One's personality is both a composition and reflection, but if I have to choose one of them, I will choose reflection as the "self" is more important to me than "me". One's composition may change, walking across the cultural landscapes and climbing the social ladder but one's self is tied to one's reflections. The fun part is that reflections are not bound to "Time-Space" barriers ( it is not time-space) and respective mental constructs, which have grown so thick over ages, that they had reduced the image of humans to Sisyphus, rolling different sizes of boulders on hills of different heights.… As the name of this Blog indicates, knols are my perspectives on topics of interests, sweet/bitter experiences or just doodling :)

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Learning to enjoy misunderstanding

One of the basic drive of curiosity is pleasure. People gather information about things that do not have survival value or any other kinds of utility but they enjoy doing them. In college, I had a friend who was frequently visiting provincial library. The library had a compilation of newspapers collated in chronological order. Strangely, he was not going to library to read books but to go through newspaper compilation to catalogue the records of cricket matches and cricketers. It was looking to me as wasting oneself. Later, when I experienced that, the more one learns about something, it gradually becomes interesting and then one starts to enjoy doing it. In other words, there are things that we have to learn in order to enjoy. Reading is one of such things. From my childhood, I was hearing that, books are men’s best friends. Now, I know why books are men’s best friends. You get the bests of what the bests of humanity had produced so far. If you enjoy reading books, you are definitely in many ways belong to future as only best of present make it to be in future. Reading is one of the must have habits for personal development, it is why I believe that, the greatest gift that parents can give to their children is to make them enjoy reading. By instilling the habit of enjoying reading, they not only provide their children the best of the teachers that humanity had produced but also satisfy a large part of drive that come from curiosity and hence save them from the evil habits that might come through curiosity. Curiosity is the initiative force for a range of addiction from smoking to video games.

OK, enough of benefits of reading but why I needed this introduction at the first place? I was needed to clear some of the confusions and misunderstanding. Although books and other forms of writings are the best thoughts of the authors but it is not necessary that readers have the same wavelength in thinking levels, the same kinds of tastes in usage of communication tricks or the time to invest in becoming familiar with thought processes and expression styles of the authors. Our limitations both in thought processes and lingual/communication preferences create usually barriers ripe for misunderstanding. It is the limitations that open the door for recommendations and interpretations. The recommendations and interpretations of the people we trust most or close to us, also influence our understanding. Still reading is thinking and the more one reads in particular area, the deeper becomes one’s levels of understanding and it is another important factor in levels of understanding.  In short, it is important to;

-          learn enjoying misunderstanding

-          learn enjoying criticism

-          learn enjoying limitations

-          learn enjoying unfamiliar or exotic expression/communication tricks

-          learn enjoying imaginative speculations

Despite of being sympathetic to human creations, when I read that, by end of century half of current 7000 languages are going to die and over last 500 years, half of world's languages have gone extinct, I scratch my head in an effort to make a sense out of it. I am not scratching my head on why people are concerned about language preservation (It is their area of interest and I look to interests as individual's niches in the growing 'cultural forests') but I am scratching my head to make a sense of it for myself. I look to language as an expression of human intelligence. It is the most economical way of communication compared to biochemical and physical communication (body language) and it is why human can afford to create complex cultures out it. I just can read and write in three languages and have some patchy familiarity with a couple of more languages and these are the limitation of my communication skills that sometime cause disadvantages for me. Having my limitations in mind, if I get concerned about preservation of 'dying languages', what can I do for them? To me, the majority of existing languages are already 'dead'. They are 'dead' for me because I can’t afford to learn them. I can't blame the world for losing half of the languages over past 500 years because it was beyond their capacity to maintain them. When a language loses its basic purpose; an economical way of communication then it becomes costly for individuals to learn and maintain them. There is no mystery or hypocrisy in it.



Just like my limitations in affording to learn more languages, I have similar limitations imposed by nature in knowing things. I can’t know about things that are beyond my physical world (like life after death, existence of supernatural beings etc). Yes, I can imagine about them but I have to make clear distinctions between “Real world” and “Imaginary Worlds”. Uncle Einstein says, “Imagination is more important than knowledge” and I do enjoy imaginative speculations about possible scenarios for things or events beyond my physical world. There are things that are beyond my limits to prove with confidence so I can only tell, whether I “Believe” in them or Not (and that is something personal). 

As I said, the more we learn about something, the more interesting it becomes and the more interesting something, the more we enjoy doing them. If it is right then, it should be applicable to our limitations and its products such as misunderstanding, criticism and imaginative speculation :)

Wednesday, October 31, 2012

Cartoon's Perspective on Evolution

I love cartoons and I don't know, why nobody has tried to listen to their perspectives (OK, I am here to make them speak :) While, there are areas where biology becomes more of philosophy like cultural evolution, cartoons don't need all that. The time  of their creation and  their creators (should be intelligent, right? hehehe) are known... 

Monday, October 29, 2012

Hurricane Sandy

The whole day, I was waiting for hurricane sandy to see, how it looks (may be it is because of media hype around it; Wish everybody stays safe :)... so, every time, I feel a wind blow, I go out to see the Sandy and so far, it is just normal winds mixed with rain (Looks good :)... The nice part was that, family and friends have called and asked, if I am safe (That is sweet; Thanks a lot :)...

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Tuesday Morning Update; Luckily, our area didn't hit by hurricane, state of emergency has lifted and services have resumed (Good relief). It is really amusing to find that, doodling sublimate great part of mixed emotions for an expected "threat" into something that roughly may be called, "art"... Here is one of my doodles on a used envelope...


                                                           

Saturday, October 20, 2012

The Ego of Reductionism

This knol is 4th part of " why it takes time to have a centralist position?",   "Nature does not discriminate" and "Pure Rationalism is destined to failure".

And now, back to our first definitions,

I look to "rationalism as another name of reductionism". Logic is the art of reducing things to their fundamentals and by "pure reductionism", I mean fundamentalism in reductionist approach. While, reductionism helps us in clear understanding of things and correlating among different things to generalize our world views but we have not to forget that, these generalizations are our mechanical reflections of reality and is one among many others. For example, we reduce the matter to fundamental particles and it allows us to generalize the whole Universe as one but that can't explain everything. For life, we need another level and as you are aware, genes are the current currency. Apart from physical reality, we have mathematical and  digital realities that are other expressions of reductionism.

Cartoon Source; XKCD

Fine, the real world is far more complex and interactive than bits but what does it have to "nature" of things and why fundamentalism in reductionism is destined to failure?

As the main purpose of "reductionism" is to have an understanding of the world, so it is basically tied to humans. One of the most philosophical reductionist exercise was performed by Rene Descartes; he doubts everything but  can't doubt his own existence and famously declares, "I think, therefore I am". To understand "reducitonism", we need it to understand humans. Just for sake of current argument,  lets reduce humans to an individual like, "I" or "you". What "I" or "you" stands on? The core of "I" is "ego". Theoretically, ego is the mediator between human instincts and reality and it helps humans behave and appear as they seem to. Now, how "ego" mediate between reality and instincts depends on the cultural conditioning and it is why, we need to rationalize things. It is the urge of ego to make the interpretations of reality fitted to its cultural conditioning. If it fails to rationalize things properly, the ego won't be able to mediate well between reality and the basic instinctual desires and the results are either "suppression of instinctual desires" or "loose control" over it. For example, war is an abnormal situation, when the cultural norms under which egos were conditioned break down and egos lose the ability to mediate well between instinctual desires and reality and the "abnormal behaviors" such as killings, looting and all sorts of abuses come as common tragedies. Of course, ego still pushes to rationalize the instinctual desires by a cultural covers such as religion, nationalism, patriotism, or simply rationalism to continue its basic functions. Don't take it wrong. Ego in general is  for our good and it is the basic drive for goal settings, achievements, confidence and social responsibilities. However, the wrong cultural conditioning can lead to negative rationalization of instinctual desires. For example, the current cultural trend, in which children are conditioned around their "personal wants and liking" are making people less concerned on collective good or they escape social reprehensibility by negative rationalizations. This "selfish" and "narcissistic" ego is the result of reductionism based on "I" and "you" approach. "Do, what you want/Like" is just half of the reality in which, we live. The other half is, "Do/want for others as you want others want/do to you".

Just as mentioned earlier, Descartes reductionist exercise was to show that, "Man is a rational animal" as it is ascribed to Aristotle. Although Men have tendency to be rational but, are they really rational by their own standards of rationality? Basically rationality falls to serve two basic human needs; (1) to make one's world view based on evidences (epistemic rationalism) and (2) to help one makes right choices and function in best ways to optimize one's abilities/talents/safety (functional/instrumental rationalism).

It is not going to take time in finding countless examples and ways that, we (humans) tend to bypass rationality. Some big ones are culture, situations, costs, time, laziness, unfamiliarity (poor information) and pleasure/pain. If you are an optimist person, you may conclude; Yes, humans have the rational competence but may act or do bad reasoning due to performance errors based on some of the mentioned conditions. But, if you are a little bit skeptic, you may conclude; humans are not good at reasoning and the chances of errors are high due to different rational competences and conditioning and it is why, cross-questioning are needed to reduce the errors and a rational conclusion is an open ended inference.

Back to our Aristotelian definition of humans as, "rational animal"; Why he had used the term "rational animal"? Why he had compared humans with animals to define the rationalism? An  unequivocal explanation comes from observations that, animal behave under obligatory natural laws. Animals never had to devise laws, set standards of morality or claims of divine laws. It is only humans, who have the ability to understand natural laws by their observations, communicate to their consciences to set up the standards for nobility and morality and obligate themselves to things, that are not obligated by nature, e.g, to help people in need that are genetically and culturally distant. Despite a common characteristics of humans in understanding and making higher standards than natural laws based on their rationality, the standards of rationalism greatly vary and naturally the standards of morality and that is something, I like to discuss in the next knol.