’s perspective or does it cease to exist outside the context of a spectator?

When I look at grass, I find it green. So, does that mean that the grass is green? No doubt, we judge greenness without having any liberty to refuse it. But if one makes way into the grass till the sub-atomic realm, he will find that there the grass does not look green at all. There are electrons buzzing around and the grass which appeared mostly solid is now mostly empty. He might even observe some quantum weirdness there but everything he observes is very unlike the grass he saw earlier. So, is the grass really green? Is it really solid as it appears? A sensible answer would be that the grass, indeed, is not green and not solid and in reality, is made up of sub-atomic particles, doing their own business at their level. Since we happen to see it from a distance, we see it solid (an averaged out behavior) and since it mostly bounces off photons whose lengths lie around 550 nm, we see it as something greenish (a trait which living beings acquired during evolution to distinguish photons of different lengths).

Let us take another example. When we eat sugar, we find it sweet. But is sugar, whose one molecule is made up of 12 carbon atoms, 22 hydrogen atoms, and 11 oxygen atoms, really sweet? The answer is no. It is the shape of sucrose molecule interlocked with the receptors on the tongue, which is experienced as sweetness.

The examples above bring home the point that the greenness of the grass or the sweetness of the sugar is nothing but a gift or should I say rather a persistent illusion manufactured out of the spectator’s mind or organ. This reduces the literal reality of things to a perspectival reality. In this school of thought, the reality we experience is a matter of perspective. In here, the perceived reality is the outcome of our subjective view-point of a world which is starkly abstract by itself. Everything we observe or experience appears the way it appears because this is how the true underlying reality would look like when seen from our position and when experienced using our organs. So, the perceived reality is, at best, a distorted, localized, biased reflection of the reality as it exists.

This puzzle of subjective and objective reality does not end here, but permeates to even more fundamental level. The subjectivity extends to phenomena which were, for centuries, thought to be objective and observer independent. This revolution occurred when Einstein, one of the most formidable thinkers of all time, took the last remainder of physical objectivity from the notion of space and time.

Until Einstein’s time, everybody believed that time is an immutable property of the real world; that it flows at the same rate for everyone. But Einstein figured out that even time is not free from the subjectivity of an observer. He made a bold statement that as one moves at faster speeds, time starts to slow down. Many people would have a tough time understanding how time could slow down, but when one lets go of his biased common sense, one could realize the serious implications of Einstein’s vision. What this means is that as one starts moving at increasingly greater speeds, all the processes start to slow, down to the atomic level. For example, a person moving at 0.9c would appear to speak slowly, scratch his head slowly and age slowly, relative to a person who is, say, at rest. So, now everybody have their own private time, their own private clocks, with reference to which to they see their worlds. We have come to call this slowing down of time “time dilation”.

There is another astounding effect of Einstein’s relativity: “length contraction”. When an observer travels at higher speeds, the world he sees appears contracted or shortened. And this contraction of his world happens from everywhere i.e. the relative dimensions are all proportionately shortened.  I can’t say how Einstein must have felt after these realizations but I surely felt a strangely mysterious feeling after fully understanding it.

So, back in 1905, what Einstein did was that he removed the age-old objective stamp from our feeling of time and space. The time we see passing through our lives and the space we feel surrounding us is all relative and our own subjective view-point. To make the point clearer, I can give another example. Imagine there are creatures which always travel at 0.99 times speed of light and these creatures have evolved just like we have. How would the world look like from their point of view? When we do mathematics, we find that if we stationary beings feel one hr has elapsed, they would feel that only 8.5 minutes have elapsed. Their notion of space would be shrunken by 50 times i.e. everything we see of a particular size, they would always see it shrunken by 50 times. 

An obvious corollary of relativity is that if you don't move in space, you move in time and vice versa. Imagine if there are creatures which always traveled at speed of light, they would not move in time. They would feel that time is stationary and space is flowing through them as if they have no control over it. Thinking carefully, don't we too feel the same way but order reversed for space and time? Since we are on the mass-dominant side of mass-energy spectrum, we hardly move in space and that's why we feel space is stationary and is all there, but for us, time moves through our lives as if we have no control over it. Isn't the reality the way we look at it?  

Thus, we return to the point we started from: The reality we perceive implacably depends on our position and is no more universally absolute. The world is only a perspective.

But something is amiss here. In the example of grass, there was an underlying objective reality that the grass is made of sub-atomic particles and we found it green because we saw it from our specific position, both literally and figuratively. But in the case of space time, what is the underlying reality? Whose time is correct? Whose version of space is real? Of course, no observer gets precedence over other and hence no version of space or time can win.

Take a simple example. A spaceship takes a flight from Earth and lands on Moon after a time. Two observers, one standing on Earth and the other in spaceship itself, observe this phenomenon. They don’t agree on the time elapsed between take-off and landing and the distance travelled by the spaceship, owing to relativity. But they both must agree on the gap between the events in four-dimensional space-time. This gives rise to the idea that space and time are not separate and hence two observers don’t agree separately on the space and time, but must agree on space-time. Hence, the underlying reality is space-time and not space and time. This reality is objective and when viewed by differently-positioned observers leads to the drastically different views of their worlds.

This reminds me of an important point that not only the reality we see is a matter of perspective but also this perspective is narrow and limited. For example, if I hold a pen in my hand, can I see the pen fully? No matter which angle I look the pen from, I always see a partial view of it. The reason being that with our eyes, we project a 2-dimensional image on retina of an object which is actually 3-dimensional. The reality of pen is 3-dimensional but we see only a 2-dimensional projection of it. That’s why we can never see it fully. And the same goes for the reality out there. The world, according to Einstein, is a 4-dimensional space-time and we see events unfolding in 3 spatial dimensions (again, owing to the way we evolved). That’s why we don’t see an objective space and an objective time. That is why we see the planetary paths curved because even if they move in a straight line in the 4-dimensional space-time, their projection on 3-dimensional space appears curved. The conclusion is loud and clear: The reality exists objectively and since we see it from our narrow and specific perspectives, our perceived reality becomes subjective and distorted picture of true reality.

But just when there seemed to be an apparent consensus over an objective reality and its distortion by our subjective observation, a revolution in science called Quantum Mechanics shattered all the widely held intuitive notions about an objective reality. It destroyed the possibility of knowing what is really going on and even rendered the question of an objective reality meaningless.

There is a long list of counter-intuitive phenomena in quantum mechanics, but if there is one experiment which alone sums up almost all the quantum mystery, it would be the infamous Double Slit Experiment. When we fire electrons through two slits, we obtain an interference pattern indicating that electrons traveled through space as wave. But when it arrives at its destination, it gives up its energy as tiny particles. So, in reality, is the electron a particle or a wave? According to intuitive notion of objective reality, the electron must be in some form (an objective form of existence, known to the universe) and it is this form which we sometimes see as a wave and sometimes as a particle. This idea was held by Einstein all his life and is called Hidden variable theory. But experiments in last century have proved that these speculations are false.

This brings us to a depressing conclusion that behind our observations, the electron could be anything. There is a fundamental uncertainty about the electron’s reality and even the universe or the particle itself has no idea about it. This is summed up in the famous uncertainty principle which rules out the possibility of knowing both the exact position (wave behavior) and exact momentum (particle behavior) together. The important point is that this uncertainty is not to us humans alone, but to the universe itself. As Sir Arthur Eddington says that a physical object has an ontologically undetermined component that is not due to the epistemological limitations of physicists' understanding. "The Uncertainty Principle, then, would not necessarily be due to hidden variables but to an in-determinism in nature itself."

In the context of Schrodinger’s Cat example, as long as the box is close, we don't and can't know whether the cat is alive or dead. It is only when we open the box, we find it either alive or dead. Similarly, it is only when we observe the universe, we create the reality. When we observe the sub atomic particles (or waves), we collapse its wave-function and see it as particle or wave. Behind observations, what it actually was, is fundamentally unknowable.

For a long time in my life, I kept thinking that may be one day, we humans could read God's mind. But how could we read God's mind if He himself is not sure anymore? Quantum mechanics, to me, has seriously undermined that quest and has even changed the goal of Physics. It tells us that we can understand the world only when we observe it because "the moon might not be there when you don't look at it."

Werner Heisenberg once said:
"... It is possible to ask whether there is still concealed behind the statistical universe of perception a 'true' universe in which the law of causality (=determinism) would be valid. But such speculations seem to us to be without value and meaningless, for physics must confine itself to the description of the relationships between perceptions."

We should, therefore, refrain from asking questions like “Is an electron a wave or a particle?” We should talk only about the observed behavior. So, a meaningful question would be “What is an electron observed to be when it passes through slits?” The answer would be “it acts as waves.” Also, “What is an electron observed to be when it interacts with the screen?” The answer would be “as particle”. What the electron really is behind the observations is a meaningless question. We can’t and should not ask questions about the reality outside of the context of it being observed.
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So, what is our opinion about the point which we started from? Is there an objective reality? Do we see the reality subjectively? From above discussions, we can conclude that an objective reality does not exist. The world as it exists is actually a ridiculously huge wave-function where everything from electrons to cars to humans plays the game of indeterminism or the game of probability. The behavior is dominant in subatomic world because they are very light in mass and hence their wavelengths are appreciable, which is why we can only speculate about a range of possibilities in this world rather than a single deterministic possibility. But we are little fortunate in the real world. Here, the objects have more masses and hence their wavelengths are negligibly small. Hence, the uncertainties are too small to be noticed. And the world seems sensibly deterministic for our purposes.

I believe that quantum theory describes the world most accurately. In our real world, everything is blurred. There are no exact positions, no exact momentum, not even the law of causality. An electron can, indeed, be at two places at once. Everything falls under the realm of possibility because the world itself is chaotic and messy. However, at our level, we see the world so organized where it’s is possible to predict future, where law of causality holds true and where there is no spooky action at a distance. This happens because of two reasons (1) we deal with heavier masses and hence uncertainty is too small to be noticed. It’s like saying we can predict a baseball’s position to 10 decimals but not to infinite number of decimals. But even those 10 decimals seem more than accurate and we perceive it as determinism. (2) We only see a probabilistically averaged-out behavior. For example, an electron can really literally go through a wall. But a baseball can never. This is because the probability of a trillion electrons together passing through the wall at the same time is very less. Hence we never see objects disappearing through the walls. In the same way, entanglement, a quantum phenomenon, never happens in real world. This is because it is probabilistically very improbable for a trillion particles to all suddenly affect the other trillion particles at a distance.

Thus, we only see our world as we see it because we see from a specific position. If there were evolved creatures of dimensions of Plank's length, they would indeed find their reality whole lot stranger than ours. Since we have evolved for millennia under these circumstances, we have come to believe them as a default view of the world. That’s why, if a cause does not come before an outcome, we are shocked. That’s why, if we see absurdly random and schizophrenic behavior of particles, we find it strange. That’s why when an electron moves through a wall, we find it repulsive. The reality is not like that. It’s absurdly random, confused and disorderly. There is no rule and no certainty. This reminds me of a dialogue of Dark Knight: “The only sensible way to live in this world is without rules”. God does seem to abide by this rule and this rule alone, no matter how repeatedly and persistently our cognition tries to convince us otherwise.











Sunday 4 November 2012

An Argument Against Myopic Thinking

In Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act II, Scene 2, Hamlet, Prince of Denmark said:

What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like a god! 

I may agree to 'a piece of work' part, but should I agree to the 'noble in reason' part as well? Should I endorse the viewpoint that man is an owner of admirable qualities? or Should I shrug off this phrase as a spell of romantic thinking and admit to an unromantic, even cynical, picture of a man?  Well, as it turns out that, while we humans are indeed noble in reason in many aspects, we, at the same time, are the opposite too. When faced with problems, we, at times, tend not to resolve the underlying problem, but to just deal with the tip of the iceberg. We invent shortcuts and short-term solutions as a response to deeper systemic problems. We succumb to our own myopic thinking and thus, inadvertently structure our society around the hidden fractures.

In this blog, I intend to throw a light on such kind of myopic thinking and such fractures that go right through the fabric of our society.
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I shall start with the case of prisons. Have you ever pondered why do we need prisons? A simplistic explanation that is usually given is that some people don't stick to the rules of society. They become a threat to the rest of the society and hence they need to be kept away from the society. A plausible argument, but very myopic. When we propose to lock up the supposedly-bad people, are we looking at the root of the problem or are we just trying to solve the problem temporarily? If prison indeed would be a solution to anything, then over time it should have reduced the number of criminals in the society. Well, has it? 



The clear failure of prisons to either act as a deterrent of crime or as a place of rehabilitation indicates a major flaw in our thinking: that by choosing to imprison the culprits, we choose to go the easy way; the way which can suppress the problem in the short term, but is of no good in the long term.

My argument is that the correct way to deal with the crime conundrum is not to lock up those who perpetrate it, but rather address the very causes that perpetrate the perpetrators.













 

As the graph above indicates that there is an inverse relationship between crime rates and economic inequality, we can conclusively suggest that rather than spending our money on making more prisons and therein locking up more people, we should focus on making our society more egalitarian; we should endeavor to reduce poverty, provide good education to everybody, provide employment and a good standard of living; we should ensure that kids are brought up in homes that are free from violence. These steps, unlike our myopic ways of thinking, shall ensure a lesser violent society in the long term. However, it should not be inferred that prisons can be completely done away with. An utopian society, a world without prisons is mostly a myth, but at the same time we should not turn a blind eye to the fact that prison is not the optimum solution for the ills of the society and hence attempts like deprivation of liberty, dehumanizing the confined are simply short-sighted methods- products of our own myopic thinking.
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The second example of the epidemic of myopia that sweeps over our society is in the educational system: in the form of the grading system or the ranking based system. We tend to manage by numbers or letters, which, in my point of view, is far too simplistic. We aim to measure and compare the learning of students, but to achieve that we invent a shortcut method: "grade them". We aim to motivate the pupils to study and end up taking away the very essence of education itself. Let's see how.

In our society, grades have become such a powerful social and symbolic force that grades and grades alone determine the future prospects and opportunities for a student. Consequently, schools become a competition and grades an obsession; in the backdrop, true learning takes a backseat. Exams and league tables, more often than not, pollute the learning environment and make the pursuit of education look like a rat race. Students feel afraid to pursue their true passion, because in a ranking based system, they would fall behind in the subjects which they don't love.

The irony of the grading system, therefore, is that while it seeks to incentivize education, it does the opposite. To show how removing grades can liberate our education system, the best example I can present is that of the Finnish Miracle. In 2006, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) conducted a survey of 15-year-olds' academic skills from 57 nations. Finland came first in science by a whopping 5% margin, second in math (edged out by one point by Chinese Taipei), and third in reading. And this has been a trend, more or less, over the years. So, how does Finland churn out so many avid learners year after year? The key is that Finnish schools rely very less on the grading system. "Students in Finland sit no mandatory exams until the age of 17-19. Teacher based assessments are used by schools to monitor progress and these are not graded, scored or compared; but instead are descriptive and utilized in a formative manner to inform feedback and assessment for learning." Great emphasis is put on trust and well-being. In short, there is no corrosive competition, unjust comparison or unsound evaluation. Finnish schools take away exactly the effects the grading system engenders and this is exactly what makes them shine.
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The third example of our myopic thinking is the reservation system or preferential treatment system, which is supposed  "to improve the well-being of perceived backward and under-represented communities" defined primarily by their 'caste', 'religion', 'color', 'gender' etc. In many countries we observe that whenever certain group or class of people is not doing well, the government provides them free lunches. In my point of view, this is plainly a short-term thinking. If you want to build your muscles, should you take a pill and get the muscles overnight or should you hit the gym and exercise regularly to achieve the same? We should cure not the symptoms but the underlying cause of illness. Let me clarify the point with examples.

Take the reservation system in India. And think carefully. Should we provide reservations to those not doing well and directly help them come in the mainstream( which, by the way, is against the utilitarian principle as well) or should we address the root cause which includes providing them better infrastructure, better education and making them capable enough to compete with the rest? Instead of giving them separate quota in jobs and other social opportunities, should the government not ensure that every kid from backward communities get little more attention in primary schools? Why not make the foundations stronger, for without proper foundation all attempts to make a stable building would be futile? 

Another recent example that comes to mind in this context is the case of the sub-prime mortgage crisis. A number of reasons are cited for the crisis ranging from securitization practices to misaligned incentives to unethical bankers. But the source of the crisis lies somewhere else. The crisis owes its existence to the short-term thinking of the US government: the myopic policy of giving free credit to those falling behind in the economy. Raghuram Rajan, in his book "Fault Lines" summarizes this fault-line in the following paragraph.



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Thus we see that we tend to look for easy solutions to the deeper problems of human society. Though at times, they might appear as the best possible solutions, but in retrospect, the shortcuts do more harm than good. If you want to solve a problem, go to its root cause. Though there are many pressing political conditions which force the policy makers to take the easy route, one can never justify the ills of a myopic policy. Period!




 

Monday 29 October 2012

Human Nature: Biological Inevitability or Cultural Conditioning?

There are many aspects of human existence- like war, morality etc- which are quite often attributed to the nativist school of thought. In contrast to the empiricist or tabula rasa view, this viewpoint holds that human beings are endowed with certain inborn, innate instincts which are hard-wired into the brain and these deeply entrenched features explain why humans wage war or why religion is so ubiquitous across ages and civilizations or why there is one true morality binding upon all of us. These characteristics of human existence, psychological nativists claim, are engendered by human biology and thus are an intractably inherent part of human nature. But in reality, innateness is not what determines the omnipresence of war or religion but cultural and historical conditioning. Put in a different way, the source of these dominant behaviors of human nature stem not from our genetic make-up but rather from the contemporary cultural practices and codes of conduct.

Take the case of war. It is naturally assumed that human beings categorically possess the animal instinct of aggression and hostility owing to the continuous struggle for survival. Why else would there be wars in all ages of human history? But as Margret Mead explains in the essay War not a Biological Necessity that war is not contingent upon factors like human nature or endless struggle for resources or frustration arising out of biologically determined drives. Warfare is more of a practice, a cultural ritual, an invention. If people have an idea about warfare as a way to handle certain circumstances i.e if war is the appropriate form of behavior, then when such circumstances appear, people will inevitably go to war. On the other hand, if people don't have an idea about war as a cultural norm or practice, they would either submit to the enemy or commit suicide themselves or  quietly go about their business or find some way to vent out the anger, but they would never go to war.The point in emphasized in the following paragraphs by Margret Mead.

There is a way of behaving which is known to a given people and labelled as an appropriate form of behaviour; a bold and warlike people like the Sioux or the Maori may label warfare as desirable as well as possible, a mild people like the Pueblo Indians may label warfare as undesirable, but to the minds of both peoples the possibility of warfare is present. Their thoughts, their hopes, their plans are oriented about this idea--that warfare may be selected as the way to meet some situation.

And, conversely, peoples who do not know of duelling will not fight duels, even though their wives are seduced and their daughters ravished; they may on occasion commit murder but they will not fight duels. Cultures which lack the idea of the vendetta will not meet every quarrel in this way. A people can use only the forms it has. So the Balinese have their special way of dealing with a quarrel between two individuals: if the two feel that the causes of quarrel are heavy, they may go and register their quarrel in the temple before the gods, and, making offerings, they may swear never to have anything to do with each other again

Warfare may be an invention, a cultural code of conduct, but is it true of morality as well? Is it not that some people are morally good; people who help others genuinely; people who can't see the pain of others? Jesse Prinz in his book "The Emotional Construction of Morals" proclaims otherwise, making the case that there is no such thing as innate goodness and the moral values of an individual is derived from cultural conditioning and emotional osmosis. The key idea is that we learn the values in very young age in the form of codes of conduct. When we scream, throw things, hurt other kids or make a noisy disturbance,our parents correct these behaviors and they usually do this by emotional conditioning. For example, parents threaten physical punishment( Do You want a slap?), they withdraw love( I am not going to play with you), they cast out( Go away!) etc. These methods cause a negative emotion in the child and thus it gets internalized in the form of morals. As and when children come in contact with society and culture, they imbibe more of the norms and morals present in the society. So later on, if they find homosexuality or polygamy outrageous, it is not because they being good are grossed out by bad things but because the society they lived in never considered it morally good and thus indoctrinated them through emotional osmosis.

Morality, in this sense, is not a standalone feeling of an individual but the collective attitude of a culture. This is why morals vary so much across places and cultures. One group's moral values might be immoral for other groups. For example, today we consider cannibalism bad, but in history, 34% of the cultures practiced cannibalism. In ancient Rome, blood sports, decapitation etc were pursued for recreation. Public torture and execution were performed in many European countries before the 18th century. And the people of these cultures didn't find them morally outrageous because it was culture in the first place which conditioned them. Thus, it would be plausible to say that our moral viewpoint of the world is mutable and insular, impacted solely by the cultures and societies we happen to inhabit.

It is, therefore, evident that the inventions of culture permeate through our lives in such a way that they appear innate to human nature.As it turns out, however, that these traits are not the part of us but of our culture. This gives us hope that if we correctly invent cultural practices and codes, we might overcome many problems in our society which are prematurely associated with hard-wired problems of human nature. Blood sports was such an invention, but we made better invention- the contemporary version of sports- which is not only much more efficient and harmless but also much more thrilling.





 

Sunday 28 October 2012

Why so Serious?

Like so many posts before, this post may also never see the light of day, for after completing them I would have achieved the goal of having vented out my feelings and thus would not have required the world to know about it. But if you, my friends, are reading it, then probably I changed my mind and am ready to face the repercussions of it.

I usually prefer to keep my unworldly thoughts to myself; thoughts that most mortals, if not all, find trivial and irrelevant. Experience has taught me that doing otherwise leads to either me being dubbed abnormal or me being made fun of by others( whom I, with no offense, now call 'mere mortals' and 'biochemical puppets' who have no idea of what they are talking about). Either ways, however, I am at the receiving end. Still, sometimes my thoughts are so irrepressible that they may get the better of me.

Yesterday, while at office, I was submersed in such unworldly thoughts and had no desire to do the mundane formatting issues. And I let that desire come out to one of my colleagues and said something like this: " let the issues come..dekh lenge..let's relax a bit". To which the reply came something like this: "itna cool mat bano..kaam bahut baki hai". Well. I didn't reply but the same day, one of my friends called up and started discussing career prospects with me and then my thoughts and feelings started overflowing.

To put everything in picture, let me start with what I meant by being cool. I meant that let's look at our position in the universe. What are we? We are not even a spec of dust in the grand scheme of things. Our position in the universe is lesser than that of a bacteria on planet Earth. Still, we tend to think we are so important and we know so much. We place so much importance on everything we do. What I meant by being cool is what this picture is saying:


Our anthropomorphic tendencies rule our lives which we all have inherited through Evolution(remember Darwin?). The consequences are numerous: We invented religion, we made Gods in human form, we made rituals to please Gods. we attributed lightening to God's anger, we made Earth the center of universe. For thousands of years, we continued to live in illusion: an illusion that we are somehow important, that the cosmos has planned it all out for us and us only. Still, time and time again, reality has hit us hard in our face. Let's see how:

We found that Earth is not the center of the universe, but Sun is. Then we found that Sun is not the center but just one of the stars among the billions of stars in our galaxy. Then we found that our galaxy alone does not encapsulate our universe but is just one of the pieces among the billions of them. And lately, we found that our universe may not be the only universe but just a bubble in an infinite froth of universes.

Still, we were hopeful that in spite of all this, we still are part of this grand design: that we are made up of the same matter that everything else in the universe is made up of. But like before, we again were wrong. Most of the matter and energy in the universe is dark- not made up of electrons, protons as we all are made up of, but of something altogether different. The particles we are made up of form only 5% of visible universe and damn, we can't see most of the matter in our universe. So much for our importance in the cosmos. Nature reveals itself as if it has no care of us.

Still, we believe that at least on Earth, we see a lot, that we see our beautiful world. Well, just look at the picture below and find how much of the Electromagnetic Spectrum we really see.



Bored of seeing, go to audio frequencies. There also, we hear only tiny fraction of whole range of audio frequencies.

Come to dimensions and you will believe that the three dimensional world we see is that is all. But oops! The universe may have many more dimensions than we seem to perceive of it. Moreover, unlike we may feel, space we see around us is all embedded with time( and yes, time is as real as space itself). We may have the illusion of time going forward, but in reality past, present and future all are present simultaneously just as space is present here and there simultaneously. This means that may be everything that is happening or will happen has already happened. If you want to see Beethoven composing his 5th symphony, just come out of the universe and look at the space-time fabric below. You will find him somewhere in the this fabric: or if you want to see your great great granddaughter, just come out and have a look at this fabric. All is present here.

I quote Albert Einstein: "What does a fish know of the water it swims in?" He asked this question as a way of pointing out that we humans have not a clue of the real nature of the cosmos in which we live. Our eyes lie to us, our cognitive patterns sabotage us. For example, do we see space around ourselves curved? We don't, but in reality Earth has curved space around us just like a heavy ball would curve a rubber sheet. And that is why when I let go of my bag from 7th floor, it falls not because something mysteriously draws it but because the 'bechara' bag follows the curved space(preferably space-time) created by Earth; it is very similar to the fact that on a curved rubber sheet, if one puts a ball around the edge it will move towards the center of the sheet. Many more wonders to tell, but I shall restrain myself here.

Well, we still won't believe that we are nothing. We thought for centuries and still do that God created us, otherwise how else can, a human body or a human brain, out of a trillion cells assemble together out of itself? Somebody must have done it, ain't it? And then to crush all our narcissistic beliefs Charles Darwin came along with the phenomenon of Evolution: The second greatest idea to me after Einstein's Special and General Relativity in whole of the history of human civilization. The idea was that we started from non-living beings which turned into simple life-forms some billion years ago and has been evolving towards complex organisms with time. Well, if you don't believe how an organ as complex as human brain can evolve, just find some documentary by Richard Dawkins on Evolution. He will make you believe in the power of Evolution.

Now, after having written so much about the futility of our efforts to inflate our importance, I don't want to go to the realm of free will, which, if understood in its truest sense, would suck all beauty and magnificence from life and render it utterly meaningless. Would you not hate it if somebody calls you a chemical being walking by, subject to the inputs beyond itself and has no self of itself?

Time and time again, we invented things to place importance on ourselves, oblivious to the real nature of  reality. But reality must dawn upon us sometime. We must not take human affairs too seriously. The point is not of running away from harsh realities of life, but of not living in illusion and therefore, treading life with knowledge and humor. Besides, we all must have a sense of humility, no matter where we are, because even the best of human civilization have little or no idea of reality. I admire greats like Albert Einstein but I also believe:" What Einstein today is, was Aristotle of his age." We have come a long way since Aristotle and we have a long way to go from Einstein.It may even be impossible to have a command over the real scheme of things.(Idea elaborated in my previous blog)

So, I am anything but 'cool'. While I must do things to fill my stomach(like formatting), I must also do things which are in the realm of reality otherwise would I be any better than a herd of swine which follows the basic evolutionary needs and urges all the time, unaware that there are other things as well.

Whether you appreciate or reject my thoughts, I sign off with this quote of Albert Einstein and the link to the video which I found very stimulating and thrilling.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Y0ky1-qKIc

"The fairest thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. He who knows it not and can no longer wonder, no longer feel amazement, is as good as dead, a snuffed-out candle. It was the experience of mystery — even if mixed with fear — that engendered religion. A knowledge of the existence of something we cannot penetrate, of the manifestations of the profoundest reason and the most radiant beauty, which are only accessible to our reason in their most elementary forms-it is this knowledge and this emotion that constitute the truly religious attitude"