“X” is power

In a scene of the movie, “J. Edgar” – A biographical movie about FBI director, “J. Edgar Hoover”-…… Hoover takes Gandy (His personal secretary) to the Library of Congress, and shows her the card catalog system he devised. He muses about how easy it would be to solve crimes if every citizen were as easily identifiable as the books in the library……. Although Edgar was thinking of having a centralized catalogue of all citizens fingerprints but now the social networking site, “Facebook” made it really easy to make every citizen identifiable as easily as finding a book in library of congress. Facebook do not use fingerprints but instead life-prints. When Edgar said, “information is power”, he might not had an idea that one day, “information” can create “Arab spring” (A clear goal; democracy) and another day, it creates, “Arab winter” (Confusion; what does it mean?). You may have heard a lot that, “Money is power” and then you learn that there is a common practice of “Fractional reserve banking” (One deposits 100 dollars for example to a bank, the bank keeps 20 dollars as reserve and lends out 80 dollars out of it which naturally in ways ends in another bank and it just goes on). Yes, information is power but the real power is in perceptions. Doesn’t matter, you catalogue it, reserve it or rationalize it. 

 For few days, I was feeling that I am going to get cold as there were signs of fatigue but to a restless nature, rest is a punishment. What else I could do except doodling and hanging on in hope of getting something done. I heard that Che Guevara, the famous revolutionary figure was suffering from asthma but still he set to travel South American continent on a motorcycle for four months but ended up traveling on motorcycle, steamship, raft, horse, bus, and hitchhiking, covering more than 8,000 kilometres (5,000 mi) in nine months instead. He just wanted to see what he had just read in books but this travel totally changed his perspective about life, people and government. The rest is what everybody knows. I wanted to watch the movie “The motorcycle diaries” that is based on Che’s travels and tell the fatigue (you are not as good as asthma) that I am not somebody who gives in to pains (Sometimes bragging tastes as sweet as ice cream)… Information, if creates a reasonable perception can give a purpose that changes life/lives. Che’s travel provided him the information that was right for the recipe of a “revolutionary perception”.

In the morning, I wrote in my notebook while taking notes, we are not just in the age of “information” but we are “thinking in paradigm of information”. The whole evolution is based on variations and mutations of “genes” and even “reductionist evolutionists” like to call it, “selfish gene” as everything else is just meant to propagate them. Wonderful huh, with this coin, they are the real “Illuminati “. No, we just can’t blame only evolutionary biologists to be trapped in “information paradigm”. In fact, it began with Philosophers. To Plato, it was not acceptable that “information” with its excellence perish in the dust of time so he created an “ideal world” and called the changing reality as its shadow. What Plato was calling shadow of ideals; human civilizations were just one of its categories. Being the product of information (Mankind’s great minds), they were not immune to falls. The falls of civilizations were the fallibility of human minds and there were always efforts to find ways to make human minds or information infallible. Although, by now, I get irritated to use the “I think, therefore I am” declaration of Rene Descartes but I have to refer to it again as it was yet another reductionist effort to find a way to make human mind infallible. After failing again and again, the Philosopher tried to copy the nature. If nature has created DNA, an infallible carrier of information then perhaps the “language” as carrier of information is the tool that can make human mind infallible. So far all efforts to create a language that make human mind infallible went in vain. We can do math but we can’t speak mathematics. When we say 99%, we don’t mean any figure but instead we mean majority common people. It is what happens when we try to speak math. 

 It doesn’t matter how hard one tries to be exact, how detailed a correlation one makes or how centralized the data become, at the end it is the “X” –the perception- that is the power. Right perceptions are revolutionary and wrong ones “confusions”…

Walking Across.....

I don’t know, whether it is an addiction or ritual but I like to call it ritual as it sounds positive. So in general, the best of part of my day is the ritual of watching a part of some historical Korean drama while taking my lunch (Once, I was calling it, “fill in the blanks” meaning to enjoy doing my favorite things in time-gaps instead of waiting for a leisure time but now it falls; watching movies, reading and writings are my favorites). I like this ritual as it allows me to see how people in other cultures rationalize their acts and behaviors. (Currently watching Yi San; though, the characters in the story are very soft and the story is very slow and sometimes even boring but still, I like it as it makes me realize that, although we all cherish the same values but we rationalize them differently. Slowly, I am also realizing that if we set aside advances in technology and knowledge in general, the history doesn't change much in terms of values. The only thing that changes are the ways we rationalize them. That also happens across the cultures. So either we walk across the cultures or across the history, it is the rationalizations that change not basic values). As in humans, 90% of Serotonin is in gut and the rest in the CNS so just by guess; I hope that this ritual (nourishing body and mind simultaneously) also increases Serotonin levels in my blood (it is just a guess).

Yesterday, I was very late in taking my lunch (the drama part was also very uneventful, hehe). The net effect, I was feeling so sleepy that I thought, it is wiser if instead of pushing myself and tiring myself while not able to make any progress in my work, I should get a nap for an hour and come back to work with a fresh mind. I set my alarm for an hour. When I woke up, it was dark. I checked the time and found that I had slept for three hours instead of one. I even didn’t notice the loud alarm (it was very deep sleep). Initially I felt bad about it but soon my mind started its work, “rationalizing the act”. You know, brain consumes 25% of oxygen and glucose in blood and if one is involved in an intensive problem solving thinking process, the brain consumes almost as much energy as an athlete pushes hard his body to break a record. So, it is natural to get exhausted after a mental work although the body appears to be idle in the process.

Unconvinced by my back-rationalizing, while still lying there, the thoughts of why ancient people about cared those hard questions, “who am I?”, “Why am I here?” “Where will I go?” come to me (I guess, it is the way mind work. It is good at diverting attention and escapes the troubles it faces. This totally unrelated thought was an escape strategy). In nutshell all those questions are linked with purpose of life. Usually, we tend to think that the “primitive people” think simple things and as people advance in terms of knowledge, they questions become more sophisticated. These are really hard questions that still people struggle with. Because, I had just awaken up so the thought of “Morpheus” came to me. In Greek mythology, Morpheus is the God of sleep and dreams. it can take any human forms to appear into dreams (Morphine is named after it).

In a way, it allowed me to hypothesize that because ancient people had not much understanding of nature so they needed explanations to match their life styles (It is because we are highly addicted to brain’s reward system, Dopamine. When our ideas are appreciated or we think, they are right; our brains reward us with dopamine). Coming back to dreams, it is still mystery. Although there are a lot of explanations but none of them are satisfactory. If I was living in ancient time, the belief that Morpheus appears in different forms in my dreams would be a very surreal idea and my brains would definitely rewarded me with lot of dopamine shots.

Although, Science is snatching all those surreal narratives but on other hand it has given us another fancy way of rationalizing and getting rewarded by brain and that is “Hypothesizing”. Brain is very good at finding patterns among very random things and constructing a hypothesis out them to rationalize things.

So what was the pattern here? Well, I guess, in order to get a higher dose of dopamine, when we rationalize, we try to link with something superior and it is perhaps why, Greeks mythology is filled with Gods and Goddesses. Those complex questions of purpose are linked with superior beings to feel superb. It is just an egoistic nature of men that do not accept things as they are (and perhaps better not to). Things have not changed much. Now that modern men think of themselves in-charge instead, we tend to think that we understand most of things and we are right. It appears to me that in future, someone while lying in his bed might be thinking about the ways we rationalize things currently and might try to find a pattern to make a sense out of them. Who knows?

Does human sense of fairness match to standards of Capuchin monkey?

It is believed that in humans, upon entering into puberty stage, they start questioning their childhood beliefs. Now, I am realizing that how shallow is that questioning?  Actually, the life of this questioning is very brief and is soon shut by dominating social values that make individuals who dare to differ either based on their conscience or misunderstandings look freaky and odd. 

 It is not just biologists who have struck by close relatedness of organisms to each other. I guess, every culture has noticed these relatedness and have their own explanations. What I want to point out is that, these explanations are constructed very well to fit perfectly to the dominating social values and norms. This is just a manifestation of human arrogance that they want to see the whole Universe revolve around them. What we usually know as Anthropocentric world view. A perspective or world view that is not anthropocentric hurts human ego and arrogance.

 It is not unusual to not get struck by very close similarities of apes to humans. When I was just a kid and was not exposed to evolutionary theory, the only prevailing explanation was that the apes are descendants of the "cursed ancient nations" that had disobeyed God. Now, I understand that how arrogant humans can be  that they even go to extent of demonizing innocent animals. Of course, if one is not exposed to biological perspective, these explanations make them to think of apes as something to hated or at least something not clean/disgusting. It is another way of intimidating people to not question the dominating social values. 

If one follows the same line of reasoning in observing human behavior regarding animals one can understand clearly that why despite of availability of information and the ability of humans to think rationally, they  demonize each other (Animals yet have still long way to wait). It  really makes sense when I see the intimidation of dominating social values. To me, it appears that  most of  humans do not have the courage to maintain the freedom of their minds. Now look at this. Morality is one of the three basic constituents of Philosophy and it stands at the core of Theology. Why the morality should be so specialized and complex when everyone needs to have it? The simple reason is that the individual's sense of justice and fairness is thoughts as something dangerous to society and making things complex is a way of blocking free thinking (Mankind are generally lazy in thinking) by intimidation of complexity (You are not qualified to have a conscience; You need to be logician or specialized in religious studies to have good judgments).... 

 Watch these two interesting videos of experiments and decide what kinds of teachings are responsible for the sens of fairness in these monkeys? Isn't it the absence of intimidation? (Complex cultural constructs)

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What is really noticeable are protests against discrimination and inequality. When I watched these two videos, I really felt that by accepting the discrimination and rationalizing injustices either by legal, cultural and religious constructs, the mankind have lowered their conscience or moral standards and let me dare to say that human standards are not even matched to the standard of these Capuchin monkeys (because either way we tolerate or even accept different levels of discrimination)

SECRETS OF THE TAJ MAHAL

Meme is still waiting for its language

I just looked up in dictionary to reassure myself that my understanding of “Meme” is not much different from that of a “standard” one and found this definition; … “(biology) a cultural unit (an idea, value or pattern of behavior) that is passed from one person to another by non-genetic means (as by imitation)”…. Frankly, I am happy that Meme is non-genetic. If it was genetic, then perhaps we might have been calling it, “Memememe” and that is not a good looking word.  No, it is not me who thinks so but it is the “neuroscientists” who imply so. You may have read and heard several times that the brain inside our skulls is not actually a single brain but rather, it is 4 in 1; the reptilian brain, mammalian brain, Ape brain and Homo sapiens brain. That means, there is not a single “Me” but a “reptilian Me”, a Mammalian Me”, an “Ape Me” and a “Homo sapiens Me”.   

Though we have “Memememe” but our personalities are the product of meme, meaning the cultures we are exposed to. My intention here is not just to play with words but to say that memes that are responsible for giving us a sense of identity and personality is mostly “constructed reality”. No, I am not trying to imply that there is a war between the “constructed reality” and “natural reality” but instead that there is war within “constructed reality” and the main weapons is the “rationality”.

Well, it is good to rationalize things but anything out of moderation loses its originality. At least, the efforts to mathematize the language tell us so (The efforts to produce a logical language like that of mathematics based on symbols is now an example of classical failure in Philosophy). To me, the thinking that, math is the only rational way of expressing things is underestimating the complexity of reality especially the life. I am telling so because it has shattered one my childish dreams. From my early introductory (just out of curiosity) reading in Psychology, I found that there is a “subconscious mind” that the conscious mind remains mostly unaware of its “thinking” and one of the main “reasons” is our unfamiliarity to its language. It uses the language of the “symbols and images” and the verbal and numerical languages that we (conscious mind) understand are not of much use to communicate with this part of our minds. It is a fact that when we sleep, the conscious mind goes passive and unconscious mind becomes active and the unconscious mind communicates with us in form of dreams and usually they are strange and we do not know their meanings. Because we do not understand their meaning so we usually just discard them by ignoring them. The idea that a symbolic language would help us to communicate with unconscious mind was very thrilling for me. Modern arts somewhat were attracting me as I was “believing” that these seemingly “irrational” creations are influenced by “unconscious mind” and are windows for us to look into unconscious minds of their creators.

As I learned that computers have their own language that is very different than ours and we need an intermediary language to translate our language to the language that computers understand and likewise translate the language of computer to our language, so we could communicate with computers, made me even more hopeful. Perhaps, what we needed was an intermediary language.

With this thrilling idea in my head, I was looking for an intermediary language (How naïve) and when I learned about Bertrand Russell’s book, “Principia Mathematica”  and that it is a book about “symbolic logic”, I got really excited. It was not hard to find it. I was available at Provincial library. I started reading it very carefully but my hope was evaporated when I found out that it is neither an intermediary language nor a language for unconscious mind. In fact, it is not even a language for conscious mind (This is one of the reasons that I got allergic to mathematics and it is really taxing me high on my “intellectual” health). I know that I am the product of meme (Cultural unit however, I take it as me + me; Conscious me + Unconscious me) but actually this meme is me-me and still awaits for an intermediary language to make it meme.