tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-60143972024-03-07T01:49:04.663-08:00the red pill <.>concentrated musings on psychohistory, teleportation and AIRay Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.comBlogger142125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-33989817582919239532020-09-25T07:32:00.005-07:002020-09-25T07:56:59.891-07:00The bell on the dancer's anklet / Siri siri muvva <p>These are the translated lyrics of the song "Śivapūjaku chigurinchina sirisirimuvvā" from the Telugu film "Swarṇakamalam" (Golden Lotus). Alternative stanzas of this song are sung by the two principal thespians as a philosophical debate, on what is the very nature and objective of creative performance itself. Should that be a natural flow that seeks the most beautiful gifts in this world? Or should that be a meditative calm that brings one closer to the very heart of consciousness? These philosophical counterpoints on cultural evolution are very beautifully expressed in the immortal lyrics penned by the poet Sirivennela Sītārāmaśāstri, and sung in the melodious voice of Śrīpati Panḍitārādhyula Bālasubrahmanyam (Bālu) and Pulapāka Suśīla. </p><p>This is impeccably filmed by the genius eye of the director Kāśīnāthuni Viśvanāth, where the principal thespian Bhānupriyā regales the audience with the varied dance styles of India, both classical and folk. The counterpoint to her performance is provided by the thespian Venkatēsh, who sees the dancer through the poet's eye and wonders about what the objective of creativity should be. </p><p><br /></p><p>Unfortunately, this scintillating achievement of Indian film is unknown to people beyond the Telugu speaking world. Hopefully, my translation will help bridge the gap, although it is impossible to convey the richness of the beauty present in the lyrics in the Telugu language. </p><p><b><br /></b></p><p><b>Siri Siri Muvva (or) The bell on the dancer's anklet</b></p><p><br /></p><p>Oh, you bell on the dancer's anklet that blossomed in worship to Shiva</p><p>Oh, you flower that blossomed by the soft dulcet steps of the dancer</p><p>Please provide the fragrance of musical accompaniment to the king of mendicants</p><p>Please sanctify our lives through the oblation of your dance. </p><p><br /></p><p>Oh, you ship of imagination, keep sailing without breaking </p><p>The way will not be shortened if you bow your head to the waves</p><p>Oh, you vanquisher of the tempest that threatened you</p><p>Wouldn't the sweet lands wished by your soul come forward to wed you?</p><p><br /></p><p>Oh, you damsel of twilight, for the sake of stars shining on the hood of the west, please don't wed the night</p><p>On the theatre of the east, as the danseuse of awakening, please spread the lights that would sparkle this earth</p><p>Let your movement be the hearkening welcome of consciousness </p><p>Let the sounds of your plucky heartbeat mould into the perennial sound of Om</p><p><br /></p><p>As a plant whose very roots became its chains of binding, please don't stop waiting for the right season to arrive</p><p>There is a boundless beauty in this earth on all directions</p><p>Let the breezes of happiness drive you sailing (Oh, you ship of imagination) </p><p>Let a new song welcome you on each waking day </p><p>As the melodies of the moonlight drift along your side </p><p><br /></p><p>The very grace of your nature is born in the moving steps of the feet</p><p>The expansion of beauty is the gift of the burning shafts of the sun</p><p>As the eye of the sun witnesses the awakening morning light of your performance </p><p>In the heart of the heaven's lake, blossomed the hundred petalled dazzling golden lotus</p><p><br /></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="BLOG_video_class" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/fckaYK0kwD4" width="320" youtube-src-id="fckaYK0kwD4"></iframe></div><br /><p><br /></p><p>PS: This post is dedicated to Śrī S.P.Bālasubrahmanyam, who passed away today. It is impossible to recount the service he rendered to Indian culture and especially to the Telugu language. May he inspire many more creative artistes. </p><p>On the philosophical symbolism of the lotus in Indian culture, I wrote an <a href="https://pragyata.com/the-infinite-lotus/" target="_blank">introductory essay</a> that can throw some deeper light on the meaning of the lyrics.</p><p><br /></p>Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-13736881993374904822020-02-14T05:59:00.005-08:002020-02-14T06:10:00.351-08:00The role of music in society<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwKFlVgh8EsfgEFOwZPgvxe8gZgpqJX6x2fa4BbVd240X-JKiTpUGWz9xlDa8YWKF_BQDMlbAMLdMEvKgxTa_ekmn4Ewpc8vneYlvtGJqas4UkNOmcHsGK2q5MPjWizxSPiIr0NQ/s1600/veena-and-human-body-1.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="437" data-original-width="550" height="254" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiwKFlVgh8EsfgEFOwZPgvxe8gZgpqJX6x2fa4BbVd240X-JKiTpUGWz9xlDa8YWKF_BQDMlbAMLdMEvKgxTa_ekmn4Ewpc8vneYlvtGJqas4UkNOmcHsGK2q5MPjWizxSPiIr0NQ/s320/veena-and-human-body-1.gif" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Sacred imagery: Human body as Veena - a musical instrument</td></tr>
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What we hold to be the highest ideals in life also dictate what we do in the humdrum of everyday life, when we are not in the least bit self-conscious. In the daily lives of most people, there are no moments for self-reflection. People barely pause and absorb what is happening around them, nor do they appropriately redirect the goals and intentions of what they want to do. Instead, most people run their lives on autopilot, discarding the mentally onerous task of decision-making to some long forgotten moment in the past. Did they ever decide what to do? If at all such a decision was even taken, was this taken for them unconsciously, due to the force of another rote habit? This decision process is all but forgotten, but that still dictates the timetables of people for everyday. In Hinduism, that is called Karma. One cannot break the cycle of Karma until a moment of insight suddenly appears like a lightning, the flash of the Vajra in the hands of Indra, which forces open the body of daily habit. Such insights are rare gifts which are hard to come by. But there is a mechanism that invites such insights to occur with greater likelihood. That mechanism is music.<br />
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Music is the most sublime of the arts. The Greek philosopher Hypatia once spurned the advances of an unwanted suitor by asking him to play music and perceive the beauty of those melodies. She contrasted them with a rag soaked in her menstrual blood and asked him to choose which is more beautiful. That body of hers was bound to perish, she said, but the music would remain eternal. But alas, how can we forget the needs of our bodies and live in the realm of music? It is simply not possible. Our bodies need to eat and to excrete. This is what makes life possible. Without the basic sustenance of life, no music can be perceived.<br />
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The Guru Nanak of Sikhs was spoken of as Pavanhāri - the one who consumed air as food. His disciples were fed healthy vegetarian food, a tradition known as Langar (kitchen) that continues in Sikhism till this day, since they couldn't merely live off air like their Guru. If eating air seems like a tough skill to achieve, how about eating music? The master Yogi and devotee Hanumān managed to become an immortal by merely being absorbed in the sound of the Rāma Nāma: the Japa (meditation) of repeating the name of Rāma endlessly. In Hinduism, the sound of Aum is supposed to be the secret sustenance of all vigor in life. This Mantra forms the fabric of the universe, each object being manifested as an oscillation of this Mantra, but barely anybody perceiving it. The highest Yogis are supposed to discard all their needs for food and be nourished by this sound alone. We mortals may not be Yogis of the calibre of Hanuman, but even we may get nourishment from music. Our minds may be far too easily distracted for meditation on a single Mantra, but they may still be tempted by the melodies and harmonies of music. This should be the purpose of music, and art in general - to awaken the mind to the unexamined possibilities. This creative potential is called the Anāhata Nāda - the unstruck sound. In the Chinese philosophical text Dao De Jing, this is called "Pu" or <span lang="zh-Hant" style="font-size: 1rem;" title="Chinese language text">樸 (</span>"unhewn wood") which is the cradle of spontaneity in mind.<br />
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Achieving such a state of clear perception and spontaneity is not possible by a mere thought or by a mere repetition of words. If music were to be the conduit to such a state, this effect is not due to the tones or the melody, but due to the silence in between, which affords the mind an opportunity to wake up from within. In the Vedic tradition, the Dēvas are supposed to be summoned by a Mantra, but only when the Mantra is chanted in the right intonation and at the right setting. These preconditions (known collectively as "Auchitya" in Sanskrit) encode the space for the silence in between. In the modern world, this Auchitya is all but lost and nobody ever hears the Anāhata Nāda.<br />
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So how can music open the doors to the Anāhata Nāda? This should be the most important criterion in how we craft our society: our customs, our institutions and even our buildings or computer programs. We should first ask, where is the place for music in any of this. Then we should ask, how can one play and participate in this music. Finally, we should ask if one achieves the meditative calm to perceive the silence (and to hear the Anāhata Nāda), while partaking this musical experience. In the modern day, the answer to all these questions is a big no. There is no place for music in our society, in our economy or in our state institutions. In fact, our world runs by the paradigm of efficiency, where leaving spaces for music or poetry is considered a violation. What is the place for music in law? Even asking such a question is considered nonsensical (but it need not be). We look at the world as a collection of boxes, and we put music in its own box, and carefully seal the lid so that it doesn't escape outside. Even within that box of music, we barely ask the question of how we can play or participate in it. The modern world requires us all to be consumers, and so we consume music or any other art. As consumers, our choices are limited to whether to buy a piece of music or not, how much to spend on this, and in the rarest cases, when to applaud. We have successfully transformed musical experience into another creature of rote habit. At this stage, we need not even pretend to ask the final question, on whether this experience of music opens any space for silence.<br />
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<br />
I am struck by the sheer absence of music in our architecture. In many cities, there are simply no spaces to listen to music. We live in a persistent cacaphony of motor sounds, the whirring of automobiles and the electronic beeps of notifications from smartphones. Merely a few centuries ago, we were living lives synchronized to the rhythms of sunrise and sunset, punctuated every hour by the melodies of church bells or their equivalent. Our grandest buildings were created to listen to music and they were placed in the heart of our cities. A few centuries earlier to that, we even had memories of biophony - the music of the animals, plants, wind and water. Those sounds of nature were our first steps of music, as well as our greatest musical inspirations. Now, there is no place to perceive music with our eyes. We are all stuck in our individualized sonoric bubbles on electronic devices. Music has become Muzak - a background accompaniment to the all encompassing busy-ness of our lives. The absence of music in physical architecture is mirrored by its absence in virtual architecture or software design. The pioneering scientists of personal computing were music afficiandos, and wanted to build software systems that replicated the joy of playing musical instruments. This is all but forgotten today. There is nothing musical about the myriad apps on our computing devices today. Instead of creativity and meditative calm, this virtual world caters to sheer consumerism and to the dumbing down of the human mind, just like its counterpart in bricks and mortar. <br />
<br />
This violence on music is greater in the poorer countries, whose customs are broken by centuries of colonialism and whose people are uprooted from their villages to newly built ramshackle cities and shantytowns. Unlike in the western world, where there are still some concert halls and theaters, the burgeoning cities of Asia and Africa provide no such places for music. Prime real estate in the heart of a city is taken up by shopping malls or fancy apartments. What is the point of music in architecture? Why should a rich person deign to share the space for music with others, when he can get the higher quality experience in his own virtual reality - his jacked up audio system in his car, or the surround sound speakers in his home? This is the reality of music today. We banished it from our architecture. We barely see the musicians in life and blood, and we barely participate in the musical experience.<br />
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In India, this epistemic violence on music has a direct effect on the spirituality of people. This is a country where the human body is compared to a musical instrument, with the mystical Chakras at the backbone of a person being the counterparts of the frets of a Veena. In their sacred divinations, Yogis saw the figures of gods and goddesses with musical instruments. This depiction of divinity with instruments of music is perhaps unique amongst the various religions. But the most sacred perception is not considered to be a visual figure, but the very sound - the syllable Aum. In India today, apart from those hermits who retire to forests and mountains, who has the opportunity to hear that Aum? Even by temples, there is persistent honking and noise from automobiles. Even in private homes, smartphones and television sets intrude into any moment of silence that may appear. Most people, whether inhabitants or visitors to India, are blinded into thinking that this is the normal state of affairs. But no, this is a mutilation of the values and the ideals of India.<br />
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In this sad state of affairs, shouldn't the architecture for music be considered at least as sacred as temples? A place where silence is nurtured, where the walls and air are shaped to resonate to music - why is this not sacred? A place where multiple people come together to sing or to play musical instruments - why is this not a glimpse of the sacred Purusha that dwells in all of us? Once we see architecture with our ears, and look for music in those walls and windows, we will quickly realize that the space for music needs to also involve the natural elements - light and water, the moist earth, and of course, the wind. This can only be supported by a green cover, of trees and flowing water. Birds and animals will play their part too. In other words, we need to build gardens. Indian texts on aesthetics refer to gardens as the right setting for music. Gandharvas - the musicians of the gods, are supposed to roam and frolic in gardens. There is an urgent need to reimagine public architecture, and music has to be right at the centre of this. Not money, not politics, not fancy pride in whichever ethnic history.<br />
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As the great Shehnai player Ustad Bismillah Khan once said, "Even if the world ends, music will survive". That is the most eternal architecture we can afford to build.<br />
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Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-51278067360049202322018-04-26T01:43:00.000-07:002018-05-01T13:00:56.505-07:00The Sanskrit word for algorithm: Vṛtti वृत्ति<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkVt33-FvJz31YEC0_mAh4nW6KOTBBbCN50ov6ZxCWOjcGZz0JhK1WwIBTvAHatzG7MaKUXdT8pTlpmqC6t4k5wKjUiVIg5UaRjch5RExQCQDFAZHp1WXNISxizLmroToY5aupPg/s1600/mandala-swirl.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="966" data-original-width="1024" height="301" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjkVt33-FvJz31YEC0_mAh4nW6KOTBBbCN50ov6ZxCWOjcGZz0JhK1WwIBTvAHatzG7MaKUXdT8pTlpmqC6t4k5wKjUiVIg5UaRjch5RExQCQDFAZHp1WXNISxizLmroToY5aupPg/s320/mandala-swirl.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i><a href="https://www.flickr.com/photos/garlandcannon/4307077901" target="_blank">Red Mandala</a>, by the Flickr user GarlandCannon. A fine illustration of the swirling nature of Vṛttis, and of how they are recursively composed of each other.</i></div>
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<br />
What is the right word to describe an "algorithm" in Sanskrit or in other Indian languages ?<br />
<br />
There was an interesting discussion on Rajeev Malhotra's mailing group on this topic. I suggested the word "<i>Vṛtti</i>" वृत्ति (pronounced roughly as <i>Vritti</i>) as the equivalent word, following the use of Pāṇini in his Ashṭādhyāyi. I am sharing my (slightly edited) argument here in this blog.<br />
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On the equivalent word for an "algorithm", Prof. Kannan and Prof.Ramasubramanian suggested "Śaraṇī" सरणि (arrangement) which probably has previously been used by the Sanskrit mathematicians. Some others also suggested "Kuṭṭaka" कुट्टक (iterative refinement) which was used by Āryabhaṭa. </div>
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<div>
But
these suggestions ignore the historical trajectory of development of
ideas in Europe. When Europe discovered the "Sind Hind" of Al-Khwarizmi,
which is but a translation and commentary of Brahmagupta's
works, it experienced a major transformation in how a rigorous
mathematical procedure should be formulated. Instead of relying on
"proof" by geometry as the ultimate arbiter, we have a series of precise
instructions for "constructively" accomplishing a task. This is a
computational method of thinking, instead of a geometric method of
thinking. This important turn in scientific thinking is described in the
works of Prof. Roddam Narasimha and Prof. C.K. Raju. In western
academia, India has not been credited for this important scientific
revolution. So why not call "Āryabhaṭam" instead of "Algorithm" ? We can
refer to the far earlier original Indian procedures of Āryabhaṭa instead of the
secondary ideas of the later scholar Al-Khwarizmi. As a computer
scientist, I have seen no single textbook, museum or university discuss
Āryabhaṭa. People can visit the computer history museum in Mountain View,
CA to see how marginally these Indian ideas are presented. Unless
Indian computer scientists demand it, this place in history will not be
ceded to India.</div>
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<div>
However,
the computational method in India is even earlier to Āryabhaṭa. We can
definitely state that Pāṇini's methods for word derivation in language are precise
algorithms. Not only that, Pāṇini's Ashṭādhyāyi anticipated many future
developments in computer programming: Lambda calculus, encapsulation in
object oriented programming, and even some ideas which may not yet have
been implemented in computer programming ! In short, Pāṇini's methods
have far more rigor and computational creativity than what reached
Europe via Al-Khwarizmi. In India, Vyākaraṇa (grammar) was clearly the
queen of the sciences. The scientific texts in every single discipline
were shaped by the computational methods of Pāṇini and other
grammarians. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The word that Pāṇini used to describe a precise computational instruction is "Vṛtti" वृत्ति. I suggest this nice paper by Paul Kiparsky for understanding how these computational instructions are given.<a href="https://web.stanford.edu/class/linguist289/encyclopaedia001.pdf" rel="nofollow" target="_blank"> (https://web.stanford.edu/class/linguist289/encyclopaedia001.pdf</a>
) The objective of Pāṇini's Ashṭādhyāyi is greater than giving a series
of instructions (algorithm) for one specific task. It is to produce a
complete "generative model" for all the variations in language. In other
words, he gives a set of algorithms for all possible tasks. This is
known as a generative grammar, and it is only until Noam Chomsky's work
that this is understood to be a precise equivalent to a Turing Machine.
So in India, we started our computational thinking with a full Turing
Machine, and not a half-baked idea like an "algorithm". </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The
operational rules of "vṛtti" are of the form: A -> B (C_D). A is
transformed into B, when it is enclosed between C and D. One such rule
can encode a full algorithm. This is because the variables A, C and D
can all be recursively defined using rules of the exact same form. It is
an automaton or a state-transducing machine. As such, in my opinion,
the word "vṛtti" वृत्ति has the
full descriptive power of an algorithm. It is a short word and can be
used to derive longer Sanskrit words to describe algorithms of different
types and for different domains. Sanskrit is a very fecund language and
many new words can be created for algorithm (e.g, Kalana-vidhi is
perfectly fine), but we often forget (a) brevity and (b) importance of
projecting the historical trajectory of ideas. </div>
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<div>
The
understanding of "vṛtti" as a procedure for transformation is deployed
in many other contexts. Patanjali uses this famously to describe the
transformations of mental states : "Yōgas chitta vṛtti nirōdhaḥ". By
using the word "vṛtti" he ties this understanding of human cognition to
the computational methods of Pāṇini. Symbolism in Itihāsas like the ten
heads of Rāvaṇa (more accurately, "daśa Kanṭha" or ten necks) is
discussed by later philosophers as "daśēndriya vṛtti" (the
transformations of mind owing to being bound by the sense-objects of the
ten senses: 5 Jñānēndriya+5 Karmēndriya). Thus, we have a history of
Indian scientists in psychology referring to the computational method of
"vṛtti". It is only recently that such computational thinking has
penetrated the cognitive sciences in "modern science". In India, we had
it from the very beginning, owing to the importance of Vyākaraṇa and its
computational methods. </div>
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<div>
The word "vṛtti"
inherently refers to the cyclical understanding of time (vṛtta वृत्त =
circle, or a metrical pattern of repetition). A transformative rule to a cyclical motion is obtained to
setting up of secondary cycles e.g, through a gear mechanism. This is
precisely how the mind is transformed by getting entangled in secondary
motions owing to the sense objects. This understanding of Yōga is very
ancient, even earlier to Pāṇini, going back to the Vēdas. Another word
Pāṇini used is Pratyāhāra प्रत्याहार, as an equivalent for compacting of
information, to refer to a larger group of variables on which the same
computational transformation (vṛtti) can be applied. In Yōga, Pratyāhāra
refers to withdrawing the mind away from the sensory objects i.e,
moving towards the "Bindu" बिन्दु which is at the centre of the circle (vṛtta). These are very precise notions for encoding human-computer interaction (HCI),
on which aspects of a computational system the user has to pay
attention to. These ideas provide an alternative to the dominant discourse on artificial intelligence (AI, exactly equivalent to Vṛtti) and its relationship with HCI.<br />
<br /></div>
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</div>
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These ideas have germinated from the ancient philosophical bed of Sāmkhya साङ्ख्य. In Sāmkhya, the objective reality of the universe is termed Prakṛti प्रकृति and the experiencing self is termed Puruṣa पुरुष. Of these two, Vṛttis belong exclusively to Prakṛti, resulting in all the manifold variation in space, as well as change in time. The evolution of Prakṛti according to these Vṛttis is termed Karma कर्म. However, Puruṣa is considered completely distinct from space and time, and thus independent of Vṛttis or Karma. Thus, withdrawing into the Puruṣa, away from Vṛttis, is termed Pratyāhāra. The accumulation of Vṛttis raise the entropy of Prakṛti (which is referred to as Rajas रजस् or dust), whereas Pratyāhāra results in lowering the entropy (or raising negative entropy, which is referred to as Sattva सत्त्व). The inertia of not doing any action is termed Tamas तमस् (darkness or illusion). These three Guṇa गुण (attributes/qualities) of Sattva, Rajas and Tamas provide the vocabulary for describing all the variation of objects in the universe (Prakṛti).<br />
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<div>
It will be unfortunate if
we don't refer to this native tradition of computational thinking in
India, when we coin new Sanskrit words for computer science. </div>
<br />
<b>Some related terms: </b><br />
<br />
Greedy algorithm: Lubdha vṛtti लुब्धवृत्ति<br />
Branch & bound algorithm: Śākhā samyamita vṛtti शाखासंयमितवृत्ति<br />
Recursive algorithm: Pratyāvarta vṛtti प्रत्यावर्तवृत्ति<br />
Backtracking algorithm: Pratyāgaccha vṛtii प्रत्यागच्छवृत्ति<br />
Algorithm for shortest path on graph: Alpiṣṭa jālamārga vṛtti अल्पिष्ठजालमार्गवृत्ति<br />
Classification algorithm: Vargīkaraṇa vṛtti वर्गीकरणवृत्ति<br />
Regression algorithm: Kramīkaraṇa vṛtti क्रमीकरणवृत्ति<br />
Neural network: Mastishka Jāla मस्तिष्कजाल Majjāla मज्जाल<br />
Neural net learning algorithm: Majjāla grahaṇa vṛtti मज्जालग्रहणवृत्ति<br />
Path planning algorithm: Mārga yōjanā vṛtti मार्गयोजनावृत्ति <br />
<br />
<b>Further Reading: </b><br />
<br />
I wrote an essay in my blog on the <a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.de/2016/11/computational-science-by-sanskrit.html" target="_blank">Computational Sciences of the Sanskrit tradition</a>, discussing the need to develop an authentic Indic perspective for computational thinking. <br />
<br />
I am writing some essays for the website <a href="http://www.pragyata.com/" target="_blank">Pragyata</a>, where I provide greater context for these ideas in the philosophy, symbolism and art of India.<br />
<a href="http://www.pragyata.com/mag/the-cosmic-wheel-366" target="_blank"><br /></a>
<a href="http://www.pragyata.com/mag/the-cosmic-wheel-366" target="_blank">The cosmic wheel</a> describes the nature of Ṛta ऋत (cosmic order). <br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.pragyata.com/mag/the-infinite-lotus-451" target="_blank">The infinite lotus</a> describes the nature of Ananta अनन्त (infinity). <br />
<br />
I am also writing some essays for the website <a href="http://indiafacts.org/author/kiran-varanasi/" target="_blank">IndiaFacts</a>. Please follow me there for my essays on Indic knowledge. <br />
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* Some people have complained to me about the word "red pill". This word has recently acquired some annoying "manosphere" connotations, although my personal blog far predates all of this. It was just a silly reference to the then newly-released Matrix movies. I will keep this blog alive, but hopefully will move the important content to a personal website.<br />
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Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-13002926776627290382017-01-29T22:59:00.001-08:002017-02-04T04:14:26.357-08:00Computational user interface design: Flights of fancy<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>Art by Moebius</i></div>
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<i>"Once upon a time, I, Zhuang Zhou, dreamt that I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes, a butterfly. I was conscious of only my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I am Zhou". </i> </div>
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I am writing this post today with a clouded head, filled with despair and frustration in equal measure. The world seems to be a muddled up morass. The largest economy (and military power) in the world has elected a singularity for its president. By a series of executive orders, this singularity seems bent on annihilating the last bit of logic from this world. How did we get here ?<br />
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We are living in the age of supercomputers in everybody's pockets. By now, we should have evolved as a species to put an end to war and poverty. We should be facing the stars and the greatest challenges that we can attempt for the million years to come. So why are we killing each other, trashing the planet and torturing all forms of plant and animal life ? How to fix this paradox of extremely powerful technology with extremely stupid people ?<br />
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I think the answer lies in really bad interfaces. Today, we have awful interfaces not only for our technological systems, but also for our political systems. With a lot of pain and effort, we may nudge these systems a little towards what we want. But more often than not, we fail in this. Our human bodies and brains have no reasonable interfaces to control the nightmare unleashed on us. The internet has become home to a growing mound of mind-viruses, whose DNA is made up as much of computer code as of psychological weaknesses of people. We cannot fight this game in the monster's arena. We need to build our own narratives. We need stories of beauty and compassion. We should be able to express our dreams, which sprout from the deep pacific of our own inner minds. We humans are far bigger than the entropy around us. We need to realize that we are still in the infancy of our time as a species.<br />
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In my tiny brain, bounded by my own limited human journey, I have a few quiet corners of joy. These are my dreams, incapable of our reach as humans today, but which I wish to see them realized before I die. All of these dreams deal with novel human interfaces for complex systems. In this blog, I will try to give some glimpses to these ideas. To provide some context, I add a few notes below with links to technical papers and my own journey in scientific research. Playing with these interfaces should be a bliss in itself. Like how an expert musician enters into a zone of trance while playing the instrument. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls such a mental state as <i>flow</i>. In ancient China, this is known as <i>wu-wei</i>, or "non-doing", a state of effortless ease where you lose track of time. In Indian philosophy, this is known as <i>ananda</i> or supreme bliss. As human beings, we are born with the physical and mental hardware capable of achieving such a state. The Chinese philosopher Zhuang Zi narrates the story of the butcher Ding, who achieves <i>wu-wei</i> through the mundane act of carving the meat of an ox. Owing to our unique experiences in life, each of us needs a different activity and instrument to achieve this state. Some achieve this by doing a sport, some by cooking, some by coding. But I believe there is a method of universal applicability that reaches everyone: music. <br />
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Musical instruments are possibly the greatest aid for achieving the state of joy. The greatest of these instruments is undoubtedly the human vocal box, running through the wind pipe and played by the tongue - the most exquisite muscle of our body. In the Sanskrit tradition of India, this vocal box is analyzed as an instrument for achieving the supreme meditative state of <i>Ananda</i>. The architecture of the human body provides half of the user interface for this instrument. The other half is provided by the Sanskrit alphabet, and to a greater degree, by the <i>Raaga</i> system of music. My goal is to trace this inspiration from this Sanskrit tradition of <i>Shiksha</i> (literally, instruction) towards designing computational user interfaces. In this tradition, the task of user-interface design is intimately coupled with the method of training for using the interface. Neither of this stands in isolation. By narrating stories of the Sanskrit alphabet, Mantric chanting and Indian music, I hope to build a general theory of computational design of user interfaces. I will do this in my following blog. Before I trace these inspirations and build a general framework for user-interface design, I want to relate my dreams. I have chosen five such dreams, ranked in a hierarchy of increasing challenge. They describe five shades of bliss in how an individual relates to the universe around him.<br />
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The first is Zhuang Zi's butterfly. Can a human being control a "butterfly" - a miniaturized drone, such that he effectively becomes the butterfly, forgetting his own body ? In order to achieve this, his natural human senses of vision and hearing have to be mapped perfectly to the sensors on the drone, which needs to be in soundless flight. His human limbs of action, such as his fingers and the vestibular system, have to be mapped to the flight controls. The mapping can be performed by high precision tracking and wireless relay. No important human sense should be left unmapped, as that will break the illusion. Feedback from active senses, i.e, motion and manipulation, are more important than passive senses. We need to trace the tree of human evolution to see where the underlying neural system in the human body can be mapped to flight. The closest flying relatives of humans are bats, who are also mammals. Indeed, they have the most exquisite control of flight through their wings. The skeleton beneath the wings has a direct mapping to the human fingers, which become elongated in bats as the upper and lower arms shrink. There is undoubtedly some shared neural circuitry between humans and bats. The rest has to be improvised. The interface should be as natural for a human as moving his hands. With such an interface, even a novice will be able to fly. But with training, he or she will be able to achieve the state of immersion, as related by Zhuang Zi.<br />
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My second dream is crazier than the first, in that it removes the use of technology altogether. By their very design, human bodies are not capable of flight, but they are capable of swimming. But many humans cannot swim, and even suffer from the fear of water. Is it possible to design a series of exercises such that by doing them, a human will be able to swim automatically, the very first time he sets in water ? In order to do this, we have to hack the human nervous system. Specifically, there are autonomous programs in the neurons in the body which produce periodic motion. These motions are beyond the conscious control of the brain, but they can be achieved by training. If there is an interface that is optimized for training these neural units, the human will be able to move them without conscious control. For example, this training can be performed through an interface for playing music. The played music will be relayed instantly to the ear through ear phones. Now, when the human is plunged into water, he just has to play a song and he will be off swimming.<br />
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My third dream is about fixing a broken human body. Due to degenerative diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, people in old age lose their capacity to walk or perform fine-scale motor control. This loss of outer performance is symptomatic of an underlying neuronal loss in the brain. This neuronal loss is in turn triggered by debilitating changes in the endocrine system and in the immune response of the body, often due to bad diet or lifestyle. But there is hope. We know today that many of the severe symptoms of degenerative diseases can be relieved using neural regeneration. Many such interesting cases are related by Norman Doidge in his book "The brain's way of healing". This miraculous rehabilitation taps into the neuroplasticity of the brain that grows new neurons and make new connections. Certain types of neuronal losses are irredeemable, but work-arounds can be devised for the others. As of present, we do not have an accepted theory of rehabilitative procedures in medicine that can achieve this. The patient also needs a lot of motivation and repetitive training in the face of hardship to overcome this. We do not know what the optimal interface is, for a human to perform this training. But if we hack the neuronal circuitry in the body, this interface can be optimized. Little by little, new neuronal circuits can be developed, starting from the Hippocampus and the Entorhinal cortex which are the ground zero for degenerative diseases. Going back to my example, the human can be tricked into using this interface as if playing a musical instrument. By playing this virtual music, he will progressively move his limbs and achieve fine-scale muscular control.<br />
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My fourth dream is about fixing the extended human body i.e, a person's home and living environments. Soon, we will have thousands of sensors embedded in every device in a home, each of which relays junk to the internet. Broadly, this junk is known as the "internet of things", and it is optimized to spy on the person and make him buy more junk on the market. But what if these sensors are instead optimized to be an extended senses for the human body ? In addition to passive sensors for relaying temperature, the composition of the fridge etc., there can be active robotic units. These robotic devices can be stationary, for example, controlling the doors of the house. Or they can be mobile, attending to the garden or manipulating items in the kitchen. Going back to my example of Zhuang Zi's butterfly, can these sensors are so deeply intertwined with the human experience that they are indistinguishable from the physical body of the human ? This is a far greater problem to solve than the flight control problem I mentioned earlier, because we do not have any guidelines for mapping. In this sense, the mapping is general, with the architecture being capable of adding new sensors and devices based on demand. But the ultimate goal is to heighten the conscious awareness of the person about all that is going on in his home. This home need not be just a person's physical home, but also other cherished places, such as homes of his friends or family, or even natural ecosystems in the wild. This vision is crystallized into a concrete application when we build technologies for independent living of elderly people. Social isolation is the main killer in old age. By using technology, we can relieve this and embed a person's conscious experience in caring environments, either in human society or in natural environments. <br />
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My fifth dream is about fixing the society. Can technology help us live consciously, such that we are aware of the ecological impact of all our decisions on the market ? This will let us optimize our decisions on what to buy and where to buy, such that the hard ecological limits about fresh water, mining etc. are respected at the local level. In addition to physical limits, we can optimize for greater goals such as compassion in how we treat other people and animals. This is the most complex dream because it needs to address multiple people. It needs to be cognizant of the social and political systems, and their legacy hardware that is often broken. But at its core, this is also a computational problem that can be fixed by an interface that maps to the human body. Imagine we have such an evolved conscious society, where every human act is optimized for delivering the greater good. This is not a Utopian dream, but a call for incremental betterment. Our current politics is broken. Our current economic system has become dangerously out of control. It is time for a brand new framework for solving the problems, which incorporates human consciousness at the core. In other words, we need to devise these social and political systems as computer-human interfaces. These interfaces have to be optimized for joy in the Zhuang-Zi sense of the word.<br />
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These are all crazy dreams of midsummer, charmed upon by Shakespeare's fairies. But we need them in the middle of winter. We need inspiration from the ancient sages of China and India. We are living through the noise of the modern age. But our human story is very long and old. We need to summon our best dreams and inspirations, as we face the wild exploding entropy of technology.<br />
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<b>Notes: </b><br />
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<i>(I hope they give some context to what I am talking about. It is actually easier to write technical articles. Writing blogs about half-baked ideas is pretty hard, but researchers need to put some effort in communicating their dream-like ideas and their connections to the general public.)</i><br />
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1. To find my dreams of childlike innocence, unmarred by the horror of Snowden revelations and the dystopic picture of the real world it painted on me, I have to back to 2013 and earlier. I am deeply grateful to my colleagues, friends and mentors who sparked my imagination in those years. <br />
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2. "Why are computer interfaces not developed as solutions to optimization problems?" asked Antti Oulasvirtta, who recently joined as a researcher in our computer graphics department at MPI Saarbrücken. This talk made a remarkable impression on me. I was doing a postdoc there at that time, working in the group of Christian Theobalt. Antti is now an Associate Professor at Aalto University in Finland. He has an excellent journal paper on this topic "<a href="http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2948131" target="_blank">Can computers design interaction?</a>".<br />
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3. Two examples from Antti stood out: He showed trained Ballet dancers on how precisely a movement can be replicated by the human body. Based on this precision, an information-theoretic bandwidth can be assigned to the movements of the human body. He also showed how quickly a person can play a musical instrument (the example was a guitar) and calculate the speed of information transmission through the Fitt's law. <br />
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4. Antti and I offered a doctoral seminar on human biomechanics for applications in HCI and computer vision. There were several great presentations by students, where we discussed research ideas, as well as gossip in the news. One of the key participants was Antti's student - Myroslav Bachinskyi, who evaluated <a href="http://resources.mpi-inf.mpg.de/touchbiomechanics/" target="_blank">the efficiency of touch interfaces</a> and point gestures using optical motion-capture systems and the <a href="http://opensim.stanford.edu/" target="_blank">OpenSim</a> software for biomechanical simulation. <br />
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5. The crazy idea of teaching somebody how to swim without ever setting in water, is from this seminar. We discussed several crazy ideas. Once we had a debate about the power of the unconscious mind for arithmetic calculation. I related the incident from the book of Oliver Sacks, where two autistic children are observed by a neuroscientist playing with marbles. Suddenly, the marbles fall on the floor and instantly, one child says "101". The other instantly factorizes them into prime divisors, saying "37, 37, 37". Since I worked in computer vision, I wondered what brain circuits would be capable of instant object recognition and counting. They are definitely sub-conscious, as there is no time for conscious reflection. There is some credence in neuroscience that all humans are capable of doing this in our brain, but we choose to "forget" the calculations. Otherwise, we will go mentally insane by information overload. But this "forgetting" is disrupted in autistic people and to some degree, by trained mental athletes. It is possible that some drugs can also inhibit this.<br />
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6. In another episode, we discussed was the Japanese game of Flash Anzan, where several numbers are rapidly flashed on a screen and the participants have to instantly sum them up. They do this by visualizing a mental abacus in the head and moving its beads. We wondered what other imaginary instruments can be simulated in the brain for amplifying other cognitive capacities. <br />
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7. We also discussed the memory palace technique (the method of Locii) for remembering long strings of information. Such memory enhancing techniques were commonplace in education worldwide, but discarded in the modern era. I will discuss them in my next blog.<br />
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8. At that time, I was working with Thomas Neumann who was visiting our group from Dresden. The project was about <a href="http://www.drematrix.de/publications/capture-and-statistical-modeling-of-arm-muscle-def/" target="_blank">capturing skin muscle deformations</a> in high detail using multiple synchronized and calibrated cameras. When reading for the biomechanics seminar, we realized that the previous methods for motion capture in biomechanics were much lower quality. This high-resolution capture using new types of sensors and computer vision methods will revolutionize biomechanics. We had a guest lecture from a trainer for paralympic athlete in Olympics and discussed how to apply these methods for developing better gear. Unfortunately, this project didn't proceed, as we had many other interesting ideas.<br />
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9. I worked with Helge Rhodin in the inital stages of his PhD in his group. We wondered whether we can learn <a href="http://gvv.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/DirectMotionMapping/" target="_blank">a mapping between the movement spaces of two arbitrary motions</a>. The application was a real-time control of a non-humanoid avatar by a human being. We realized that this problem can be solved in a purely learning framework, with rather simple models. The example of Zhuang Zi's butterfly is an idea inspired from this project. Helge did several excellent works afterwards.<br />
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10. I continued my collaboration with Christian's group after I finished my postdoc. One of the cool projects we did was <a href="http://gvv.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/VisualDubbing/" target="_blank">mapping the facial expressions and lip movements of people across two different languages</a>. The application was visual dubbing of movies across different languages. The main investigator here was Pablo Garrido, who developed a <a href="http://gvv.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/PersonalizedFaceRig/index.html" target="_blank">detailed 3D facial performance capture system from monocular video</a>. One of the contributors for this project was Ingmar Steiner, who works on speech synthesis. He showed us the data from current state of the art systems for the capture of the vocal diaphragm through fMRI. In the end, we used a parametric model for mapping the lip movements, that is learned from a carefully aligned data set of 3D meshes. But ultimately, with enough data, this can also be solved as a learning problem from images themselves, as some new deep-learning methods are demonstrating.<br />
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11. After I left MPI, I worked at Technicolor research for improving the tools of visual effects artists. Manipulating 3D facial expression is a fascinating topic because we are visually so sensitive to it. The 3D artists who work in this field have an evolved vocabulary for describing certain grimaces and muscle movements. While trying to improve their tools, I understood the central nature of human artistic experience. The learning problem cannot be divorced from this. <br />
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12. The ideas related to neural regeneration for combating degenerative diseases are inspired from several interesting talks I attended at the<a href="http://www.wolberslab.net/iscan-2016.html" target="_blank"> iScan workshop</a>. I hope to work on these technologies in the future.<br />
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Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-5251374304950912642016-11-24T11:37:00.001-08:002018-04-24T21:28:23.789-07:00Computational science by Sanskrit <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> Saraswati,
the goddess of speech, is the personification of Sanskrit. She is also
an ancient river that supported the Indian civilization for thousands of years.
(Art by <a href="http://abhishekart.com/" target="_blank">Abhishek Singh</a>) <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></i></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Crisis in our understanding of
computation: </span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Computers are now in everybody's pockets,
but most people are unaware of what they are doing. Soon, computers will be
integrated into people's clothes and into their own bodies. But for most
people, they remain a black box. The renowned journalist Kevin Kelly once
stated on Twitter, </span></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">"People mistakenly believe an egg is
simple. Nice smooth-rounded corner case. No buttons. But simple needs
complexity". </span></div>
</blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Imagining a computer as an egg is a
horrible analogy, although it sounds profound on first glance. Mr. Kelly is a smart
writer with informed opinions. So this makes him an especially good candidate
to debunk - what we may call a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">support
vector</i> in machine learning parlance. The fact is people are already
panicking about how opaque computers have become. Social media like Facebook
and Twitter have precipitated awful political decisions, with nobody having a
clue about how to find the truth amidst fake news, innuendo and subtle
manipulative messaging. I have previously argued how the web is resembling an
octopus-like monster that enslaves the user, instead of being a personalized
tool like a bicycle. With growing power of artificial intelligence (AI), this opaqueness of computation
is reaching scarier proportions. Even for the technically literate people, the
analysis of algorithms is getting more and more complex, especially with data-driven
machine learning. How to prove the convergence and optimality of an algorithm
that uses a ton of data and encodes it in a multi-layered neural network? When
these neural networks are used for financial trading, make insurance policies
or evaluate employees, they exhibit complex biases that are much harder to
debug than traditional computer programs. But the fundamental problem remains not
AI, but our own ignorance. How can we as a society arrive at political
decisions about the use of AI, when most people are completely clueless about
computers?</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Along with this crisis lies a huge
opportunity. Computer algorithms are getting increasingly proficient in understanding
human languages and interpreting visual images like humans do. With these
advances, the borders between programming languages and human languages are
getting blurred. New paradigms of computer programming are emerging that
imagine computers as partners that speak with humans, and solve problems through mutual dialogue. However, we as a society still do not see
computer programs as natural language dialogue and literature – capable of literary beauty and emotive
content. Equivalently, we do not see literature as a computational object with
hyperlinks between various literary references (apart from rare visionaries
like Ted Nelson who see it thus). We do not use computer programs to speak to each other or to
investigate our internal psyches. To the extent that we use them, we do it
unconsciously. A powerful demonstration of this is the failure of semantic web,
which was supposed to provide a rich context specific layer of information on
the web that is pertinent to the user. Instead of this, we got a million bots
and cookies that spy on the user without his knowledge. Now with the internet
of things, this networked espionage on users has penetrated household objects.
The principal cause of this dystopia is the lack of human communication between
users and computers, capable of encoding computational procedures.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">Along with the specter of ignorance about AI lies the risk of technological unemployment. The skills of most people are becoming obsolete in an economy driven by AI bots. This is particularly worrisome for India, which houses the largest pool of working human population in the world. So the disenfranchising of users with respect to machines has an economic exploitation angle to it, that disproportionately affects India and other poor countries. But this might be a situation where Indian cultural experience may be particularly well-suited to build a humanistic vision about AI. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Long before AI and computers, we have a historical example where computational thinking has profoundly shaped
literature and arts: the Sanskrit language. In the following, I will
give different types of motivation why people working in computers and AI need to
study Sanskrit: obtaining an alternate perspective, the technical superiority
of Sanskrit grammar, the immense heritage of scientific works in Sanskrit, and
the virtues of Sanskrit culture towards promoting biodiversity. </span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Alternative imagination through
linguistic diversity: </span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">A couple of friends asked me, what would
be an Indian perspective about AI? In fact, this is a deep question that needs a lifetime of an answer. When we think with logic, we are inherently
bound to the very language in which those logical categories are formulated. So
each language offers us a unique perspective about the world. As an Indian
who speaks English, French and German, I know this personally. My entire
personality changes in response to the language I am speaking. Even within
India, there are thousands of languages. For example, in my mother tongue
Telugu, there are two words to denote the inclusive and exclusive
"we". This facility doesn't exist in English or in Hindi, so it always remains
ambiguous when I say in a group of people "<i>You can
come for dinner.</i> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><i>We will make food.</i></span>" The noted poet Shatavadhani Ganesh once remarked how in
Indian languages we never say "<i>I don't feel good</i>", but rather
"<i>My body doesn't feel good</i>". These subtle differences in
language make a huge impact in one's consciousness in how one's mind reasons
about a given situation. Apart from the words, there is the poetic aspect to language in how the very sounds are pronounced. So the same concept might sound differently to the consciousness when expressed in a different language. So it is useful to have multiple linguistic and
cultural perspectives about the problem of AI.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">It is important to have an immersive
cultural experience to trigger the mind to think in new categories. Merely
using a few words in a new language will not impact one’s consciousness and yank it
out of existing categories. For this reason, Confucians ordered their daily
lives in a precise framework of rituals and ethical values. As Sinologist Edward
Slingerland<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>puts it, ritual is a method
for hard-wiring the cold calculating processes of the logical brain (Broca’s area, Anterior Cingulate Cortex
and so on) into the hot thinking of the subconscious brain (circuits in the
brain stem). Until one achieves this hot thinking, one’s conscious experience
will not change. This awareness has long been part of Indian culture, which
introduced many festivals, rituals, <i>mantric</i> chanting and immersive networked relationships
between daily activities. In terms of language learning, such immersive
experience is far better in picking up a new language than studying through grammar and
dictionaries. This is validated by automatic machine translation systems where
even computers learn better when taught through examples. However, human
translators fare still better, because they can make conscious associations between words and contexts. It is important that we as a species preserve
this biodiversity in human consciousness. By this, I mean we need to preserve not only the
languages, but also the daily living experiences of a large group of people.
Bernie Krause wrote about how animal vocalizations are dramatically altered when
the biophonies of their ecosystems are destroyed by motor vehicles and industrial sounds. Similarly, human
vocalizations and conscious experience are destroyed when their supporting cultural
ecosystems are damaged. This is particularly a problem for poor countries
and vulnerable tribal communities.The destruction of their languages has a dramatic impact on the physical and mental health of people. When rituals and songs from childhood are preserved, they help maintain the health and cognitive capacity well into old-age. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The scientific enterprise
is a global effort, with people from many countries
collaborating with each other. However, there is a dominant narrative and it is
written in the language of English. The western universities, especially those
based in USA and UK, set the global narrative and the scientific categories in which we
think. This is worrisome because English is a notoriously fickle language
with no precise grammar. George Orwell described how the English language can
be distorted to mean arbitrary things. We have seen this in the political
sphere when words such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">"insurgent"</i>,
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">"surge"</i> and now <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">"alt-right"</i> are introduced.
But a similar corruption happens in the scientific sphere, based on how the
academic establishment encourages certain scientific terms to become popular. The worst
form of bondage is when we are completely unaware of how we are bounded by our own thought processes. This
makes slavery through controlling the language one of the subtlest and wickedest
forms of slavery. In this regard, we have to see how colonial powers
systematically abducted native American and Australian children from their
parents and enrolled them in boarding schools, where they were punished every
time they spoke in their mother tongues. Such boarding schools existed in India
where the elite bureaucrats were trained during the British Raj. But the greater problem today is how economic opportunity is denied to Indians who
don’t speak English. In this way, Indians are being alienated from their own
mother tongues and forced to think in English – an imported language, where
they are not recognized as an authority. For example, despite being fluent
speakers, Indians are not allowed to teach English in many countries. This is a subtle form of economic bondage where Indians remain
consumers of English products, but do not have any brand recognition when they
are the producers. If the English language is imagined as a computer, Indians do not have the root privilege and can only use a limited set of commands. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">In computer science, such chains of
slavery are exposed in the programming environments we use, and how much
control a programming language gives to the user. This is allegorically
narrated in the classic movie Tron, where the wicked operating system tries to
curb the freedom of the user. In today's world, we can replace this operating
system with Facebook, or NSA, or the manufacturers of mobile devices. Our online
and offline lives depend on these services, but how much awareness do we have
of our personal data that we leave behind ? Without awareness, there is no
freedom.Most people do not have a conscious awareness of their data because the computing environments do not interact with them in a language and graphics that they can relate to, although it is now possible to build such interfaces. </span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Degree of transparency in language: </span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">There is a remarkable difference between
different human languages on how opaque they can be rendered to the speakers
(or equivalently, how they can be manipulated by a position of authority). Borrowing the analogy from Kevin Kelly,
the English language is like a giant egg. This problem is apparent in the very
words "artificial intelligence". What exactly do we mean by
"intelligence"? What do we mean by "artificial"? Do we
expect an AI to be masculine or feminine? Do we expect this to be compassionate
or selfish? Do we treat it as a person, capable of suffering? More importantly,
does humanity have a creative agency with AI? Does the principle of strict causality in physics even permit humans to have a creative agency? Howe we answer these questions is simply a matter
of convention and social custom - these are
decided by positions of authority. For example, the Oxford dictionary gives
guidelines on how to interpret the words. Academic authority is consulted for
the interpretation of scientific terms. But this is not the case in
Sanskrit - which has many distinct words for intelligence: <i>buddhi, manas, citta, jnana, vijnana, prajna, ahamkara</i> and so on. Which of these words should we use to translate <i>artificial intelligence</i> ? The meaning of these Sanskrit words is not given by convention or authority, but is clear from their very etymology. </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">In this blog and later, I will argue that we should not merely translate from English categories, but build a complete scientific framework from the grounds-up using Sanskrit terminology. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Sanskrit is unique, because unlike any other human language, there is
no dictionary needed for Sanskrit. Instead, it possesses a generative grammar of computational rules. The number of Sanskrit words is potentially infinite. Even if we restrict to words less than 5 syllables in length, there are more than hundreds of thousands of words. Each word in Sanskrit is akin to
a self-explanatory computer program that can be parsed into individual
syllables (phonemes) by which its meaning can be derived. Thus, an infinite number of new words can be generated whose meaning
will be unambiguous to a Sanskrit speaker. The magic of Sanskrit grammar
is that you can have multiple ways of breaking a word and putting it together
again, that leads to multiple angles of meaning, all of which converge on the
denoted object. Certain words have even ten or more derivations to
distinct contextual associations, that reflect the meaning like how the
facets of a diamond reflect light in many directions within. This is unparalleled by any other language. The reason for this are two computational processes called <i>Sandhi</i> and <i>Samasa</i> that specify what to do when words are put together. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">I will illustrate this with a sentence containing just two words, from a mathematical text in Sanskrit called <i>Yuktibhasa</i>.</span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>JyaSamvargam</i> <i>CapaDwayaYogaViyogArthaJyaVargAntaram</i>. </blockquote>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">This <span style="font-family: inherit;">translates</span> into the following equation: </span><br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">sin(a)sin(b) = sin^2((a+b)/2)-sin^2((a-b)/2) </span></blockquote>
How is this possible? The first word is the expression on the left. The second word is the expression on the right. The equals-to sign is omitted, because it is implicit from an aspect of Sanskrit grammar known as <i>Vibhakti</i>. The left expression is translatable into English as Sine-Product. The right expression can be translated into a Lisp like syntax as follows. <br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Difference(Squares(Halves(Sum&Difference(Pair(Arcs))))) </blockquote>
The word order in Sanskrit is reversed, but otherwise this is what it says. The key thing to note is that the symbols () and & are omitted in Sanskrit. The parse-tree of how the parantheses close with each other is implicitly determined by the rules of <i>Sandhi</i> and <i>Samasa</i>. These compuatational rules enable on-the-fly generation of complex words that precisely describe any given semantic context. Such words are used not only for mathematical formulae but in poetry and regular parlance. For example, the hero <i>Arjuna</i> is addressed in the epic <i>Mahabharata</i> as <i>Savyasachi</i> (the one who can shoot arrows from both hands), <i>Pandava, Partha</i> etc, depending on the context in which the other person is referring to him. For any given context, the names themselves are not important for understanding people or concepts, but rather the relationships between them. We can see this influence in all Indian languages, where family relatives are addressed with words that denotes the precise kinship in the family tree. But unlike other languages where the meaning of words can change over time, the etymology of Sanskrit words retain their purity. <br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Key to understanding this is to recognize
the nature of "pollution" in a language that can obscure meaning. Indian
philosophers understood the universe in terms of five subtle elements, named as
- space, fire, air, water and earth. These elements have a distinct philosophical
meaning (which should not be confused with the meaning of the words in
English). In this order, these elements are defined as those cumulatively
accessible to the senses of sound, touch, </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">sight, </span>taste and smell. Thus, the
most gross element is named "earth" which is accessible to all the
five senses, where as the most subtle element is named "space" which
is accessible merely to the sense of sound. The grosser elements are considered
prone to pollution, where as the most subtle element "space" and its
associated property of "sound" is free from it. Any natural language
is considered as "<i>Prakrit</i>" (literally meaning "natural")
which has all the five constituent elements. A "prakrit" can be
polluted, just as earth, water and air could be polluted. When a language
(Prakrit) becomes polluted, it is termed Vikrit. When it is mixed with
polluting materials, it becomes "<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bhramsa</i>".
When the nature of the polluting materials overtake the very nature of
language, it becomes "<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Apabhramsa</i>".
The greater the amount of pollution in a language, the greater the harm created
to the ecology of concepts defined in that language, in how they relate to the perceiving mind. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Amongst modern languages, English is an Apabhramsa and its grammar is that of
an Apabhramsa - needing an infinite number of exceptions. But at its core, English
is a "<i>prakrit</i>" whose exact nature is often not known to its speakers.
Other languages are also Prakrits - each with their own charm and sweetness, when
realized in their unpolluted forms. However, at the core of any Prakrit is the
fundamental vibration of "sound", which is free from any type of
pollution. Indian philosophers argue that there is a language that is present
only in the most subtle aspect of "sound" - Sanskrit. Thus,
Sanskrit is not an ordinary language (Prakrit). It is considered beyond any
type of pollution. The closest analogy in the western tradition is the language
of pure mathematics. However, there is a significant
difference: Sanskrit is a spoken language. It cannot be represented in symbolic
form - with whichever alphabet - without losing its purity. There are two other
differences. Unlike mathematical/programming languages, Sanskrit can be used
for poetry and aesthetics as well as for science. Unlike
mathematical/programming languages, Sanskrit is based on a continuous living
tradition and is indeed the direct ancestor for modern mathematical/programming
languages, which only preserved parts of its aspects. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">To understand what is
missing, I will give a few examples. The nature of a computer program in the UNIX
programming environment is not evident from the name of its command, unlike the
vocabulary of Sanskrit. One has to look up the man page of the command to
understand what the program does. One can also look in the source-code of the
program, but that can be obscure in itself. Typically, this source-code or its associated data
structures are not even available for other computing applications, such as
popular web-services like Google and Facebook. Another comparison is with the
Lisp programming language, whose compiler is a short program written in Lisp
itself. This makes Lisp a very flexible language where new programming syntax
can be invented on the fly. Such is also the case for Sanskrit language, which
has a very compact grammar given by Panini. However, a blind person cannot
comprehend the syntax of the Lisp language, but can follow the diction in
Sanskrit. This is also the case for mathematical equations and formulae, which
were traditionally represented as poems that can be sung in Sanskrit. It is
also important to note that mathematical notation has certain limits. Many applications enabled by modern computing hardware like deep neural
networks, differentiation of discontinuous functions etc. cannot be
adequately analyzed by the current mathematical notation. This may be a fundamental limitation. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> There are certain key differences
between modern axiomatic mathematics and traditional Indian Ganita expressed in
Sanskrit. From a very early point on, Sanskrit tradition was conscious of the
limitations of 2-sided logic (I explained this in a different blog), so did not accept the notion of proofs by contradiction and used them only sparingly. Instead, the onus is placed on experimental
observation, like in physics. Further, the notion of the conscious observer is very
carefully defined, with respect to different layers of consciousness. Sanskrit language can be seen as a method of encoding low entropy
through its technical terms and grammar. By repeated use, they refine one’s
consciousness and make one see certain things that are not seen on first
glance. As Sanskrit is a spoken language, these words can be chanted or heard,
with eyes closed in meditation. This can be a source of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>mathematical inspiration. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><br /></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The heritage of scientific works in
Sanskrit: </span></b></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> The computer scientist Alan Kay
once argued that humans are very myopic in how we think about the future - our
eyes are dazzled by the present and we can imagine the future only in terms of
finite modifications of the present situation. However, our culture and history
are vast, with many ideas forgotten by the wayside before they reach their
maturity. In computer science, we can see this every passing year, as brilliant
ideas lay forgotten for several years, until new powerful computers or better
user-interfaces suddenly make them popular again. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">But the true history of computation (and science
in general) is not known to most people. Their origins lie in the ancient
history of India, which for the most part, has only been given brief glimpses
in Europe. The central figure of this story is the Sanskrit grammarian Panini,
who was born before the Buddha, and wrote the first algebraic system, the first
formal system, and indeed, the very first computational system. Panini stands
midway between us today and the earliest Sanskrit sages 5000 years ago. With
Paninian grammar and associated <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">shastras</i>
(scientific texts), India had a headway of about 2000 years before
Europe (and most of the other countries) when it comes to computational
thinking. This computational mindset has penetrated into million art-forms,
cultural and religious practices and of course, the scientific investigation in
India. For example, the <i>sutra</i> tradition of Panini is the direct ancestor of the modern mathematical notation that we use in science today. The Vayu Purana of 500 BC gives an explicit definition of a Sutra to have the following characteristics: </span><br />
<ol>
<li><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><i>Alpaksharam</i>: with the fewest letters possible</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><i>Asandigdham</i>: unambiguous</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><i>Saaravat</i>: meaningful & have the capacity to generate new sutras</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><i>Viswatomukham</i>: applicable to the external world </span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><i>Astobham</i>: containing no pauses and gaps</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><i>Anavadhyam</i>: irrefutable from perception and other means of knowledge (<i>pramanas</i>)</span></li>
</ol>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The Paninian rules of grammar have developed in this Sutra tradition and took them to the highest pinnacle. If you look for this in wikipedia, or in textbooks, or in trendy TED
talks, you will not find it. The reason is simple: India was colonized and its
history was suppressed. For the most part, historians of science ignore the
contributions from the whole world beyond Europe. They perpetuate colonial stereotypes about the superiority of
Europeans (Greeks) which sound comical and funny in this 21<sup>st</sup>
century. The fact is Europe was a scientific backwaters right up to the dawn of
the industrial revolution. Greeks and Romans had very few tangible achievements in science. They were quite superstitious and had appalling arithmetic, inaccurate time-keeping
by calendars, poor navigational tools and medicine that barely worked. This evidence cannot be rubbed
away by magically attributing scientific merit to random Greeks from
antiquity, by citing secondary literary sources. I will quote from the book
“<i>Upright thinkers</i>” by MIT physicist Leonard Mlodinow, who says point-blank that
systematic scientific investigation and intellectual discourse never happened
in the Arab world, China or in India. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Thinkers who were critical of the
intellectual status quo and who attempted to develop and systematize the
intellectual tools necessary to push the life of the mind forward were strongly
discouraged, as was the use of data as a means of advancing knowledge.</span></div>
</blockquote>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">This is ridiculous, considering all the
“data” and astronomical tables that Europe actually used to make their
calendars came from the Arab world and India. The best rebuttal is given by
Prof. C.K.Raju who traced out the gradual historical development of calculus in
India starting from Aryabhata and contrasted this with the dramatic appearance
in Europe. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">In India, too, a Hindu establishment
focused on caste structure insisted on stability at the expense of intellectual
advance. </span></div>
</blockquote>
</div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Actually, India never had heresy. Not
only were controversial issues discussed openly, but there is a well-documented
tradition of philosophical debate. Unlike other cultures, the various types of
personal bias are explicitly listed through the system of <i>Purva Paksha</i>. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This enabled thinkers of competing schools to
admit that their authority on truth is only partial, and not complete without
the knowledge of other schools. There is no
comparable example to the trial of Socrates in India. The rishis of India
always stressed on personal experience of knowledge instead of adhering to the
letter of tradition. When we talk about social inequalities, how can we ignore slavery.
Greeks and Romans had atrocious slave societies which continued until the
modern times in European colonies. As attested by the Greeks, slavery was
altogether absent in India. In fact, the archeological evidence from India
shows it to be one of the most egalitarian societies in the world and
materially quite well-off, right until the Islamic invasion. This is not to say
that inequalities did not exist, but they have to be treated relatively with
other societies. In any case, this a lazy argument and does not suffice for a
wanton dismissal of India. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">In contrast to Europe, the scientific
tradition in India is continuous and shows consistent material artifacts
throughout time. Indeed, the literary corpus of Indian manuscripts dwarfs
every other civilization, with hundreds of thousands of Sanskrit works still
lying untranslated. The scientific superiority of India was acknowledged by
every civilization, including by the Greeks. The Arabs, who studied knowledge
from all over the world, stated explicitly that Indians were the first race to
pursue science. But in today’s western controlled academia, Indian contributions
are acknowledged only grudgingly. Wikipedia, which admits citations only from
western sources, is a great example of this bias. When we look up the entry for
“thesaurus”, say, the first reference is to one <i>Philos of Byblos</i>. Does anybody have
a copy of this book ? Has this been ever seen by western scholarship except
through extrapolations from secondary sources ? Is there a living cultural
tradition of using this book ? None. This can be contrasted with the secondary
mention of the Sanskrit “<i>Amarakosha</i>”, which is a real book. It is far larger
and has been in continuous use till today. If the history of science
is a train, Indians are eligible to travel only in third class compartments. Greeks can travel for free. There
are many levels of control: western academic scholars and their “peer”-reviewed
journals, popular books and magazines written by western-certified academics,
online portals, and finally censorship on social
websites like Wikipedia or Facebook. It is a good exercise for the reader to check his / her favorite science website (Aeon, Nautilus, Conversation, Edge) on how much the sections on the history of science and philosophy has elements from India or China. This hardly reflects the actual numbers of scientists of Indian and Chinese origin, even those working in the west ! It is an open question how long this
academic cartel of western superiority can be maintained against the growing economic power of India and
China, as well as the relative egalitarian structure of online communication. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">This systematic eclipsing of Indian
achievements gives a very distorted view of history, making these conclusions
useless. For example, the grand tome of Steven Pinker <i>“Better angels of our
nature”</i> on the history of violence in the world has scant data from India. It
is unforgivable because India had the longest historical record of civilization
as well as the largest human population in the world. The data from India is
also inconvenient to Pinker’s thesis, which argues that historically
violence has only fallen down in time. In fact, India had a very peaceful
civilization for thousands of years along the Indus and Saraswati valleys with
no warfare. A similar distortion occurs in the book “Guns, Germs and Steel” by
Jared Diamond due to the complete absence of India. Diamond argues that
state power from agricultural states has forcibly penetrated tribal peoples
living in the peripheries and forests. But this did not happen in India, where
the tribal languages and customs survived to the present day. Finally, I have
to mention the book “The information” by James Gleick which gives a broad
history of information theory and computer science, but completely overlooks
India. As I will demonstrate through this series of blogs, it is absurd to
overlook the country of Panini. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="biodiversity"></a>
<br />
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<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Sanskrit as a promoter of biodiversity: <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></b></div>
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6YHkF3tqbWxEW5AcDvZS79yWJLk36vtc8aQPkctA5EgPurZa8lERG9i9FHjQjSWd7mmxpmK5rX3JeyrPZ-3j_AIA5LP6sOk98KArc8eQapMIrb6BwWrRUrGHhfSFprUsUy6yZrw/s1600/saraswati.gif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="275" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg6YHkF3tqbWxEW5AcDvZS79yWJLk36vtc8aQPkctA5EgPurZa8lERG9i9FHjQjSWd7mmxpmK5rX3JeyrPZ-3j_AIA5LP6sOk98KArc8eQapMIrb6BwWrRUrGHhfSFprUsUy6yZrw/s400/saraswati.gif" width="400" /></a></div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><i>Extent of the fertile cultivated lands around the Saraswati river in the Vedic period </i></span></div>
<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">For about ten thousand years, the Indian
subcontinent was not only the most populous area but also the most
technologically and economically advanced civilization in the world. But
despite this, this region preserved its biological diversity. The forests of
India housed vast numbers of tigers and other wild animals, whose numbers
started to decline only during the colonial era. The same is true for
linguistic and cultural diversity in human societies. One can contrast how
Irish and other Celtic languages got exterminated from the British isles to how
Dravidian and south east Asian languages thrived despite the dominance of
Sanskrit. India is the only civilization in the world where tribal languages
and customs are preserved, despite being in close contact with literate
societies. Apart from protecting economic and lifestyle niches, religious beliefs
and practices were also protected. Many external religions such as
Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Syriac Christianity, Bahai'ism have seeked and found
refuge in India. This case of India is all the more surprising when we note
that the aggressive European civilizations were but cousins to India, sharing a
common linguistic and mythological ancestry. So what did its cousins lack that
made India tolerant? </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The answer may be in the computational
nature of the Sanskrit language and the sciences nourished by it. Taken
together, they are a means to amplifying the consciousness of a person, making
him aware of every single aspect of life and his conduct to it. <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>This reinforcement of consciousness is the key
to avoiding environmental catastrophe in any age. Often, humans destroy living
ecosystems through sheer ignorance and not paying attention. Greed is a big
factor, but stupidity results in greater violence in the long term. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">The languages and the belief systems that we think in are <i>Prakrits</i> - applicable to a specific place and context. A certain type of fish might survive in certain type of waters, but other fish may die. Such is the case with <i>Prakrits</i>, they cannot claim to be universal. Further, if they become polluted (becoming <i>Apabhramsas</i>), they cause suffering to the very creatures that used to live there earlier. The greatest cause of suffering is the ego nurtured by the polluted mind. For example, after they conquered Bengal, the British have systematically scorched the region with famine to break the morale of people. The Americans exterminated the bison so that they could starve the native Indian tribes that depended on it. It is hard to fathom the depravities of such egotism, which continues to cause ecological destruction today. Even if we were completely selfish people (which I believe is a mischaracterization of us humans), we should be aware of the pitfalls of short-term greed. There is an important lesson to be learned from human civilizations that survived for a long time without ecological collapse like in India (at least until today's age).</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> The lesson to learn is the open computational grammar of Sanskrit, which makes it modifiable to suit to specific local contexts in space and time, such that the human mind pays attention to the changing constraints of nature. Like pure waters of an unpolluted river, they can be enjoyed by all living beings. In a more general sense, we can say the same for open-source software if it achieves political and economic awareness amongst people. </span> </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">When we compare the Indus-Saraswati
valleys with other ancient civilizations like Mesopotamia and Egypt, the first
thing that pops out is the sheer difference in size. North-western India was
the largest alluvial plain to have been cultivated by early humans and this was
nourished by the gigantic melting glaciers of the Himalayas post the ice-age.
This was the most fertile territory for settlement of humans, as it had every
single mineral and ecological resource. Because of the sheer size of this area,
the rest of the world experienced a huge cultural and genetic influx from here. In contrast, there is little evidence for inflow of people into India until 2000 years ago. There is no
genetic, archeological or literary evidence for an invasion/migration of Aryans
into India. Hitler was a complete idiot and so was Hegel. Modern racists are
equally stupid, despite being awful people. The case should have been closed,
but a problem still remains: why are European languages similar to Sanskrit if they
were not both sired by the same rampaging invaders? Considering the very ancient dates for agriculture and civilization in
India, an enormous amount of vocabulary might have been borrowed from India along with the spread of
agriculture. Words for numbers, agricultural tools and settled
village life could have been borrowed from Indian practices. Even genetic
evidence shows a significant migration from India and central Asia towards
Europe. These cultures could have evolved into distinct new languages over
thousands of years. Even the ancient European mythologies are a partial
reflection of the more extensive Indian works. Using the relatively simplistic tree model for language evolution, the Greek Indologist Nicholas Kazanas argues that European ancestors speaking Indo-European languages spread from the Saraswati valley through a northern route, with a stop-over in the Amu Darya basin and further into Russia. There is genetic evidence that Europeans evolved the ability to digest milk protein in this region, which probably gave these tribes an advantage over previous settlers in Europe (along with agricultural knowledge). </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">More broadly, the science of historical linguistics will need to evolve better models for linguistic
evolution than simple hierarchical specialization from a common tree. How languages
evolve may be far more complex, where technical words and
phrases spread like in fluid dynamics.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">India may have been the ancestral home for European tribes, but this agricultural civilization
did not spread along with a simultaneous awareness of ecological consciousness
and respect for nature. This can be contrasted with the parallel spread of civilization towards the south of India. Unlike the frigid north (just recovering from the ice-age), South India was already in a more advanced settlement phase: so these languages
did not borrow vocabulary for numbers and settled village life as in Europe. However, the scientific and
cultural influence of Sanskrit is tremendous in all Indian languages. For
example, Telugu shares 90% of its vocabulary with Sanskrit, despite being a
Dravidian language. Speaking Telugu provides a significant advantage in learning Sanskrit, as I discovered, not just in vocabulary but in all aspects of grammar. So this arbitrary grouping of South Indian languages into a separate family (based on corrupt models of language evolution considering only simple words and verb inflection patterns, but not the language in its entirety) needs to be questioned. Unlike European languages, South Indian languages didn't borrow such simple word structures from the Saraswati valley because they already had a working vocabulary for them, but borrowed more technical words and computational grammars which are infinitely more enriching. In this regard, it is illuminating to compare with the Finno-Ugric languages in Europe which also borrowed certain terminology for agriculture (these words resemble ancient Indo-Iranian roots than the later Germanic languages, despite the geographic proximity). The final clinching evidence is that the names of all Indian rivers (including many in South India) can be traced to Sanskrit etymologically, but very few European rivers have Indo-European roots. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Throughout the cultural history of India, all
great poets and writers in regional languages studied Sanskrit and were equally
proficient in it. The power of Sanskrit in word formation and grammar has
penetrated all Indian languages. In fact, the first writers of any regional
language (Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam etc.) wrote a technical Paninian-style
grammar for their language before composing any literary work. This is because
they understood the importance of grammar in imparting consciousness to the
literary tradition. This is in stark contrast to European languages whose
grammars were woefully inadequate until Sanskrit was discovered in colonial times. The
imperfect alphabets, spelling, and word formation of European languages resist change to this day. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">It is time to reclaim the word “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Aryan</i>” back into Sanskrit, where it has
a precise etymology. The root word refers to agriculture. Aryan simply meant a
noble person belonging to a settled agricultural civilization. “<i>Aryavarta</i>”
referred to the large arable land between the Indus and Gangetic plains that
was suitable for agriculture. The computer scientist Alan Kay mentioned that we
as technologists have not yet discovered a practice of “agriculture”: a stable,
settled community that respects nature and evolves a set of civilized norms. I think
this is exactly what is needed with computer science and AI: I term this “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Arya Prajna</i>” in Sanskrit – roughly
translated as civilized intelligence or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Aryan
Intelligence</i> for AI. Idiots and Nazis may be damned – they do not control
how I speak words of my own heritage. I can as well call it Indian Intelligence
or Hindu Intelligence, but that will do disservice to the many tribal communities
who still live with their traditional nomadic lifestyles, and who are equally
part of Indian / Hindu fabric. The Aryan ethic is a subset of Indian
culture, but it was successfully exported as a universal value system, both to
the west and to the east. I don't mind other people using this word, as long as they use it in the right context and meaning. In this regard, it is important to note that Buddha
called himself as adhering to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Arya
Dharma</i>. In my opinion, the best examples of the Aryan ethic in today’s
world are actually people who still live in the erstwhile plains of Saraswati
river – now turned into the Thar desert.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;">
</span>These are <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bishnois</i>, who are a
vegetarian community living sustainably and who are passionate protectors of
wildlife in the region. These people are my inspiration in how we should use
technology to live intelligently and consciously. This comes only through
understanding nature’s rhythm (<i>Rta</i>) and the mutual interrelationships between
all objects (<i>Indrajala</i>) including one’s own mind. This is known as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rtambara Prajna</i> in Patanjali’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Yoga Sutra</i>. We can equivalently call it<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Arya Prajna</i>. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> <span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span></span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Sanskrit categories of knowledge:</span></b></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span>
</div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">In an ancient time, the sage Vyasa
organized the Indian knowledge corpus into the Vedas (Veda literally means
knowledge, and Vyasa literally means compiler). Many people believe that <i>Vyasa</i>
is a common moniker used by an entire group of scientists and poets who
compiled these texts. These texts are broadly divided into the internal
spiritual sciences and external objective sciences. Unlike in the western and
Abrahamic faiths, it is the external sciences that are used as entry point for
the inner sciences, which are always shaped in their image. Thus in the Indian
tradition, seeking the inner spiritual truth is a series of recursive steps of
understanding the external world and creating a subtler internal universe in
that image. The inner sciences are dealt by the Vedas, which are four in
number. Each of them is paired with an outer science, these four are known as
the <i>Upavedas</i>. This is the grouping I will adopt in my series of blogs. The
pairs are as follows. </span></div>
<ol start="1" type="1">
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><i>Rig Veda</i>
(hymns in verse form) paired with <i>Ayur Veda</i> (science of health)</span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><i>Sama Veda</i>
(hymns in song form) paired with Gandharva Veda (science of arts and
music)</span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><i>Yajur Veda</i>
(hymns in prose form) paired with <i>Artha Veda</i> (science of ethics and
economics)</span></li>
<li class="MsoNormal" style="mso-list: l1 level1 lfo1; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; tab-stops: list .5in;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><i>Atharva Veda</i>
(hymns in composite form) paired with <i>Sthapatya Veda</i> (science of
engineering)</span></li>
</ol>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">In this series of blogs, I will deal with
them in the order 4-3-1-2. In each blog, I will try to provide a computational
perspective on these subjects, grounded in a historical narrative from India. I
will try to raise some new questions, as well as introduce certain Sanskrit
words that encode unique perspectives to think about the existing issues.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">I will connect language
with physics, and argue how grammar is a better model for doing physics than
the Newtonian analogy of "law". This will require building a complete
framework for computational science through <i>Vedangas</i>, which I explain
below.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>On ethics, I will describe the
limitations of language and logic in expressing ethical dilemmas and how that
relates to economics. In modern times, these dilemmas relate to the ethics of
AI in autonomous cars, finance and robotics, as well as technological
unemployment. I will substantiate this with discussion from the Indian
<i>Dharmashastras</i>, epics and the <i>Artha Shastra</i> of Chanakya. On health, I will argue about
how we need to understand the human body as a holistic ecological system and
vice-versa. I will discuss the holistic theory of healing in Ayurveda that
combines pharmacology with ritual, arts and mental discipline. I will connect this
with related evidence in neuroplasticity, gut bacteria,
endocrinology, psychology and the broader ecological health in the environment. On art, I will argue how
creativity is connected to gender and sexuality, using the theory of <i>Samkhya</i>. I will describe the principles of the ancient text of <i>Natyashastra</i>, as well as the
computational arts of <i>Avadhanam</i> and the 64 <i>kalas</i> traditionally practiced in India. I will try to provide certain directions on how to
extend these art-forms through AI, virtual reality and cybernetic systems. These
connections may look weird to a novice, so far greater elaboration is needed.
But I believe these are essential issues which cannot be overstepped while
thinking about AI. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">On the first topic of the science of
engineering, we need to understand the central role of computation in all
engineering sciences today. In the Indian tradition, the Vedas are supported by
six fields of supporting study – known as the <i>Vedangas</i> (limbs of the Vedas).
These are the external body to the internal spirit of the Veda, echoing the
Indian practice of equating the internal world with the external world. As the
external world is easier to study and analyze, the Vedangas are studied
rigorously by the students before the Vedas. I describe them in the following.
Each of them merits a separate blog with references, on how traditional Indian
knowledge can be used to interpret computational sciences. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpFirst" style="mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">1.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Shiksha</span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> (literally “instruction”): I translate this into today’s
language as <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">user-interface design</b>. Usually,
this is translated as phonetics, as the original texts mostly dealt with
accurate pronunciation. However, this is misleading because phonetics and
alphabet are far more precise in India than in Europe or in the middle-east. Further,
Shiksha also dealt with hand mudras that encode alphabets. The very word
Shiksha (instruction) refers to the fact that user-interface design is not
merely about providing the alphabet of interaction, but actually about
instructing the users on how to achieve proficiency with this alphabet.Traditionally,
Shiksha is visualized as the nose of the Veda (knowledge). </span></div>
<div class="MsoListParagraphCxSpMiddle" style="mso-add-space: auto; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo2; mso-margin-bottom-alt: auto; mso-margin-top-alt: auto; text-indent: -.25in;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">2.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Chandas</span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> (literally “structure”): I translate this into today’s
language as <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">combinatorics and theory of rhythm</b><span style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">.</span>
This is because this is precisely what this field describes. Pingala, who wrote
one of the earliest texts on Chandas described binomial theorem, Fibonacci
series and other combinatoric devices. Usually, Chandas is translated as
“prosody”. This is misleading because Sanskrit prosody is far more extensive
than the meters in other languages. What Sanskrit prosody analyzes is
the systematic division of time, which ultimately leads to how music can be
composed. This musical rhythm controls the movements of a person and sets them
to the right tempo, in order to perform any action. In this regard, this is a central element of sensory-motor loops in robotics, which can benefit from this inspiration. Traditionally, Chandas is visualized as the feet of the
Veda. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">3.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Vyakarana </span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">(literally “grammar”): I translate this
into today’s language as <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">programming
language theory</b>. This is because Paninian grammar is very different from
how “grammars” of other languages are treated. It is in fact equivalent to the
Backus-Naur Form in which programming languages are written. It also contains a
huge ontology of semantic concepts, that is especially relevant for AI programming.
Traditionally, Vyakarana is visualized as the mouth of the Veda. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">4.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Nirukta </span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">(literally “etymology”): I translate this
into today’s language as <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">semantics</b>.
This is because Sanskrit tradition has an extensive theory known as “<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">sphota</i>” on how meaning can be derived
from etymology. It needs to be always used in conjunction with Vyakarana.
Traditionally, Nirukta is visualized as the ears of the Veda. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">5.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Kalpa </span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">(literally “making”): I translate this into today’s language
as <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">geometry</b>. This is because
geometric context is the essential framework in which a ritual is formulated.
The texts of Kalpa deal with rituals pertaining to specific situations. Any
type of abstract ritual context can be encoded into a geometric context. Further, the
texts of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>kalpa contain “sulba-sutras”
(literally “string-rules”) that expose the earliest known geometric constructions and proofs, along with the so called Pythagoras theorem (should be rightfully called the Sulba theorem). Traditionally, Kalpa is visualized as
the hands of the Veda.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; mso-fareast-font-family: "Times New Roman";"><span style="mso-list: Ignore;">6.<span style="font: 7.0pt "Times New Roman";">
</span></span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Jyotisha </span></b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">(literally “seeing”): I translate this
into today’s language as <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">harmonic and
data analysis</b>. This is because time-keeping is the essential ingredient in
seeing things in the external world. The texts of Jyotisha described observing
astronomical events and precisely calculating time. They produced sophisticated
works of trigonometry and calculus, that form the basis for the modern
mathematical theory of analysis. However, the philosophy of Aryabhata and other
scientists of Jyotisha is very different from axiomatic mathematicians working
on analysis. It is more in line with modern techniques of data-interpretation
(observing the external world). So this is where this inspiration needs to be
deployed. Jyotisha has often been misused to make "predictions of the future", just like how data analysis is being misused today. Traditionally, Jyotisha is visualized as the eyes of the Veda. </span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">In the upcoming blogs, I will try to
summarize the Indian contributions towards each of these fields to build a
holistic framework for computational sciences. I will try to build certain
perspectives on how these inspirations can be deployed today for solving open
problems and for looking ahead. These issues need to be thought through again
and again, by scores of people, so that a coherent Indian perspective can be
built about AI. At present, Indian scientists rarely use Indian categories and
terminology. One significant disadvantage is the lack of Indian language
translations for cutting edge scientific topics. In this regard, a stark
contrast can be observed with Chinese, Japanese and various European scientific
communities.This needs to change.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">I will give a few examples to indicate
the kind of perspective I would like to build. In Sanskrit, <i>Mantra</i> and <i>yantra</i> signify
a cybernetic environment for the user and can be used as new models for
software and hardware respectively. The etymology of these words and their
existing associations with Indian psychology may create a new humanistic focus
on computing, where the effect of software on user's mental state is placed central to its evaluation. From the Indian perspective, the physical analogy for an
algorithm is not a mechanical clock, but a constantly flowing river that
nourishes people. This river is <i>Saraswati</i> on the banks of which Indian civilization
flourished, and who was later glorified as the goddess of speech. In the Indian tradition, this river is supposed to flow through all
the other rivers, blending at sacred spots of confluence. When Indians make
pilgrimages, they carry small pots of<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>water
from the rivers of their places of origin to the sacred Ganges and mix them in.
This is a way of acknowledging the commonality of all the rivers. Interpreting
this tradition with computers and algorithms, we should encourage
interoperability of all computing systems, by periodically blending in the
waters of computation with each other. This is necessary to prevent the chaos
of codecs, ports and standards that we experience today. This is a gentler method of ensuring interoperability than setting the agenda from the top down. Thinking
of algorithms and computer programs as rivers also requires us to
maintain them free of pollution. Various types of pollution in terms of data-structures, security, network infrastructure
etc. need to be addressed in a similar manner to how we address pollution in ecology. I will discuss these aspects in conjunction with Ayurveda.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span></span></div>
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<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">Learning
Sanskrit for Poetry and Spirituality: </span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">My blog will
definitely annoy many people, to whom there needs to be no better reason to
learn Sanskrit than to read the Upanishads or to enjoy the poetry of Kalidas. Indeed,
sublime works of Sanskrit such as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Abhijnana
Shakuntalam</i> had a huge influence in the European renaissance, influencing
the likes of Goethe and Coleridge. In a public discourse, Shatavadhani Ganesh once chided people championing scientific applications of Sanskrit as
idiots who miss the true beauty of this language. Point taken. Personally, I do agree that
these poetic works are the highest treasure of Sanskrit, but this will always be a
subjective personal judgement. These works of poetry and spirituality are
complementary to scientific practice, in how we analyze the external world. My
argument is that our modern tools for science are imperfect and need to be re-hauled through Sanskrit. The modern methods of academic instruction,
mathematics and science have been disconnected from the actual historical
heritage in Sanskrit works. This disconnect has produced so much pollution and
strife in this world that people cannot even find their inner world of
poetry any more.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>In Sanskrit tradition, the contrast
could not have been stronger. Great mathematicians like Bhaskara were also
highly skilled poets. All the great Sanskrit poets and musicians used
computational thinking that would pride a scientist. These bridges have to be
rebuilt today, not only for the sake of lovers of Sanskrit, but for the whole
world. The mainstream narrative from western media is okay with letting Indians have their naked mystics, but not as open about acknowledging the full extent of scientific contributions. So mysticism and poetry are not my bone of contention. But anybody who tries to confine the applicability of Sanskrit to just within these realms is an enemy, not of Sanskrit, but of science.</span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">What to do next ? </span></b><br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: justify;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">I have a
tough problem writing these blogs and I need help from the readers. Firstly, if you like my blog, please copy it and annotate it with your own impressions and ideas. </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">You may use everything written in my blogs with
the most liberal creative commons license. </span>If you are an editor, please edit my arguments and cite them with references, wherever needed. You can cut specific portions of the text and distribute it to a certain audience who may not be interested in the other aspects. At this stage, I need to sharpen my ideas through discussion and criticism. If you have money, please support my research :) If you are from CDAC or other such scientific institute working on Sanskrit, please be aware that digitizing old Sanskrit texts or art-forms is not the only goal within your mandate. It is high time that a brand new vision for computation and human interfaces is built from Sanskrit. If you are the Indian government, please evolve a funding scheme that adequately supports scientists working in these fields. You have no more excuses for lack of monies. An ecosystem of funding and support is needed not only for scientific literature, but also for technical development of computational systems based on these ideas. It is better to have many sources of funding, such that they cannot be controlled by vested interests in the establishment. I think a blog is neither the right encoding (a book may be better, I might write one when my ideas become more mature) nor the right method of communicating to the public (who have short attention spans, but I don't care about the average reader). The right method of creating online literature has not been developed yet. Ted Nelson had several great ideas in his <i>Xanadu</i> system, but even he is unaware of the Sanskrit tradition of etymology, <i>sutras</i> and <i>bhashyas</i> (no fault of his). A new world of computational literature will be built in my own life-time: I would like to shape it with inspiration from the Sanskrit tradition. After all, the future is not settled yet. </span></div>
</div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"></span>
</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">I will try the age-old
Indian trick of using stories and mythologies to get my point across. In essence,
our situation today is similar to the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Kishkindakanda</i>
in Ramayana, where Rama requests the help of Sugriva to find his lost Sita
(Indian scientific inspiration). Sita is kidnapped by Ravana and imprisoned in an ivory
tower in Lanka (western academia) and we need to build a bridge to get there.
My job here is to be like Angada - the son of Vali, convincing the king Sugriva that he should
keep his promise to Rama. I should have no ego. I should let go of the fact that my own father Vali has
been killed by Rama, as this is done for the cause of <i>Dharma</i>. For me personally, Vali is the altar of European "enlightenment", of which I am definitely a product. But how can Vaali equally not be my own personal Indian heritage ? Actually, I cannot be sure. So I have to keep evaluating the relevance of Sanskrit in a dispassionate manner: on issues such as technical transparency, biodiversity and so on. Only this context determines who is Rama and who are Sugriva and Vali. The cause of the Indian claim for scientific heritage is important, but cannot be the sole arbiter of my work here. This is also why I ignore the aspect of poetic beauty and spirituality in the relevance of Sanskrit for computation.These are subjective values and prone to misinterpretation. After the Vanara army is ready, I have to show where to
ocean is shallow and how to build a bridge to Lanka. But I need help from
everybody to pick up their stones and lay them down. When the time comes, I
should be ready to serve as a messenger to the court of Ravana. When I place
my foot down on a topic, no Rakshasa should be able to lift it up. This is hard
work and I am not sure if I am monkey enough to be up for it (please excuse my
pun from the Ramayana). There are many others like me, and most of them are not
even Indian. But learning Sanskrit for the purpose of redeeming science can be
as joyful an endeavor as living the Ramayana in our own lives. In this sense,
there is a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rasa</i> to this drama and it
is not mere mechanics. </span></div>
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<b><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">References: </span></b></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman";">If you actually got until here, it means you have patience for more reading. There are many references to be added here and this section will (may) be updated later. I will give specific references in the upcoming blogs when I discuss individual topics in greater detail. </span><br />
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><br /></span>
</div>
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;">[1] Rajiv Malhotra's book <a href="http://beingdifferentbook.com/" target="_blank">"Being Different"</a> : I highly recommend this book to everyone, especially his passages on Hegel and German Indology. He also supported a <a href="http://rajivmalhotra.com/store/" target="_blank">volume of books on Indian scientific contributions</a>. He also organizes a series of <a href="http://swadeshiindology.com/" target="_blank">Indian Indology conferences</a>. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;"><br /></span><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">[2] C.K.Raju's articles on the history of Indian <i>Ganita</i> (calculus): <a href="http://ckraju.net/IndianCalculus/index.htm" target="_blank">1</a>, <a href="http://ckraju.net/papers/Eternity-and-infinity.pdf" target="_blank">2</a>, <a href="http://ckraju.net/blog/?p=117" target="_blank">3</a> ...His book on <a href="https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/the-eleven-pictures-of-time/book225734" target="_blank">the various theories of time</a> which critique Newtonian and Einsteinian models of physics. See also <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MvpuC7Dg4e0&t=15s" target="_blank">his lecture on the superiority of Indian methods of time-keeping</a>. But most importantly, know about the real history of calculus. </span></span><br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<span style="font-size: small;"><iframe allowfullscreen="" class="YOUTUBE-iframe-video" data-thumbnail-src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/IaodCGDjqzs/0.jpg" frameborder="0" height="266" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IaodCGDjqzs?feature=player_embedded" width="320"></iframe></span></div>
<br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">[3] The <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbMVogVj5nJThf31TNSQzuN7zqxe7HdRN" target="_blank">video lectures on the contributions of Indian mathematics</a> by IIT Bombay. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"> <span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><br /></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: small;">[3.141...] See reference [3.141<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">5</span>...] By the way, what time is it ? Never enough time for perfection. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">[4] The <a href="https://www.scribd.com/doc/232875587/Foundations-of-Indian-Culture-Session-Notes" target="_blank">lectures of Shatavadhani Ganesh on Indian culture</a>: they are a treasure-trove of erudition with many references. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;"><br /></span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;"><br /><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">[5] The videos on Sanskrit learning by Advaita Academy: </span><a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWjpkY4mU2RDgcakdhrrC8mUIqkaosEDU" target="_blank">Panini's Ashtadhyayi, </a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWjpkY4mU2RD8URCGJFG5nZQcb_PKTW8-" target="_blank">Sanskrit instruction</a></span><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">[6] The videos on <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLWjpkY4mU2RD8URCGJFG5nZQcb_PKTW8-" target="_blank">Indian culture and arts by Shaale</a>. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;">[7] Michel Danino's<a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP06WrEItKXlH4aopocitS0KRKNFfL9uE" target="_blank"> lectures on the Aryan Invasion Theory</a>. </span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">[8] Michel Danino's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL-NRrjK61OD0o0w_XtG3hVO1ECEFcFGsv" target="_blank">lectures on the Indian civilization</a>.</span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">[9] Edward Slingerland's book <a href="http://eslingerland.arts.ubc.ca/tryingnottotry/" target="_blank">"Trying not to try" </a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">[10] Leonard Mlodinow's book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/Upright-Thinkers-Journey-Living-Understanding/dp/0345804430" target="_blank">"The upright thinkers" </a></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">[11] Steven Pinker's book <a href="http://stevenpinker.com/publications/better-angels-our-nature" target="_blank">"The better angels of our nature" </a></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">[12] Jared Diamond's book<a href="http://www.jareddiamond.org/Jared_Diamond/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel.html" target="_blank"> "Guns, germs and steel" </a></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">[13] Bernie Krause's book <a href="http://www.thegreatanimalorchestra.com/" target="_blank">"The great animal orchestra" </a></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">[14] Alan Kay's lectures on the history of computing ideas: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvmTSpJU-Xc" target="_blank">1</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ubaX1Smg6pY" target="_blank">2</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YyIQKBzIuBY" target="_blank">3</a>, ... </span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;">[15] Ted Nelson's <a href="https://www.youtube.com/user/TheTedNelson/videos" target="_blank">videos</a>: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KdnGPQaICjk" target="_blank">1</a>, <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En_2T7KH6RA" target="_blank">2</a>, ..</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">[16] John Kadvany's article on <a href="http://doc.gold.ac.uk/aisb50/AISB50-S13/AISB50-S13-Kadvany-paper.pdf" target="_blank">Paninian grammar and modern computing</a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">[17] Subhash Kak's article on the <a href="http://www.ece.lsu.edu/kak/bhate.pdf" target="_blank">application of Paninian grammar to computing</a></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;">[18] Rick Briggs on the possibility of <a href="http://www.aaai.org/ojs/index.php/aimagazine/article/viewArticle/466" target="_blank">using Sanskrit for knowledge representation</a>. Sadly this article is very badly misinterpreted by jingoists. I will write more about knowledge representation and semantics when I discuss Vyakarana and Nirukta. </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;"> </span><span style="font-size: small;"><br /><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">[19] Introduction to the <a href="https://uttishthabharata.wordpress.com/2011/11/25/flexible-sanskrit/" target="_blank">flexibility of Sanskrit </a></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">[20] My article on the <a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.de/2015/11/the-four-sided-negation-tool-for.html" target="_blank">four-sided negation in Indian logic</a></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;">[21]</span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> My article on <a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.de/2015/05/growing-old-in-age-of-machine-learning.html" target="_blank">technological unemployment </a></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;">[22] </span><span style="font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">My article on the <a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.de/2015/07/octopus-and-bicycle.html" target="_blank">trend of monopolization in computing applications</a></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;">[23] PRI's world in words is one of favorite podcasts: this is <a href="http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-06-29/world-words-live-ainu-zaza" target="_blank">their episode on endangered languages</a>. <a href="http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-05-25/japan-ainu-language-largely-unknown-and-unloved-linguists-are-fascinated-it" target="_blank">Ainu tribal woman of Japan</a> singing in old-age, <a href="http://www.pri.org/stories/2016-08-18/new-generation-canadians-are-learning-language-and-not-all-them-are-tribal" target="_blank">native American tribal languages</a> destroyed by colonization, their biased episode on <a href="http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-02-26/fancy-learning-indias-ancient-sanskrit-language-get-ready-be-challenged" target="_blank">Sanskrit revitalization</a> (where Sanskrit is portrayed as a liturgical language connected with religious nationalism - quite a contrast, for example, with Ainu)</span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;">[24] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nbv1D7F-V40&t=51s" target="_blank">Sanskrit Ghana Pati singing in old age</a>: Just like the Ainu woman above, but with a lot more computational complexity (I will write about the error correcting codes of Ghana recitation in my blog on Shiksha). </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;">[25] Greek Indologist <a href="http://www.omilosmeleton.gr/en/nk_cv_en.asp" target="_blank">Nicholas Kazanas</a> has written many books, and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tsqMWj0WFKc" target="_blank">videos of his lectures</a> are available on Youtube. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;">[26] American Indologist David Frawley <a href="http://indiafacts.org/sanskritization-new-model-language-development/" target="_blank">disputes with the hierarchical tree model for the evolution of Indo European languages</a> and proposes a diffusion-based approach. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;">[27] Teman Cooke argues that <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j12BBcKSgEQ" target="_blank">the myth of the scientific method is a lie</a> and this is not how science is conducted in the real world. This lie was invented to make way for European appropriation of scientific discoveries from the rest of the world. See [28].</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;">[28] <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwRTqOhXDgJgjSSlHgGL8Qs8EH4iSbhkd" target="_blank">CK Raju's interviews with Claude Alvares</a> where he argues that the paradigm shift theory of Kuhn is a lie. He also gives a broad historiography for scientific discoveries in India as well as in the Arab world.He serially debunks the myth of Copernicus, Euclid and Claudius Ptolemy. In my opinion, the myth of Claudius Ptolemy is the most important one to debunk (and it is also the easiest, as it rests on ridiculously flimsy grounds). </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;">[29] Here is an informal blog that recounts <a href="http://indicportal.org/indic-perspective-math-1/" target="_blank">various instances of how Indian Ganita is digested into western mathematics</a>. This summarizes CK Raju's scholarly work along with examples and illustrations from other writers. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: small;">[30] Sankrant Sanu is an activist for the cause of using Indian languages in higher education and computing: His book <a href="http://www.bhashaneeti.org/" target="_blank"> Bhasha Neeti</a> has a nice web portal. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">[31] There is an ecosystem of web portals explaining Indian culture, philosophy and customs from the insider perspective: <a href="http://prekshaa.in/" target="_blank">Prekshaa</a>, <a href="http://www.pragyata.com/mag" target="_blank">Pragyata</a>, <a href="http://indicportal.org/" target="_blank">IndicPortal</a>, <a href="http://indiafacts.org/" target="_blank">IndiaFacts</a>, <a href="http://creativeindiamag.com/" target="_blank">CreativeIndiaMag</a> and so on. They are very good and not at all jingoistic, as how the mainstream media portrays them to be. (You might run into hotheads and idiots on social media though). Just like any other web-based education / journalism organization, it is unclear how these endeavors make any profit. As profits get depleted from journalism, the only journalism that will survive is a fake one, with support from the (financial) establishment. The same can be said about education. This will have a deleterious effect on our democracy. The business model for web education and journalism needs to be redefined and Indian culture may provide psychological insights on how to do this (I will write more about this when I write on the Artha Veda). </span></span><br />
<span style="font-size: small;"><br /></span>
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">[32] </span>Loads of references about AI, technological unemployment, ethics in AI, autonomous cars, how data-driven learning messes up algorighmic convergence.. are you kidding me ? Use google man. Or get a PhD. Or check out the <a href="https://soundcloud.com/saadcaffeine/sets/ethical-machines" target="_blank">Ethical Machines podcast</a><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">. Or the</span> <a href="http://www.fatml.org/" target="_blank">FATML</a> conference. One of the organizers is an<a href="https://medium.com/@geomblog/when-an-algorithm-isn-t-2b9fe01b9bb5#.87txe7q00" target="_blank"> expert Sambhar cook</a>. Check out his <a href="http://blog.geomblog.org/" target="_blank">geomblog</a>. </span></span></span><br />
<br />
<span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: small;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-family: "times" , "times new roman" , serif;">[33] People who have read my blog before would know that I severely reject parochialism. As a reference to new readers who might come across this post, I am sharing two previous essays I wrote: <a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.de/2016/01/anatomy-of-open-source-education.html" target="_blank">How th</a><a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.de/2016/01/anatomy-of-open-source-education.html" target="_blank">e European renaissance was driven by advances in the science of anatomy</a>, <a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.de/2008/12/anatomy-of-terrorism.html" target="_blank">how parochial superio</a><a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.de/2008/12/anatomy-of-terrorism.html" target="_blank">rity complex coupled with victim</a><a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.de/2008/12/anatomy-of-terrorism.html" target="_blank">hood is a deadly murderous mix that leads to terrorism</a>. </span></span></span></span></div>
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Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com15tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-21061642678571414322016-07-01T13:49:00.002-07:002016-07-02T03:11:50.299-07:00The three sided hope<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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I joined a photography hobbyist group recently, where once a month, we are invited to take photographs based on a theme. The theme for this month is "<i>Hoffnung</i>". In western philosophy, <i>Hoffnung</i> (hope) and <i>Angst</i><style>
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</style> (fear) are the two colors through which the world is painted. A young child, a blossoming flower, or a candle in the dark may signify hope. Their opposites signify suffering and fear.
Although this dualistic model is the most common way we think of the world
today, it is not natural to India. In India, we think in terms of not two, but
three qualities or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Gunas</i>. There are
three sides to hope, which are exactly the same three sides to suffering. A
depiction of hope from an Indian perspective should show all the three
qualities. I
wanted to take a photograph that captures this Indian perspective about hope.</div>
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I decided to try my luck on a Sunday walk in the park. It had drizzled earlier, but the sun had come out by then. Along the stream, there were a few broad leaves that held gleaming beads of water. I stooped onto my knees and took a few pictures, but I was not very pleased with them. I needed to wade through a thick mud to get to a better angle. I did not have the grit and patience to get to that. </div>
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"<i>Es gibt keine Hoffnung hier</i>", I muttered, echoing the words of Buddha. There is no hope to be found in this bubble of existence. As shadows are sustained by light, so is light sustained by shadows. <i>Hoffnung</i> and <i>Angst</i> are two sides of the same phenomenon. They are sustained by the relative mirroring of one impression by another. <i>Das ist pessimistisch</i>, but such pessimism may be healthy as one wades through this mud of life. Suffering can be eliminated by transgressing these relative realities and realizing the void. But this eliminates hope as well. </div>
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But what about the gleaming beads of water that I photographed ? They could be a totem to a dissect the causes of suffering. Upon meditating on them, I observed there are three causes for the suffering and confusion in my own mind. </div>
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The first is the overawing power of greed in this world. We are rapidly destroying this planet - our only home. Millions of plant, animal, insect and bacterial species are going extinct as we are usurping their habitats for the cause of industrialization. Ancient dwellers of this planet, living for eons before the first human was ever born, are being decimated. They do not have a voice on the stock market. They do not have a political representation. Such is the fate for human culture too, with thousands of languages in the danger of going extinct. Ancient songs and rituals are disappearing, with people forced into a common uniform of modernity, that speaks in only one language. The defining element of greed is expansion. The free flow of capital will not tolerate any barriers. Like a parasite eating a host species from the inside, this greed is corrupting the values of human society and even the very nature of the human self. </div>
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The second cause is the impermanence of beauty. The poet John Keats said that a thing a beauty is a joy forever. But is it ? Every object in this world has to grow old and die. Such is the fate of people, plants and animals. Such is also the fate of art, languages, or ideas. Even if one can defend oneself against the onslaught of greed, how can one do so against the very element of death ? This planet will die, the sun will die, galaxies will drift apart in space, and the whole universe will die in a slow heat death. Mirroring this physical decay is the decay of information structure, as entropy rises. This rising chaos of matter and information will eat every object in this universe, including human beings and their relationships. Paraphrasing the words of the computer scientist
Norbert Wiener, it is hard to be optimistic when faced with the grim fate of
the universe.
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The third cause for suffering is the indifference in this world. When one is confronted with the futility of choice between equally impermanent things, nihilism is the only acceptable viewpoint. What can a finite being do to make a difference to an infinite amount of suffering ? It is a rational response for man to be indifferent to the pain of other men, animals, and anything else in the universe. With rising indifference in society, truth will become a casualty. When we admit that everything is going to die, nothing needs a history. Nothing needs a safeguard of protection. As a computer scientist, I see the mighty force
of indifference in how we build the internet and its applications. Provenance
is stripped from works of beauty as they are converted into bits, and
endlessly mashed up. Technology is turning fakery into an art-form, as it is becoming
increasingly difficult to distinguish the fake from the real thing. Given
enough technology, even human relationships can be faked. This indifference will turn a blind eye to greed. As the more vicious and militaristic of people annihilate the others, the world will shut its eyes in indifference.<br />
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According to Hindu philosophy, the three causes of suffering correspond to the three <i>Gunas</i>: <i>Rājas</i>, <i>Satva</i> and <i>Tāmas</i>. They encompass the entire vista of suffering in the world. They cannot be reduced any further. When one imagines a utopia, one is necessarily ignoring one of the three causes of suffering. It may appear that one cause of suffering is reduced, but this automatically increases the effect of another cause. Minimizing suffering requires one to find and maintain a delicate balance between the three <i>Gunas</i>. This is far more difficult than binary narratives such as choosing the light over the dark. <br />
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Having indulged the reader on the nature of suffering, I have now the tough task of convincing of hope. But as I said, the three causes of suffering have their counterparts in three causes for hope. To convey this, I need to evoke the <i>Rasa</i> of <i>Shringāra</i> in the mind of the reader. Taking inspiration from the Sanskrit poet Kāḷidās, I will try to describe hope through the beads of water in my photograph. <i>Upamā kāḷidāsasya</i>, as the saying goes in Sanskrit. The simile belongs to Kāḷidās, as he rendered it in the most fetching manner. In Sanskrit poetry, <i>Alankāra</i> refers to ornamentation, which engages the attention of the reader. From <i>Upamā</i> (simile / comparison) are derived <i>Utprēksha</i> (transposition by imagination) and <i>Rūpaka</i> (metaphor / equation of one to another). I will render them in my own limited manner. <br />
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The pearls of water stand tip-toed on the leaves, dispassionate to the world around them, just as <i>Brahma</i> sits in meditation on the lotus rising high above the cosmic ocean. They tell us that in this world of sorrow, imagination and non-attachment will take one to a higher plane of happiness. Each drop is a world of its own, but it reflects the light from every other drop, leading us to imagine if that light is the omnipresent <i>Vishnu</i> who spans between the worlds. This light reveals to us that the greed and narrow-mindedness of people living in their own bubbles will eventually be overcome by the expanding presence of love. The world seems blessed with these rain drops, as water washes the leaves of their sins and renews them, moving them from death to rebirth in every single moment, as <i>Shiva</i> the immortal one is realized as every single object in this universe. </blockquote>
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The trinity of <i>Brahma</i>, <i>Vishnu</i> and <i>Shiva</i> represent the three <i>Gunas</i> of <i>Satva</i>, <i>Rājas</i> and <i>Tāmas</i>. Every object in the universe has an intrinsic composition of these qualities, and based on how they are balanced, it evolves over time. Reflected inwards, these three <i>Gunas</i> converge in the trinity that lead to the inner self. Reflected outwards, they diverge and become <i>Dōshas</i> (faults). Thus, the <i>Gunas</i> are like three gates that lead to hope when opened simultaneously. But when any of the <i>Gunas</i> is taken to excess <i>i.e, when</i> any of gates are opened in isolation, they lead to suffering. </div>
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<i>Brahma</i> creates a new virtual world over the cosmos as it exists now. Over time, this virtual world expands in a greedy manner and tries to eat everything. In our minds, and in our societies, we keep creating such virtual worlds. The economic world dictated by money is one such world. Our conceptions of religion, honour, ethnic identity are all such virtual worlds. When this virtual world is not balanced with the two other <i>Gunas</i>, it metamorphoses into greed, which is the first cause of suffering. This greed needs to be overcome by the expanding presence of love, symbolized by <i>Vishnu</i>, and by the indifference to the historical ego, symbolized by <i>Shiva</i>. </div>
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The expanding presence of <i>Vishnu</i> to reach into every single object in the universe, also means it has to bear their decay and death, which is the second cause of suffering. Loving attachment to anything in this universe will inevitably cause pain. So this <i>Rājas</i> quality has to be balanced with the creative capacity of <i>Brahma</i> and the ever-renewing quality of <i>Shiva</i>. </div>
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<i>Shiva</i>'s complete indifference to the historical ego of self (the story that one tells of one's past) will make one oblivious to the pain of others, which is the third cause of suffering. It also makes one not care for one's cultural roots. It leads to the annihilation of passion for beauty. Social and ecological relationships will thus be destroyed. So this <i>Tāmas</i> quality of <i>Shiva</i> has to be balanced with the loving presence of <i>Vishnu</i> and the creative capacity of <i>Brahma</i>. </div>
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Thus, the three sides of hope are also the three sides of suffering. Like three sides of a triangle, these three <i>Gunas</i> describe the universe in its entirety and enclose the self. Hope is achieved by the realization of the thinking mind that it is none of the three <i>Gunas</i>, but the deeper self that is centrally located, which transcends them altogether. In <i>Bhagavad Gīta</i>, this is mentioned as </div>
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<i>Swadharmē nidhanam shrēyaḥ, paradharmō bhayāvahaḥ</i></div>
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Following the nature of one's own self (<i>swadharma</i>) causes happiness. Following the nature of the others (<i>paradharma</i>), as given by the identification of the three <i>Gunas</i>, causes fear. </div>
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This <i>Ātman</i> (self) or its nature (<i>swadharma</i>) are ineffable terms. They can neither be described by words nor depicted as pictures. Thus, all my attempts to capture a photograph depicting Hope are hopeless. However, hope is present in the silence between the sounds, in the unmediated sight, and in the unspoken word. Chinese philosophers call this same phenomenon as the <i>Dao</i>. When one chants a mantra in full attention, or when one sings in full honesty, or when one dances in complete abandon - when one is completely absorbed in any activity that one forgets one's own ego, in that very moment, Hope is realized as the inner self. </div>
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Using water is apt in describing this otherwise ineffable moment, as the <i>Mantra</i> in <i>Taittirīya Āraṇyakā </i>says, </div>
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<i>Yopām āyatanam vēdā, āyatanavān bhavati. </i></blockquote>
The one who knows the root of water, will get established in his roots (his inner self). <br />
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This verse is known as <i>Mantra Pushpam</i>. It says that the stars are the root of water, and water is the root of the stars. Everything in the cosmos is maintained by water. In the <i>Sāmkhya</i> philosophical system, water is one of the <i>Pancha Bhūtās</i> - the five elements related to the sensory apparatus of the mind. Water refers to that part of the universe which can be accessed by the senses of hearing, sight, touch and taste, but not by the sense of smell. Unique among the five senses, the sense of smell is completely dependent on memory, and thus on the historical ego. Thus, in this philosophical sense, to sense water, one has to let go of one's memory and ego. This would lead one to the ineffable moment which contains Hope. The presence of water in this universe is a totem that hope is available, however desperate the situation may appear. <br />
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<i>Yopām pushpam vēdā, pushpavān prajāvān pashuvān bhavati</i></blockquote>
The one who knows the flower of water, will become the holder of flowers, society and animal wealth. Through this ancient verse of the <i>Brāhmaṇs</i>, I wish the reader a life filled with Hope.<br />
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<b>Notes: </b></div>
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1) Readers who are conversant in western philosophy will notice that my translation of the German word "<i>Angst</i>" as "<i>fear</i>" is crude. This is for reminding the reader that my translation of Sanskrit terms to English is equally crude. To properly know a tradition, there is no alternative to learning the original language in which the ideas re expressed. </div>
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2) Here is an interesting exposition of the <i>Mantra Pushpam</i> through <i>Bharatanatyam</i>. </div>
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3) Here is an <a href="http://www.adelineyoga.com/wp-content/uploads/MantraPushpam.pdf" target="_blank">English translation of the <i>Mantra Pushpam</i></a>. </div>
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4) The <i>mantras</i> are supposed to be chanted by a person in full attention. There is a specified intonation in how one should chant the <i>mantra</i>, which are marked on the written text. These <i>mantras</i> have been passed down by oral transmission for thousands of years. </div>
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5) The <i>Mantra Pushpam</i> is typically chanted at the end of Hindu ceremonies, when a flower is ritually offered to the deity. Notice how the ritual ends with an <i>Ātma Pradikshana</i> - a circumambulation around themselves, signifying that the deities are present within their own bodies. </div>
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6) Earlier, I wrote a gentle introduction about the <a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.de/2010/04/samkhya-arithmetic-of-natures-evolution.html" target="_blank"><i>Sāmkhya</i> philosophical system</a> in this blog. I followed this up with an introduction to the <a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.de/2010/05/devas-of-samkhya-natural-or.html" target="_blank"><i>Devās</i> in <i>Sāmkhya</i> and the <i>Pancha Bhūtās</i></a>. I also described the <a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.de/2015/11/the-four-sided-negation-tool-for.html" target="_blank">Indian logic of </a><i><a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.de/2015/11/the-four-sided-negation-tool-for.html" target="_blank">Catuṣkōṭi</a>. </i></div>
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7) Identifying a cause for hope is one of the hardest challenges for atheism. Modern atheism is built through a criticism of organized religion in the west, especially Christianity. I can broadly summarize three responses to this problem. If readers are aware of more responses, please point them to me. </div>
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7.a) I found the first response articulated in the excellent book by Bill Bryson "<i>A short history of nearly everything</i>". He says that the odds of the universe constituting itself (all the physical constants in their right proportion) are so low that there is good cause for hope. Furthermore, the odds of a person being born as an individual, with all the genetic forefathers surviving and finding their mates, turns the odds for hope much further. The drawback of this response is "<i>shit happens</i>", also known as the "<i>Problem of Evil</i>" in Abrahamic mythology (tackled, for example, in the Book of Job in the bible). Just because the past has been good, nothing can be taken for granted for the future. Otherwise, we will succumb to the classic error of the gambler. </div>
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7.b) This is the <i>Transhumanist</i> response: medical science will prolong our lives forever and make us immortal. We will merge with the machines and upload our consciousness to a computer. The drawback with this response is that it only addresses the cause-2 of the suffering: death. There is no guarantee that the 1st and 3rd causes of suffering will vanish. In fact, they might be accentuated. People can become immortals and lead crappy lives for an infinite amount of time. Transhumanism is inspired by the Omega point of Teilhard de Chardin, which I think is derived from an incorrect reading of the <i>Vēdānta</i> philosophy of Aurobindo. The subtle nature of the 3 <i>Gunās</i> as both the cause and cure of suffering is lost. </div>
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7.c) This is the response I used to give whenever my friends were feeling down: we have insufficient knowledge about the future, so we cannot assume that it will be bad. Assuming that it is bad means we are making an error of prejudice with insufficient data. I think this is a philosophically sound response to the problem of suffering, but psychologically not effective. <br />
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I think the three-sided response for hope rooted in the <i>Sāmkhya</i> system gives a strong naturalist alternative, but it argues that there is an aspect of the self (<i>Purusha</i>) that cannot be reduced to the constructions of the mind. Other Hindu philosophical systems like the <i>Vēdānta</i> are derived from <i>Sāmkhya</i>, but they posit a reality that is greater than the universe. </div>
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8) Deconstruction has become a philosophical pastime in the past century, often being used as a weapon to destroy existing systems of politics or works of art. When applied internally, this is a cause for good, as symbolized by the perennial renewal of <i>Shiva</i>. But when applied externally to other objects, in isolation from the other two <i>Gunās</i>, it becomes a cause for suffering. I think many plans for utopia, going back to the earliest iconoclastic religions, have failed because of this misunderstanding.</div>
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9) Water plays an <a href="http://moonpointer.com/new/2011/02/significance-of-water-in-buddhism/" target="_blank">important role in Buddhism</a>, as a meditative tool and similar to how it is used for the <i>Abhishēka</i> of <i>Shiva</i>. Buddhism derives from the <i>Shramāna</i> systems of India, from which <i>Shaivism</i> is also derived. So it emphasizes the deconstruction path of investigation into self. The <i>Shaiva</i> traditions follow a similar line. In contrast, the other religious systems like <i>Vaishnavism</i> or <i>Yōga</i> emphasize the other <i>Gunās</i> of <i>Satva</i> and <i>Rajas</i>. But maintaining a balance between the <i>Gunās</i> and ultimately transcending them is a central aspect of all Indic religions.</div>
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10) Here is a <a href="https://www.indiacurrents.com/articles/2011/12/14/three-gunas" target="_blank">website explaining the three Gunas</a>. I found the Celtic looking symbol at the top of this blog from this page. I wonder if ancient European pagan religions had a similar three-fold understanding of reality. If anybody is aware of this, please let me know. </div>
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Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-38546189873110136722016-03-13T08:56:00.000-07:002016-03-13T15:08:52.099-07:00Saga of the space turtles: Intergalactic transmission of life using today's technology<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i><a href="http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/schematics/cardassian_ships.htm" target="_blank">Spaceship from Star Trek</a>: How close is science fiction to reality ? </i></div>
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<b>The fury of an idiotic race: </b><br />
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<i>Out, out, brief candle!
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<i>Life is but a walking shadow, a poor player
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<i>That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
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<i>And then is heard no more. It is a tale
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<i>Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury
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<i>Signifying nothing.</i> </blockquote>
This quote is from Shakespeare's Macbeth. It signifies that human life is like a soap bubble: a minor shimmer of existence before it bursts and disappears into death. And such is the fate for the entire human race. <br />
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We humans are living on this planet for an extremely tiny glimpse of time. We may vanish altogether in an instant. All of our cousin species in the Homo genus went extinct. Some of them have indeed lived for much longer than us. For example, <i>Homo Habilis</i> lived for 1-2 million years on this planet. In contrast, the history of <i>Homo Sapiens</i> is less than 0.2 million years old. Even within our species timeline, the vast majority of our history is unbeknownst to us. We spread out of Africa around 60 thousand years ago. What follows is a ridiculously small amount of time. In comparison, the light from the center of our own galaxy - the Milky Way - will take 26 thousand years to reach us. The Milky Way is around 100 thousand light years across. The nearest galaxy Andromeda is 2.5 million light years away.<br />
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It is only about 60 thousand years ago that we started making stone tools and producing cave art. The history is human culture is far shorter. The earliest written alphabet is just 5 thousand years ago. The great religions that are still alive in our society arose even later. Thus, all the bickering and fighting we do between nations and religions is for a nanoscopic length of evolutionary time. In physics, at scales as minute as this, quantum effects predominate. Random particles and their antiparticles will arise and die in the very next instant. The history of the human race - all our hopes and dreams, passions and petty fights - they all compress into such a meaningless trivium. We arise and disappear before another intelligent life in this universe, if it even exists, bothers to take a look at the earth.<br />
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The <a href="http://www.sevenbrieflessons.com/" target="_blank">physicist Carlo Rovelli</a> says<br />
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We are not a species that is known for sticking around. We are not like the turtles, which have lived unchanged for millions of years. We are very much like the other Homo species. </blockquote>
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<i>Think like a turtle: A <b>Space Turtle</b> </i></div>
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Our lives on this planet may be short. But before we disappear, we will be tearing down an entire fabric of life. Since our very origins, we humans have been systematically destroying ecosystems and scorching this planet. When we first spread to Australia, about 40 thousand years ago, the continent was green and teeming with life. Soon after humans arrived, grand and gorgeous species of mega-fauna, that lived for millions of years on the continent, went extinct: either hunted down by us, or eliminated by the disruption of the ecological balance by us. The anthropologist Jared Diamond explains that this destruction of ecosystems had terrible consequences for the future development of humans in Australia. With noting to sustain large human societies, the populations began to perish and those who survived had to revert to a primitive lifestyle with minimal technology. Some human populations in Tasmania have even forgotten how to light a fire. Diamond argues that the advantages of civilization are only temporary, and that mismanagement of ecological resources will spell death to civilizational progress. There may be a short explosive burst of death such as wrought by a nuclear war, or a slow painful drawl of death due to famine and pollution. But the end result is the same.<br />
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Whatever be our fate, we modern humans bear an intense fury of destruction that would shock even our ancestors. We are turning oceans into acid and the atmosphere into a grand sewage dump for carbon dioxide. As the planet warms due to our actions, we await famines, extreme weather and scarcity of fresh water. We do not know how much of technology, ecological resources and civlization we will be leaving in tact for our future generations. There may not be any large species of animals left on this planet, except those that we imprison in concentration camps called as industrial farms. All big species of animals and plants may go extinct in the wild. <br />
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If the rate of species extinction is awful on land, it is even more terrible in the oceans. We humans have been relatively late to make our presence there, but we are making up for the lost time. Many whales, sharks and fish are now facing extinction. Majestic animals like the leatherback turtle, which crosses the entire length of the Pacific ocean in a year, subsisting on nothing but jellyfish, may vanish from earth. These gentle creatures have survived for millions of years in the same lifestyle. One of my favorite authors - <a href="http://www.barelyimaginedbeings.com/" target="_blank">Caspar Henderson</a>, in his "<i>Book of barely imagined beings</i>", recounts a magical moment touching the back of a leatherback turtle as she was laying eggs.<br />
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Touching the leatherback holds all the magic of childhood. The animal is vividly alive in a realm that is largely beyond our reach and our imaginations. Later I recall a phrase attributed to Zhuangzi: <i>'all the creatures in this world have dimensions that cannot be calculated'</i>.</blockquote>
Often, the destruction of life by humans cannot be seen but can be heard by the ears. The musicologist and naturalist Bernie Krause talks about the spectrum of biosymphonies, where different species find and occupy their own niches of frequency, much as individual musical instruments find niches in the timbre of an orchestra. When an ecosystem is damaged, its sound signature changes drastically. We humans are thus systematically destroying the music of this planet. <a href="http://www.thegreatanimalorchestra.com/" target="_blank">Beautiful sonorific places teeming with life</a>, such as the Amazon basin or the Congo delta, are being turned into silent graveyards by us, disturbed only by our anthrophonic sounds of the motors of vehicles and machine saws.<br />
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But is there any hope to save this spectacle of life on earth ? Is there any hope for us - the idiotic race of this planet ? In the grand vista of this universe, there may be no other place as vivid with memories and beauty as our own planet. Can we preserve these memories and relive them in a different time, and in a different planet ?<br />
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This is not easy. There is no other planet in our solar system or in adjacent star systems which is even remotely like earth. So this magical spectacle of life cannot be recreated nearby, but how about traveling into deep space ?<br />
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<b>Saga of space turtles: </b><br />
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<i>Pale blue dot: where is land ?</i><br />
<i> The Pacific ocean on earth is a microcosm for deep space</i></div>
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The first thing we should note about deep space is that it is vast. There is nowhere for us to alight and take a short break. Barring a grand revolution in physics, possibly resolving the mysteries of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_entanglement" target="_blank">quantum entanglement</a> and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_catastrophe" target="_blank">statistics of dark particles in vacuum</a>,
intergalactic travel will need millions of years. There will be no pit stops for us to refuel our tanks. A comparable analogy is humans trying to cross the Pacific ocean. Let us first consider the problem of exploring deep space. Because we do not even know where to go. <br />
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In 2014, NASA's Kepler mission found an <i>'earth-like'</i> planet in the habitable zone. This planet, known as <a href="http://www.nasa.gov/ames/kepler/nasas-kepler-discovers-first-earth-size-planet-in-the-habitable-zone-of-another-star" target="_blank">Kepler-186f is 500 light years away from us</a>. This planet may very well be a red flag, but reaching even here will take us at least millions of years. In reality, what we need is a program of constant space exploration to hunt for the right planet. This exploration needs to run for hundreds of thousands of years, spanning across millions of watch-towers in space. We cannot wait for the perfection of science and technology to start this program of space exploration. In fact, we do not have any guarantee that our earth will remain intact for much time longer (probably due to our own foolishness). So we need to start working now: we need to build a space program that can be updated as technology advances in the future. Referring to the Viking sagas and the leatherback turtles, I will call this space program as the saga of the <i>space turtles</i>. <br />
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What do I mean by a <i>space turtle</i> ? It is a small self-contained space ship that can be built in a modular fashion. It would have protective outer covering for dealing with cosmic radiation and dust projectiles in space. Inside, it will have long-lasting electronics and robotics gear. It will be equipped with radio and laser transmission equipment, as well as spectrometers and other instruments to do astronomy. The optical equipment inside the space turtle should be made such that they have no single point of failure. This can be achieved through recent advances in computational photography, with millions of sensor cells and thin optical components. Similar to the eyes in humans and animals, these computational eyes will be robust to wear and tear, and will rely on computational intelligence for doing most of the interpretation. Thus, each space turtle will be a hardy robotic animal, that can be mass-produced and sent to explore deep space. <br />
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First, we need to build a factory outside the earth's atmosphere for fabricating these <i>space turtles</i> and launching them outwards. Capitalizing on recent advances in 3D printing and electronics, we can build such a factory in a relatively small space, possibly by revamping the international space station. It is necessary to do so because sending a new space-turtle should be a relatively simple procedure, which should not require huge budgets simply to launch it beyond the earth's atmosphere. Sure, it is still necessary to overcome the earth's gravitational pull, but it is possible to do this using the alignment of the moon and other planets and minimal fuel otherwise. Thus, it will become cost-effective to make far more launches than is currently possible. This is important because, when we are exploring a brand new territory, the ability to perform many experiments increases greatly our likelihood of success. But equally important is our ability to learn from mistakes and update our knowledge. With respect to the <i>space-turtles,</i> it means we need to be able to update their operative procedures from across space: what is their navigational orbit, where are their lenses focused, what type of image analysis software do they have on board to analyze the astronomical observations etc. We should be able to do this as simply as performing a software upgrade across space. <br />
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<b>Performing a software update in space: </b><br />
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<i>The Opportunity rover on Mars: A great achievement for software </i></div>
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In any space mission today, the on board software is sealed and finalized several years before the launch. I once visited the NASA Jet Propulsion Lab and met with the engineers (my heroes) who sent the Spirit and Opportunity rovers to Mars. These rovers were remarkable achievements of precision in landing and navigation, but the software they had on board was at least a decade old. I was completely dumbstruck when I was told this. In extremely fast-moving fields like computer vision and robotics, this means this software was from a completely different generation of algorithms. This makes it all the more remarkable how it worked perfectly and we were able to achieve such results in navigation and landing. <br />
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Space exploration is extremely costly and there is very little room for failure, so a battery of tests are done before the launch to check that the software works under every possible criterion. In fact, rigorous theorem proving and software verification are done to their highest standards in the software meant for space missions. However, these practices are exactly the opposite of how we build large software systems today on the internet. Here, we perform software update at the speed of light and even connect the computers and electronic devices perennially to the internet. We access not only data but also programs through cloud computing. An army of software developers and freelancers collaborate on adding new features and see their results instantaneously. This speed and flexibility in development enables us to take risks and test millions of possible options. It is currently not possible to do this for space missions. But why not ?<br />
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A space turtle launched from outside the earth's atmosphere will be a lower risk mission than sending it from the earth's surface using rockets. Secondly, the "intelligence" required in a space turtle will be limited to astronomical navigation and observation, at least initially. This will be much easier to accomplish than greater challenges such as soft landing, or path planning on an exoplanet. So in principle, these software updates can be sent by radio transmission or by optical laser transmission, if there is a direct line of sight to the <i>space turtle.</i> The data that can be transmitted will be then limited in bit-rate, but we are thinking in terms of millions of years to explore deep space. So this is not a problem. When we can perform software update in space, it will be possible to transmit large objects such as the latest neural networks to recognize specific patterns on astronomical images, or those to optimally navigate and orient the instruments aboard the space ship. <br />
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<b>Building an intergalactic network: </b><br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUA5pshGPepOZO3pgxjqimn3LUENU-qPZyJFX8Q3ekcwxVXQ0sTm36-A5WM991FcCaoVl8lwBKHD6M5mkt2unPQzhy4gOUQBZ6sn6KCMQ-O-iUiW4wi_QkSEA6xXmxmhT2xF0ePw/s1600/voyager-path.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="268" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiUA5pshGPepOZO3pgxjqimn3LUENU-qPZyJFX8Q3ekcwxVXQ0sTm36-A5WM991FcCaoVl8lwBKHD6M5mkt2unPQzhy4gOUQBZ6sn6KCMQ-O-iUiW4wi_QkSEA6xXmxmhT2xF0ePw/s320/voyager-path.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Path of the Voyager mission: The first man-made object to escape from the solar system</i></td></tr>
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<b><br /></b>
When the internet was built in the 1970s, the engineers used to call it the <i>intergalactic network</i>. This was a vision and inspiration for them to build it in a completely foolproof manner, able to withstand large shutdowns of relay servers or even a nuclear attack. Those engineered systems from the 1970s have been a huge success. The internet is an extremely reliable system - probably, the best that the human ingenuity has produced so far. <br />
<br />
So, when do we build a real inter-galactic network ? Using space-turtles as relay stations, they can be made to communicate with each other and evolve a protocol for transmitting information across space. In order to do this, they have to be dispersed widely to various locations throughout the solar system, and later, to outside into the deep space. A space-turtle will not be tethered to a fixed geographic location, such as an internet relay point on earth. If the network architecture is fixed, the bandwidth usage can be modeled and algorithms can discover strategies to route information in the fastest and most optimal manner across the network. However, the space-turtles will be moving in deep-space, subject to the relative gravitational pull of different planets and stars. By the time a packet is received by a space-turtle, it may be at a completely different location in space than when the packet was transmitted. This requires the development of a new generation of network routing algorithms.<br />
<br />
We also need a new generation of error-checking and parity algorithms to ensure the correctness of the transmitted message. This is even more important for software updates in deep space, where the correctness needs to be checked also in the temporal context i.e<i>, is this the most accurate software for the current physical location that the space-turtle is located in ?</i><br />
<br />
But the beautiful thing is that all of this algorithmic innovation can happen in parallel on earth, independent of how and when the space-turtles are deployed. We can build such algorithms and test them in simulation, or through practical applications such as robots exploring the deep oceans.<br />
<br />
Ultimately, a modular and organic network of space-turtles will decide where to flock together and exchange key pieces of information with each other. This can happen in locations where the space-turtles can recharge their batteries, for example, using energy of the stars. Later on, as the space-turtles explore inter-galactic spaces, they need to communicate with each other to meet at a specific location in thousands of years of time.<br />
<br />
I think it is informative to look at the flocking behavior of turtles in the ocean to understand how space-turtles should meet with each other. Turtles get together in large numbers on some safe islands
to spawn the young. These young turtles suffer an extremely high
mortality rate, but some of them survive and continue the journey. Ultimately, these explorers will have to work in tandem and identify a planet that is the most suitable for recreating earth-like life. This will be a journey that takes millions or even hundreds of millions of years. But that is okay, we have ample time until the heat death of this universe.<br />
<br />
<b>Encoding DNA for millions of years: </b><br />
<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>DNA can now be sequenced and synthesized</i></td></tr>
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<br />
So far, we have not talked about how to transmit life. There is no life-form on
earth that can survive such long journeys in a single life span. Some of
the hardiest species - the <a href="http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/science-nature/how-does-the-tiny-waterbear-survive-in-outer-space-30891298/" target="_blank">extremophile Tadrigrades</a>
- may survive for decades in a low energy hibernated state, but not any longer. The living
tissue of organisms will also need to be protected from high energy bombardment by
cosmic radiation. In this scenario, it is foolish to even ask if life
can be transmitted <i>in vivo</i> to another galaxy.<br />
<br />
However,
there is a different possibility, involving the recent technologies of
genetic engineering and synthetic biology. It is now possible to write
down synthetic DNA into a cell and store it for hundreds of thousands of
years. With improved storage, this DNA can last for even millions of years.
In fact, this is one of the most promising methods for archiving media
information. At an annual company conference last year, when I was working at Technicolor Research, I had the
singular privilege of looking at <a href="http://www.dailynews.com/science/20150810/this-harvard-scientist-is-coding-an-entire-movie-onto-dna" target="_blank">a movie stored as DNA</a>
in a colorless solution in a tiny test tube. Using the latest gene
sequencing technology, in collaboration with Harvard University,
researchers converted the pixel values in video to a code defined by
the nucleotide pairs in DNA. Information is information, and can be
encoded into any language and decoded back. In this context, the
language is made by the two base pairs of DNA: guanine-cytosine and
adenine-thymine. We can create a code to represent the video film and
transcribe it into synthetic DNA and thus archiving it. This is by far
the best archival format that is currently available for movies. If we can archive a
movie, we can also archive the entire genome of Homo Sapiens. Indeed, we can archive the genomes of millions of species that are necessary for
our own survival.<br />
<br />
At the other end, there is a decoder,
which is a gene sequencing machine (these are already becoming
extremely cheap). So far, it is good enough for decoding the video of a film and to project it onto a screen. But if we want to create
life, then things are more complicated. At the current state of
technology, we need a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oocyte_cryopreservation" target="_blank">frozen egg cell</a> into which the DNA can be impregnated. Our current technology cannot
freeze egg cells for more than a few decades. But this might change in
the future. Another possibility is to synthesize egg cells from stem
cells. This is also a technology undergoing rapid development. With the
right type of storage and synthetic biology, the decoded DNA can be
impregnated into a living cell and then reconstructed into an organism.
If and when such technology develops on earth, it can also be deployed
on a distant galaxy, a million years deep into the future. <br />
<br />
When we have this technology, we can deploy it within the space-turtle. Then each space-turtle contains
valuable cargo: gene sequencing machines, DNA storage of genomes, frozen
stem cells that can transform into egg cells, as well as computers and
navigational instruments. Another tantalizing possibility is that the space-turtles mimic the process of reproduction itself in space. Like how a mother turtle gives birth to a baby
turtle, a <i>space turtle</i> should be able to 3D print a baby
spaceship in its exact make. During the period of gestation / pregnancy,
the mother space-ship can expand in size, making room for printing out
the parts of the baby ship. The raw material for 3D printing can be
provided beforehand, making it sufficient for producing several
generations of space turtles. Another possibility is to collect raw
material by grabbing cosmic dust. Over hundreds of thousands of years,
sufficient cosmic dust can be accumulated to produce a child space-ship.<br />
<br />
Thus, these space-turtles will build a civilization of patient and peaceful life-forms, entirely robotic in origin, but harboring the hopes and DNA of biological life on earth. They will roam distant galaxies in deep space for millions of years. Together, they will build a detailed map of the universe with its myriad galaxies and mysteries. They may even do some scientific investigation on their own, and continue where we humans left off. But ultimately, they will find a suitable habitat for life - the kind based on DNA and wet biology - so that we can together ponder even greater mysteries. <br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Reconstructing a biome: </b><br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><i>Species interconnections in a biome</i></td></tr>
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<br />
If we take millions of years until we find a suitable planet, we may also take millions of years to make it inhabitable for ourselves. In fact, we can run a fast-paced simulation of biological evolution on this planet. We can accelerate specific evolutionary turning points, by turbo-charging the DNA of the species. As life proliferates by harnessing energy of the stars, it will also make significant changes to the atmosphere of the planet. For example, cyanobacteria can create Oxygen on the planet's atmosphere. Huge forests and coral reefs can be created. These will support large biomes of interconnected species. Predators and prey may flourish for millions of years on this planet and undergo some biological evolution themselves. The space-turtles may keep visiting the planet at periodic intervals, to check the progress on how the planet is yielding to life.<br />
<br />
As and when the conditions become appropriate, the space-turtles will introduce key species onto the planet: those which we consider as the fondest memories from our planet earth. Ultimately, they will introduce humans as well. This may take several millions of years. <br />
<br />
I think the current state of scientific knowledge is more or less sufficient for the problem of space exploration, but definitely not enough for reconstructing a biome by modeling the ecological interconnections of species. But hopefully, our knowledge will get better in the coming centuries, and the space-turtles can update themselves over the intergalactic network.<br />
<br />
In addition to ecological knowledge, we will also upgrade our psychological knowledge on how and when environment affects the growth of a person. If we are able to identify the different life-changing moments in a person's life and capture them in the digital format, they can be encoded along with a person's DNA. These phenomena in the environment can then be reproduced exactly in that order, which will create a replica of the same person that was living on earth, several millions of years ago. Thus, we will achieve a version of immortality, as well as a possibility to learn from the mistakes in a past life. We can avoid the terrible mistakes we did as a civilization, but also those that we did as individual human beings.<br />
<br />
If this is not a plan for achieving paradise, I don't know what is. <br />
<br />
<b>Relay stations of rocketry: </b><br />
<br />
In this blog post, I talked about a quasi-spiritual dream. I read in the book <i>"Adventures in Human Being"</i> by Gavin Francis, that humans who keep smiling a lot will have a physical imprint of their smiles on their faces as they grow older. The facial muscles responsible for the smile, when exercised a lot, leave their imprint not only on the physical appearance of the person, but also on the brain. The nerves connected to these muscles produce happiness hormones and make the person think bright and happy thoughts.<br />
<br />
<br />
So if we keep trying to smile, we may indeed become happy. I think the space-turtles are such a dream that induces a smile. It is far-fetched, but it is not impossible. As we try to build them, we may indeed change our society. By forcing ourselves to think long-term over millions of years, we will see the pettiness of today's politics. We will feel the outrage caused by man's destruction of the nature's treasures. We will be ashamed of the sacrifice of millions of human lives for nothing. We may even put an end to the endless wars of greed. In this regard, space-turtles are a story I want to believe in. It may not be true, but it is a story that will lead us to a better world.<br />
<br />
I have left one thing left unsaid: the whole saga of the space-turtles starts by building a factory outside the earth's atmosphere. This narrative gimmick let me short-circuit the entire process of sending a space-craft up in space. At the moment, only large nations (and billionaires like Elon Musk) can send a space-craft to outside the earth's atmosphere. What is the likelihood that anybody will support my plan ? Zero. <br />
<br />
So I need a reasonable plan for this first step: for overcoming gravity and reaching beyond the earth's atmosphere. The computer scientist Alan Kay (one of my heroes) has once said that "moonshot" goals are terrible for the progress of science. For example, the Apollo missions have sent humans to the moon, but all space exploration collapsed after that. It became simply too expensive to pursue the leads obtained by the technology. Instead of moonshots, what we ought to have developed was a scalable and organic model of space exploration. I think the space-turtles yield such a model, that grows naturally and ultimately scales to an intergalactic network. But can we build such a model also for rocketry and to reaching beyond the earth's atmosphere ?<br />
<br />
If we break the task of overcoming earth's gravity into small chunks, then individual humans and companies can solve them. After all, many companies are capable of making airplanes and many individual humans are capable of making robotic drones. These flying machines can reach great heights, but they cannot refuel in the air and make pit-stops until they reach beyond the earth's atmosphere. But why not ?<br />
<br />
One option is to build a space elevator - a long cable tethered to the ground through which energy can be transmitted. But this again requires huge investment from nations, which may not be forthcoming. Another option is to build flying pit-stops, where other planes can charge and refuel. <br />
<br />
If we tether some equipment to a large Helium balloon, it can already rise beyond the earth's atmosphere. But there, it deflates and falls down to the ground. May be, it is possible to coalesce material together in the higher reaches of atmosphere. Like pieces in a jig-saw puzzle, teams of drones can dock into each other and build a greater space-ship. Such navigation and docking is not impossible. With today's technology, we can already perform highly accurate navigation on roads and stormy weather. Similarly, such intelligent navigation technology may enable multiple drones to find and dock together, after which they spend a small amount of fuel and reach into a low-earth orbit. <br />
<br />
Another possibility is to transmit energy by laser beam. Each of the drones can stock up some energy, and beam it via Laser to a mother-ship, which can use all of this energy to overcome the earth's gravitational pull and reach a low-earth orbit. There may be failures, some of the drones may fire the laser beam inaccurately. But the nice thing is this system is scalable. It will be possible to repeat the experiment and learn from the previous failures.<br />
<br />
Ultimately, if and when life escapes from this planet, it will do so using methods that are scalable and organic. Like the space-turtles, we need to think in terms of millions of years. Achieving a relay system for rocketry is probably not that hard. We may even solve it in just a few hundred years.<br />
<br />
<i><b>Keep smiling, space-turtles !</b></i><br />
<br />
<br /></div>
Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-46160565297061892502016-02-07T11:13:00.002-08:002016-02-09T07:48:28.718-08:00A comparison of Confucian-Daoist dichotomy with the Vaishnavaite-Shaivaite dichotomy : A paraview of Edward Slingerland's "Trying not to try"<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>The analogy of a chariot for the human mind: (Left) The charioteer in Plato's Phaedrus controlling the good and bad horses (Right) The chariot of Arjuna in Mahabharata, driven by Krishna</i></div>
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<b>Chariot of the mind: </b><br />
<b><br /></b>
Plato compares the human mind to a chariot. In his dialogue <i>Phaedrus</i>, Plato speaks of a person's intellect as a charioteer driving a chariot pulled by two horses. One of the horses is of a noble breed - representing the positive aspects of a passionate nature. The other horse represents irrational passions of the body that pull the chariot in the wrong direction. It is the job of the charioteer (the intellect) to perpetually control the chariot and guide it towards enlightenment. This distinction between the cold reasoning intellect (the charioteer) and the hot passions of the body (the horses) may be rooted in the biological nature of the human mind. There are separate neural circuits in the brain - basal ganglia and the limbic brain for fast responsive action (like the horses), and the cortical regions with the anterior cingulate cortex for providing reason and feedback (like the charioteer).<br />
<br />
A very similar analogy of the mind as a chariot is present in the<i> Katha Upanishad</i>, an ancient Indian philosophical text, but with some subtle and interesting differences. They illuminate the distinction between a Platonic worldview and the <a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.de/2010/04/samkhya-arithmetic-of-natures-evolution.html" target="_blank">Samkhya worldview</a>. The Platonic and Samkhya systems greatly influenced the further philosophical development in the west and India respectively, so it is interesting to look at these differences. The <i>Samkhya </i>system divides the physical nature (<i>Prakriti</i>) into 5 layers of reality:<br />
<br />
<ol style="text-align: left;">
<li><i>Annamaya </i>- the inanimate layer e.g, rocks</li>
<li><i>Pranamaya </i>- the layer of breath e.g, plants </li>
<li><i>Manomaya </i>- the layer of mind or sensory-motor control e.g, animals</li>
<li><i>Vijnanamaya </i>- the layer of intellect or linguistic understanding e.g, human conversation</li>
<li><i>Chinmaya </i>- the layer of ego or historical self e.g, the memory of humans </li>
</ol>
The suffix <i>maya </i>that is used for each of these layers denotes the fact that these layers are measurable and objective. One interesting consequence of the <i>Samkhya </i>system, that is of relevance to artificial intelligence (AI), is that if something is measurable and objective, it can be replicated in a computer. However, it is not exactly equivalent to the modern reductionist view of the mind. Samkhya accommodates an aspect of mind called <i>Purusha</i>, that can be loosely translated as the experiencer or the unchanging self. This is considered to be beyond and separate from the 5 layers of nature (<i>Prakriti</i>). Unlike <i>Prakriti</i>, <i>Purusha </i>is considered immeasurable and unchangeable. Many translators have used the word <i>soul </i>to refer to this, but as we have seen, many aspects of the Platonic soul are already described in the 5 layers above. So, the <i>Purusha </i>can be understood as a dramatically reduced aspect of the soul, beyond all the realms of action, movement or change.<br />
<br />
<i>Katha Upanishad</i> follows the lead from the <i>Samkhya </i>system and describes the chariot as follows: the unchanging self (<i>Atman </i>or <i>Purusha</i>) is the lord of the chariot. The intellect (<i>Buddhi</i>) - composed of linguistic understanding - is the charioteer holding the reins. The reins are the mind (<i>Manah</i>) - referring to the sensorimotor control in the brain. The horses are the senses (<i>Indriya</i>). The paths ahead are the objects of the senses. It is the job of the intellect to drive the horses into the right path, such that the chariot is led to enlightenment.<br />
<br />
A very interesting modification of this analogy of the chariot occurs in the parable of the Mahabharata war. In the epic of <i>Mahabharata</i>, the character of the hero <i>Arjuna </i>is a metaphor referring to the philosophical concept of the conscious mind. His chariot is driven by <i>Krishna</i>, who is not any ordinary charioteer. In fact, there are many characters in Mahabharata that are paragons of intellect - <i>Vidura, Bhisma, Drona</i> etc. Probably the best personification of intellect and wisdom in Mahabharata is <i>Yudishtara </i>- the elder brother of <i>Arjuna</i>. But the chariot of <i>Arjuna </i>is driven by none of them, but by <i>Krishna </i>- whose character is a metaphor to represent the cosmic order of the universe.<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
What does it mean to have one's intellect replaced by the cosmic order ?</blockquote>
<br />
I think we can appreciate this analogy much better by looking northwards from India, and learning about the philosophical history of China.<br />
<br />
I recently read a fantastic book by Prof. Edward Slingerland titled <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Trying-Not-Try-Science-Spontaneity/dp/0770437613" target="_blank">"<i>Trying not to try"</i></a>, that narrates the various philosophical debates in ancient China. I will give a <a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.de/2016/01/anatomy-of-open-source-education.html#paraview" target="_blank">paraview </a>of this book in my blog, connecting it with my perspectives as a computer scientist and as a person versed in Indian mythology. I am also bringing some perspectives from Prof. Slingerland's excellent <a href="https://courses.edx.org/courses/course-v1:UBCx+China300.1x+1T2016/info" target="_blank">MOOC course "Ancient China meets modern science"</a>, which I am taking right now.<br />
<br />
The central concept of Chinese philosophy is a mental state known as <i>Wuwei </i>(pronounced <i>ooh-way</i>) that can be loosely translated as "effortless ease". A related, but not completely identical idea is the mental state termed as "<i>flow</i>" by Hungarian psychologist Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi. A sportsperson or a musician is said to be in this state of flow when their conscious brain is switched off and their expert movements are achieved by completely unconscious control. In ancient China, the notion of w<i>uwei </i>went beyond physical expertise and denoted a type of mental and spiritual dexterity. Great philosophers like Confucius, Mencius and Zhuang Zi developed theories on how to achieve this <i>wuwei</i> state. Unlike western (and to some extent, Indian) philosophy, <i>wuwei</i> brings the notion of salvation to the very present, and connects it to the success of both material and spiritual pursuits.<br />
<br />
<b>Why bother with comparative religion ?</b><br />
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
I once listened to an<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJCiwF2_sN8" target="_blank"> interesting podcast</a> on the role of synesthesia in different religious traditions. As often happens in the discussions of comparative religion, this discussion was limited to the Abrahamic traditions of Christianity, Islam and Judaism. In the study of religion, discussions about how a religious observer experiences his spiritual life are grouped under the term <i>phenomenology</i>. Since the religious experience is inherently subjective, one can argue that it is beyond the ambit of science. This is probably true for theoretical topics such as theology and religious ontology, but phenomenology offers an interesting glimpse for science into the religious mind. Despite the obvious differences in religious ideology between the Abrahamic religions and Buddhism / Hinduism, the phenomenology of what is reported by the mystical people in these various religions are quite comparable. But mystics are a rare breed in any religious tradition. Most people are concerned with improving their lives in the here and the now. In this regard, of all the great religious traditions, I think the Chinese religions are the best in bringing mystical phenomenology and secular lives into a common analytical framework - through the notion of <i>wuwei</i>. Since China was not colonized to the same extent as other cultures such as India, the study of Chinese religion is also relatively unimpeded by prejudice. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
Thus, in our modern age and era, it is illuminating to study what Chinese philosophers had to say to achieve a harmonious state of mind. In the fields of psychology, computer science and cognitive science, the shadows of Plato and Freud loom large in the subconscious of the researchers. Alternate viewpoints from China or India may be considered as means to balancing this hidden bias. The analogy of a person's mind to the chariot is especially useful in developing computer software and cybernetic systems, as ultimately they are supposed to serve a human user (the lord of the chariot).<br />
<br />
<br />
<b>Hot and cold cognition in the human brain: </b><br />
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The human mind is an engine that runs on at least two gears - hot and cold. This is probably the case for any complex system that has to operate in the real world, with strong constraints on the amount of time available to take any decision. Hot cognition is easier to understand. It is characterized by rapid instinctual reaction to a stimulus from the environment: to escape from danger, to seize an opportunity, to navigate through obstacles etc. Delay in response to such environmental stimulus will be a matter of life and death. Such instinctual response to the environment can be seen throughout the animal world. In humans as in other animals, this behavior is coordinated by the sub-cortical brain areas in the limbic system dealing with emotions and spatial memory. But despite this outward similarity, the human limbic brain is significantly advanced. In particular, it exploits the extra storage and computations in the cortical areas, which can be considered as offshoots of the limbic brain. In any case, hot cognition in both humans or animals is characterized by rapid response to stimulus.<br />
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In contrast, cold cognition may be a uniquely human trait. This is performed by slow and rational thinking, where all the alternative hypotheses are explored by the brain in order to take the optimal decision. Cold cognition is the reason why we have science and culture. But rational thinking is computationally expensive and needs a large window of time. Typically, it involves examining and overcoming our structural biases about the world, and this might generate emotional turmoil. At the least, cold cognition requires us to plan deeper into the future, than what can be immediately seen and felt by the senses.<br />
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In any real world situation, the human mind is constantly confronted by a choice - whether to rely on hot cognition or cold cognition, to take decision. Most often, this question is not felt consciously, and is resolved using the cheaper computational apparatus of hot cognition. But in other times, the conflict appears centerpiece in our conscious mind and plays out as a battle.<br />
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Should I eat this ice-cream, or should I stick to my diet ?<br />
Should I steal this money, or should I return it ?<br />
Should I prepare for my exams, or should I watch a movie ?<br />
Should I donate money to this charitable cause, or should I keep it for myself ?
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We speak of this conflict as between the heart and the mind, or between the body and the mind, or between emotions and the reason, or between the horses and the charioteer. Resolving these conflicts in favor of cold cognition is not easy, and requires computational resources. Psychologists term this as cognitive overload or ego depletion. Each person has a limited reservoir of mental capacity for voting in favor of cold cognition, and if this reservoir is depleted, will make cognitive mistakes. The structure of the brain responsible for this cognitive control is the ACC (anterior cingulate cortex). The psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud had a dismal view of human condition that is torn between this eternal battle between the hot and cold cognitions, which he termed as the id and the super-ego. He wrote that culture and civilization condemns humans to be eternally in this state of <i>Unbehagen </i>(queasy, like a bad stomach upset). Freud moaned that if only the reins of civilization were torn apart, human passions would run loose like free horses and engage as they please in rape and murder. This pessimistic (and frankly, ridiculous) view of human cognition has led to several crappy psychiatric treatments, as well as some dodgy speculation in cognitive and political sciences.<br />
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This is where ancient Chinese philosophy may serve as an effective antidote. Like Freud, the sage Confucius realized that there is a battle in the human mind between cold and hot cognition. However, he thought that this battle can be resolved happily. Similar to how a rock is carved into a statue or how a block of wood is carved into a musical instrument, Confucius considered that it is possible to carve the hot cognition into complete alignment with the aims of civilization. With sufficient training, he considered that a person will become naturally and effortlessly good: perfectly dextrous, perfectly compassionate and perfectly courageous. This is a glorious and optimistic vision of human nature, even though it realizes its inherent limitations. I think the Confucian worldview has more support from objective evidence than the Freudian worldview. People don't become rapists and murderers overnight if the lights of civilization get turned off. In fact, during natural catastrophes and disasters, people overwhelmingly help each other and get together as a society. Confucius would reason that this happens because of continuous training of the human hot cognition by living in a civilized society. He valued the importance of daily rituals that show propriety and kindness. He valued a holistic education - that not only teaches students to be effective craftsmen or soldiers, but also instills in them a love for civilization and culture. Thus, arts, sports and music were considered an important part of Confucian education. When the society and culture are organized such that the daily lives of its inhabitants are bathed in a language of rituals, Confucius argued that human virtues such as compassion and courage will be downloaded into the hot cognition, as effortless to perform by a person as an expert musician playing an instrument. This effortless ease is known in Chinese as <i>wuwei</i>.<br />
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<b>Wuwei and the paradox of flow:</b><br />
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But is it really possible to achieve a state of <i>wuwei </i>by rigorous training ? Before we look at the broader philosophical definition on goodness and wisdom, we can analyze how the state of <i>wuwei </i>is achieved by sportsmen and athletes. Every athlete wants to be in the zone and does his best to maintain this zone. But as any athlete can tell, this is not easy. In particular, thinking consciously about how one is playing is disastrous for performance. For example, in tennis, consciously observing the bodily movements of limbs is a recipé for missing the ball. So, a good coach of tennis will desist from commenting on the specific bodily movements of the player, but will give suggestions on how to improve the focus on the game.<br />
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In a similar manner, thinking consciously about <i>wuwei </i>will prevent the person from achieving it. In this manner, it is similar to other human unknowns such as how to fall asleep or how to impress a romantic partner. Any conscious artifice or trick will ruin the goal, especially if the person at the other end becomes aware of the trick. When we evaluate the virtue of a compassionate act or that of an artistic performance, we will be displeased if we know that this act is framed or set up as a plot. In Nicomachean ethics, Aristotle says that unlike a craft, a virtue is to be evaluated not just by the final object that is produced, but by the intrinsic process that produced it. Thus, to be virtuous, a person has to be inherently good and not just fake it. In this regard, <i>wuwei </i>is particularly interesting because the performer and the evaluator are one and the same person. One cannot fool one's own consciousness.<br />
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Due to the central nature of <i>wuwei</i>, all Chinese thinkers have grappled with the problem of how to get into this state without consciously trying to get there. The answer of Confucius was to mould the subconscious of the mind, through daily rituals and habit, as well as through signs and symbols that lurk in the environment. But the problem is that these rituals and signs will force the person to be self-conscious, to be aware that he is trying to get into <i>wuwei. </i>This is similar to how a person can ruin a date by reminding the partner ostentatiously, and through every sign and action, that it is a date. This a paradox that cannot be resolved. Other Chinese thinkers, known as Daoists, took the directly opposing position from Confucius, saying that one should not try at all and just go with the "flow". They systematically went about deconstructing the cultural artifice that Confucius upheld.<br />
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<b>Confucian-Daoist dichotomy:</b><br />
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<i>Three laughers at the tiger ravine: Hui Yuan, Tao Yuanming and Lu Xiujing realize that spiritual purity cannot be measured by artificial boundaries</i></div>
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To a novice, Daoist philosophy sounds like environmentalism or nature religion. The book of <i>"Dao di Ching"</i> extolls the virtue of the "<i>uncarved block</i>". It uses a mythological character - the old master (<i>Lao Zi</i>) to contrast the message of the well known master Confucius. The Daoists argued that, by propping up artifice and cultural rigidity, Confucians are doing everything possible to prevent people from getting into the natural state of <i>wuwei</i>. At the core of the debate between the Confucians and Daoists is the very nature of the human childhood: is this something that is inherently good or bad ? Is it something that needs to be preserved or is it something that needs to be sublimated by culture ? Confucians would argue that the wild nature of man, as present in his childhood, is something sub-human. They wanted to refine this nature through the tools of culture. Daoists would argue that this core human nature is the very best that there is. Their mission was to rediscover this original purity by taking apart the artificial notions of cultural rigidity.<br />
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Who is correct here ?<br />
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This is a debate that is not resolved to this day. During the European renaissance, this debate played out between Hume and Rousseau. The ideals of romanticism not only gave us great works of philosophy, but also great works of art and music. Poets like Yeats and Wordsworth would not have existed without this shift to romanticism in art. In the United States, this debate was spearheaded by figures no less than Thoreau and Emerson. These debates reverberated throughout the world: Gandhi was deeply inspired by the romanticists and his philosophy was essentially a call to return the world to its original state of harmony with nature. But the romanticists did not win the debate conclusively.<br />
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Today, one of the sharpest voices trying to undermine romanticists is that of the cognitive scientist Steven Pinker. His tome <i>"Better angels of our nature" </i>is essentially a war cry against romanticism. This book argues through myriad figures and numbers that there is nothing to be salvaged in the wild state of nature and that all human good is a product of an organized civilizational state. Confucius would approve of Pinker, although their philosophical outlooks are not exactly identical. Notably, Confucius would scoff at the reductionist Freudian mindset that does not find value in hot cognition (or in ancient ritual, for that matter). But what they both share is a disapproval of human childhood. Pinker spends considerable amount of time in his book, arguing how human children are riddled with jealousy and mean behavior. He is following in the foot steps of Jean Piaget, who argued that children do not have a theory of mind in their early years and cannot understand the notions of compassion. However, Piaget may not have the last word. The more recent scientific work on child psychology, described by Alison Gopnik in her brilliant book <i>"The philosophical baby"</i>, argues that children have innate compassionate behavior, and that in some ways, their consciousness is superior to that of the adults. Daoists would approve of this research. <br />
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Essentially, all philosophical debate can be understood as a dialectic between structuralists and deconstructionists. The structuralists want to build an artifice of civilization and the deconstructionists want to dismantle this and return the society to a state of childhood. In western philosophy, the earliest such dialectic was between Aristotle upholding the structuralist position and Diogenes deconstructing it.<br />
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But can we find the complete answer by blanket judgements to one side or the other ? After all, achieving harmony with nature or achieving a state of <i>wuwei </i>are inherently paradoxical quests. The interesting thing about ancient China was that the philosophical innovations rubbed off from one side of the debate to the other, producing an enriching dialectic of thoughts. An important philosopher that refined the Confucian strategy<i> </i>was Mencius, who argued that people have natural sprouts in their soul that can be cultivated into full-scaled virtues. He used the analogy of a farmer cultivating rice sprouts - planting them at the right spot with adequate water and sunlight, but then waiting patiently for them to grow fully. In this way, he accommodated the Daoist argument that human nature is inherently good, but still argued for the centrality of Confucian ritual and learning. Another important philosopher on the Daoist side of the debate is Zhuang Zi, who deconstructed the very romanticist attitude of the early Daoists. He argued that trying to consciously go towards a primitive mode of living is as foolish as consciously following the Confucian ritual: neither would bestow <i>wuwei </i>on the person. Echoes of this debate later reverberated between the zen Buddhists in Japan.<br />
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The reason why ancient China achieved such a fruitful philosophical exchange was that neither side of the debate was oblivious to the essential paradox at the heart of <i>wuwei</i>. They saw the value of engaging the other side in the debate. Many Chinese philosophers had close friends who believed in other philosophical paths, but with whom they conversed regularly. This debate continued to flourish when Buddhism was embraced in China. One of the best examples of this philosophical fluidity between various schools is the story of the <a href="http://hinessight.blogs.com/church_of_the_churchless/2006/03/three_laughers_.html" target="_blank">three laughers at the tiger ravine.</a><br />
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I am not sure if we have such relaxed attitudes today, even in our scientific communities, about respecting alternate viewpoints and holding philosophical exchange. The western religions have historically suppressed alternate viewpoints. Modern scientific method has weekend these prejudices, but did not abolish them completely. As I argued earlier in my blog, we are often quite reckless in<a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.de/2015/11/the-four-sided-negation-tool-for.html" target="_blank"> how we think using negation</a>. This thinking is particularly problematic when dealing with topics of an inherently paradoxical nature. In the following, I will present how a philosophical debate quite similar in nature to Confucian-Daoist dichotomy was conducted within Indian culture, which used different strategies to dealing with the paradox.<br />
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<b>The duality of Vishnu and Shiva:</b><br />
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Indian culture and religion ultimately stem from the philosophy of <i>Samkhya</i>, which posits a duality between nature (<i>Prakriti</i>) and the experiencing self (<i>Purusha</i>). It argues how any duality that we observe in whichever situation of life ultimately stems from that root duality. As I explained in the begining, nature (Prakriti) can be observed in 5 layers, with the higher layers dealing with subtle concepts like intelligence, memory and ego. All of this is considered to be within the realm of objective measurement. In fact, the word <i>Samkhya </i>refers to enumeration. Everything in nature (Prakriti) can be numbered and measured. The residual beyond measurement is called <i>Purusha</i>, and it is described as unchanging, eternal and unmovable. In contrast, nature (<i>Prakriti</i>) is ever dynamic and metamorphizing between different forms. The mechanics through which different objects in nature transmute from one form to another is given by the 3 <i>Gunas </i>(qualities): <i>Satvik </i>(self reflection or renunciation)<i> Rajas </i>(aggression or growing) and <i>Tamas </i>(inertia or destruction). I described them in <a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.de/2010/04/samkhya-arithmetic-of-natures-evolution.html" target="_blank">greater detail in an earlier blog</a>.<br />
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On the topic of human culture and civilization, the gunas of <i>Rajas </i>and <i>Tamas </i>are relevant, which are symbolized at their subtlest level by the deities <i>Vishnu </i>and <i>Shiva </i>respectively. In the Samkhya system, <a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.de/2010/05/devas-of-samkhya-natural-or.html" target="_blank">the deities are entirely naturalistic</a> (belonging to <i>Prakriti</i>), and can be loosely understood as programs running on a cosmic computer. Of these two deities, <i>Vishnu </i>preserves culture and <i>Shiva </i>destroys it. Thus, they split very neatly into the Confucian and Daoist camps. Indeed, <i>Vaishavaites </i>who worship Vishnu extoll the values of culture, where as <i>Shaivaites </i>who worship Shiva deconstruct the value of culture. From a historical and anthropological point of view, Vaishnavaites had been the most resistant groups in India to changing cultural norms and practices. Many powerful Indian kingdoms followed in the <i>Vaishnavaite </i>mould and aimed to establish order in accordance with civilizational norms. In contrast, <i>Shaivaites </i>were often ascetics and revolutionaries, residing in the wilderness and in the margins of the society. The most extreme <i>Shaivaites </i>are known as <i>Tantrics </i>or <i>Aghoris</i>, who reside in burial mounds and eat rotten flesh. They do this in order to deconstruct their mental constructs of society and nature. They are India's counterparts to Zhuang Zi's howling sages of the mountains.<br />
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There are many myths and stories in Indian culture that elaborate on this dichotomy. But the interesting thing is that the mythologies of Vishnu and Shiva are deeply interwoven with each other. So neither the <i>Vaishnavaite </i>nor the <i>Shaivaite </i>tradition stands on its own, and needs to evoke mythological imagery from the other camps to tell the stories. For example, Vishnu carries a conch shell that symbolizes the wild nature of wind (an attribute of Shiva). Shiva has a son who is the leader of the solar deities (which include Vishnu). So when mythography encodes a cryptic tale of how to achieve a mystical state of mind, it invokes the attributes of both Vishnu and Shiva. This corresponds to the paradoxical nature of these mental states, which cannot be achieved by trying consciously. Sometimes, one has to follow rules and norms. Sometimes, one has to deconstruct them.<br />
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This philosophical dialectic on the values of ritual and norms stems from an even earlier period in India. The first division was between the <i>Brahmanas </i>(who praised the <i>Vedic</i> ritual) and the <i>Shramanas </i>(who deconstructed the ritual). The religions of <i>Buddhism </i>and <i>Jainism </i>sprung from the <i>Shramana </i>tradition. <i>Shaivaite </i>and Tantric asceticism also stem from the <i>Shramana </i>tradition. But the interesting thing with each of these religions is that, once they start to gain a significant number of followers, they had to seriously engage with the opposing philosophical positions. For example, Buddhism split into various camps based on how the ritual was valued. Even as the religions split and multiplied, the mythographical imagery developed by these schools was frequently borrowed by the other camps. As Confucius would argue, this mythographical imagery is like an environmental backdrop that helps the subconscious to be drawn into a state of <i>wuwei</i>. Unlike dry logic that suffers from limitations of expressibility in dealing with paradoxical concepts, mythography provides a cultural language to reason between them.<br />
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We can consider the analogy of the chariot to the human mind in a similar manner. Here, the symbol of <i>Krishna </i>(an avatar of <i>Vishnu - </i>the preserver of cosmic order) is used to express the state of effortless ease that is achieved by a person while doing an action. During the Mahabharata war, Krishna instructs Arjuna on how to achieve this effortless ease while performing difficult tasks - these instructions were written down into an independent sacred text known as the<i> "</i><i>Bhagavad Gita"</i>. Krishna asks Arjuna to not consciously desire the fruit of any labor, but to follow a path of desire-less action. If his actions are in accordance with the cosmic order (termed as <i>Rta </i>in India, or as <i>Dao </i>in China), he would succeed.<br />
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This message from the Gita is referred to in the book of Edward Slingerland, but unfortunately it is mentioned as a Daoist message. I think it is more in line with Confucius, as is most of the Vaishnavaite mythology. One important point of comparison between Vaishnavaite and Confucian ritual is the nature of timing for the ritual. Similar to the Vaishnavaites, Confucians had specific rituals for the various seasons as well as for astronomical events (alignment of stars and planets). But unlike the Vaishnavaites, they did not have rituals corresponding to the time of day. In ancient India, the sunrise and sunset were central to the anchoring of the ritual, where the people were instructed to salute the Sun. The outer sun is considered a manifestation of the inner sun, and the supreme head of all these solar deities is Vishnu. Thus, it is natural for Vishnu to retain the role of the preserver for ritual and culture.<br />
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In contrast, Shiva descends from the wild deities of wind (<i>Rudra</i>), who destroy culture and civilization. Shiva is termed as the destroyer of the three cities: the physical world, the mental world and the sensory world. An important form of Shiva is <i>Pashupathi </i>- the lord of animals, which shows the sacred symbolism of the primitive aspect of nature. Like the <i>Lao Zi,</i> Shiva was also termed as the <i>ancient one</i>. In all these aspects, the mythography of Shiva aligns well with the Daoists. The abode of Shiva is considered to be the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_Manasarovar" target="_blank">Manasa Sarovar lake</a>, which resides in western Tibet. This leaves open the tantalizing possibility that both the Daoists and Shaivaites have a common cultural point of origin. In any case, exploring this common philosophical bent may help deconstruct the worldview that we now take for granted, but which mostly excludes Indian and Chinese philosophy.<br />
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<i>Manasa Sarovar lake: The abode of Shiva</i></div>
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Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-13702758531750999422016-01-25T12:33:00.001-08:002016-01-26T22:38:15.247-08:00Homebrew AI Club <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Last Saturday, I had a great chat on Skype with Samim and Roelof - two very cool guys who are planning a sort of machine learning revolution. I met them on Twitter, where I came across their <a href="http://ethicalmachines.com/" target="_blank">"Ethical Machines" podcast</a>. This is a remarkable podcast that I highly recommend to anybody who is interested in AI, computers or the future of society. Unlike the regular commentary on mass media, whose portrayal of AI is often a one-dimensional caricature of the question <i>"How far are we from the Skynet in Terminator ?"</i>, this podcast gives a nuanced understanding of everything about AI. This is because Samim and Roelof are both active programmers and researchers, who follow and shape the most recent trends in AI. But this is not just a technical podcast. It is also about the ethics and politics of AI, as well as about art and culture.<br />
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I will give a small profile of Samim and Roelof. They created <a href="http://gitxiv.com/" target="_blank">Gitxiv</a>, which is a nice mashup of Arxiv and Github - two places on the internet where scientific researchers post preprints of scientific articles and the source-code of the projects. Gitxiv is a place of combining these two and more. As compared to various scientific communities, the machine learning community is remarkably open and sharing, with even big companies making the source-code of their projects available for the general public. Gitxiv is a place to bring all these energies together. They are soon planning to extend this venue to share data sets - an important element for reproducing scientific results today. I feel Samim is an artist at heart, he is interested in AI because it opens a new frontier in creative exploration. He is also a sharp thinker and entrepreneur. He is based in Berlin, which is probably the most interesting place in the world for a person with this combination of qualities. Roelof is a Ph.D student in Sweden, working in the area of natural language processing. But he is also a political activist with a strong understanding of social activism. In my past, I have briefly participated in activism about free software, though this is nothing to write home about. But I understand how incredibly enriching it is to do the basic ground work in social activism and to engage with people. So Roelof has some great perspectives out of his experiences.<br />
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Together, Samim and Roelof are a great team and they both share a passion in democratizing AI technology to the masses. I ran into them through making some snarky comments on Twitter, with my typical pessimism about the future of AI. Especially over the past one year, I grew very critical. I wrote many critical articles in this blog about the progress of AI and about the increasing despondency of our society's future with it. This is rather depressing, as I consider myself to be an AI researcher at my heart. There is a classic trope in PhD-Comics about the "bitter post-doc" - I probably fit this bill very well. When I speak with younger researchers and students, I have to consciously work on what I say so as to not depress them completely. But my pessimism about AI has less to do with technology, and more to do with the single-minded "Skynet" narrative that our society is building for it.<br />
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Speaking with Samim and Roelof literally lifted my spirits up, at least for a brief while. Samim is a very optimistic guy who sees the silver lining under any cloud. Right in the beginning of our chat, he pointed out that we need more narratives on how we tell the AI story. He pointed out that there are already several positive ones - the ecological perspective, the global consciousness perspective, the young entrepreneurship perspective. Even with my bitter pessimism, I couldn't deny that ! Our chat then became about how we can build on these narratives. We remembered the glorious days of the personal computer revolution in the 1960s and 70s - in some way, we are all fans of the great pioneers like Doug Engelbart, Alan Kay and so on. At the same time, we are conscious of the great consolidation going on in the market, where huge data clusters are condensing under the rule of monopolies. I talked about the consolidation going on in the visual effects and creative industry, damping some of Samim's hopes that this might be a way out. But Samim is too optimistic to ponder on my negatives. Roelof added a very interesting point - about how consolidation is going on in the sphere of academia and universities. He pointed out the creation of the University of Amsterdam - merging two historically separate universities (religious and secular) into one, and then the creation of commercial research centers within the premises of the university, where students have to sign an NDA before stepping in. This is shocking news to me (well not really, what did I expect !?), but we bemoaned how the Netherlands - which historically had a liberal tradition, that saved European culture from death during the aftermath of the printing press revolution - is no longer as much a defender of the free culture as it used to be.<br />
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We then talked about how, or if it is even possible, to replicate the personal computer revolution in the sphere of AI and machine learning. What we need desperately today is a "Homebrew Computer Club" - the rag tag band of losers, programmers and nerds, which in the 1970s took on the grand big monopolies of Xerox and IBM. I mentioned that this has to be a popular movement, not limited to the elite set of programmers and researchers, but inclusive of all sections of the society: the young kids at school, old people, and especially, artists and the creators of culture. We need to get those guys and girls who define the "<i>quintessence of cool</i>". AI and machine learning is something everybody should claim ownership on. But how ?<br />
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A few weeks ago, I visited the <a href="http://www.meetup.com/Paris-Machine-learning-applications-group/events/224283100/" target="_blank">Paris Machine Learning Meetup</a> - hosted by the <a href="http://nuit-blanche.blogspot.fr/" target="_blank">brilliant blogger </a>Igor Carron and his co-conspirator Frank Bardol. I talked about virtual faces and Leonardo da Vinci - as random a mix up of ideas as you can imagine. I have been thinking of going to this meetup for a long time, mostly because I liked its logo, which I show below.<br />
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This logo talks about giving power to the data, but it is really using a revolutionary image of "giving power to the people". This reminded me of the stories from the early days of computing, where Ted Nelson published his legendary book <i>"Computer Lib / Dream Machines"</i>, which also uses the same iconography.<br />
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This crazy book used to be the bible for the Homebrew Computer Club. I haven't seen this book, but finding and owning a copy of this is one of my life's missions. This book kickstarted the idea of democratizing computer technology to the masses, much before anybody has seen or heard of a personal computer. What we need today is a seller of such dreams about machine learning for the masses. This includes machine learning for your grandma, your dog, and your street artist. We cannot afford to bind machine learning in the prison of researchers, elite programmers and mathematicians. The only hope to save our society from descending into a totalitarian state is by democratizing AI. But how to do that ?<br />
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The meetups sprouting in all major cities of the world show a path forward. They widen the audience from researchers, engineers and managers of fat-wallated companies, to something broader. But there is a long way to go before we get your grandma, your dog and your street artist to get interested in machine learning. Alan Kay thought of computer programming as a medium, something as simple to use as a book. But we have not got there yet. Even bonafide computer programmers don't think of programming as a medium, they think of it as a skill to show off. In reality, programming should be as trivial to do as speaking a language: obviously requiring some training, but something that one can do without conscious effort. We have a long way to go till we get there.<br />
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Even though I grew up as a quintessential nerd and studied computer science in various universities, I never understood what computers were all about, until I came across <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6E3E1B24787ECD62" target="_blank">this lecture by Michel Serres</a> in 2007. The French research institution INRIA, where I was working as a doctoral student, was celebrating its 40 years and invited the philsopher Michel Serres to be the keynote speaker of the function. His talk was about a point that is so simple that it blew my mind away: computers are not tools for solving problems, but tools for solving people, who in turn will solve the problems. In other words, all the fantastic applications of computers and the internet are just a side-show to something much bigger: like tiny ripples of water on a tsunami. Very few people understand the real impacts of the computing revolution, because they need to imagine this from a perspective of a "changed brain" or a "new self", not from the present self. But there is a catch - before the computing revolution can catch on and make its true impact, it has to engage with the vast majority of the society. It should not be limited to just the elite few programmers and researchers.<br />
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It is not Michel Serres who first articulated this vision, but Marshall McLuhan. This greatly inspired early pioneers like Engelbart and Kay. An even early expanse of this vision is from Vannevar Bush, who wrote the essay "As we may think" at the end of the second world war. In physical terms, a computational way of thinking would rewire the human brain, expanding the higher cognitive functions, as well as those dealing with compassion and empathy. In other words, we will become a better species through the practice of computational thinking. I think the early dreams of the computing pioneers have largely failed. We stand today in a desolate moonscape of parched desert, where the vast majority of human population live in a prison of apps and trivial status updates - what Alan Kay once reminisced as Henry Thoreau talking about the implications of the transatlantic telephone cable, "that it will help the vast majority of Americans to know about the latest fashion statement of a European princeling". This pessimism about human nature aside, I think there is a fundamental reason why the early dreams of computing pioneers have failed - the lack of useful applications to engage the user to the full potential of computing. I think this is now beginning to change with machine learning.<br />
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In the early days of personal computing, Alan Kay and colleagues have made little children draw on the computer screens and play music, and used this as a basis for establishing the principles of computer programming. As a child drew a picture on the equivalent of a "MS Paint" like program, they romanticized that the child was "programming". By the way, "MS Paint" (And Apple Paint, or any of the other clone demos) is a trivialized corruption of the original ideas behind this demo at Xerox Parc, which indeed had educational value to teach many computing aspects. But despite the best efforts of the pioneers, they did not succeed in inculcating a knowledge (and love) of programming in the masses. Today, we might be in a much better position, because we can rely on large data sets, sensors and machine learning source-code to realize far more engaging applications.<br />
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So the time for a <b>"Homebrew AI club" </b>is ripe. A new culture of computing can start today, where every human can be an active participant. This can take full advantage of the connecting power of the internet. But what is stopping it ? I don't know. But it may be time to put off our conspiratorial hats and believe in the full potential of the human species. It is time to get rid of the fears of the NSA, the big brother state, the lousy social networks and see the bigger picture.<br />
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I don't know how and when this massive social change will happen. But after talking with Samim and Roelof, and generally brewing some thoughts in my puny head, I have a list of points to ponder on.<br />
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<b>Ten commandments about AI (actually, just ten talking points) : </b><br />
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1) The word "homebrew" is brilliant. It is reminiscent of home-brew alcohol, which has a direct benefit on the human user, and which immediately alters the mental states, which is exactly what we need to aim for.<br />
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2) We need artists. Anything big like a social revolution will not happen due to a bunch of nerds talking about mathematical equations. We need big mojo people like Che Guvera or Steve Jobs (though less arrogance and ass-holish behavior would be nice). Heck, we need women. It is high time there are more women in computing. Most of all, we need to engage with people who have a creative spark.<br />
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3) All of us nerds need to start at home and explain technology to our families, girlfriends and boyfriends. The first thing to start explaining is probably data security and privacy. There are a monumental number of losers on the web who share their private data without even knowing about it. We should first subtract our friends and families from this group.<br />
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4) But privacy awareness and computing knowledge are not one and the same thing. There will never be a magic switch that will bring us to a privacy-respecting world. Living in the digital world will always be a battle against adversarial powers, which in the future, will only become more powerful and obscure though the use of data and machine learning. It is highly important that everybody knows how to keep track of their own data and use it for the better. But how do we train n00bs in this ?<br />
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5) An important obligation is with helping elderly people. Most elderly people are already clueless with technology - fiddling with the inner lives of TV remotes and email preferences is not for them. But everybody has a right to lead a dignified life online. Before we snark and snigger on the troubles of elderly people with technology, let's imagine how much more awful our own lives will be when we grow older. Technology will screw us million times over then (that is, if we are still alive then, and did not all disappear in the smoke of a nuclear explosion).<br />
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6) The first step about doing machine learning is collecting data. What better place to start than collecting data about oneself: one's own friend's circle, one's shopping habits, one's tax bills, one's entertainment preferences etc.. We need open-source software that helps people to collect data and organize it in a nice manner.<br />
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7) The second step is to train people to use machine learning: simple regression functions, then more complicated methods like deep-learning.. It is likely that not everybody will understand the maths behind it. But this is not as important as being able to use these methods in a regular and confident<br />
manner -similar to how one uses home appliances everyday. I still remember the awful day when I, as a fresh graduate student in USA, put a tin-foiled sandwich in the microwave and saw it explode in fireworks. To make it all worse, this happened in front of a bunch of school kids, that I was supposed to teach about robotics ! In my entire life until then, as an engineering student in India, I have never used a microwave oven. If you grilled me about what would happen if you put metal in a microwave, I would have pondered over my physics knowledge and answered correctly that it would explode. But when I was just hungry and wanted to eat my sandwich, physics was the last thing on my head. So I completely failed as a functional user of home appliances in the USA, due to my complete lack of training. With respect to using machine learning, I think we need to train people to be first functional users of technology. Obviously, a few will cross over into learning the maths behind it. But even if they don't do that, it is still quite okay.<br />
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8) The third step is to expand this training to a full programming language. I think most people get it wrong with teaching programming languages. Most humans don't care about the Turing-completeness of a language or a programming paradigm. They just want to get shit done. But knowing about the basics of computability and information theory will be a must for anybody in the future. So we need to train them how to think computationally - what are the types of algorithms, how do we store data structures, how do we evaluate computational cost etc. We need ways to explain this in a simple manner to everybody. We can do this. After all, driving a car is not trivial. Putting a sandwich in a microwave is also not trivial (as I found out). But with a little bit of training, people do both these tasks quite well.<br />
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9) We need a way to swallow our nerd pride. It is not easy. We all have to work on it. When you are superior to your peers in some skill that is essential for anybody's survival, you can very often feel smug about your superiority. I don't know if it is humanly possible to not think otherwise. But being a smug monkey is not the point. Evolving from monkeys to humans is our goal.<br />
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10) We need to enlist doctors and the medical profession for our help. Of all the various disciplines, I think clinicians have the most respectful view of human potential. Every day, they see broken people in their clinics, but they try to fix them and raise their potential. In a way, great teachers are also like clinicians. They treat each student separately and help them realize their individual potentials. The medical profession is also very relevant because everybody is concerned about their own bodies and their medical choices. Often these choices are complex and require a fair amount of statistical and computational thinking. So we can develop computing paradigms that teach machine learning for people by using their own personal data for medical choices.<br />
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I would like to finish off this blog by talking about narratives, and about the stories we need to tell about AI. I will use two existing pop culture narratives - the movies<i> "Star Wars" </i>and <i>"Lord of the Rings"</i>. I am a great fan of both these movies.<br />
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The <i>"Return of the Jedi"</i> from the Star Wars movies gives a very nice narrative about how a "primitive" tribe of Ewoks overcame the much greater power of imperial storm troopers. Sure, there were a few Jedi warriors who were helping them, but the Ewoks were the fundamental game changer in the battle, which is one of the most lovely aspects of the movie. In our battle over AI, we need to get the Ewoks - people who value friendship and nature more than technological gadgets.<br />
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The "Lord of the Rings" books offer another similar narrative (actually George Lucas was quite inspired by these books). The final battle with the dark lord Sauron is won through an alliance of elves, men, dwarves, as well as hobbits and ents. I particularly like how central the hobbits and the ents are to these battles, as these are tribes that are not technologically superior, but value friendships and nature immensely. Another nice reference is to the wizards (loosely analogous to the AI researchers), who are split between the forces of the light and the dark.<br />
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Well, these are just two narratives, not quite complete, but much better than the stupid Skynet narrative about AI. The danger of the Skynet narrative is that it is fatalistic - as if humanity is like a deer caught in the headlights, unable to do anything about AI.<br />
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Robots are going to get your job.<br />
Robots are going to make out with your boyfriend.<br />
Robots are going to eat your babies.<br />
Robots are going to wipe you clean.<br />
No, Robots are going to make your breakfast.<br />
No, Robots are going to make you immortal. </blockquote>
This binary narratives about AI need to stop ! Humans are the agents of their own lives !<br />
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We also don't need help from a Jesus-like savior like in the Matrix movies (yes, hello, the title of my blog). But we need stories that help us believe in everyone. <br />
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Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-16137016527406308432016-01-17T15:53:00.000-08:002016-04-13T08:45:24.657-07:00Anatomy of open-source education: A paraview of "Adventures in human being" by Gavin Francis<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>An anatomical drawing from "De Humani Corporis Fabrica" by Andreas Vesalius, published in 1543</i></div>
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<b>Traveling through time in Florence : </b><br />
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A thin fog hangs low on the Arno river in Florence, framing the picturesque bridge of Ponte Vecchio in a nice photographic effect. Inhaling the chill of the early winter air, I walk by the rows of shops selling jewelry and trinkets on the bridge. As the evening sets in, the throngs of tourists are gone, along with the artists, street food vendors and the peddlers of souvenirs chasing them.There is a faint smell of wood smoke, perhaps coming from a pizza getting baked somewhere.<br />
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As I absorb this moment of tranquility, my mind is occupied by a man who lived here five and a half centuries ago - Leonardo Da Vinci. I am reading <i>"Adventures in human being"</i>, a book by a young Scottish doctor and clinician Gavin Francis, and Leonardo is a central character in the book. Partially autobiographical, the book narrates the author's experiences in his medical practice and explores the idiosyncrasies of the various organs of the human body and how they are discovered in the history of medicine. Leonardo Da Vinci - the great artist and engineer, the maker of the Mona Lisa and the flying parachute - also helped humankind discover the most fundamental of objects, their own faces. He is the first person in history to study facial expressions in a scientific manner - how the muscles stretch and deform the skin, and how human emotions are translated into smiles and frowns on the face. As I pass by the tourists and Florentine citizens, I wonder how Leonardo would have looked at their faces. Would he have read the emotional history of their lives in one glimpse ? Would he have seen in X-Ray vision the anatomy of muscles beneath the skin ? As I wonder, I begin to suspect if Leonardo is the answer to the greatest question of history: how did our human civilization enter the modern age of scientific investigation ? And why did this happen first in Florence, Italy ?<br />
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Once the cultural capital of the world, Florence now resembles a museum opened inside out - a dissected corpse of European renaissance. It is as if the vibrations of a furious energy from several centuries past spilled the masterpieces of art onto the pavements and gateways, with museums and galleries unable to hold them within closed doors. <br />
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Museo Galileo is an unassuming building behind the famous Uffizi gallery, which is dedicated to telling the story of how modern science began. I visited this museum a few years ago and saw its fantastic <a href="http://catalogue.museogalileo.it/index/IndexObjectsInAlphabeticalOrder.html" target="_blank">historical relics</a>. Now I play a game in my mind, trying to recollect where behind the walls of this building they lie: the first telescopes, microscopes, astronomical charts, sundials, mechanical clocks, navigational compasses, and the first instruments for measuring electricity. Walking through those exhibits was like traveling through time, with each successive era bringing in greater standards of precision in measurement. Apart from the myriad scientific instruments, there were two sets of objects that piqued my interest then. The first were a set of demonstrators illustrating specific scientific principles - for example, <a href="http://catalogue.museogalileo.it/object/ApparatusToDemonstrateParabolicTrajectoryProjectiles.html" target="_blank">the parabolic path of a projectile</a> discovered by Galileo. The second were a set of anatomical models showing advances in medical science - for example, tools for delivering babies in complicated pregnancies. On first sight, these anatomical models showing messy biology stood awkwardly different from the clean instruments of physics. But there is a link between the two, though this fine museum fails to show it within its modest premises. That missing link now lies in the <a href="http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/leonardo/accessible/introduction.html" target="_blank">British Library in London</a>, in the <a href="https://archive.org/details/noteboo00leon" target="_blank">notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci</a>. They demonstrate that anatomy was the first modern science and physics followed afterwards.<br />
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The great physicist Ernest Rutherford said<br />
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All science is either physics or stamp collecting. </blockquote>
This disdain runs deep in our academic establishment, with physics at the top of the pecking order of departments. Many fields try to ape physics in their methodology, aiming for overarching theories which condense the "truth" into a small set of equations. But are we doing it completely wrong ?<br />
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In this blog, I will narrate a short history of the science of anatomy - the original harbinger of precision in modern science. I will argue that we scientists should aim to mimic anatomy instead of physics. By that I mean, we need to pay attention to detail even without any pretence for an overarching theory. This is not mere stamp collecting, but an art of map making that is necessary to understand a complex and dynamic subject, such as the human body. I believe this is particularly important for the field of my own study - computer science, which is arguably leading us into a new scientific age. I once <a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.de/2008/03/q-u-e-s-t-i-o-n-s-o-f-o-u-r-t-i-m-e.html" target="_blank">related on this blog</a> <a href="https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL6E3E1B24787ECD62" target="_blank">a lecture by Michel Serres</a>, where he used the word <i>bouleverser </i>to describe what computers are doing to our society - destroying everything and remaking them in a brand new fashion: politics, culture, education, economy, science, everything. This radical transformation is comparable to only two preceding moments in human civilization: the inventions of writing and printing. As we try to step into such a new scientific age, we should understand how this happened before, 500 years ago in Florence.<br />
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<b>Awakening of the science of anatomy: </b><br />
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<i>(Left) An anatomical drawing based on "Anathomia Corporis Humani" by Mondino de Luizi, written in 1316. The drawing is from a later print in 1541. Contrast with the lack of detail as compared to Vesalius, above. (Right) The cover of the book showing practice of dissection for anatomical studies.</i></div>
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Browsing through wikipedia, I discovered a peculiar quirk from history that connects three great scientists. The anatomist Andreas Vesalius was born in 1514 and died in 1564. The astronomer Galileo Galilei was born in 1564 and died in 1642. The physicist Isaac Newton was born in 1642 and died in 1726. Tibetans who believe in reincarnation might very well say that the ghost of the scientific spirit successively reincarnated in these three people. The last of the three, Newton was born on 25th December 1642, which gave rise to a recurring annual joke amongst atheists during Christmas time, that <i>"Of course, we need to celebrate the birth of Newton"</i>. Newton revolutionized physics by bringing it into the ambit of mathematics: his glorious three laws of motion. Many school children grow up thinking that this mathematical insight occurred to Newton while he was dozing off under an apple tree when lo, an apple popped on his head. Of course, this story is a myth and not true, but so is the myth that physics was the centre of modern science. To understand what motivated Newton, we need to understand Galileo and his fellow pioneers in precise astronomical observation, such as Johannes Kepler. And to understand what motivated Galileo, I believe we need to understand Vesalius and his fellow pioneers in precise anatomical observation. <br />
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By the time of Vesalius, the science of human anatomy was already mature. Crucially, it was Europe that held the advantage in anatomical knowledge as opposed to other great civilizations such as China, India or Arabia. These other civilizations stood superior to Europe in many other fields such as mathematics or astronomy. Scholars of history keep arguing why the awakening of modern empirical science, requiring precise experimental observation, arose in Europe and not in other places. There are many theories, but I believe the answer lies with anatomy, where Europe and specifically Italy, held a distinct superiority over other places. Dissecting the human body was a cultural taboo in many civilizations, as it is still today in many contexts. Ancient India had a vast knowledge in medicine, but cutting the human body was <a href="http://www.jpgmonline.com/article.asp?issn=0022-3859;year=2002;volume=48;issue=3;spage=243;epage=5;aulast=Rajgopal" target="_blank">banned due to religious reasons</a>. Instead, Indian anatomists let the body decompose naturally and peeled off the layers using <i>Kusa </i>grass. This was not as effective as using precise surgical instruments for studying anatomy as practised later in Europe. Ancient China<a href="http://www.sesp.northwestern.edu/docs/publications/6074956944509ac426aaa6.pdf" target="_blank"> had a cultural emphasis on holistic medicine</a> that required studying the entire body, as opposed to observing each organ in detail. This resulted in a lack of a demand for anatomical knowledge. It is not clear whether Arabs performed dissections, but the strong prohibition in Islam of representing the human body in artistic form resulted in a shortcoming of anatomical knowledge.<br />
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A strong contrast to all these civilizations is the popularity in Europe of the artistic description of the human form. Sculpture and fine-arts have been valued highly by the Greeks and pursued with equal gusto by the Romans. It can be argued that Greek science and philosophy have stagnated during Roman times, but the arts of sculpture, painting and architecture have advanced immensely. As the artistic standards rose for the description of human form, many painters and sculptors realized that they needed to understand the underlying muscular structure of the human body. However, the Roman empire prohibited the dissection of the human body, again due to religious reasons. The Greek physician Galen, working in Rome in 2nd century AD, obtained his anatomical knowledge by observing the injured gladiators. When this didn't give sufficient knowledge, he compensated for this by dissecting animal cadavers. For many centuries, his work remained the standard in Europe as further progress was stunted by the ban on dissection. A remarkable element was that the delivery of human babies was studied by dissecting sheep, so much so that <i>amnion - </i>the scientific word for the placental membrane - comes from the Latin word for lamb. Obviously, this extrapolation from animal studies to human bodies resulted in several errors, which were not corrected until the 16th century by Vesalius.<br />
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Before Vesalius could achieve his mastery of the human anatomy, the gates needed to be opened for scientific investigation of the human body by dissection . The first advantage was given by Christianity. Although it required the proper burial of the bodies of believers, Christianity removed the sharp prohibition on dissection present in pagan Rome. The atmosphere was sufficiently relaxed by 13th century AD, when an Italian physician named Mondino de Liuzzi was able to perform public dissection of human cadavers. He wrote a text named <i>"Anathomia Corporis Humani"</i> which is considered to be the first true anatomical text, based on observations of the human body.<br />
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The later physicians in Italy regularly performed dissections and improved anatomical knowledge. Thus, the text of Vesalius with its detailed anatomical drawings is the outcome of a gradual evolution. The publication of this text was greatly aided by the invention of the printing press by Johannes Gutenberg (born 1398, died 1468). But the science of anatomy was already in the ascendancy by this time. Apart from physicians, sculptors and artists in Italy studied anatomy in a rigorous manner. The teacher of Leonardo Da Vinci (born 1452, died 1519) in Florence, Andrea del Vercocchio (born 1435, died 1488) was a master of human facial anatomy, as can be seen in his drawing below.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP8U-lR_iX6tBVLfuyJSJyf20Y7C85EimswBeE-BJdMbNE3k5v6H1o3UQ39s11ptpyvJbnUabSufi6noIcFtGIos-RxjmFT_r9wNv7Rfy4b0t3SvL3_Enuoxby5Miv37WKrr1Tmw/s1600/StJerome_Verocchio.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgP8U-lR_iX6tBVLfuyJSJyf20Y7C85EimswBeE-BJdMbNE3k5v6H1o3UQ39s11ptpyvJbnUabSufi6noIcFtGIos-RxjmFT_r9wNv7Rfy4b0t3SvL3_Enuoxby5Miv37WKrr1Tmw/s320/StJerome_Verocchio.jpg" width="202" /></a></div>
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<i>Drawing of St Jerome by Andrea del Vercocchio, the teacher of Leonardo Da Vinci</i></div>
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Another great master of human anatomy is the sculptor Michelangelo (born 1475, died 1564). This analysis of human anatomy flourished in Florence and spread from there to the whole of Italy and Europe. Specifically, Leonardo Da Vinci depicted bone structure and musculature in significant detail, as shown below.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJCiQqpvlBWp-S6TVc8hDYacrC91Nh4-PMpgsZ0xcQuNW8xTKgSvJ0Od0iYZ3U3upvbo1uT5nd2w9e4UudW4yOFDtbcsDrThAP5EF_o1C50VwwdH_Ma7g7RJIZkK6RcxvfalXwqg/s1600/davinci1.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjJCiQqpvlBWp-S6TVc8hDYacrC91Nh4-PMpgsZ0xcQuNW8xTKgSvJ0Od0iYZ3U3upvbo1uT5nd2w9e4UudW4yOFDtbcsDrThAP5EF_o1C50VwwdH_Ma7g7RJIZkK6RcxvfalXwqg/s320/davinci1.png" width="299" /></a><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg31C05Lb5Ift3VTQIUfyPhhLqahGxc8KAxGhop_yji404H_s3STaALoZHySK4DXRGKW7mq20t-BDDCWmKerQIiTps0_rcnM8EPrJax9bHkAD9kwpcAkH91A0bvgNzhHtHVWnspoQ/s1600/davinci2.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg31C05Lb5Ift3VTQIUfyPhhLqahGxc8KAxGhop_yji404H_s3STaALoZHySK4DXRGKW7mq20t-BDDCWmKerQIiTps0_rcnM8EPrJax9bHkAD9kwpcAkH91A0bvgNzhHtHVWnspoQ/s320/davinci2.png" width="240" /></a></div>
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<i>Anatomical drawings of Leonardo Da Vinci from his notebooks</i></div>
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Apparently, Leonardo was so curious to study facial expressions that whenever he saw particularly ugly or grotesque looking people, he followed them around the town in the hope of catching their facial expressions under different emotions. His systematic analysis of the human face is the secret behind his masterpieces - such as the<i> Last Supper</i> and <i>Mona Lisa</i>, with their precise and enigmatic facial expressions.<br />
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It is sometimes acknowledged that<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annus_mirabilis#1543_.E2.80.93_The_year_of_science" target="_blank"> the year 1543</a>, with the publication of the book<i> De Humani Corporis Fabrica</i> by Vesalius, is the beginning of the scientific revolution. Another significant event in the same year is the publication of Nicolas Copernicus about the heliocentric theory of the universe (something already discovered by several ancient astronomers). However, we have to note that the work of Vesalius is not the beginning, but a significant milestone of maturity for the science of anatomy. In terms of scientific investigation and experimentation, the other sciences caught up only much later.<br />
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The scientific study of anatomy revolutionized surgery, and medicine in general. In his book <i>"Adventures in Human Being"</i>, Gavin Francis describes the Victorian medical school building in central Edinburgh in Scotland as follows.<br />
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Carved into the stone lintel of the entrance was "SURGERY <span style="font-size: large;">ANATOMY </span>PRACTICE OF PHYSIC" The greater weighting given to the word ANATOMY was a declaration that the study of the body's structure was of primary importance, and the other skills we were engaged in learning - those of surgery and practice of physic (medicine) were secondary. </blockquote>
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Edinburgh has a unique and significant place in the history of anatomy. The physician and artist Charles Bell was born and practised here. Francis narrates how Bell was inspired by the drawings of Da Vinci and by his analytical detail in the depiction of facial musculature. Bell described in detail the different facial nerves that animate the human facial expression. One of the medical pathologies that is studied by Bell is that of facial paralysis, now known as Bell's palsy. The complexity of the facial anatomy in the human has <a href="https://archive.org/details/essaysonanatomyo00bell" target="_blank">led Bell to proclaim that humans are unique</a> with respect to the other animals in how complex their facial expressions are. This model <a href="https://archive.org/details/expressionofemot1872darw" target="_blank">was later criticized by Darwin</a> who also studied in Edinburgh. But Darwin expressed a great fondness for the anatomical work done by Bell and by his predecessor Da Vinci, which undoubtedly influenced the later development of his theory of evolution. Even the observations of Charles Bell on the uniqueness of human facial expression remain relevant to this day, as facial expression mirrors the complexity of emotional states in the human brain, which is substantially superior to that of the other animals. In more recent times, psychological research by Paul Ekman and others has investigated how the facial expressions in different human cultures, including traditional tribal societies, are remarkably similar to each other and exhibit similar complexity. The synthesis of virtual human characters in films and computer games derives greatly from this work in psychology and anatomy. <a href="http://gvv.mpi-inf.mpg.de/projects/PersonalizedFaceRig/" target="_blank">3D face modelling for visual effects</a> is also my window into this fascinating field. <br />
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Another significant advance in the study of anatomy is the work by Henry Gray, <a href="https://openlibrary.org/books/OL24780759M/Anatomy_descriptive_and_surgical" target="_blank">whose classic</a> <i>"Gray's Anatomy: Descriptive and Surgical"</i> first published in 1858, remains an important reference to this day. Many scientists working in other fields have relied on this book to extend their findings to the field of medicine. This open scientific investigation, structured on an open understanding of the human body, has greatly benefited mankind. This is arguably one of the most important gifts of science: in addition to the discoveries of evidence based medicine through randomized controlled trials, and that of antibiotics such as Penicillin. These advances in medicine have saved countless number of lives and alleviated the pain of several more people. In this sense, even from a practical and utilitarian point of view, medicine (and specifically, anatomy) is a greater role model for sciences than physics.<br />
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="openatomy"></a>
<b>Open source education of anatomy: </b><br />
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With the advances in body imaging technologies and computational medical sensors, we now have a unique opportunity to extend the understanding of anatomy to the general public. Unlike X-rays and CAT scans, novel imaging technologies such as Ultrasound Imaging and Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI and fMRI) do not use harmful ionizing radiation. Thus, in principle, they can be used extensively for acquiring a lot more data about the human bodies than what we have today. But in practice, they remain extremely expensive and have not yet realized economies of scale. Very few people have deep knowledge of their own bodies, as captured by the latest medical imaging technology. Why is this ?<br />
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Very often, it is too late when doctors perform clinical diagnosis of harmful tumours, bone fractures or misalignments in the body. This results in costly late procedures or even in the death of patients. This is terrible, but there is a greater problem that is not apparent to people who are not aware of the possibilities of computational medicine.<br />
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It is now possible to capture and analyse the human body throughout its metabolism, and obtain a detailed understanding of its processes of digestion, locomotion or cognitive control. Obviously, all these bodily processes depend on the exact physical structure and anatomy of the patient, as well as his lifestyle. So the medical advice can be tailor-made to the exact needs and requirements of the patient. This can be achieved by computational analysis of the sensor readings from one patient, and putting them in relation to the statistics from large human populations. All of this computational analysis needs to be grounded on the anatomy of the human body. Another grounding factor is the DNA of the patient. If we have an open model to represent this knowledge, this can facilitate the development of personalized drugs as well as lifestyle recommendations, which can be prescribed by the doctor in coordination with experts in many different fields. These recommendations can be as detailed as the posture of the body, the cognitive tasks during the day, or how to organize one's home or furniture. This will be in stark contrast to the <i>one-size-fits-all</i> drugs that we currently have in the pharmaceutical market. In fact, future generations will look back at our current medical practice in dismay, similar to how we look at the ancient Roman physicians who delivered human babies on the basis of sheep anatomy. <br />
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However, medical diagnosis is not solely a computational problem and we can never replace the role of the clinician. Reading the book of Gavin Francis made me realize this very strongly. There is an underlying strand of compassion and empathy that runs throughout the book, across the various medical cases that he describes. This empathy cannot but be obtained from a dedicated clinical practice. It is the job of the clinician to explain the alternatives to the patient and convey the information in a manner that he can understand. Very often the problems are not clear cut and there is no easy solution. In this sense, the role of the clinician is not much different from that of a teacher. What we now have is a problem of educating the general public, and making them understand their own bodies in a more profound manner.<br />
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Despite the great advances in technology, our societal understanding of the human body has not progressed much from the era of Leonardo Da Vinci. We need a new model for anatomy that corresponds to the computational understanding of the human body. We need a method of communicating this model between experts and the general public, in a way similar to how printed books communicated the anatomical drawings of Vesalius. Without these models of communication, we will not be able to exploit the advances of medical imaging technologies and computational medicine. In fact, the situation is far worse. These advances will be used by the nefarious powers on the market who will exploit the <a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.de/2015/11/of-electric-fences-and-free-software.html" target="_blank">gullible public similar to how livestock animals are exploited</a>. The disaster in the food industry, which keeps churning out addictive sugar loaded products, is a case in point. Another disaster is unfolding in the industry of medical supplements and pain medicine, which make the human users addicted to them. Many people use legal drugs such as nicotine and alcohol as pain relief. But the human exploitation is not limited to food or drugs. All social and cognitive activities will be analysed with respect to how they affect the human body, and thus they will be exploited. An important avenue of exploitation, based on advances in neuroanatomy and physiology, is that of our digital lives on the internet,which now hosts a significant chunk of the economy.<br />
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How can we have an open-source education of computational anatomy for the general public ? This is not an easy question to answer. In fact, the question is deeply tied to how we communicate computational objects in general. Most people do not understand computers. Even trained computer programmers do not understand complex software. This is the case even for <i>"open-source"</i> software, where the source-code is made public for anyone to see. For most people, this is illegible and a foreign, alien language. If we are not able to communicate relatively simple computational objects like web pages, how can we communicate complex biological models to the public ?<br />
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We need to go back to the roots of anatomy and decipher how those artists sketched the human form and musculature. In fact, an anatomical drawing follows a complex aesthetic of visualization. When the body is dissected, the important nerves and muscles are drawn out and presented in a visually comprehensible manner. This is necessary even for medical students, and more so for patients. If we want to show the metabolism of the human body in motion, we need to develop a similar language of aesthetic. Crucially, this language should be able to represent the computational aspects of the metabolism that are relevant for diagnosis. This might seem like a daunting task, but we have a great starting point, which is that people are motivated to know about their own bodies, and they can start from the static anatomical drawings aligned to their medical images. However, we cannot avoid the job of educating the public. In this regard, we need the effort of artists similar to Leonardo Da Vinci, who can bridge the elite world of scientists to the lay person. <br />
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We still have many cultural taboos about anatomical images. Most people associate bone skeletons and inner body images with corpses. Very few people see them as masterful creations of nature, depicting all the dynamics of life. In Germany, there is a traveling exhibition of plasticized human and animal anatomy, known as <i><a href="http://www.koerperwelten.com/de.html" target="_blank">Körperwelten </a></i>(Body Worlds) which keeps running foul of religious groups. Part of the appeal to such anatomy exhibitions is their shock factor and morbid element. However, we need to grow out of this shock and understand our human bodies in their true dynamic form. We need artists who can bridge this gap. <br />
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="anatopen"></a>
<b>Anatomy of open-source education: </b><br />
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The media theorist Marshall McLuhan has theorized in the 1960s that modern media is fundamentally reshaping our human consciousness. He profoundly influenced many computer scientists who wanted to achieve a fundamental transformation in human society through computational thinking. In order to qualify as a <i>medium </i>for thinking, a computer should not be restricted to an elite set of programmers or engineers, but used by everybody. In other words, this should be as versatile as a book. This vision and dream was the driving force of the pioneering work in personal computing by scientists such as Seymour Papert and Alan Kay. We now have the technological means to provide personal computers for all human beings. However, the way we are using computers today is a complete disaster, and a total sell out of the original dream.<br />
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Most people use their computers (now hidden inside their mobile phones or home appliances) as livestock tethered to a pole. In other words, they are willing slaves to an overarching system of control. With repetitive use, they are conditioned to think and behave like captive animals. In this regard, computers and internet are much worse than books, and closer to chemically addictive substances. A loose analogy to the situation today is most people using books entirely to write confession material to the pastor in the church, and never for reading anything, not even the bible. If books were used like that, they would have resulted in a slave society in complete thrall to the powers in the dark. The invention of the printing press by Gutenberg would have simply exacerbated the situation. In reality, this did not happen. The fundamental reason is that the elite scientists have found a way to communicate their knowledge to the general public. This started with the science of anatomy. Today, we face a similar task in computational sciences. I believe we can draw similar inspiration from anatomy, building the first applications in health and environmental sciences, where there exists a significant minority of passionate people eager to know more. These people can be trained to think in a computational manner through applications that visualize the hidden anatomy of the human bodily processes or of the environmental processes. Much as the underlying neural and cardiovascular structure describes the health of the human body, the threads of biodiversity and natural resources describe the health of the environment,<br />
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These applications need a method for communicating computational media that can be easily interpreted and visualized by the general public, which over the course of interaction, reveals the computational intricacies to the user. In other words, we need to decouple how the media is programmed with how it it reacts to the user. But at the same time, we need a guarantee that the user interface produces the same level of computational control as a full-fledged programming language. The work of Alan Kay, the original inspiration behind the movie <i>Tron</i>, remains a hallmark in this regard. Snippets from this inspiring work are now available in the programming languages of Smalltalk and Squeak. Another example is the work of Bill Atkinson at Apple, who developed Hypercard (<a href="http://www.douglasadams.com/dna/980707-00-a.html" target="_blank">eulogized here by Douglas Adams</a>). Although limited in its computational expressiveness, this pioneering work was far ahead of the <i>World Wide Web</i> developed by Tim Berners Lee, in terms of user expressibility. The web, in turn, is far more expressive than the disastrous world of <i>apps </i>we have today. In terms of computational education of the general public, we have regressed tremendously.<br />
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In today's world (in 2016), my personal hopes for an open data format for educating the general public to think in a computational manner are with <a href="http://ipython.org/notebook.html" target="_blank">iPython notebooks</a>. At present, these notebooks are used extensively by researchers in computational sciences and machine learning to display scientific data sets. With a little bit of prodding, they might be developed to communicating computational data to the general public. Taking another cue from clinical medicine, we can develop applications to help the users understand their own bodies or lifestyles in an analytic manner. It is very easy to develop <i>apps </i>that make money by getting the users addicted via some psychological weakness. It is much harder to develop <i>apps </i>that don't make as much money, but will educate the public. Without conscious effort from programmers, these will never happen.<br />
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<a href="https://www.blogger.com/null" name="paraview"></a>
<b>What is a paraview : </b><br />
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This blog post is inspired by my reading of the book by Gavin Francis. However, it also draws from my own personal experiences in my life and my perspectives as a computer scientist. In this sense, it is something more than a review of the book. I am expressing my inspiration by using the equivalent of anatomy in the human language: etymology, to coin a new word.<br />
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In Greek, the prefix <i>"para"</i> refers to something <i>"beyond"</i> or <i>"by the side of"</i>. Interestingly, this is one of the prefixes that applies equally to Greek and Sanskrit. Examples in English that use this prefix include paragraph, parallel, parapsychology, paranormal, parachute (first imagined by Da Vinci). I coin the word <i>"paraview"</i> to refer to a <i>"view beyond the subject"</i>. I think this is a very useful word to describe a detailed comment enriched with one's own experience or perspective. Ideally, our expressions of the digital lives on the internet should be connected to one another as paraviews, and not organized in a hierarchical list. This imposition of hierarchy on human thought by the world wide web is <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9PmIkAYhI0" target="_blank">one of the complaints of Ted Nelson</a>, the originator of the ideas of <i>hypertext </i>and <i>hyperviews</i>. At present, we do not yet have a <i>hyperview</i> browser to inspect the anatomy of online content, as envisioned by Ted Nelson. But at the least, we can try to express paraviews, instead of mere appendages in a hierarchy. </div>
Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-30722707349386058282015-11-25T14:00:00.001-08:002017-05-26T06:14:12.708-07:00The four sided negation: A tool for overcoming bias in science, atheism and democracy <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Towards the end of the 12th century, the Islamist raider Bakthiyar Khilji ransacked the ancient Buddhist university of Nalanda in eastern India. Apart from the many students and monks who lived there, the monastery also housed a large library, similar in extent to the great library of Alexandria in Egypt. After he looted the wealth of the monastery and put to death many monks, Bankthiyar Khilji was asked to decide on what to do with the books in the library.<br />
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Khilji first asked if there was a copy of the Quran in the library. The answer was negative. He then asked to burn all the books in the library. "But valuable knowledge in the books will be lost forever", warned the caretakers of the library. Khilji famously answered as follows<br />
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"If there is a book that says anything against the teachings of the Quran, then it is blasphemous and should be burned. If there is a book that agrees with the teachings of the Quran, then it is superfluous and should also be burned. Please take care that no book is left unburned."</blockquote>
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The Persian historian Minhaj-i-Siraj who was accompanying the raid, recounted that the fires from the embers of the library kept blazing for several days. This action might horrify us today on account of its senselessness and violence, but there is a twisted logic to what Khilji said in defense of burning the books. An echo of this logic can be found in the pronouncement of George W. Bush after the 9-11 attacks on New York City in 2001.<br />
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You are either with us or you are against us! </blockquote>
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Bush did not see any shades of gray in the vast canvas of the political landscape of the world. Similarly, Khilji classified knowledge in a strict binary fashion, that which is in agreement with the Quran and that which is not in agreement. He considered Quran itself as all-encompassing in knowledge, so this strict binary classification precipitated his decision. But what was lost in the many books burnt in Nalanda was not only a vast compendium of facts and knowledge, but also a philosophical commentary on the limitations of binary classification of knowledge. Indeed, the most profound examination of these limitations was done by Nagarjuna, a Buddhist scholar who many centuries earlier served as a rector to the Nalanda university, in the third century AD. But what Nagarjuna elaborated on was an even more ancient tradition from India, tracing its roots at least three thousand years deeper into history when it was codified in the Vedas - the holy scriptures of the Hindu religion. According to this tradition, logic is not 2-valued (as commonly understood as true/false), not even 3-valued (as commonly understood to denote shades of gray), but is 4-valued. This 4-valued logic is known in Sanskrit as <i>Chatuskoti</i>. For a long period of human history, this logic reigned supreme in Asia. Eminent philosophers and logicians in China, Japan and southeast Asia have painstakingly translated the Buddhist scriptures into their native languages, the most cherished ones being the commentaries written by Nagarjuna.<br />
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I think it is sad that this ancient logic is lost today in practice. Due to its association with religious and spiritual discourse, this 4-valued logic is sometimes considered unscientific, but nothing can be farther from the truth. In fact, the most important applications of this logic have been in objective fields. In this blog, I will argue that considering 4 sides to a negation, instead of the usual 2 sides, is a necessary requirement for both scientific study and political discourse. Essentially, negation is the most elementary operation in language. We cannot think without using negation on different concepts and ideas. But every time we apply negation, we are introducing a strong bias into our thinking, which will eventually lead us to severe errors and paradoxes. We will examine this further, while taking some interesting detours in history.<br />
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<b>Introduction to <i>Catuskoti </i>or the 4-sided negation: </b><br />
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<i>Figure 1: Venn diagram illustrating binary logic </i></div>
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Let's consider a simple proposition<i> "Cheetah is the fastest animal"</i> and denote this by the symbol A. In regular logic, this proposition is either true or false. When we think of a proposition, we usually visualize it in the mind's eye on a straight line-segment: akin to a barometer of falsehood. On one end lies truth and on the other end lies falsehood. When we are certain of the truth value of a proposition, this line-segment dissolves into two tiny dots, standing apart from each other, which we can call "A" and "Not A". However, this visualization is incorrect.<br />
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Instead, what we need to visualize is the Venn diagram shown in Fig 1. When we frame a proposition, we create an island "A" in a vast sea of possibilities, known as the universe Ω. When we use strict binary logic, we associate "Not A" to everything in this Ω except the island denoted by A. Depending on how many words we use to describe A and how clearly we describe it, our knowledge of this island increases. But the vast sea surrounding this island can be still a mystery to us. For example, to elaborate on our example, a Cheetah can be described as a wild cat with a yellow fur coat and spots, that it is native to Africa and that it hunts gazelles. To go to the extreme, we may describe it by giving the entire genome of Cheetah in the code of DNA. But what exactly is "Not A", what differences to the genome of Cheetah will classify it as a Non-Cheetah ?<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFSl0l0oMnMmdeirLHpUA8-YhW4VPuAbnjept8wNgqQE_pvG5U3OLl_7Uf9w6eYTl8ECA0itoO4Nzp9olUy4dyMvlHLhmVHCNDFXYLm-yuDg17nUNjapPnzWKapCtN36sNnrwX1A/s1600/Screen+Shot+2015-11-22+at+11.41.10+AM.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="199" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFSl0l0oMnMmdeirLHpUA8-YhW4VPuAbnjept8wNgqQE_pvG5U3OLl_7Uf9w6eYTl8ECA0itoO4Nzp9olUy4dyMvlHLhmVHCNDFXYLm-yuDg17nUNjapPnzWKapCtN36sNnrwX1A/s320/Screen+Shot+2015-11-22+at+11.41.10+AM.png" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>Figure 2: Venn diagram illustrating fuzzy or probabilistic logic </i></div>
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As our knowledge about other animals increases, we can measure our understanding by creating an island of ambiguity "A and Not A" that is encroaching into the island of "A" in the Venn diagram. This island measures the ambiguity of the proposition, inherent to the finite length of description of A. As we conduct experiments into how fast Cheetahs run as opposed to other animals, we can measure the probability of A being true. Ideally, this island of ambiguity shrinks and we get back to our binary world.<br />
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But in reality, we still have no complete knowledge of the universe Ω. What exactly is an animal ? How many other animals do we know ? What exactly do we mean by "fast" ? Can bacteria floating in rapid ocean currents be considered animals ? This is a case we have not considered when we framed the proposition A. Unlike the island of ambiguity, this uncertainty is not related to A but to the universe Ω. Specifically, it refers to the limitations of our understanding when we say "Not A", its overlap with Ω is not as complete as we imagine it to be. If we correct for this, we obtain a visualization of the 4-valued negation as follows.<br />
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<i>Figure 3: Venn diagram illustrating Chatuskoti, or the 4-sided negation. </i></div>
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This 4-sided negation creates four distinct zones in the universe Ω . With increasing knowledge, our understanding of all these 4 zones increases, but the zone of "Neither A nor Not A" may remain forever. This is because we may predict that we don't know something about the universe, but we may not be able to express exactly what it is that we don't know. Please note that this limitation is due to two things: (1) our understanding of the world and (2) the limited expressibility of language. Even if we allow humans to be omniscient (in whatever finite context for Ω specified by our problem), the ambiguity in the language may never be resolved. This is a mathematical fact as well as a philosophical realization, that is achieved very recently in Western philosophy. We can refer to the works of Bertrand Russel and Ludwig Wittgenstein, as well as the mathematician Kurt Godel. In contrast to the west, these limitations were studied from the very beginning in Indian philosophy and logic.<br />
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In the traditional Indian philosophical system of Vaiseshika, the universe is supposed to consist of many tiny atoms. In the Venn diagram above, this translates into Ω being composed of many (possibly infinite) tiny discrete samples. When we use negation, it is like cutting the above Venn diagram with a knife. Our knife may not be sharp enough to cut precisely through the different atoms. Thus, the 4-sided negation is a fundamental tool in logic that acknowledges this limitation.<br />
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Unlike the island of ambiguity given by "A and Not A" which is addressed by fuzzy or probabilistic logic, the 4 zones of Catuskoti cannot be reduced to a single line segment between 0 and 1. Indeed, such a reduction is topologically impossible. What we need is a different mathematical construction. I am not aware if there is anything that fits to the bill. <br />
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I find it useful to employ an additional tool along with the traditional line-segment between 0 and 1, with which to measure probabilities. I suggest using a circle, to which the entire universe Ω is projected. This circle can be visualized as roughly centered at the island "A". At each point on the circle, we can measure our uncertainty in predicting the world towards that direction. Unlike the probabilities, this uncertainty (ignorance) can be unlimited, but it can still be characterized in some way. For example, we can say that our ignorance is greater in certain directions than in others. The metaphor of a circle is also used in defining what a "well-rounded" education meant. Until a few decades ago, the education of a person was not considered complete until he achieved certain basic knowledge in various diverse fields. Without this fundamental knowledge on all directions, it was considered that any decisions or conclusions made by a person would be faulty. However, with increasing knowledge and diversification of scientific fields, our society has sadly reduced the impetus on well-rounded education. Though this is sad as it is, I think it is a symptom of a deeper problem in logic where the 4-sided negation was forgotten. So where and how was this innovation in logic forgotten ?<br />
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<b>The story of Ramon Llull and how European renaissance missed the 4-sided negation: </b><br />
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Ramon Llull was a Catalan philosopher in the 13th century who was critically important for the historical development of European renaissance. He has traveled extensively and spent a significant amount of time in North Africa, conversing with Arabs in the Moorish centres of learning. During his time (roughly termed the middle ages), Europe has sunk into the depths of ignorance, with the classical discoveries of Greece and Rome forgotten. In contrast, Arab civilization was in full flourish, where the Arab mathematicians and astronomers have compiled and built upon the knowledge from multiple lands ranging from Greece to India and China. It was the contact with Arabs, in southern Spain and Italy, that sparked the fire of European scholarship. Ramon Llull was a critical piece of this puzzle.<br />
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Arab astronomers were interested not only in mapping the course of the stars and the planets, but also in understanding how this connects to the human psychology. These esoteric sciences of astrology, alchemy and parapsychology are shunned today as superstitions, but in earlier periods, all scientific investigation was done at the behest of such esoteric subjects. The fundamental goal of these scientists was to liberate human condition from suffering and achieve harmony with the universe, the objective study of natural phenomena was only a means to this end. The harbinger of modern science, Issac Newton, was himself a practitioner of alchemy. With Ramon Llull, these lines were blurred even further. The Arab astrologers were developing upon the ancient science of Indian astronomy and astrology (known as <i>jyothisha</i>). In ancient Indian mythology, the circle denoted the universe and the square denoted the human understanding of this universe. The Vedic sacrifice required mathematical understanding of how to convert a circle into a square. These esoteric ideas spurred a lot of mathematical development - arithmetic, algebra, trigonometric functions, infinite series and so on. Many of these ideas reached Europe via an Arab translation of an Indian text called <i>Brahmaguptasiddhanta, </i>(translated into Arabic as <i>Zij-al-Sindhind</i> by the astronomer Muhammad al-Fazari). The Arab astrologers codified these ideas into a mechanical system that makes the right predictions irrespective of who is using the system. In one form, this mechanical system became a device known as a<i> Zairja - </i>the first human imagination of an automaton.<br />
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Ramon Llull was deeply inspired by the Zairja and created an esoteric art of symbolism that he termed <i>Ars Magna</i>. This was supposed to represent all the aspects of the universe, as well as all the aspects of God. By representing all the possible aspects of knowledge in a cartographic manner, he created the first representation of a <i>"well-rounded"</i> knowledge. He wanted to develop a mathematical automaton for debating with the Muslims, in order to win them over and convert them to Christianity. The legend goes that he was pelted with stones in Tunis when he announced that his <i>Ars Magna</i> could not be understood unless the person accepted Christ as the savior. After his death, Llull was beatified by the church, but his most sincere disciple was burnt at stake. This was Giardano Bruno, who developed upon <i>Ars Magna</i> to denote all the cosmological concepts and who had come to the conclusion that sun was at the centre of the universe (and not the earth, as mentioned in the bible). Galileo escaped a similar fate from the church by recanting his sayings, although he could see the motion of the planets in his telescopes. This uneasy relationship with astrological and esoteric sciences persisted in all Abrahamic faiths, with practitioners often being accused of worshipping the devil. This is inevitable, because these sciences stemmed from pagan cultures like Greece and India.<br />
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The influence of Llull extended beyond astronomy. Leibnitz made his dissertation about Llull's art, and this greatly influenced his future pursuits: calculus and logicism in philosophy. He called this <i>Ars Combinatoria</i>. Along with Newton, Leibnitz was the fundamental mover of the European renaissance in mathematics and physics. Many mathematicians tried to follow in Leibnitz's footsteps, to ultimately realize a consistent and mechanical system that can predict everything. The latest expression of this dream was by Hilbert, who tried to reduce all mathematics to a set of axioms. However, this adventure was cut short by Godel, who proved that inconsistencies inevitably will creep up in any system of axioms if it tries to be complete (describe everything). This crazy pursuit in history <a href="https://www.academia.edu/14013024/The_perfect_language" target="_blank">has been described aptly by the computer scientist Gregory Chaitin</a> (who along with Vladimir Kolmogorov is reckoned as the founder of the field of algorithmic information theory). To this day, the field of knowledge representation in computer systems, ranging from databases to the internet, is indebted to Ramon Llull and the <i>Zairja</i> of Arab astrologers. The amazing thing is that this historical line of development has completely missed the <i>Catuskoti</i> or the 4-sided negation in logic. It is a mystery why this has not reached Arab scholarship from India, and from there to Europe. It is unlikely that all the knowledge disappeared with the burning of the Nalanda library.<br />
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If Llull was aware of the Indian tradition of logic, he wouldn't have expressed that the people of Tunis needed to convert to Christianity to understand his <i>Ars Magna</i>. He would know that <i>Ars Magna</i> will forever be a work in progress, and forever be deficient of its goals. This was ultimately expressed in late 1800s by Emil-du-Bois Raymond as "<i>Ignoramus et ignoramibus</i>", and at that time, he was soundly ridiculed for saying this.<br />
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The history of western logic had another brief brush and fascination with India. The English mathematician George Boole was deeply inspired by Indian philsophy. His wife Mary Everest Boole, a significant mathematician of her own right, was the bridge to India. Her uncle Everest was a great adventurer in India and gave the eponymous mountain its name. Mary Boole also was in correspondence with Jagadish Chandra Bose, who was a noted Indian scientist at that time. She wanted him to study the efforts of her husband, but t<a href="https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/de-gruyter/why-dr-j-c-bose-did-not-reply-to-mary-boole-s-open-letter-of-1901-qcqr2c8822" target="_blank">his letter was left unanswered by Bose</a>. George Boole developed an elaborate system of logical inference by using the principles of algebra, which he wanted to apply for esoteric ends (salvation, transcendence etc.) Nobody at that time believed that this system would have any practical use. This changed dramatically when Claude Shannon used Boolean logic as the basis for his mathematical theory of information. It is an open question if the development of information theory would have taken a different course if Boole incorporated the 4-sided negation into his logic. However, this did not happen and computer systems today are mostly restricted to 2-sided or 3-sided logic (Infinite-valued logic, like fuzzy systems, are actually extensions of 3-sided logic as illustrated in Figure 2).<br />
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<b>Philosophy of Nagarjuna </b><br />
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In philosophy, western philosophers starting from Kant, have expressed doubts about the limitations of spoken knowledge. Russel and Wittgenstein have systematically characterized the various dilemmas and paradoxes that arise from these limitations of expression. In Indian philosophy, this awareness of these limitations was already fundamental due to the <i>Catuskoti</i> logic. The onus in Indian philosophy was not about finding these limitations, but about achieving spiritual transcendence by overcoming these limitations, even if it is not possible to express them in spoken language.<br />
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Historically, Indian philosophy was divided into 9 streams or viewpoints (<i>Darshana </i>in Sanskrit). Of these 9 streams, 6 are in support of the existence of a conscious self (<i>Samkhya, Nyaya, Vaiseshika, Yoga, Mimamsa, Vedanta</i>) and 3 are in opposition to the existence of self (<i>Buddhism, Jainism, Charvaka philosophy).</i> But all these systems germinate from the same root and stem, which is the <i>Samkhya </i>tradition, which provides the mythological imagery and symbols to argue different concepts. I have <a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.de/2010/04/samkhya-arithmetic-of-natures-evolution.html" target="_blank">earlier written an introduction on this blog to the <i>Samkhya </i>system</a> (meaning <i>enumeration</i>), clothing traditional philsophical terms in a modern garb of vocabulary, so that we can better understand them. Mythological images can better express notions of paradox than linguistic symbols and logic. So many Indian religions have explored this route, <a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.de/2010/05/devas-of-samkhya-natural-or.html" target="_blank">developing a plethora of symbols and stories</a>. The idea is that transcendence could be achieved through devotion, or love, or following the right action, without the necessity of knowledge expressible in the spoken form.<br />
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However, the path of knowledge was not altogether absent. Philosophical systems using logical inference and deduction were developed first by the <i>Nyaya </i>and <i>Vaiseshika</i> traditions, which are based on the <i>Catuskoti</i>. In this way, knowing these traditions (or viewpoints) was considered essential for greater philosophical study in other systems. The first significant challenge to these systems was given by Gautama Buddha. The Jain tradition also has an elaborately developed logic, criticizing and thus extending the earlier Nyaya systems. Probably, the most extensive development of logical inference for transcendental goals was done by the Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna in the 3rd century AD. The Australian philosopher Graham Priest, who specializes in dialethist logic (or para-consistent logic) <a href="http://www.thezensite.com/ZenEssays/Nagarjuna/NagarjunaTheLimitsOfThought.pdf" target="_blank">wrote a great introduction to Nagarjuna's philosophy, from a western perspective</a>. He believes that the vision of Nagarjuna was greater than even Wittegenestein and Russel, as he observed greater paradoxes.<br />
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I will try to give a short introduction to Nagarjuna, but before we go there, we should know that he remains a profound influence in many Buddhist countries. His Madhyamika tradition (or middle-way) has deeply influenced the development in China and Japan. For example, when we speak of Japanese koans (or riddles), they stem from a tradition that goes back to Nagarjuna. To get a more thorough overview of this philosophy, one should consult these living traditions. What I can give in this blog is a very brief glimpse. In India, the influence of Nagarjuna had been profound on Shankara, the philosopher who popularized the Advaita tradition in Hinduism. It is Shankara who is probably the closest link to existing religious practices in India and its ancient philosophic tradition. I believe that without understanding Nagarjuna we cannot decipher that link. I am not capable, in any measure, to do undo these mysteries. But I think I can give a hint.<br />
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Recall that we represented the Catuskoti using a Venn diagram with four zones, for studying an objective question such as "Is Cheetah the fastest animal ?". But any such objective study is limited to the very ground on which we observe the different phenomena. In other words, we are restricted to the 2D plane of the Venn diagram, although the real universe may have many more dimensions. The computer scientist Alan Kay <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs" target="_blank">once gave a good analogy to this situation</a>. We can imagine that we are in the crevice of a deep gorge, like the grand canyon in USA, which is shaped by several eons of erosion and landscaping. By standing in this gorge, we can observe the many layers of sedimentary rock that reflect the movements of history. But our vision will be restricted by these rocks in the gorge. Very rarely we take a fleeting glimpse at the sky and wonder what may lie beyond. Alan Kay calls such a glimpse a "<i>Kerpow</i>", a punch that pushes oneself beyond the dimensions of the world they are living in. In Buddhist and Advaita philosophy, salvation or transcendence is considered to be obtained by a series of such "kerpows".<br />
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Firstly, we do not even know the topology of the 2D plane of reality that we showed in the Venn diagram. Buddhist and Hindu philosophy considers this as <i>"Samsara</i>" - a cyclical world where we keep retracing the same steps. I think the Dutch artist Escher gave a brilliant visualization of such a world, with ants walking along a Möbius strip.<br />
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<i>Figure 4: Ants walking around a Möbius strip - illustrating the Buddhist Samsara</i> </div>
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Nagarjuna considered the problem of logic in such a world. A rationalist person is like an ant walking around this Möbius strip of logical constructs (zones of Catuskoti). In order to escape from this restrictive world, Nagarjuna developed a 9-valued logic. The first four zones correspond to one-side of the plane, as illustrated in Figure 3. The next four zones correspond to the other side of the plane, an inversion of the previous four zones. Nagarjuna said that an inquisitive and philosophical mind will not be satisifed with either of these 8 zones and seek a 9th zone, which is an escape from the Möbius strip, into the three-dimensional space. Obviously, this is a procedure that has to be repeated several times, as we approach concepts of greater logical ambiguity. In Buddhist mythology, this is akin to climbing up the <i>Meru </i>mountain at the top of which lies salvation or <i>Nirvana</i>.<br />
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A very similar rhetorical exercise in negation is undertaken in the religion of Advaita. A follower of this tradition performs negation in a series of steps called<i> "Neti Neti"</i> ("not this, not that" in Sanskrit).<br />
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As we can see, Buddhist and Hindu philosophy graduated from 4-sided logic that is suitable for objective analysis to more complex 5-sided or 9-sided logics suitable for spiritual investigation. However, this gave a bad image for 4-sided logic, which got confused with esoteric and spiritual agenda. I believe a proper application of 4-sided negation to objective scientific fields will give fruitful dividends, especially in situations where our ignorance of the field is immense but predictable.<br />
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<b>How to overcome bias in atheism and democracy: </b><br />
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Bias in science is dangerous, but bias in politics has immediate consequences for humankind. Even if people don't have a thirst for knowledge, they need to survive through their daily struggles. In this way, if our political discourse has serious limitations related to the logic we deploy, we will face the trauma of misunderstanding and violence. Unfortunately, the majority of people who have active political opinions today use 2-sided or 3-sided logic in their heads. That means, they do not understand the 4th zone (neither yes nor no) that is reflective of their relative ignorance of the subject.<br />
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A faulty language in debate is like a bad posture of the human body - when used repetitively, it results in pain. A great analogy is with the case of vertigo that happens due to tiny calcium crystals that accumulate in the inner ear, destabilizing the balance of proprioception. People who suffer from this vertigo feel that their world is constantly spinning. Needless to say, this is a nightmare condition. A cure for this vertigo has been found very recently by an American doctor named John Epley. Using a 3D cast of the human ear's anatomy, he devised a series of motions (called the Epley maneuver) that moves these particles from the troublesome spot in the ear to a non-bothersome spot. The relief felt by the patient is dramatic and immediate, almost leading them to suspect of black magic. I think that heated political debates will benefit from the 4-sided negation in a similar manner. By understanding how our language and words are framed, and how limited they are in expressing certain ideas, we can overcome our ignorance and conceit.<br />
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Of all the debates in politics, I think nothing is as absurd as the debate on religious freedom. This is because nobody wants to really understand the other side in a religious debate. The famous (notorious) atheist Richard Dawkins recently put this as "<i>If I want to repudiate Leprechauns, I should not be expected to understand Leprechaun ideology".</i> This laziness is understandable. However, what is not excusable is the reluctance to see one's own ignorance. By using 4-sided logic, instead of the more intuitive but faulty 2-sided logic, we will develop a habit of systematically understanding where our ignorance lies.<br />
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In France, there is currently a heated debate about the limits of religion. Owing to its historical revolutionary spirit against the catholic church and monarchy, French political life is very secular. However, this secularism comes from the pick-axes and shovel-fights of the 17th century, where all the debates were fought using the 2-sided negation. The secularist in France is highly confident in himself about how right he is. In this way, he is not much different from a rabid religious fundamentalist. The problem here is not with the ideology, but with the 2-sided negation.<br />
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Wise people of many cultures, including religious people, have learnt to be conscious of the limitations of their knowledge. In India, where many cultures and religions intermingled in history, people have high tolerance for ambiguity. A person may be Hindu, but pray in a church, or seek blessings from a Muslim saint. A musician may be a very deeply religious Muslim, but still offer prayer to Saraswati (the Hindu goddess of learning). A good example was Ustad Bismillah Khan, a gifted Shehnai player. There were thousands of examples of Hindu and Muslim saints who cherished the company and customs of other religions. My favorite example was Kabir - a devoted Muslim poet who sang praises of Rama. The evidence of this cosmopolitan culture in India is present in all religions, including Christianity and Islam. All these religions are integral parts of the rich tapestry of Indian culture today.<br />
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There has recently been an opinion piece in New York Times, <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/28/opinion/india-france-and-secularism.html?_r=0" target="_blank">comparing the state of secularism in India and Franc</a>e. I find this essay to be a nice illustration of the problems with a 2-sided secularist outlook. France had an awful history of religious discrimination against Jews, Protestants and now against Muslims. By comparison, the history of India is a miracle, with very few incidents of religious violence for such a large population. In my opinion, the reason why India achieved this is not because of greater scientific knowledge or better legal rights, but because of a cultural assimilation of the 4-sided negation, which allows for greater tolerance in debate. In contrast, due to its reliance on 2-sided black and white logic, France is at a greater danger of discriminating against its own citizens.<br />
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However, India is not an idyll of peace. Its traditional tolerance is today under great threat. The urge for purity and austerity, as made notorious by the Islamist fundamentalists, is encroaching every religion. For example, in India, the Hindutva brigade is creating a cartoon version of Hinduism where the 4-sided logic is truncated into a 2-sided one. This desire for bifurcating everything in this world into two distinct boxes of good and bad, or pure and evil, is a self-destroying engine. Happiness and salvation in this world lie in a tolerance for ambiguity and in a consciousness of our limitations. This is as true of atheists as of religious people, of whatever religious stripes.<br />
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The works of Shakespeare are considered a turning point in western literature, <a href="http://www.cbc.ca/radio/ideas/the-massey-forum-at-stratford-the-discovery-of-the-self-1.3272713" target="_blank">where the internal dilemmas and mental confusion of characters are shared directly on stage</a>. A human being is thus presented as a process in the making, and not as a finished product. The most famous example is the soliloquy of Hamlet "To be, or not to be". This introspection of our mental processes is essential for us to be a better person. However, the story of Hamlet was a tragic one. Hamlet succumbs to the guilt of murder. However, if Shakespeare used the 4-sided negation in the soliloquy of Hamlet, following the lead of Nagarjuna, he would have asked<br />
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<i>"To be, or not to be"</i><br />
<i>"Or to be and not to be"</i><br />
<i>"Or neither to be nor not to be"</i><br />
<i>"Is there still a question ?"</i><br />
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A dramatic gesture would be to make Hamlet nod his head using the Indian head wobble. I will end this blog with this funny note. I believe that Nagarjuna's philosophy is responsible for this gesture, that stumps many foreigners who visit India, who cannot understand whether their Indian friend is saying yes or no. For greater clarification, they may ask,<br />
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<i>"Do you mean yes ?" </i><br />
<i>"Or no ?"</i><br />
<i>"Or yes and no ?"</i><br />
<i>"Or neither yes nor no ?"</i><br />
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<i>"Or did you just reach nirvana ?" (This is an extremely rare case) </i><br />
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<b>Addendum: Representation of Chatuskoti using Predicate logic</b><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal;">After discussing with Joscha Bach (</span><a href="http://palmstroem.blogspot.com/" style="font-family: Helvetica; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal;">http://palmstroem.blogspot.com</a><span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal;">) on Twitter, I realized that Chatuskoti can be implemented in predicate logic using 3 predicates: A, Unknown(A) and Unknown(Not A). When these 3 predicates are treated as binary variables, they give rise to 8 states. More interesting things can be represented when these predicates are treated as continuous variables, able to take any value between [0,1]. The space spanned by these 3 predicates can be visualized as a cube standing on 3 axes. I propose to call this Gotama's cube (referring to the ancient Indian logician who developed Nyaya Sutras). The 8 states appear as corners of this cube, which can be enumerated as follows: </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal;">0) Unknown Not A, Unknown A, Not A</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal;">1) Unknown Not A, Unknown A, A</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal;">2) Unknown Not A, Known A, Not A</span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal;">3) Unknown Not A, Known A, A </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal;">4) Known Not A, Unknown A, Not A </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal;">5) Known Not A, Unknown A, A </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal;">6) Known Not A, Known A, Not A </span><br />
<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal;">7) Known Not A, Known A, A </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal;">Of these 8 states, the states (4,5) are indistinguishable. So for practical purposes, they can be considered as 1 state, marked as "Unknown A". Similarly, the states (0,1,2,3) are indistinguishable. So they can be combined into a single state marked "Unknown Not A". With these 4 states, we get back to our traditional representation in the Chatuskoti. The clubbed state "Unknown A" is equivalent to "A and Not A". The clubbed state "Unknown Not A" is equivalent to the state "Neither A nor Not A". </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal;">Why do we need 8 states in predicate logic and not 4 to represent Chatuskoti ? </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal;">This is because Chatuskoti states clearly that only 1, and not any more, of the 4 states can be true: A, Not A, A and Not A, Neither A nor Not A. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal;">Because of this, we cannot map either of the states (A and Not A) or (Neither A nor Not A) to the predicate "Unknown (A)". This is because the predicate Unknown(A) can be true at the same time as A or Not A. This is the natural combination of predicates in predicate logic. However this is strictly forbidden in Chatuskoti. So the traditional method of handling uncertainty in predicate logic, using the predicate Unknown(A), which by the way is different from fuzzy or probabilistic logic without any additional predicate, is still insufficient to map the space of Chatuskoti. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal;">However, it is possible to cover all the 4 zones of Chatuskoti with 8 states, given by 3 predicates, by allowing for some redundancy. Please note that this is not the most compact representation of Chatuskoti. In theory, you can have just 2 predicates to map these 4 states. However, this predicate is not the usual "Unknown (A)". </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal;">I am not sure if many people use 3 predicates, specifically an additional predicate "Unknown (Not A)" apart from "Unknown (A)" in computer-based logic and knowledge representation. This is a fairly simple method to adopt, and will potentially give rise to more stable knowledge representations. If you are a researcher in knowledge representation or machine learning, please go ahead and try it. All you need to do is modify your traditional error bars with 2 confidence values instead of one confidence value. :) </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal;">You can also visualize the uncertainty on Gotama's cube : Using the HSV representation, map the hue value to the axis (A-Not A), map the saturation value to Unknown(A), and map the intensity value to Unknown (Not A). The interesting thing with this visualization is that it exposes the aspect that without saturation, you cannot distinguish hue. And without intensity, you can distinguish neither saturation nor hue. But in lighter shades, the colours become better visible. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: "helvetica"; font-size: 12px; line-height: normal;">Do let me know if you do any such experiments. I will be happy to report them in the comments here. </span><br />
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Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-88949190391890413102015-11-13T15:14:00.002-08:002018-11-20T06:04:11.030-08:00Of electric fences and free software: A cybernetic theory of freedom<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i> Cattle imprisoned by an electric fence: Illustrating a cybernetic conception of freedom </i></div>
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<i><b>What is freedom ? When can a person be considered to be free ?</b></i><br />
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Is this a question for philosophers or for computer scientists ? The answer may be the former, but I will take the second perspective in this blog. There is indeed an objective way to measure freedom using concepts from information theory. This may not be the sole perspective, but I think it throws some useful light, especially for understanding our digital lives on the internet. This blog post is divided into five sections. First, I will talk about the relationship between privacy and freedom. The second part is a personalized fan history of information theory, of people that I call the <i>Skywalkers</i>. The third part is about one of the Skywalkers - Norbert Wiener, and his cybernetic perspective about freedom. The fourth part is about the freedoms given by free and open-source software, and my understanding of how these freedoms fall short of Wiener's measure. The fifth part is about education - of raising a new generation of citizens who understand and cherish cybernetic freedom.<br />
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For those readers who can't be bothered to read the entire post, here is a short summary. Much of our thoughts and actions as human beings are not conscious, but driven by hidden mental processes in the subconscious brain. So it is important to develop a theory of personal freedom that considers these subconscious processes, especially for our digital lives on the internet.<br />
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<b>On privacy and freedom: </b><br />
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There is a remarkable project under development called the <a href="https://freedomboxfoundation.org/" target="_blank">Freedombox</a>, which is trying to put a collection of privacy software for browsing securely on the internet. This is built on top of the Debian stack of free software, and includes the powerful Tor browser and hidden services. I recently saw a <a href="http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/sflc2015/04_freedombox.webm" target="_blank">great presentation of Freedombox and its features</a> by Sunil Mohan Adapa, who is a good friend of mine from my university days. After the Snowden revelations about industrial scale spying on the public by NSA and other government security agencies, there has been a greater demand for software that protects the privacy of the users. However, encryption software is typically difficult to use for the general public. This put them out of reach of most public, except for technically sophisticated programmers as well as actual criminals who will be careful to cover their tracks.<br />
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Why do the general public deserve privacy on the internet, if they are not doing anything wrong ? The vast majority of people are citizens respectful of law, but they have the right to the human dignity of privacy. As human beings in control of their own lives, they deserve the right to hide their wallets, bank statements, personal photographs, medical records, psychological weaknesses, or browsing histories from people seeking that knowledge. If and when human beings lose their privacy, they also lose agency to control their own lives. Instead, they become equal to cattle which can be herded into flocks and exploited by a master. This master can be a government, a large corporation, or a criminal agency - whoever has the wherewithal (technical and logistical capabilities) to snoop on the unsuspecting public. If humans lose their privacy, they are like stray animals, waiting to be reined in by a harness and branded by the hot iron of the husbandman. If the husbandman is caring, they will be milked or fleeced, but their lives will be spared. If the husbandman is vicious, they will be butchered and served on the table. In either case, they will lose their freedom to roam as they please. So the question of privacy comes down to human dignity. Do we want to treat people as humans or as cattle ?<br />
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What sets Freedombox apart from other similar software projects is that it aims to protect novice users, without any programming expertise. This includes people using home computers and smart phones to browse on the internet, share pictures with friends, or control home appliances using web apps. To target such a general user with minimal programming expertise, any privacy technology should be as simple to use as flipping on a light switch. This is what the Freedombox aspires to be. During his presentation, Sunil demonstrates the installation procedure of Freedombox with a theatrical gesture, connecting the box to the internet cable and to the electric plug (which is all it takes for the installation), saying<br />
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This is how we provide freedom, one home at a time </blockquote>
This is an amazing achievement, but I believe victory is not that easy. For a long time, the bane of free software has been its technical complexity. Using most commercial applications with GNU/Linux software has been hard or even impossible. Many hardware vendors refused to provide drivers for their devices to interoperate with free software systems. If free software is a wide open field of freedom, there existed many fences that daunted people from accessing this freedom. There has never been any doubts about the quality and efficiency of free software systems. In fact, most web servers and large-scale software systems are built on top of free software, but such systems are built by capable engineers who are not daunted by the barriers of integration. However, this situation has been changing in the last few years, spurred by projects such as the Ubuntu, which aim to reach to the general public (known in programming parlance as n00bs). Even compared to the guarded optimism of Ubuntu, what the Freedombox aims for is radical: giving the power of a veteran system administrator to a novice user, all in a box that can be plugged in and switched on. Essentially, the Freedombox destroys the fences, the one single factor that is limiting the spread of free software.<br />
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<b>Standing on the shoulders of Skywalkers: </b><br />
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In order to assess whether this project will succeed, I think we have to go back to the dawn of computing. The seeds of the computing revolution were sown in the decades before the second world war. As the war raged on and everybody was awed by the power of the atom bomb, a greater force was rumbling below - the force of computing machines. It is said that computer science is as much about computers, as astronomy is about telescopes. Computers and algorithms are a powerful tool like no other in human history. What is it that they help us to see ? In my opinion, there were three people who understood computers to the full extent of what they help us to see. I don't include the two giants: Alan Turing and John von Neumann to that list. The three people were: Claude Shannon, Norbert Wiener and Vladimir Kolmogorov. In my mind, I call them with the acronym <i>Skywalkers, </i>giving one syllable for each person's last name <i>(s)ky(w)al(k)ers</i>.<br />
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In 1943, just as the embers of the second world war were hot and most mathematical work was still classified, Alan Turing visited Bell Labs in the USA, where he crossed paths with Claude Shannon. He later mused in his diaries about the conversation he had with Shannon.<br />
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Shannon wants to feed not just data to a Brain (a nickname Turing gave to a futuristic computing machine), but cultural things ! He wants to play music to it. </blockquote>
This incident helps me explain why I have chosen the <i>Skywalkers </i>as visionaries for where and how computation can be applied to understand the world. In my opinion, these three scientists captured the grand vista of everything that can be analyzed in a computational and information theoretic manner: physics, biology, media, sociology, psychology, the very process of thinking itself - essentially, the entire skies. Everything appears in a more profound manner when seen through a computational lens, with all the underlying veins and sinews that make up the fabric of reality glistening in bright contrast.<br />
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I remember an incident when I was chatting with a physicist friend of mine when somehow our conversation came to the hypothetical case where aliens are observing the earth and judging the complexity of its different artifacts. My friend thought that the most complex objects to be found on this planet could probably be the digital computers, with their micro controller chips and complex electronics. But I thought differently, the most complex artifact would be the spoken conversations between humans. There is an inherent complexity in human language that is quite extraordinary. From the perspective of a computer scientist, computers themselves are not that complex. In order to generate complex artifacts, the required computation may happen not only on digital computers, but also on biological ecosystems or in human societies. This complexity of these artifacts can be measured in an objective manner, based on the length of the shortest computer program that can generate such artifacts. We need to thank the Skywalkers for giving us the conceptual tools to do this.<br />
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Essentially, computer science is the study of information, which is everywhere. It is the study of control and feedback, which are everywhere. It is the study of probabilities and complexity, which pertain to everything. <i>Skywalkers </i>are those giants who captured this vast canvas for computers.<br />
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Newton once said that<br />
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If I have seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. </blockquote>
This quotation goes earlier to the 12th century, to the Bernard of Chartres. Chartres is a central town in France that housed one of the oldest cathedrals. We will come back to this cathedral at the end of this blog. But, we can reframe this quotation to refer to computer science as follows.<br />
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If we can learn to stand on the shoulders of skywalkers, we can also walk the skies. </blockquote>
There have been many great computer scientists (and indeed in other scientific disciplines) who followed the lead of Shannon, Wiener and Kolmogorov. Going with the Star Wars theme, we may think of these scientists as Jedi knights, who can control the <i>Force,</i> which is the underlying information pervading this universe. Unfortunately, despite the spread of personal computers and smartphones, most of humanity cannot think in computational and information theoretic terms. This makes them particularly vulnerable for manipulation.<br />
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<b>Behavioral conditioning and cybernetic freedom: </b><br />
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Of the three Skywalkers, the person who understood the most about how computers will affect humans is Norbert Wiener. I am currently reading an introductory book for general public that he wrote in the 1950s, titled <i>"The human use of human beings"</i>. Reading this book is like walking on a glacier, slow and painful. When I was living in the Alps, I had my share of walking on glaciers, deep crevices lurk beneath your feet and you should be watchful of everything that melts and tumbles into the bowels of the earth below. But after you cross the glacier and climb a peak, you may catch an aspect of the entire glacier as it carves through the landscape. Only then will you get a grasp of its immense physical power. The ideas of Wiener are like such a glacier, cutting through rocks and boulders, across fields as diverse as biology, sociology and physics.<br />
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Unlike many of his contemporaries, Wiener realized that there is a dark side for computers, even prompting him to exclaim<br />
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I agree with what Einstein used to say about the three bombs: there are three bombs. The first one is the atomic bomb, which disintegrates reality. The second one is the digital or the computer bomb, which destroys the principle of reality itself - not the actual object, and rebuilds it. And finally the third bomb is the demographic one. </blockquote>
This is a stunning pronouncement made just after the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Wiener was a pacifist and an environmentalist, and by wearing these hats, he had no trouble finding people agreeing with him about the first and third bombs. But in his day, talking of computers as a "bomb" that would destroy the very principle of reality was quite unusual. The only people who could probably remotely understand this pronouncement were behavioral psychologists, following the lead of Pavlov. Wiener explains how a machine can perform behavioral conditioning on a living creature, using the example of cattle and electric fences.<br />
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On cattle farms, the construction of wire fences strong enough to turn a steer is not easy. It is thus economical to replace a heavy fence of this type by one where one or two relatively thin strands of wire carry a sufficiently high electric voltage to impress upon an animal a quite appreciable shock when the animal short-circuits it by contact with the body. Such a fence may have to resist the pressure of the steer once or twice; but after that, the fence acts, not because it can hold up mechanically under pressure, but because the steer has developed a conditioned reflex which tends to prevent it from coming into contact with the fence at all. Here the original trigger to the reflex is pain; and the withdrawal from pain is vital for the continued life of any animal. The transferred trigger is the sight of the fence. </blockquote>
Crucially, from the perspective of cybernetics, it does not matter whether the communication is between man and man, or between man and machine, or between animal and machine, or between machine and machine. The purpose of any communication is to establish control. Whether, we as human beings allow ourselves to be behaviorally conditioned by electrical fences (in various metaphorical forms) is up to us. In cybernetic terms, freedom corresponds to the control of such electrical fences that deter humanity from trespassing them. Where are these electrical fences in today's society and who controls them? It is only possible to answer this question, when one is versed in the tools of information processing.<br />
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Most people didn't understand Wiener. John McCarthy, another great hero of mine, who went on to coin the term "artificial intelligence" (and found the scientific field) described of Wiener as a "<i>humongous bore</i>". Along with co-conspirator Marvin Minsky, he basically created the "new" field of artificial intelligence in order to escape the prying clutches of Norbert Wiener and John von Neumann (another giant with a massive ego). Wiener had been a terrible mentor (his mentorship of Mcculloch and Pitts, who invented artificial neural networks, is <a href="http://nautil.us/issue/21/information/the-man-who-tried-to-redeem-the-world-with-logic" target="_blank">another terrible story</a>) and he had his own issues of awful childhood, being raised in the public eye as a child prodigy by a disciplinarian father. However, by abandoning Wiener, the fledgeling field of artificial intelligence (AI) got divorced from its cybernetic roots, where machines were compared not only with humans but also with animals. The cognitive machinery of the human brain shares its core architecture with animals, and most of its functions are subconscious. The thoughts expressed in language, driven by conscious desires and motivation are only the tip of the iceberg. But this final superficial layer became the sole focus of AI, and remains so mostly even today. Between McCarthy and Minsky, Minsky gained a closer understanding of Wiener, aided by his careful study of Wiener's protégées McCulloh and Pitts. However, I believe even Minsky held an unhealthy fixation with higher level cognitive processes - those visible under conscious human inspection. There were very few scientists in the computer science community who were studying subconscious mental processes, and building defenses against them for the safety and freedom of humans.<br />
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<b>Freedoms in Free and Open-Source Software: </b><br />
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The plight of AI as it got fixated with higher level cognitive processes is not just an esoteric artifact, worrisome only to scientists and philosophers. In fact, the merry pranksters led by McCarthy and Minsky conquered the entire realm of computing technology. They spearheaded the revolution of personal computing in the 1980s. They were instrumental in defining the world wide web and its myriad applications. Most relevant to this blog, Richard Stallman, the founder of free software movement, graduated out of the MIT AI lab. It is he who defined what "freedom" means with respect to the use of software: the freedom to use, the freedom to inspect the source-code, the freedom to modify it, the freedom to share it and so on. These freedoms are necessary for the human user of a software to be the master of his own control, but they are not sufficient by themselves. True, if these freedoms are absent, whoever controls the software also controls the user using it. But even if all these freedoms are present, the human user can still be under the control of the software provider. This is because of the simple reason that the human user is unaware of his subconscious mental processes. In order to achieve true freedom, what need to be revealed openly (in a human readable format) are not only the software code, but also the hidden mechanics of the human cognitive processes while the user is interacting with the software.<br />
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In the earlier days of personal computing, the functionality and specification of software could be given in a small finite description. This functionality was the same for every user testing the software. So in principle, even though the average user is unaware of how the software is gaming his subconscious brain, it is possible that somebody exists with jedi powers of information processing, who can analyze the entire chain of human software interaction. However, this has changed dramatically in the recent years. Nowadays, by accumulating a lot of data, a software system evolves a personalized model of the human user and reacts to him in a unique personalized manner. Consequently, the reaction modalities are unlimited and cannot be tested by other users. This is particularly true of cloud-based software that hides the data collected from the users in a distant database. But even if the raw data is available for inspection, the average user may not have the computational capacity and the education in information processing, to understand how the software is curtailing his freedom.<br />
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Beyond free software, there exists the paradigm of open-source software, which does not support all the freedoms listed by Stallman. This paradigm grew out of the work of Linus Torvalds and others, who argued that the freedom of "source-code visibility" is sufficient for most purposes. Many large internet software companies, such as Google and Facebook, are releasing the source-code of certain software projects. This is welcome, but I believe it is still unclear whether this dumping of software source-code is helping the freedoms of users. In fact, large computer systems today use tons of user data, that are locked in the proprietary file systems and databases of these companies. It is more this data, rather than the software source-code itself, that predicts the behavior of a software. Without this data, I do not think that a machine learning algorithm can be considered technically even "open-source". In this way, these public releases of software source-code are short of even the definition of Linus Torvalds. What we have instead is a phenomenon similar to viral infection. Due to the limited size of the ecosystem of programmers working on a particular field, the public releases of software source-code are an attempt to monopolize these ecosystems. What results from this infection is an early stage of technology lock-in, before the technical field is even matured. This is not a new phenomenon, we can argue that Unix and C programming languages are themselves artifacts of technology lock-in. But the consequences of technology lock-in in today's era of big data will be far more severe.<br />
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Finally, I want to talk about the tremendous pressure on scientific researchers to release the source-code of the software systems they used for conducting their experiments. I think it is admirable when a scientist releases source-code, but this cannot be imposed. Often, the progress of science depends on personalized investigation and passions of a scientist. The scientific community needs to tolerate dissenters with diverse perspectives, and create avenues to build a common field of study from multiple viewpoints. Often, it is necessary for scientists and research institutes to build credibility by publishing a series of results, before they can release their methods or software. If they release their secret sauce before they achieve due recognition, their unique perspective about research will be submerged in the din of the majority. Essentially, if the software is not even released (freedom 0 - of using the software is not given), there is no question about violating other freedoms of source-code inspection etc. On the other hand, releasing source-code without releasing data is a very sly game.<br />
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<b>Education of a new generation of computational citizens: </b><br />
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We are still in the very early stages of the computing revolution. In terms of impact, the only comparable inventions are that of writing and printing. Both these technologies are revolutions in how information is organized and processed: they tremendously affected all aspects of society: economics, law, health, education and government. Overall, these effects have been resoundingly positive. But the society needed a couple of centuries to absorb the aftershocks of these technologies. The domain that concerns us the most is that of education, as this is where future citizens are forged.<br />
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When writing was invented, it facilitated the externalization of memory: helping people to think and reason about concepts and ideas that are too large to fit in a brain. The pessimist may have said that people needed to remember less and this would corrupt the faculty of memory (such an opinion was voiced by Socrates), but indeed the opposite happened. New methods for expanding memory, such as the <i>Method of Loci</i> were invented at the same time as writing. This story of the art of memory is recounted beautifully in the book of Joshua Foer <i>"Moonwalking with Einstein"</i>. In the long run, writing as a technology created a new way of doing science as well as politics.<br />
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Something similar has happened with printing. This greatly expanded the reach of knowledge for ordinary citizens. The pessimist may have said that with so many books being printed, the quality is dwarfed by the sheer quantity, but the quality actually increased. New methods were invented on how to judge the quality of books, and how to quickly scan large passages of text. The writer Nicholas Carr argues in his book<i> "The shallows"</i> that the practice of quiet contemplation while reading a book encouraged other mental processes dealing with higher cognition (engaging the pre-frontal cortex of the brain). The age of enlightenment was a direct result of this expanded consciousness of people, as well as a greater tolerance and empathy for the perspectives of others.<br />
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With computing, we simply did not yet experience such a revolution in education. I think Alan Kay, the inventor of object-oriented programming (along with a whole bunch of other ideas) expressed this most clearly. He says that nobody, except in scientific fields, uses computers for what they are good for. Everybody else is using them to mimic old media : books, television, movies etc. What we need to cultivate is a new type of thinking: based on a computational and information theoretic perspective, what I mentioned earlier as "Standing on the shoulders of Skywalkers". A person who is able to think computationally will not need protective barriers that treat him like a child. He will be conscious of his cybernetic freedoms as a fully educated citizen. No powers - either in the government, or in the greedy towers of finance, or in the greedy dungeons of crime - will take him for granted. But to get there, we need new programming languages and new paradigms of computing. We need new methods of sharing data and accessing it computationally across the public. What we need are freedoms far greater than envisioned currently by the movements of free software and open-source.<br />
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If the average person is able to program computers and regularly analyzes information through computational lenses, this will produce physical changes in the brain, similar to how the quiet contemplation of reading a book changed the prefrontal cortex. I am optimistic that when this happens<i> en masse</i>, we will build a society that is far more cultivated and compassionate than we have today. In fact, this might be our only salvation for the ecological and environmental catastrophe that we are hurtling into. But we don't know how long this will take. Alan Kay says that this may take a couple of centuries. He likens himself to people laying bricks to construct a cathedral, like the cathedral of Chartres in France, that took several generations to finish. These cathedrals were not only wonders of architecture, but they also housed large libraries where the scholarly works of Arabia, China and India, as well as ancient Greece and Rome, were studied by European students. This sparked the period of renaissance.<br />
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I hope we will see a similar computational renaissance in a future not too distant from now.<br />
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<i>Alan Kay's interview: Go to 6:20 to get his message on the culture of computing. But watch the entire interview for greater wisdom. </i></div>
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<i>PS: The title of this post is a reference to John Steinbeck's novel <b>"Of Mice and Men"</b>. In this novel, there are two characters George and Lennie, who can be interpreted in many ways. The conscious and self-reflective George refers to the intelligent programmer who has a deep desire for freedom and who wishes good for the society. The kind-hearted brute Lennie can refer to the uneducated citizen, who is given access to the vast powers of computing. He may also refer to computation itself personified. There are easy references to be found for other characters in the novel, each with their own greed and insecurities. The novel has a sad ending - George shoots Lennie in order to save him a more painful death. This is my greatest nightmare. I hope the future does not hold such an end for computing. I hope our generation of humanity will avoid this end.</i><br />
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Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-31310823809356285292015-10-25T15:04:00.002-07:002015-10-28T04:04:41.667-07:00Can fasting prevent Alzheimer's disease ? And how to answer such questions<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>Women of Rennell Islands: Were they spared from Alzheimer's disease due to famine experienced in childhood ? </i></div>
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Humans love to think of themselves as gods, as bright dazzling balls in the sky, radiating ideas and exchanging pointers on how their ideas can solve all the problems in the world. Nowhere is this conceit more apparent than people blathering on the internet. Mea culpa. But the other day, this conceit has been broken for me, when all of a sudden I woke up with a stiff back. Years of lounging on a work desk have taken their toll on my back muscles and they decided to apply for an early retirement package. Of course, I am not willing to grant them that. But their message has been heard, their point has been taken. As if to reinforce the point, which might be lost in subtlety and in the humdrum of life, the changing seasons also gave me a sore throat and a cold. I am reminded that I am a bag of sticks which is held together by fibers, wires and valves, any of which can be twisted out of shape. I used these sick days of staying at home for reading through a set of books that I purchased recently. As it happens, they have to say nary a bit about this physical condition of human existence.<br />
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Humans are pipe-shaped animals, with the biggest pipe - the intestinal pipe going from the mouth to the anus. </blockquote>
This is how Giulia Enders colorfully puts it in her book <i>"Gut: The inside story of our body's most underrated organ".</i> This book was a good starting point to learn how viscerally our brains are connected to our viscera. But I finished reading another book, that made an exhaustive deconstruction of the notion that we humans live in a Platonic sphere of abstraction and ideas. That is the book <i>"Village Effect" </i>by Susan Pinker, which forcefully reminds us how our brains are tied to our bodies. I think every computer engineer needs to read this book. I recommend this book especially to my friends in the Silicon Valley, plotting their next big social apps or cyber addictions on the unsuspecting masses. As I mentioned, people are not dazzling gods made of ideas, but inherently tied to their physical bodies., which are like bags of sticks. In fact, human bodies are even more rickety than that analogy suggests.<br />
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Firstly, our bodies have their genetic makeup of the DNA code, which we have not deciphered yet, but which predisposes us to certain physical and mental states. Beyond the DNA, our bodies have digital switches triggered by the environment, that turn on or off large sections of genetic code. This is known as epigenetics, a phenomenon that can even be transmitted from parents to children. Beyond this digital circuitry at the cellular level, our bodies have a layer of complicated organic chemistry, known as the endocrine system. Various chemicals secreted into our body at different glands make our hearts beat faster, activate our immune systems or shut them down, make us feel comfortable or cranky, and dramatically color our emotional states. Chemicals such as serotonin, epinephrin and oxytocin dictate how we behave as humans. This is why people get addicted to drugs, and why they can be saved by pharmaceuticals. At a layer higher than chemistry, our body is a network of neurons - not just in the brain but significantly also in the gut. The thoughts that we think, the experiences that we have, and the foods that we digest will all influence which chemicals get secreted into our bodies and which digital switches (epigenetics) get turned on so that our DNA can be expressed. Digital technologies pretend that we are simply a software of consciousness running on the hardware of our brains. But this is far from the truth. Designing a good user interface means taking care of all the layers of being human: including the chemical and genetic layers. Needless to say, addressing this level of complexity has not been attempted by anybody yet, and what we have today are awful user interfaces - both for digital systems and for social systems.<br />
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This brings me to another book I purchased <i>"The human use of human beings"</i> by Norbert Wiener. This book is a classic from 1950s and Wiener is one of the founders of computer science, specifically the theory of cybernetic control that addresses the interface between the human and the machine. I have not got to reading this book yet, but Wiener was a visionary not only for computer theory, but also for the monumental blunders that will be done by digital technologies to humankind. According to Wiener, digital technologies are pretty similar to socio-economic and legal systems: both encode a protocol of communication with humans for making them do what is expected of them. The sad thing is that we were tremendously wrong on designing both socio-economic systems as well as digital technologies, simply because we misunderstood humans to be Platonic agents of ideal action, and not as rickety bags of DNA and chemicals.<br />
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Getting back to the <i>"Village Effect" </i>by Susan Pinker, the book is a revelation on many fronts: People with strong social circles, as in a small tightly-knit village, lead long and healthy lives. People without strong social bonds suffer not only from loneliness but also from an early death due to a severe lack of immunity to diseases. Face-to-face conversations and pats on the back boost the oxytocin in our bodies which revitalizes the immune system, something which does not happen with virtual messages. Mobile devices and screens have documented negative effects on the cognitive growth of babies and adolescents. Adolescents using digital media and online social networks are at a greater risk of bullying and social conditioning. The thing that stuck me is how unanimous the psychologists are. These are fairly new findings in psychology, but they are not controversial. Like the tobacco industry, the computer industry has been simply ignoring these findings. It considers these as "somebody else's problem", nothing to do about it. After reading the book, I was stuck by the mental image of an Indonesian baby that was recently on the news, who was addicted to cigarettes and sniffing out tobacco smoke like a chimney. This disaster in Indonesia is in no small measure due to the advertising of tobacco companies that saw a remarkable growth of sales in the rising populations of Asia (even as the dangers of tobacco got apparent in the USA). The future generations of humanity will probably judge us as badly, letting the young and vulnerable people get addicted to the charms of social networks and digital pornography.<br />
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However, there is a fundamental problem that prevents us from connecting cause and effect in complex fields like psychology. As mentioned earlier, our bodies are like Rube-Goldberg machines, composed of complex systems of chemicals and DNA, each of which is triggered by non-linear switches. The effects of any cause will become apparent only much later, and can only be gauged in a probabilistic sense. Like my stiff back that resulted from my sedentary lifestyle of several years of lounging on the chair, the effects of modern living on my mind will be apparent only much later. Typically, such effects will be reduced cognitive skills, reduced social empathy, and reduced immunity to diseases. These effects will probably show up clearly only in my old age, when I will be the most vulnerable.<br />
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It is said that scientists working in most fields suffer from a physics envy, eager to condense the topic of their study to a pithy set of equations. Unfortunately, this approach to doing science is not valid for complex subjects that have many variables and non-linearities. Nevertheless, scientists in fields as diverse as biology and sociology have the urge to reduce their subjects to crude one-dimensional models, sometimes with tragic consequences. A similar envy exists in medical fields, though I believe it is less known. I term this the <i>Penicillin envy</i>: every pharmacologist and medical practitioner wants to find a wonder drug that can cure the disease of their study. In fact, this is a very modern jealousy, stemming from the remarkable success of the antibiotic drug Penicillin. It just works, as long as the infection is bacterial and the bacteria are not resistant to this drug (which was typically the case when the drug was first tested). This wonder drug inspired the search for many similar drugs that can take effect on the body just as quickly. However, this search has often been a fool's errand. Our bodies are not pristine laboratories for physics experiments. As I said, they are like Rube-Goldberg machines, complex and remarkable when they work, but threatened by collapse and failure at multiple levels. The complex multi-layered metabolism of our bodies has its own way of healing; drugs and medical procedures can only facilitate this natural healing procedure. Despite great advances in medical science, the workings of our body remain mostly a mystery, and this is especially true for psychological ailments.<br />
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In fact, digital technologies are not unique in creating a set of rich world diseases. People living in traditional hunting-gathering societies have very little problems with diabetes, coronary heart disease, or indeed, back pain. Our modern sugar-rich diets and sedentary lifestyles are exerting hidden pressures on our internal organs, our immune systems, and our brains. These problems are systemic - stemming from how our society is organized, and not from individual personal choices. For example, the fact that the majority of drinks in the super-market contain massive loads of sugar predisposes us to making that choice for a sugary drink. The fact that the majority of our friends are on Facebook predisposes us to post on Facebook.<br />
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Perhaps, the most tragic of the modern diseases is Alzheimer's disease, where the brain shrinks as it becomes clogged by protein. This is a disease closely connected to diabetes (sometimes called type-3 diabetes). With Alzheimer's, the brain suffers a gradual loss in long-term memory, as well as in its capacity to form new memories. Sometimes, people experience mental hallucinations and delusions. In the intermediary stages, they may gradually lose their vocabulary. As the disease advances, people may suffer complete loss of speech and become unable to even perform simple tasks independently. This is a slow and painful way to die. I came across two remarkable essays on how Alzheimer's disease affects the patients and their caregivers. You may <a href="http://www.theguardian.com/society/2015/oct/20/the-deviousness-of-dementia#comments" target="_blank">read </a><a href="http://www.wsj.com/articles/is-our-identity-in-intellect-memory-or-moral-character-1441812784" target="_blank">them </a>at your leisure.<br />
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Even after a hundred years of intense study, there is no cure in sight for Alzheimer's. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tkIg-SxPzTA" target="_blank">People still dream of a miracle cure</a>, similar to Penicillin. But it is more likely that this disease will be similar to cancer, presenting many fronts on the battle. One interesting piece of information I learnt from Susan Pinker's book is that starvation in mice seems to have a protective effect against Alzheimer's disease as the mice get old. Several scientists speculate that this could be true for humans as well. Pinker also wonders if the elderly people she studied in Sardinia, who live exceptionally long lives, had a protective benefit against Alzheimer's due to starvation they suffered during the second world war. Why should starvation protect against a late onset disease like Alzheimer's ?<br />
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This got me thinking about evolutionary reasons, where people who suffered starvation during childhood may have an additional impetus to live older lives, and to keep their memory from deteriorating. I got reminded of Jared Diamond's book <i>"The world until yesterday"</i>, where he recounts a singular case from Rennell Islands. In a different online essay, he <a href="http://discovermagazine.com/1996/jul/whywomenchange817/" target="_blank">relates the same experience</a>.</div>
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">In 1976, I visited Rennell Island, one of the Solomon Islands, lying in the southwestern Pacific’s cyclone belt. When I asked about wild fruits and seeds that birds ate, my Rennellese informants named dozens of plant species by Rennell language names, named for each plant species all the bird and bat species that eat its fruit, and said whether the fruit is edible for people. They ranked fruits in three categories: those that people never eat; those that people regularly eat; and those that people eat only in famine times, such as after--and here I kept hearing a Rennell term initially unfamiliar to me-- the hungi kengi. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">Those words proved to be the Rennell name for the most destructive cyclone to have hit the island in living memory--apparently around 1910, based on people’s references to datable events of the European colonial administration. The hungi kengi blew down most of Rennell’s forest, destroyed gardens, and drove people to the brink of starvation. Islanders survived by eating fruits of wild plant species that were normally not eaten. But doing so required detailed knowledge about which plants are poisonous, which are not poisonous, and whether and how the poison can be removed by some technique of food preparation. </span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Georgia, 'Times New Roman', serif; font-size: 15px; line-height: 21px;">When I began pestering my middle-aged Rennellese informants with questions about fruit edibility, I was brought into a hut. There, once my eyes had become accustomed to the dim light, I saw the inevitable frail old woman. She was the last living person with direct experience of which plants were found safe and nutritious to eat after the hungi kengi, until people’s gardens began producing again. The old woman explained that she had been a child not quite of marriageable age at the time of the hungi kengi. Since my visit to Rennell was in 1976, and since the cyclone had struck 66 years before, the woman was probably in her early eighties. Her survival after the 1910 cyclone had depended on information remembered by aged survivors of the last big cyclone before the hungi kengi. Now her people’s ability to survive another cyclone would depend on her own memories, which were fortunately very detailed. </span></blockquote>
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It seems likely that starvation in childhood may activate an epigenetic pathway that prompts the body to live a longer life and to be mentally agile in old age, in order to guide younger kin to stave off hunger and danger when the need arises. This is justified from an evolutionary point of view, whether such a thing exists in the physiology of the human body is an open question. If it does, it is very likely that we can fool our bodies into activating this pathway, by fasting at the right period of our lives.<br />
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There are two problems for testing such a hypothesis. Firstly, providing a systematic review of the causes and outcomes will take a very long time : especially if human tests need to be performed, as opposed to using other mammals as proxies. Secondly, there is no money to be made by such a discovery. No pharmaceutical company will become rich by suggesting that people fast. This is the tragedy of our economy. Our society is structured in such a way that important medical advances are being stunted.<br />
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I posed this question on fasting and Alzheimer's disease only as an illustrative example. The medical field is replete with such questions. More specifically, serious questions in psychology cannot be answered easily by simple experiments. Due to the very nature of the human body and its multi-layered physiology, we need to conduct experiments on a very large scale and across large timelines. We simply do not have the scientific apparatus today to do those experiments.<br />
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Things get even more depressing when you consider economics. If medicine is concerned with the physiology of a single human body, economics ought to be concerned with the health of whole societies (and whole eco-systems). These are, by definition, even more complex systems. But the trend in economics is to argue for simple theories. Very often, these theories are not even tested. Economists suffer very much from tribal affiliations - with opposing camps refusing to engage in a common dialogue and in a common framework for scientific enquiry. In any case, posing open questions that require long-term inspection is not encouraged in this era of high-frequency trading. So what we have in economics today is a pseudo-science, disguised in a plethora of numbers.<br />
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In 1949, the Nobel prize in medicine is awarded for a surgical procedure known as "<i>lobotomy</i>", where the neural connections are cut between the pre-frontal cortex (dealing with rational thinking and cognitive complexity) and the central areas dealing with emotions. This was professed as a cure for mental ailments such as Schizophrenia, but later understood to be a tragic disaster. Before this understanding dawned, many patients were lobotomized and turned into vegetables. The Nobel committee realized this fiasco fairly soon, but I wonder how long it will take them to realize such blunders with the Nobel prize in economics, where entire societies have been lobotomized.<br />
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The one hope that I have for the future is that it will be possible to model large complex systems directly from the data, using advanced machine learning. These models will ultimately replace the simplistic models in medicine, psychology, human-machine interaction and economics - with more accurate predictive models. This will take time, but ultimately we will realize the follies of the current age.<br />
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Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-47445906125370707802015-10-11T09:20:00.001-07:002015-10-19T10:43:13.792-07:00A natural park for humans <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi57YGLHNnJGQ3aD5Z84-_t7IqZbkYaztf7HNc_LCEYGSEyn12KNUIHvyj4pbgErDOH3ucuwg3XtU3O97flmhg3rt8BHWrp3k2WSBLMuz7u9ZTZ3H3WrDKq-T9hce2sCa-UqXX9TQ/s1600/roborhino2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="218" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi57YGLHNnJGQ3aD5Z84-_t7IqZbkYaztf7HNc_LCEYGSEyn12KNUIHvyj4pbgErDOH3ucuwg3XtU3O97flmhg3rt8BHWrp3k2WSBLMuz7u9ZTZ3H3WrDKq-T9hce2sCa-UqXX9TQ/s320/roborhino2.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<i>Can humans live in ecological balance with robots ? Artwork by <a href="http://crazyasian1.deviantart.com/" target="_blank">Robert Chew</a>.</i></div>
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<b>A brief history of ecological time: </b><br />
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Prof. Stephen Hawking recently <a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.de/2015/10/oikoumene-natural-park-for-humans.html" target="_blank">did a Reddit AMA</a>, where he answered two distinct types of questions: about AI-pocalypse where an AI smarter than humans would spell the end for us, and about technological unemployment where humans lose jobs to robots and AI, that are not necessarily smarter than us in all aspects. I have previously written that the first type of questions based on <a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.fr/2015/05/growing-old-in-age-of-machine-learning.html" target="_blank">AI-pocalyptic thinking are distracting</a>. So I will ignore such issues and focus on what Prof. Hawking said on technological unemployment.<br />
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<div style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: 'Exchange SSm 4r', ExchangeWeb-Roman, Georgia, serif; line-height: 28px; margin-bottom: 14px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
<span style="border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: brandon-text-wired, brandon-text, brandon-grotesque-1, brandon-grotesque-2, BrandonText-Bold, 'Gill Sans', HelveticaNeue-Bold, 'Helvetica Neue Bold', 'Helvetica Neue', Helvetica, Arial, 'Lucida Grande', sans-serif; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><i>Have you thought about the possibility of technological unemployment (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_unemployment), where we develop automated processes that ultimately cause large unemployment by performing jobs faster and/or cheaper than people can perform them? Some compare this thought to the thoughts of the Luddites, whose revolt was caused in part by perceived technological unemployment over 100 years ago. In particular, do you foresee a world where people work less because so much work is automated? Do you think people will always either find work or manufacture more work to be done?</i></span></div>
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The outcome will depend on how things are distributed. Everyone can enjoy a life of luxurious leisure if the machine-produced wealth is shared, or most people can end up miserably poor if the machine-owners successfully lobby against wealth redistribution. So far, the trend seems to be toward the second option, with technology driving ever-increasing inequality.</div>
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Prof. Hawking's candid response ruffled a lot of feathers. Marc Andreessen, the master venture capitalist of Silicon Valley, who created the Netscape Navigator web browser, and thus arguably created the world wide web as we know it today, has tweeted as follows.<br />
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Shorter Stephen Hawking: "For hundreds of years, people who claimed that machines reduce jobs have looked silly. But I'll be different!" 😏</div>
— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) <a href="https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/652310656704606212">October 9, 2015</a></blockquote>
In fact, this is a mischaracterization. Prof. Hawking was clearly arguing against greed and inequality in capitalism, and not against the automation of work. He is not alone in questioning the current economic paradigm of liberal capitalism, driven mostly by the free movement of global financial capital. Many economists, such as Thomas Piketty in Paris, have documented the rising economic inequality of the current era. Many other economists, despite supporting the free market paradigm, are also questioning the instability and chaos wrought onto the market by modern financial innovations such as derivative trading, high frequency algorithmic trading and global financial deregulation. I have <a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.fr/2015/07/octopus-and-bicycle.html" target="_blank">previously argued</a> that the automation of finance is directly connected to the aggregation of data into monopolistic systems, which I termed as Octopuses. The architecture of the world wide web, as developed by Tim Berners-Lee and popularized by Marc Andreessen, is responsible at a fundamental level for the growing monopolization of the global economy. Thus, it is the specific architecture of computer systems that we chose to develop, and not computation and automation in general, that are responsible for technological unemployment.<br />
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In this blog, I will argue that inequality and monopolization, though awful in their own terms, are actually symptoms of a deeper malaise, which is the destruction of biodiversity and ecological balance. This is a story much older than the advent of computers, or indeed, the advent of money. It is a story as old as hundred thousand years, starting from the spread of humans outside Africa. Ever since that defining moment lost in the depths of time, we humans have systematically destroyed biodiversity on this planet, turning millions of plant and animal species extinct. The scary news is that this rate of species extinction is actually accelerating. In this long dance of death, only one species has been left unaffected - us. But for how long ?<br />
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The history of human civilization can be viewed as a long march towards peace, prosperity and health, as forcefully argued by Prof. Steven Pinker and <a href="http://www.ourworldindata.org/" target="_blank">visualized in nice graphs</a> by Max Roser of Oxford University. Human violence has fallen dramatically over the past few centuries. People today in most parts of the world enjoy long peaceful lives in good health. This picture will only get better as abject poverty continues to drop and medical science continues to progress. However, there are <a href="http://www.igbp.net/download/18.1081640c135c7c04eb480001178/1376383107963/NL78-anthropocene.pdf" target="_blank">other graphs that illustrate the Anthropocene</a>, the current geological era marked by species extinction and destruction of ecological habitats. So where is the destiny for humans, in the first set of graphs or in the second set ? Can humans be separated from ecological interdependency that characterizes every other species on this planet ?<br />
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We humans are super-predators that kill fully grown adult animals, whereas other predators kill mostly juveniles that are still not ready to breed. Thus, we have successfully wiped out entire species by predation. We are also a highly adaptable species that survives in extremely different geographic climes - from the poles to the tropics, where we encroach onto the ecological niches of other animals and drive them to starvation. Due to our enormous brains and highly cohesive social structure, we humans are efficient virtualizers, who can simulate the behavior of other animals and outcompete them for ecological niches. When one species goes extinct, it brings down a whole network of species that co-evolved with it. Certain animal species, like rats and crows, as well as domestic animals and pets, have co-evolved with us and out-compete many other species to extinction. This aspect of virtualization of behavior gives a good hint of how robots and AI will relate to us humans. As Alan Turing has proved in the universal aspect of computation, computers can be used to simulate any type of behavior in a pristine mathematical sense. In this regard, robots will be even better than us at virtualization of behavior. So will we maintain an ecological balance with them ? Or will we be out-competed across all of our ecological niches ? This is definitely a question for ecological biology and not just for philosophy.<br />
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<b><i>Oikoumén</i>ē: A cartography of human habitat</b><br />
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Human societies typically considered themselves to be part of nature, although the modern capitalist society is an aberration from the norm. Every cultural tradition that arose in hunting-gathering or agricultural societies has been conscious of ecological limits in nature and developed norms to respect them. However, these lessons were only learnt in retrospect, after observing massive destruction of ecological habitats. Only much later were they encoded in ethics, religion and economic behavior of humans. In all of our past human history, we were able to find new habitats where the learnt lessons could be implemented - by slashing and burning more forest, by spreading across the oceans, by creating technology that enabled us to survive in harsher climes. However, the rate of our technological progress has shrunk the planet. We do not have a second planet to apply the lessons that we learn today. There will be no going back to the drawing table. Earth, the pale blue dot in the vastness of the cosmos, that supported life and shaped our evolution as humans, remains our only home. So there is an urgency to get to grips with the awesomeness of our destructive power, even if all we care for is the selfish survival of our own species.<br />
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Ancient Greeks were probably the first to seriously study the geographical habitat of where humans can survive. They termed it <i>Oikoumén</i>ē (<i>Oikos </i>is home in Greek). Anaximander, Aristotle and ultimately Ptolemy derived detailed maps of the earth that can be inhabited by humans. This gave birth to the disciplines of not only geography and cartography (map making), but also economy and ecology (both derive from the root word of <i>Oikos</i>). In fact, it is impossible to study geography in isolation to the qualitative aspects of economics and ecology. We can also argue that ecology and economics cannot be studied separately from each other, and from the limits imposed by geography. So how is it that today's field of economics is so completely devoid of geographical and ecological consciousness ? How is it that it became an esoteric quasi-religious discipline that establishes truths of its own - on market stability, growth, production etc., independent of ecological limits ? Especially in the fields of macro-economics and finance, where the decisions affect the society on a global level, this selective ignorance of ecological limits will be disastrous. There is a tendency in free market ideologues - the school of economics that is the most influential today, to disparage ecological limits altogether as inconsequential, and subscribe to a belief in the miracles of technology to produce more with less. Green revolution, that expanded agricultural yields, is often cited as proof. But agricultural yields increased only because of concerted scientific investment and technological development after noticing and accepting a severe threat; not by ignoring the ecological limits altogether and not by performing <i>laissez-faire</i> capitalism.<br />
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<i>Ptolemy's map of the Oikoumené, reconstructed from the description in his book "Geography". </i></div>
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Today, we have the serious threat of climate change due to the incessant burning of fossil fuels. Despite the clear evidence that we need a moratorium on fossil fuels (vast reserves of coal, oil and natural gas should be left forever buried under the ground), we keep funding the exploration of new fossil fuels. Our entire economy is deeply enmeshed with the financial interests of oil and natural gas. The network of financial capital, enabled by a loose regulatory framework on a global level, obscures these interests through several layers of virtualization of capital. In fact, it is impossible to fix any single ecological issue without fixing the rut in financial capital, and the algorithms and computers that enable them. It is important to note that climate change is not the only ecological threat facing us as humans. There are several planetary boundaries that have been identified, with varying degrees of precision by environmental scientists. However, unlike ancient Greeks, we ignore them completely in our study of economics and<i> </i><i>Oikoumén</i>ē.<br />
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<i>Planetary boundaries for survival of humans, more information is available in the book <a href="http://www.amazon.com/The-God-Species-Saving-Planet/dp/142620891X" target="_blank">"The God Species"</a> by Mark Lynas. </i></div>
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The economic situation today is so absurd that it should put to rest any ideas that humans are under conscious control, either politically or economically, on our planet. Great wars are being waged today between nuclear armed countries, to secure the mines and distribution pipelines of fossil fuels. Vast populations are being bombarded and displaced geographically. The developed economies of the west are completely clueless about where to invest financially, so as to fund health insurance and secure the retirement benefits of aging citizens. Periodic booms and busts of real estate and related non-productive sectors are happening with increasing frequency. On the other hand, vast sections of developing economies are suffering from high unemployment and poor education, especially of the youth. Everybody is terrorized by the whimsies of capital flight, that can happen at the drop of a hat. It is important to note that there is no conscious human agency, either benevolent or malevolent, at the crux of these economic disasters. On the other hand, these faults are systemic - similar to the fractures and creases in a dam that will inevitably result in flooding. But unlike physical fractures, fixing economic fractures is not easy. We are up against the tangle of systemic interests that are deeply enmeshed, and operated today by computer algorithms. Many of these algorithms are closed source, either because they are part of secretive operating procedures of companies and financial institutions, or because they belong to governments but are hidden underneath legal jargon and diplomatic channels. Increasingly, the algorithms that make up a government are being rendered invisible using secret courts (such as the FISA court of USA) or trans-continental business partnerships that are not accountable to any country's law.<br />
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There is an important United Nations conference on Climate Change in Paris next month, to achieve a legally binding resolution on all countries to limit the burning of fossil fuels. But hopes are low everywhere. At the global level, the architecture of economic and political systems is so rotten that any agreement that is achieved then will be immediately violated, in spirit if not in letter. So if we are not able to fix the problems at a global level, what can we do to ensure an <i>Oikoumén</i>ē for the future generations of humanity ?<br />
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<b>A natural park for humans </b><br />
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<i>Yellowstone national park: the first national park in the world </i></div>
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The answer to this question might be what American novelist Wallace Stegner called the best invention of USA.<br />
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"National parks are the best idea we ever had. Absolutely American, absolutely democratic, they reflect us at our best rather than our worst."</div>
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In 1871, an American geologist named Ferdinand Heyden has achieved the status of a National Park for the Yellowstone region, after feverishly campaigning for several years. He argued that if the federal government fails to protect the territory, nothing will remain of this beautiful landscape.<br />
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"The vandals who are now waiting to enter into this wonder-land, will in a single season despoil, beyond recovery, these remarkable curiosities, which have requited all the cunning skill of nature thousands of years to prepare."</div>
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The Yellowstone national park gave birth to a widespread movement all over the world, where large tracts of land were set aside by the governments, where sensitive natural ecological balance is maintained and spared from human interference. It is crucial to note that the value assigned for these national parks is not human monetary benefit, but a spiritual value in letting nature be for nature's sake. It is a value that cannot be measured in human currency of whatever make.<br />
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From the very beginning, the involvement of humans in a national park has been up for debate and riddled with racist and classist overtones. Traditional people, such as hunter-gatherer tribes, have long been living in natural landscapes by maintaining ecological balance. With whatever tools and technologies under their employ, they have learnt to curtail their tendencies of greed and over-exploitation of nature, by learning the lessons the hard way over generations. Now as their lands and livelihoods became federal property, they were displaced and succumbed to living in despair under tribal reservations. In many cases, their languages and cultural lore became extinct, as it was devoid of the essence of living in their natural environment. This specter of cultural extinction is a constant throughout human history and it is accelerating today, just like the parallel rate of biological species extinction.<br />
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If we widen the definition of cultural extinction to include the extinction of professions and regular daily routines of people, the story will get much worse. Over the course of civilization, humans have specialized into varied professions based on the specifics of local geography and the availability of economic resources. Often these professions existed for centuries and over generations, thereby crystallizing into a cultural lore on how to lead a happy life in the society. Even today, people who lead long and happy lives invariably live in socially cohesive village societies, whose support is as essential in old age as medicines invented by science. However, in the last couple of centuries, this idyll of village life is getting eroded as many professions disappeared and people were forced to migrate in search of transient opportunities. With automation and robotics, these professions have become even more transient, requiring a nomadic existence where the daily routine will never gets crystallized into a precise set of norms. This constant disruption of routine (and the threat of unemployment) will produce anxiety, to which our species has not been prepared by evolution, even with our large brains and adaptable societies.<br />
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So why is it that we refuse to cast humans as deserving of ecological protection, just as trees and animals in a natural park ? We can answer this question in two distinct ways. I believe one answer will lead us to racism and narrow-minded ness, whereas the other answer will lead us to compassion and happiness.<br />
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The first answer is centered on "us", trying to protect our specific professions and lifestyles. We can do this by framing laws and closing borders, even as we ignore the plight of other humans and other animals. This is the impetus of conservative politics, that I do not support, even as I understand the anxiety and tensions behind them. Essentially, conservative politics is blind to a paradox: if we claim protection on the basis of ecological grounds, how can we ignore the plight of other animals and humans ? Are they not as essential as us for maintaining the ecological balance ?<br />
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The second answer is centered on "them", trying to protect the specific professions and lifestyles of other humans. This needs to be done beyond any monetary value for justification. When we create a national park, we do not try to measure the value of nature in a human currency, but associate a greater "spiritual" or "ecological" value for the mere existence of nature in balance. Similarly, when we try to protect the professions and lifestyles of other humans, we need to protect them for their own sake. Can we humans be grand enough to overcome selfish greed and protect other humans and animals ? Can we be vigilant enough to protect the ecological balance of other humans and animals, even if we get nothing in return ? Indeed, there is one direct benefit with this type of thinking: compassion leads to happiness.<br />
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We can start with cases that urgently need help: traditional people living in subsistence lifestyles throughout the world are under threat. Their lands are being encroached by mining corporations, loggers or livestock farmers. They suffer high rates of sexual and criminal violence. Can we sacrifice something to protect their traditional lifestyle even if we do not share their ethics or morals ? Can we preserve their languages ? We can then widen this net of compassion for marginal groups of people that live within our own society: sexual minorities, drug addicts, undocumented immigrants. Can we sacrifice something to preserve this lifestyle of others, even if we do not agree with this lifestyle and do not believe in a common destiny with them ?<br />
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<b>Raising an AI with good parenting</b><br />
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These questions are not mere philosophical nuisance. These are practical steps to preserve our own <i>Oikoumén</i>ē, as it comes under threat by robots and AI. BBC has <a href="http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-34175290" target="_blank">recently interviewed economists Erik Brynjolffson and Andrew McAffee</a>, where they gave advice to readers on which jobs will be hard to be replaced by AI (and thus relatively stable). This line of thinking is too deterministic and focussed on the current moment. In fact, trying not to be replaced by a robot is a race that gives no pleasure to any human, as the robots will eventually catch up. If we are bound to run this race, we are definitely screwed.<br />
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Most people think of robots as alien beings. Even people who believe in the eventuality of strong AI - <i>i.e,</i> an emergent artificial consciousness similar to human consciousness, still imagine this AI to be devoid of any ecological connections to the environment. Essentially, this is indicative of how desensitized they themselves are, as humans, from the environment. I found it illuminating to think about this aspect in popular movies and books. How many animals have we seen in the Matrix trilogy of movies ? It is as if the entire movie happens in an ecological vacuum consisting of humans and robots, without any other biological life. In general, how much of wildlife do we see in any movie or books about AI ? Isn't it absurd that any AI that comes out of this planet will be disconnected to the ecological niches on this planet ? If we as humans create good ecological niches that require compassion, any AI that comes to occupy these niches will be compassionate to us. On the other hand, if we create ecological niches that blindly optimize for selfish greed, we cannot guarantee that the interests of AI will be aligned with those of us humans.<br />
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Dylan Evans, a British cognitive scientist, <a href="http://littleatoms.com/podcast/podcast-dylan-evans-and-andrew-mueller" target="_blank">said in a radio interview recently</a> that two things seem to happen to people working on intelligent systems. They either become ecstatic believers of a rapture-like moment, where AI will solve all our problems, or they become paranoid about the terrible enslavement of humanity by a super-complex system. Bill Joy, the creator of the Java programming language, was the first one I knew of who flipped. Dylan Evans himself flipped to apocalyptic thinking a few years ago. The problem with either ecstatic or apocalyptic mental states is that it is hard to think rationally and reasonably. I believe that having an ecological mindset will help computer scientists to cultivate more nuanced opinions about AI.<br />
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I will end this blog on a personal note. I recently attended a brilliant talk by Prof. Tom Mitchell of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU), on how to raise a machine. This happened at an event celebrating 25 years of Max Planck Institute for Informatics, where I am an alumnus. But I am also an alumnus of CMU, where I was a visiting student twelve years ago. When I was at CMU, Prof. Mitchell's course on machine learning was over-registered and the lecture halls were always filled to capacity. So I was not able to take his course, although I sneaked into some of his lectures. At that time, he just finished an introductory text book on machine learning. The field has advanced greatly in the last ten years, so it was a great opportunity for me to hear from Prof. Mitchell what he thought of the progress. He spoke of the paradigm of function approximation and optimization that achieved the greatest success in machine learning in recent years. But he admitted that this was also something of a disappointment. He recalled a conversation with his mother, where he was trying to explain what machine learning means, when she said<br />
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I know about learning. I raised you. </blockquote>
This is a great analogy. Human children learn about a lot of things (a lot of functions to approximate), and they learn how to learn. Raising a machine needs to be done in a similar fashion. With this as inspiration, Prof. Mitchell created <a href="http://rtw.ml.cmu.edu/rtw/" target="_blank">NELL (never ending language learner)</a> - a machine that is never shut down and that has been trying to build a conceptual model (ontology) of the world, by learning over several years from the web. This is the closest I am aware of, to an AI that is capable of reaching human-level consciousness, even as it stands extremely far from this goal. As we see, such a machine needs to be "raised", from examples and good parenting. If we humans create awful examples - by exterminating our ancestors, by destroying eco-systems, by eliminating rivals without compassion - we should not complain if our children (AI) will do the same to us.<br />
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Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-59181114374823787062015-08-23T16:39:00.000-07:002015-08-24T11:02:32.445-07:00Can virtual reality lead us to a virtuous reality ?<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>Prisoners in a cave seeing shadows on the wall </i></div>
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Since time immemorial, virtual reality had been a narrative tool for debating philosophical concepts. The brain in a vat, colorfully visualized in the Matrix movies, had been a point of debate before the advent of computers, and even before the advent of writing. The fundamental virtual reality is man's conception of the world in his own mind, which exists even before there is any technology to reproduce it in any form. These debates have produced a rich lore of cultural and philosophical ideas. But today, even as we stand extremely close to implementing virtual reality through technology, we are cut off from these debates about deeper questions, such as how to lead a virtuous life. The Greek philosopher Plato relates a dialogue between the teacher Socrates and his disciple Phaedrus on the virtues of writing. In this, Socrates criticizes the technology of writing for creating false expectations and for corrupting the memory of humans. I think we today need such a critical dialogue on virtual reality, which may be the next great medium for human communication. Before I present arguments for and against virtual reality, I will give a short introduction to the philosophical context.<br />
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<b><i>Plato's cave and Vishnu's dream: </i></b><br />
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Plato used the allegory of prisoners trapped in a cave, in order to discuss various political systems in his opus <i>'Republic'</i>. These prisoners see shadows of objects projected onto a wall, as lit by a fire which they never see. To them, these shadows represent the entire gamut of reality, and they cannot conceive of a three dimensional object illuminated by natural light. One of the prisoners escapes the cave and sees the world outside, as well as the bright sun illuminating everything. In the beginning, his eyes are unable to take in this light, but gradually he understands the world for what it is. He returns to the cave to explain his findings to the others, but he is unable to find the words to tell them. Further, as he comes back, he finds his eyesight has become incapable of distinguishing the faint shadows on the wall. The prisoners deduce that going out of the cave is terrible, as that would destroy the eyesight. Thus, the prisoners are held in the cave by the captors without the use of force. Some of them need to be restrained by chains, as the person who escaped the cave unnoticed, but the others are there by their own choice. In Plato's narrative, the captors are the people in power - the guardians of the republic. His work discusses different forms of government and their relative virtues. This allegory of the cave is brilliantly rephrased in Emir Kusturica's film <i>'Underground'. </i>In computer graphics, one of the first immersive virtual environments to have been developed, by Thomas DeFanti and colleagues, was called CAVE (CAVE Automatic Virtual Environment, following the fashion of recursive acronyms that computer scientists like) in reference to Plato. <br />
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Two important questions unanswered in the allegory of Plato's cave are how would a prisoner realize that he is imprisoned, and how could he escape. The allegory hits the limit of its narrative potential before answering them. In Indian mythology, I am aware of a few allegories that discuss these questions. Unlike Greek mythology, Indian mythology visualizes the world as an onion, with many layers of virtualness - internal personal world, external social world, outer cosmic world and so on - each of which held in place by the actions of gods. The gods can be thought of as subconscious mental processes, who are not always visible to the conscious mind, but visible when inspected with care. These gods can be understood in a hierarchy, with higher gods referring to more subtle processes that drive the simpler ones. When confronted with the illusion of virtualness that is preventing the conscious mind from seeing the true nature of reality, it can either react angrily demanding the destruction of this illusion, or react in mirth smiling at the illusion and going along with the play of it. These two choices refer to the nature of two principal god-heads in Hindu religion: Shiva and Vishnu respectively. There can be many other choices spanning the spectrum between the two. The formal theory of aesthetics and artistic expression in India, known as <i>'Rasa'</i>, specifies 9 different principal emotions, with different gods commanding the different emotions. For understanding virtual reality, it is illuminating to discuss the mythology of Vishnu. Here, the world is understood as the dream of Vishnu. Over the passage of time, the world becomes more complex as well as more repressive and unjust. It is then that Vishnu enters the world in his own dream as a conscious actor known as an <i>'avatar',</i> helping the right win over the wrong. Thus, an <i>'avatar' </i>is an automatic process in the virtual world, that appears whenever the world becomes too unjust. From the perspective of a person living in the virtual world, escaping the illusion means realizing that he is one and the same as the dreamer of this illusion, and doing actions in this world that are just and righteous, similar to what an <i>avatar </i>would do. Currently, the word <i>'virtual avatar'</i> has taken quite a different meaning - to refer to a simple participant obeying the rules of the game in the virtual world.<br />
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<b><i>Digital, cyber and virtual: </i></b><br />
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What is a virtual world ? Do newspapers and television media count as virtual worlds ? Can we consider early internet bulletin boards and social forums as virtual worlds ? What about social media - websites such as Facebook or Twitter ? What about head-mounted displays such as Oculus Rift or Microsoft Hololens ? I think they are all virtual worlds in some sense, with each technological evolution getting us closer to the ultimate virtual reality. In the 1970s and 80s, the popular adjective was <i>'digital'</i>, which referred to Shannon's information theory that helps us represent any natural signal or phenomenon as digital information. Later on, in the late 80s and early 90s, especially during the rise of the internet, the popular adjective was '<i>cyber</i>', which originated from Wiener's theory of cybernetics (coming from the Greek root word meaning <i>'to navigate'</i>), that presented a way to understand human beings as part of a larger technological (or social) system. Personally, I like the words <i>'cyberspace'</i> and <i>'cybermedia'</i>, as they actively invoke human participation in the technological system. Both these words are slowly going out of fashion. The word <i>'virtual reality' </i>was invented by Jaron Lanier, another great hero of mine. By this, he meant a world that is <i>'virtually indistinguishable', </i>for all intents and purposes,<i> </i>from the real world. So the intents and purposes are very important in understanding how close we got to virtual reality. If our intents and purposes in life are just to be passive consumers, then we are already very close to virtual reality. But I hope that we have deeper desires and dreams. Nowadays, Lanier likes to use the phrase<i> 'being an avatar'</i>, to refer to the virtual reality suits that he developed in his pioneering company VPL. By this phrase, Lanier refers to fully using the body (hands, fingers etc.) and holding active human agency while navigating the virtual world. The popular media today uses virtual reality (often condensed as VR) to mean head-mounted displays like Oculus Rift, which currently do not even feature any controls for the hands. This is a dramatic reduction in scope for the phrase <i>'virtually indistinguishable from the real world'</i>. It is far easier to build a virtual world where the user watches passively or has very limited set of controls. But these limitations of user-interface are a form of slavery and repression. Unfortunately, most people do not realize them to be so, until they are completely engulfed in the virtual world and cannot escape. In this blog, I will try to elaborate on these issues. I will use the word virtual reality (VR) how Lanier has meant it. Digital media, cyberspace, social media and immersive media can all be considered as partial fulfillments of VR.<br />
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<b><i>What is a virtuous life ?</i></b><br />
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<i>Perhaps there is only one cardinal sin, impatience. Because of impatience we are driven out of paradise. Because of impatience we cannot return. - Franz Kafka </i></blockquote>
Every religion has a list of cardinal sins and virtues and devises a scheme to optimize the personal time and resources of its followers, towards achieving these virtues. Kafka has tried to condense all the sins into a single sin of impatience. Going by his opinion, cultivating a lot of patience may be a good virtue, something I am not sure the internet encourages. I find it absolutely stunning that none of the world religions have issued any dictates (yet) on how their followers should spend their time on the internet. For example, religions that value internal reflection and meditation, such as Buddhism, do not prohibit their followers from using Twitter, which inundates the user's attention with a hodge-podge of unrelated tweets and messages. Checking Facebook or Twitter is probably the opposite of meditation, but even the Dalai Lama uses Twitter. I wonder how Buddha (or Mohammed, or Jesus) himself would have evaluated different web sites and services today. I suspect not many would be to his liking. Personally, I am not religious and do not have an elaborate philosophy on what one should do in life. I will keep it simple. In life, we can try to maximize money, knowledge, power, or reputation. Depending on what we try to maximize, leading a virtuous life may mean different things. But what is the point of doing any of that if we are doing it alone by ourselves ? What will be the value we are getting from all the other people and beings in nature ? So I think leading a virtuous life means cultivating deep friendships. It is on this premise that I will discuss whether virtual reality can lead us to a virtuous life i.e, whether it can lead us to deep and fulfilling friendships. </div>
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<b><i>Arguments against Virtual Reality:</i></b><br />
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1) <i>VR will imprison humans into isolated sensory bubbles.</i> </blockquote>
Most people today are already hooked to their mobile phones. It is not uncommon to see a family spending time together, but each of them typing furiously into their smartphones. This will only get worse in the future with immersive displays. But people may not even be seeing the same world anymore. This is apparent on the websites which collect massive amounts of user data and offer tailor-made services that better fit to the user profiles. By using services like Google, Facebook or Amazon, users might be getting a very biased view of the world. In the future, we can expect these virtual services to encroach into real world spaces using augmented reality. An empty billboard or a QR-code might be replaced by user-specific visual information. Noise-cancelling headphones might be equipped with computer chips that filter out specific audio patterns and add other context-specific information. In this scenario, can we still say that we share a common world ?<br />
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2) <i>VR will destroy our privacy. </i></blockquote>
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We are already living in an age of huge data trawling, where government spying agencies and corporate services are collecting every single byte of data that comes out of everybody, similar to how large fishing ships trawl the ocean-floor sweeping the entire marine life into extinction. The most important effect of this massive data collection is that the spying agencies are able to model not only our conscious actions, but also our sub-conscious, to a degree that we are not even aware of. This dramatically reduces the amount of freedom that we can have as free citizens in a republic. Firstly, the vast majority of people voluntarily silence themselves, avoiding behavior patterns that may be construed by the others as problematic. Secondly, even the few who are noisy and adventurous will not be aware of how deeply their choices of action are restricted. With VR, every single sensory input that comes into the window of the user's perception can be spied upon. With sensors attached to the user's body, many subtle readings about temperature and electro-chemical activity in the body can be spied upon, without the user even being conscious of it. Unlike the philosopher kings favored by Plato and Socrates, the powers that spy on us and make decisions about us will be computer programs that have extreme prejudice and zero wisdom. This is a recipe for death and stagnation of our society and culture. </div>
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3) <i>VR will destroy intimacy with the physicality of the real world.</i> </blockquote>
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The problem with VR is that it doesn't have to be very good (virtually indistinguishable from the real world) in order to monopolize 100% of our attention. At present, VR technology cannot handle touch, taste and smell, even though our body has fine-scale touch, taste and smell receptors. Touch may be the most fundamental of all our senses. It is known that babies who lack a loving touch in their early infancy will suffer from serious developmental problems. Our brains are highly adaptable organs and are constantly rewiring themselves to cater to the various sensory processing needs. If we spend more time in VR, the sensory information that is still incapable of being reproduced by technology will lose out in our brains. It is known that children who spend a lot of time indoors, reading books in a dim light, will develop myopia. Similarly, people spending time looking at computer screens or head-mounted displays will have their visual receptors compromised. One of the problems with current VR displays is that they don't offer accommodation cues, this creates a type of nausea in people. But with repeated use, the users' brains will adapt and rewire themselves. Similar losses can happen with other senses such as proprioception and balance. Our bodies' multiple senses and motor activation are coupled. Hearing affects smell, touch affects vision and so on. These important cross-sensory couplings will be damaged by the use of VR. It is possible that existing digital technologies may have already massively rewired our brains. </div>
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4) <i>VR will destroy a continuous sense of time. </i></blockquote>
When sensory information can be modulated and controlled in VR, it can also be presented in an achronistic manner i.e, different events that happen together in time can be presented at different times to the user. This is already the case when we read news or twitter-feeds. Due to information overload, the computer will make decisions for us on where to prioritize our attention. Depending on the type of digital services we use (whether we pay for them or advertisers pay for them), these decisions may not even be in our best interests. Our brains have evolved to modulate their attention to process different events in time. The notion of internal mental time is fundamental to our cognitive skills. When this is destroyed or usurped by a computer, we become incapacitated in responding to our social and emotional priorities. For example, a friend or a family member might need our attention at a specific point in time, but we may not be available to them immediately. Essentially with VR, in addition to isolated data bubbles, we may also be living in isolated temporal bubbles.<br />
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5) <i>VR will inhibit sacrifice and charity. </i></blockquote>
It is known to psychologists that people value a virtual sacrifice in a very similar way to a real sacrifice involving their time or money. For example, after users like the Facebook page of a cause, they are seen to be donating less actual money to the very same cause. This will be a problem if the users have to allocate a limited budget of time and resources to a set of real world people and causes. They will be unable to make these decisions in a conscious manner, without a clear accounting of how their virtual time and money is transferred to their real time and money. Thus, they might be fooled into thinking that they sacrificed something to the virtual persona of a friend, while their real friend is left cold and dry. This is currently the case for people subscribing to music services like Spotify or Apple Music. It is not clear how much the artists profit from the involvement of the users. With further virtualization, these channels of communication will become more opaque.<br />
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6) <i>VR will become a hate-amplifying machine.</i> </blockquote>
We are currently living in the golden age of internet shaming. Gossip is a fundamental means of human communication. In fact, our very language may have evolved as a means of social gossip. We gossip primarily about other people, especially if we perceive the others to be cheating or doing something bad. This is a human tendency that has evolved to maintain social cohesion, when we were living in small groups. But now on the internet, this has become a source of massive social witch-hunts, where a negative message is amplified by a vast social horde in a matter of seconds. People feeling self-righteous and vindicated rush in to destroy the supposed culprit for whatever perceived offense (which is often incorrectly perceived, because of the lack of context). Women and young girls, as well as sexual minorities, are typically the target of this hate-amplifying machine of social media. I dread what new types of shaming await us in VR. People have greater propensity to behave nastily in certain social conditions, which may be unwittingly recreated in the virtual world. Anonymity breeds asocial behavior. Impatience leads to frustration and anger. Stripping things out of their context and presenting them in isolated chunks lead to quick judgmental behavior. In fact, peaceful and empathic behavior is the result of slow processes in the brain, that need a long time to consolidate memories and ideas in the prefrontal cortex. Instinctive behavior is typically the result of the so-called reptilian brains, which are responsible for fight-or-flight decisions. It is easier to design a virtual world that engages the instinctive behavior patterns of people, but which ultimately leads to a hate-amplifying machine. </div>
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6)<i> VR will destroy cultural diversity.</i> </blockquote>
In nature, there is a give and take relationship between different species in an ecosystem. Different species find ecological niches to cater to specific needs and adapt to the others in their surroundings. Due to biodiversity, even if the competition in nature is intense, every plant and animal has the possibility for specialization. This creates a virtuous feedback loop, with greater biodiversity bringing even more opportunities. However, we human beings don't like biodiversity. We have been singularly responsible for the most dramatic biodiversity loss in recent ecological times. We are by far the most adaptable species on the planet, and we eat into many ecological niches that have been historically filled by other animals. Understanding this is important, because the current technological evolution through the internet is nothing but an extension of our own biological evolution. With internet and virtual reality, there is limited possibility for building cultural ecological niches. When everything becomes convertible to digital information openly tradable on the internet, network effects dictate that only few actors will remain. This will be the death for a vast number of human cultural offshoots.<br />
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7) <i>VR will create social pressures for confirmative bias. </i></blockquote>
When we humans are conscious that we are being watched, especially by people in power, our behavior changes dramatically. We not only avoid talking about unusual opinions, but also actively look to the crowd to spot patterns of majority behavior and confirm to them. This is particularly true in moments of uncertainty and crisis. With VR, the social pressures for confirmation will be far greater, as we will be watched not only for our speech but also for our body language and subconscious thoughts.<br />
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<i>8) VR will create a mistaken notion of beauty and happiness in the world. </i></blockquote>
With VR, we all have the possibility to maintain a clean persona, something that removes all of our warts and unique idiosyncrasies. Most people will use this opportunity to showcase an idealistic version of themselves. We can already see this today on Facebook and LinkedIn profiles. With virtual reality, we may have virtual humans that are impossibly good-looking and cleverer than any real person. Natural processes of aging, getting fat, or making socially inappropriate mistakes will be profiled and corrected in the virtual persona. Good friends are like mirrors to our true selves, and when we can successfully hide our true selves, we can never make any true friends.</div>
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<i>9) VR will create a pseudo-flat world where anybody can speak, but nobody will listen. </i></blockquote>
One of the greatest hopes about the internet was that it would flatten all the hierarchies of power and enable anybody with an idea to come forward and share it with the others. In reality, this flatness on the network has resulted in a rapid monopolization of user attention. Established news outlets, commercial agencies and celebrities keep getting attention, but it is still extremely hard for novices to find an audience. The social rewards on the network tend to follow a power law distribution, with a very long tail. With VR, when all the senses are controlled by technological gadgetry on an individual user specific manner, it will be even harder to have an ambient social space, where it is possible to bump into new artists and cultivate new tastes. In due time, people will stop publishing and expressing themselves creatively or emotionally. This will be particularly true for elderly people who will suffer from an even greater sense of isolation.<br />
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<i>10) VR will pit the living against the dead. </i></blockquote>
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Through VR, it is possible to reanimate dead actors and celebrities. Unlike living people, who need to support themselves physically for food and shelter, the dead have no such obligations. Consequently, the media created by dead actors and artists, which are managed by their estates, will be able to out-sell the living artists and actors. Thus, the living artists, even those who are extremely talented and who would normally fall under the 1% who succeed in a long-tail distribution, may not find any audience at all. This is extremely discouraging and most people will not even bother expressing anything. Instead, a combination of dead artists and computer programs will control the attention of people. Nothing is more horrific than living people having a relationship with dead people in VR. This is a scary thought that I had in 2003 and this spurred me to write the very first post in this blog.<br />
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<b><i>Arguments for Virtual Reality:</i></b><br />
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<i>1) VR will become an empathy machine, helping us understand the perspectives of the others. </i></blockquote>
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VR can be used to record the entire world as seen from a person's eyes, and thus, it offers the possibility to crawl into her skin and step into her shoes. This will give us an opportunity to see the world from the perspective of a child, a woman, a transgender person, a refugee etc. This will help us build a greater awareness of the terrors of famine, war and poverty. Recently, a movie shot with a panoramic camera rig inside a Syrian refugee camp has been made for the Oculus Rift. How do we ensure that such media will keep getting made and keep catching the attention of people ? I don't think it is straightforward that using VR will make us more empathic, but it definitely has a potential. <br />
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<i>2) VR has infinite space for everyone. This reduces tensions for space and ownership. </i></blockquote>
Most disputes we have in the real world are due to limited space and property. In VR, every human being can be provided with an infinite estate of space and property. This abundance will reduce the potential for conflict. But we should not be fooled into thinking that everything will be abundant. Human attention will remain scarce, so this will become a sacred resource that will be hoarded. Even if the users are not completely pulled into the virtual world, virtualization of real resources such as houses and cars can increase space. This is the principle behind the so-called sharing economy. But the current economic models of virtualization of resources, as visible in websites such as Uber and Airbnb, do not actually encourage sharing. Instead, they are a form of monopolization of resources and labour. Unless it is the users themselves who are sharing virtual resources (or virtualizations of real resources) in a peer-to-peer manner, without anybody being the middle-man and hoarding data, the benefits of increased space will not be felt. This is because, from the narrow perspective of the middle-man, scarcity is more profitable than abundance. </div>
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<i>3) VR can accommodate minority languages and cultures, alternative narratives of history. </i></blockquote>
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Human history is a series of genocides and mass extinctions. Many cultures have disappeared over the tide of time. This process of cultural extinction is ongoing, many human languages today are at the risk of extinction. This is particularly true of poor countries and traditional societies in tribal organizations. If you are a member of a minority language or group, what obligation do you have to preserve this language ? Would you not be reducing your potential opportunities by not learning the majority language and picking up the majority-approved skills for taking up a job ? These are questions that many human beings are facing today. But with VR, it is possible for us to create virtual worlds with alternative narratives of history, where everybody speaks a different language or participates in a different culture. It will be possible for individuals to check in into these virtual worlds to pick up their lost crafts and languages.<br />
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<i>4) VR can build a new powerful language to reason about the world, our past history and motivations. </i></blockquote>
When we can record our past in intimate detail, we can reason about it in a scientific manner. When we face a tough choice or decision, for example, on a large investment of money, it will be possible to systematically evaluate all the possible alternatives and tally them with our motivations. This is a tool that is currently available only to large corporations with huge data repositories. With VR, it will be possible for individual human beings to reason about their world experiences in a data-driven manner. Each human being will potentially develop his own personal language of visualization.<br />
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<i>5) VR helps connect friends and family with people at a distance or with a physical handicap. </i></blockquote>
Communication technologies have already made it possible for us to talk to distant friends and relatives. With VR, it will be possible to share personal spaces and directly be in their presence. People with a physical handicap will also find it beneficial to communicate through VR than in the real world. It will be possible to walk or move their limbs in a manner that suits to their own personal expression than how they are limited by the handicap. People with extreme handicaps such as motor-neuron diseases, can also benefit from computerized input to interact naturally in VR.<br />
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<i>6) VR can help overcome prejudice, we can take up avatars that neutralize our bias on gender, race etc.</i></blockquote>
We all suffer from a set of prejudices and biases owing to our cultural upbringing. For example, people listen to men more attentively than to women. People also have stronger bias against a woman speaking in a strong and forthcoming manner. Most often, these biases are subconscious, even if we do not admit them consciously. With VR, it will be possible to train us to overcome these biases. It will be possible to assign a common gender or race for all the participants in a virtual discussion room. Important decisions on politics, economics or ethics can be taken by separating the physical charisma of the speaker from the actual comport of his speech.<br />
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<i>7) VR can help us imagine counterfactuals, understand opportunity costs of actions, and plan large development projects.</i></blockquote>
Little children spend a lot of time making up fantasy worlds. This is now accepted in child psychology as an important process of growing up, as they construct elaborate models of alternative possibilities known as <i>counterfactuals</i>. Even after we grow up as adults, we require a strong imaginative capacity to reason about counterfactuals in order to build elaborate plans. VR will provide a powerful tool to reason about counterfactuals. For example, if we are planning a large development project, we can visualize it in VR before we commence the construction. We can undertake democratic debate where different participants design alternative possibilities of this project and finer details are discussed. It will be possible to run complex simulations of the project, understand the opportunity costs with respect to the alternatives and continuously improve the design.<br />
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<i>8) VR can help overcome deficiencies of sensory perception by modulating and amplifying input.</i></blockquote>
We are extremely limited in our sensory perception by a narrow band of visual spectrum and auditory bandwidth. We are even more limited in our sense of smell. Further, our vision is limited by opaque objects and occlusions. Most importantly, we do not see many aspects of the real world, because contextual knowledge plays a key role in how we focus our attention. With VR, we will be able to modulate sensory input, recognize important objects and activities and direct user attention to them by amplifying certain aspects of the input. For example, a doctor will be able to visualize the inner physiology of a patient. An electric technician will be able to visualize the corona around a high tension electric cable. A student of paleontology will be able to visualize an extinct species of animals while studying their bones and fossils. Further, it will be possible to combine multiple sensory inputs and translate them from one modality to another. Completely new signals that are aggregated from large data sets, such as the results of a complex physics experiment or activity on the stock market, can be directly fed into one of the sensory modalities in VR.<br />
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<i>9) VR can help us appreciate the natural world and preserve it better. </i></blockquote>
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With VR, we will be able to visualize the natural world and be in presence of magnificent animals and ecosystems. This active sense of presence is important for many people to help appreciate the wonders of the natural world and thus politically organize to better preserve them. At present, VR is limited in outdoor capture of wild ecosystems, but this is changing very rapidly. It will be possible in the future to appreciate the wonders of coral reefs or deep ocean beds, without actually setting foot on them. This will also help preserve these sensitive ecosystems from tourism.<br />
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<i>10) VR can integrate multiple human inputs into one grand social brain. </i></blockquote>
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One of the grand dreams of the internet was that it would help us integrate multiple human expertises into a grand social brain. Unfortunately, instead of bringing out the best in each of us, it has often reduced us to the least common denominator. However, this race to the bottom is not a given. It is possible that VR will help us overcome our prejudices and limitations, and accept the worthiness of the viewpoints of the others. It may even bring in a more effective democracy. It is still early days, so we can keep hoping for the best.<br />
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<b><i>Drugs, obesity and cyberspace:</i></b><br />
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There is a strong interrelated history between drugs-based counterculture and internet technologies. Many of the pioneers in computing technologies were libertarians who had strong sympathies for the use of drugs. In fact, many of them were inspired by the mind expanding visions offered by psychadelic drugs. Some of these drugs offered the possibility to closely inspect mental processes, and thus push computing technologies towards an expansion of ordinary mental capacities. When people repeatedly use their computers or internet services, they do not understand that they are actively changing their brains. But this is what they are doing. Jaron Lanier has thought of virtual reality as a <i>"possibility for exploring alternative states of consciousness"</i>, such as what traditional shamans do while they enter the bodies of eagles or jaguars in their dreams. Lanier felt that western culture has become too rationalistic and lost a key opportunity for imagining alternative states of being, which is what virtual reality may have to offer. </div>
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Unfortunately, when computing pioneers start developing their technologies, they will have unrealistically high expectations of the common users. Even in the height of the drugs craze in the 1970s, many people did not take psychadelics like LSD. They may offer opportunities for mental introspection and expansion, but most people are scared by the powerful hallucinations. Instead, most people want to take simple and addictive drugs that make them feel good. Psychedelics like LSD are not addictive, where as tobacco, alcohol (or heroin or cocaine) are highly addictive. Most people forget that sugar is also a drug and that excessive sugar consumption is highly addictive. The market ultimately trains the people to get hooked onto these simple drugs like sugar and alcohol, because the resultant behavioral patterns of users are predictable. In essence, people become converted into pigs in a feeding lot, mindlessly consuming whatever the market dumps in front of them. A global epidemic of obesity is now raging due to this massive mismanagement of these economic imperatives. </div>
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<b><i>My engagement with internet services today: </i></b></div>
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With digital technologies and virtual reality, we are facing a similar situation as in the food market. Large monopolies on the internet, such as Google or Facebook, like us to be pigs consuming information, getting hooked on the dopamine rush of sugar-like elements, such as social acknowledgement or instant gratification. So we are potentially sleepwalking into a nightmare of virtual reality, instead of a possible paradise. What can we do ? Personally, I am training myself not to get hooked on social networks like Facebook. I will never offer social acknowledgement (likes or positive comments) when my friends are sharing personal moments on Facebook, as I do not want to be complicit in them getting hooked to such services. I do not offer a public comment to anybody on Facebook unless it is something I believe to be an unusual or rather controversial opinion. On Twitter, I have a different strategy, which is to avoid participating in witch-hunts. I try there to never say a negative word or message on any person. I find managing Google services to be the hardest. I still haven't figured out a strategy for this, apart from trying to hide some of my data in places where Google cannot reach yet. The same is true for any other big company almost working like a monopoly: Amazon (e-commerce), Apple (smartphones) etc. It is better to encourage smaller alternative companies, even though their business model is exactly the same. I try to encourage local producers and companies, closer to the geographic area where I am staying, because this also makes political engagement possible. But these are all short-term strategies. In the long term, we need to find a more sustainable model for humanistic digital services, on a global level. </div>
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<b><i>Love and slavery:</i></b><br />
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There is a great passage in the novel <i>'Beloved'</i> by Toni Morrison. The male character Paul D, who used to be a slave, ruminates over the nature of love.<br />
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So you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own; lay down with head twisted in order to see the loved one over the rim of the trench before you slept. Stole shy glances at her between the trees at chain-up. Glass blades, salamanders, spiders, woodpeckers, beetles, a kingdom of ants. Anything bigger wouldn't do. A woman, a child, a brother - a big love like that would split you wide open in Alfred, Georgia. ....</i></blockquote>
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<i>For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love. The best thing, he knew, was to love just a little bit; everything, just a little bit, so when they broke its back or shoved it into a croaker sack, well, may be you'd have a little love left for the next one. </i></blockquote>
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These are heart-breaking passages, and the novelist really captures the essence of slavery in this abject giving up on love. But in the very same novel, the female character Sethe says. </div>
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<i>Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all. </i></blockquote>
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I think digital slavery through virtual reality is not as terrible as physical slavery. But if we build a tyrannical virtual world, its effects on the human imagination will be equally dismal. Essentially, what we are shaping today are the loves and dreams of future generations. </div>
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<i><b>Language and slavery: </b></i></div>
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When I look at the positives and negative aspects of virtual reality, one common issue stands out - the agency of human users to navigate virtual worlds and create virtual worlds by themselves. At present, virtual worlds (and computing services in general) are opaque to most users. We humans are used to the communication medium of language, which gives us ample opportunities to express ourselves. Even novice speakers can express basic emotions through language, while expert speakers can formulate long and precise arguments. Most people are not aware of it, but language also binds us in chains, preventing the easy germination of certain thoughts and ideas. This is why speaking multiple languages becomes a key cognitive skill that helps us understand the limits of linguistic expression. <br />
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With virtual reality, we need a mode of interaction that is similar to language. We are currently far from this, but developing such a language was the original goal of personal computing pioneer Alan Kay. He was instrumental in developing the object oriented language paradigm through Smalltalk, which he hoped would be accessible to young children in schools. Building a framework of computational thinking by virtual reality will be a new medium of human communication. When today's children grow up speaking in such a medium, they will have greater thoughts and dreams than we can even imagine. If we build it right, it will become a powerful tool for human expression. If not, it will be an instrument of human slavery. Children who grow up being used to virtual slavery will accept real world tyranny. This is something we should protect them from. The key developer of Smalltalk, Dan Ingalls, has a precious quote about the nature of computing languages.<br />
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<i>An operating system is the collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one. </i></blockquote>
In fact, with virtual reality, we are currently building tyrannical operating systems, but extremely poor languages for user expression. This needs to be reversed, until we gradually eliminate the operating system itself. <br />
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I would like to leave the readers with the art work of Alex Grey, known as <i>"Net of being"</i>. Here, the artist is expressing the subconscious mental state of our society, the dreamer Vishnu, in whom all our internal mental states are connected in an interwoven manner. We need to realize this common consciousness, which is the only way to fix our society's problems. Art and virtual reality are a means towards that end.<br />
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Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-14553394092939361692015-07-28T16:02:00.001-07:002015-08-13T07:56:39.987-07:00Octopus and the bicycle <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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In the <i>"Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy"</i>, there is a spaceship known as the <i>"Heart of Gold"</i>, which is run by a hypothetical physical law known as the <i>"infinite improbability drive"</i>. It keeps appearing randomly at the most improbable place in the universe, to pick up some negative entropy in order to drive through the vast reaches of space. This spaceship is probably the best analogy for describing the early days of the internet. It has been just a few years ago, but many people have forgotten the exhilarating thrill of those early days. Within a few keystrokes and mouse-clicks, you could go to strange places into the far reaches of the human imagination, meet with strangers and learn dramatically new things. Most websites in those days had awful designs, but there was a human being behind each one of them, putting personal time and effort into presenting new and original ideas to the world.<br />
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In the years that followed, the internet has increasingly become alienated from this human experience. In the beginning, people used many alternative protocols to navigate the internet. But very quickly, the internet has reduced to mean only one thing - the "HTTP" protocol used to navigate the world wide web (WWW). Within a few years, this reduced even further to just a handful of websites - Google, Facebook, Twitter etc., that most people spend their online time on. Each person lives now in a manicured data bubble that is managed by large companies and governments. This shrinking of the scope of what the internet means has happened simultaneously with the increasing realization of the loss of privacy and human agency in using the internet. Instead of enabling us to meet new people and ideas, the internet has become a prison where we can only hope to meet computer programs that either want to sell things to us or to spy on us. The human has been banished from the internet, and wherever present, he is reduced to a byte-sized computerized doppelgänger of himself. Human communication degenerated into trivial status updates and tweets, as the audience for a long and deep conversation has disappeared on the internet.<br />
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I belong to the last generation of people who experienced computers before they experienced the internet. In this sense, I belong to a minority of people who have a living memory from before the technology was locked in. Just like human beings, large computer systems also have a childhood. Preserving those early memories of childhood is essential to remind ourselves of the dreams and alternate possibilities that existed. Much too often as we age, we get stuck in a rigid habit and lose track of our deeper desires. Douglas Adams, the writer who dreamed of the spaceship with infinite improbability drive, also made a documentary called <i>"Hyperland"</i> about the upcoming future of the internet. When seen today, this documentary shows some fascinating glimpses into those lost possibilities.<br />
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We lack the right metaphors and symbols to express what we have lost over these years. I would like to present two metaphors in this blog - <i>the octopus</i> and <i>the bicycle</i>, that express two sides of any large computer system, including the internet. I hope these metaphors will give a deeper and more personal understanding, such that we may build a better future for the internet.<br />
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<b>The legend of the bicycle</b><br />
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<i>"What a computer is to me, it is the most remarkable tool we have come up with. It is the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds." - Steve Jobs</i><br />
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It may seem shocking to us now, but computers were never supposed to be personal tools of human beings. Ever since their very conception by Alan Turing (even earlier by Charles Babbage), they were supposed to be centralized systems to organize mathematical thought. Nobody understood why you needed to have a <i>"personal computer"</i>, as opposed to simply sharing computational resources for whatever you needed to do. In fact, this is exactly what our society is evolving into now, through the paradigm of cloud computing. When we trust large organizations and their computers to take care of our personal information and needs, whether they be Amazon, Microsoft, Facebook or Google, we are acquiescing to the paradigm that we humans do not need personal computers. This was exactly what the pioneers of computer science believed. So what happened in the 1970s and 80s requires some explanation. This personal computing revolution, as visible to the public through Apple and Microsoft computers and software, was a strange anomaly that needs to be explained. This is where we need the metaphor of the bicycle.<br />
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In the Swiss town of Basel in April 19, 1943, a chemist named Albert Hoffman had experimented on himself with a small dose of a synthesized chemical that had profound effects on his mental state. He experienced intense hallucinations and requested to be escorted back home. Since there were no motor vehicles available, he rode his own bicycle, taking a trip that was simultaneously physical and metaphysical. That chemical was LSD. In the later years, it profoundly impacted research into psychology, apart from influencing pop culture at large. Hoffman's bicycle trip is commemorated to this day as <i>"bicycle day"</i> by psychedelic enthusiasts.<br />
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But before LSD was discovered by the counter-culture, it was being used in scientific laboratory experiments on volunteers. One of the first set of experiments were done in the San Francisco bay area, on a set of physicists and computer engineers. The altered mental states offered by psychedelics were considered an indication of the vast potential for the augmentation of mind, as being investigated by computer engineers. This specific mind augmentation project was the brain child of Doug Engelbart at Stanford Research Institute (SRI), who had a singular vision of humans working in tandem with computers. His contemporaries were thinking of computers merely as tools for automating the thinking process, thereby solving mathematical problems in symbolic logic. The common metaphor used was the mechanical clock. But Engelbart had a different vision, he saw the computer as a vehicle that could be used to transport the human mind and to connect with other humans. His vision was so extraordinary that he had a tough time explaining this to his peers and very few people got it. The psychedelic experience had been crucial for many of those people to grasp this vision. The intense personal nature of this experience also proved that any computer-based augmentation needed to be also personal. One of the engineers who grasped this first was Alan Kay. He used the metaphor of the bicycle to refer to a <i>personal computer</i>, a personal vehicle for the augmentation of mind.<br />
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By the early 1970s, an environmental movement has also germinated in the bay area. An influential event was the publication of the Whole Earth Catalog, showing the picture of the earth as taken from space. Riding a bicycle was also a matter of showing environmental commitment. Alan Kay never drove a car and became part of this bicycling community in Palo Alto. He persisted in his vision that computers need to be direct personal extensions of human intellect, as easy to learn as it is for a kid to ride a bicycle, thereby becoming a new medium of expression as Marshall McLuhan formulated. It was extremely hard to communicate this vision in an era of massive mainframe computers. What both Engelbart and Kay had on their side was a remarkable revolution of miniaturization of electronic integrated circuits, known as Moore's Law. Gordon Moore of Intel popularized the notion that electronic chips were shrinking rapidly and at an exponential rate, meaning that computation would be far cheaper in the future. Engelbart realized this trend far earlier and shaped his entire research agenda keeping faith in this future. The quintessential turning point came when he presented the technologies being developed by himself and colleagues in December 9, 1968. Recognized later as the <i>"mother of all demos"</i>, this presentation showed all the main applications of personal computers and the internet - text editing, video conference, graphical user interfaces, windows etc. But this system also had a lot more possibilities which were later lost in the future due to technology lock-in. Alan Kay was in the audience during this demo and this profoundly impacted him.<br />
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Kay later joined the Xerox Parc research center and founded the Learning Research Group, where he hired some of the best engineers from Engelbart's team. He had a unique vision in personalized computing through a very high level language, resembling human communication of ideas. He wanted this programming to be so simple that little kids can do this without much training. This vision gave birth to object oriented programming and personalized windows on a computer screen. Due to strict business practices and lack of imagination, Xerox had been unable to profit from this work.<br />
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However, the cascade of social revolutions in 1970s that were unleashed by psychedelic drugs, anti-war movement and environmental concern (all merging into the hippy youth movement) has also produced a popular computing enthusiast movement. This was centralized around the Homebrew Computer Club, which explicitly distanced itself from large power structures like universities and big companies. This club was founded by an idealist named Fred Moore, who wanted a people's computer that could be used by individuals to organize themselves and to plan against powerful adversaries. Many hobbyists have learnt their basic tricks from this club and they all wanted to build personal computers, that they personally and exclusively controlled. Many companies have sprung from this vortex of popular enthusiasm, but the most successful of them was Apple. Ultimately, Apple would grow up to be the heir of the innovations from Xerox Parc and SRI, hiring most of those engineers, including Kay. This was where Steve Jobs got his bicycle metaphor from. This story of the high dreams from the 1960s and 70s, that so influenced our society later, is brilliantly recounted in John Markoff's book <i>"What the dormouse said"</i>.<br />
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In retrospect, a bicycle is a very unusual analogy for a computer. Unlike cars and trains, it is used mostly by one person exclusively. It is also friendly to the environment, leaving no toxic residues. It is a tool that encourages social mobility. Historically, many men and women gained social and financial independence in the early 1900s, when bicycles were introduced. Many people, especially women, had to fight and overcome social barriers for using bicycles. By using bicycle as a metaphor, a computer was symbolizing all these positives as a human tool for individual empowerment. This vision was a gift from the social and political consciousness of the 1960s and 70s. But this was a very unusual perspective of looking at computers. It would not be valid for very long, especially after the rise of the internet.<br />
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<b>The legend of the octopus</b><br />
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<i>“The first thing you need to know about Goldman Sachs is that it's everywhere. The world's most powerful investment bank is a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money” - Matt Taibbi </i></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">An octopus is probably the closest thing to an alien being that a human can imagine. Many seafaring cultures have imagined a giant squid or octopus as a vicious monster lurking beneath the seas and attacking sailors. In Norse legend, Kraken is a gigantic sea monster that overturns ships. The French science fiction pioneer Jules Verne used an army of giant squids as a plot device in his novel </span><i style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">"Twenty thousand leagues under the sea"</i><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">. where they attack the submarine of Nemo. H. G. Wells imagined an invasion of earth by octopus-like Martian beings. This subsequently inspired the popular arcade game <i>"Space Invaders"</i>. In an episode of the cartoon <i>"Futurama"</i>, a giant space squid called Yivo docks it horny tentacles onto every inhabitant on earth, in a thinly veiled criticism of organized religion. Perhaps most memorably, H.P. Lovecraft referred to an octopus-faced alien monster in his story </span><i style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">"Call of the Cthulhu"</i><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">. This giant monster lies dreaming underneath the ocean, reaching into the subconscious of the humans who fall prey to its evil thoughts in the dark recesses of their minds. While waiting for the return of Cthulhu, these humans do its bidding by spreading a cult-like religion with murderous practices. </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">What is it that gives us major creeps about the octopus ? Is it its suction cups and sensory organs all over its body ? Is it its uncanny craggy camouflage ? Is it its slimy soft body that wiggles through nooks and crannies ? Or is it its tentacles ? I think it is the tentacles. </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">Political cartoons have long used the octopus and its tentacles to refer to a huge organization with unwieldy power on many areas - railroad companies, oil corporations, British empire, Soviet Union, and more recently, the secret service and financial conglomerates like the Goldman Sachs. The NSA has preemptively cast itself as an octopus wrapping its tentacles over the globe, in a promotional logo for a spy satellite. This is a classic tactic for preventing an opponent from shaming oneself, by declaring the shameful act as downright obvious and natural. This is a tactic for desensitizing our vocabulary, but can it unsettle a visceral metaphor rooted deep in our fears ? May be not. The giant octopus and its tentacles will remain a symbol for power that greedily wishes to penetrate every activity, that threatens the very earth and all humanity. The story of today is that large computer systems are resurrecting this octopus of our fears. I think the analogy with the cult of the Cthulhu is not too far off. </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">In earlier days, the computation required to resurrect this octopus was performed on accounting notebooks and ledgers. Vast monopolies like railroads or empires were built on the basis of precisely modeling the needs of a society and staving off all competition to cater to these needs. One of the earliest examples of using electronic computers to do the same business is Walmart, which successfully outcompeted all retailers out of the US consumer market by precisely modeling the needs of the consumers. But the person to completely realize the power of algorithms in modeling and thus commanding the market is a Hungarian programmer known as Thomas Peterffy. He founded the field of algorithmic trading on the New York stock market. When it was once temporarily outlawed for computers to bid on the stock market, he created a robotic contraption of a mechanical hand that looked at numbers on the display screen and punched in the right keystrokes to make the bids. He is now a multi-billionaire. </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">The vast majority of economic transactions today are conducted through such algorithmic trading. Behind the interface of economic transactions, there are vast models of computation that predict how people are making economic decisions. If we consider the computational models to be a giant octopus, its tentacles are probing into every single human being. Just as in a living octopus, these tentacles are hungry for sensory input, spreading their suction cups on every sphere of economic activity. Spying organizations like the NSA similarly nurture another and even larger computational octopus, building a global infrastructure to feed its hunger for data. In the civilian sphere, computer companies like Google and Facebook create their own computational octopuses, which dock their trillion hungry tentacles on every human being and suck up every bit of data that floats by in their vicinity. The rules of the game for economic success of software companies have changed dramatically. The bigger the computational octopus, the greater the economic reward. It has become immaterial and irrelevant to care for the human experience and added value brought in by software, beyond merely using these as baits to hook up human users to the tentacles. </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">The futurist and writer Jaron Lanier calls these computers as <i>"Siren Servers", </i>which he warns will destroy, </span><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">over the course of time,</span><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;"> the very market they model to the minutest detail</span><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">. Lanier doesn't believe that this will be in the interest of the Siren Servers or the organizations they serve. I think he is wrong in making this conclusion. His error is that he believes that there can be multiple Siren Servers, each modeling activity in its own domain. But I believe there is only one single octopus - one single Cthulhu that whispers into the greedy subconscious of multiple organizations. In the end, they all want to resurrect this octopus and usher its rule on the planet. Each one of them believes that they are the sole master of this octopus, but they are utterly and hopelessly wrong. </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">Lanier acknowledges that there is a race between the octopuses (my term, he calls them <i>Siren Servers</i>) to out-meta each other. Each of these octopuses wants to have the most over-reaching definition of action on this planet and suck up as much data as possible to model everything. Essentially, the octopus that can subsume a smaller octopus will eat it and confiscate its tentacles. This is literally how mergers between software companies happen nowadays. The entire software architecture is discarded and the list of users is confiscated. In other words, the tentacles are immortal and they keep coalescing together. The cult of Cthulhu is now the predominant religion in Silicon valley, where venture capitalists incite young entrepreneurs to hoard users and hook them up with tentacles, with no end game in sight except to sell all this data and users to a gogoolpus like Google or Facebook. </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;"><b>Can you out-compute the octopus ? </b></span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">If we had a time-machine and went back to the Silicon valley of the 1970s, engulfed in all the political tumult and socio-environmental consciousness, it would indeed look like a very strange place. The computer engineers of that day would be outraged to learn where we have ended up. Instead of computers helping individual users to outwit the larger power structures, they have unleashed a consummate spying nightmare. Most of those engineers had participated in the Vietnam war protests, and they would have been shocked to learn that our society has accepted this state of affairs as normal, with almost zero political activism. But after the initial shock of anger and despair, they would also realize how hopeless our situation today is as compared to them. </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">In our day, it is futile to even hope to out-compute the octopus. In every quantifiable aspect, the octopus will win. The question for an idealistic start up today would be</span><i style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;"> "What can you do that Google cannot do more efficiently ?"</i><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">. The answer is nothing, or close to nothing. Resistance is futile, join the Borg. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;"><br /></span>
<span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">But there is a catch. The octopus needs to have access to data. If you are able to withhold this data and run the computation yourself, your bicycle will outrun the octopus. It is very tempting to believe that you can build an octopus and ride it yourself. But most certainly, it will be the octopus that rides you and not the other way round. This brings us to a catch. Is there any way to slay the octopus at all, if we cannot grow a powerful adversary to counter it ? </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;"><b>Ride your bicycle to meet your friends</b></span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;"><br /></span>
<span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">The greatest gift of human life is the ability to make friendships. It is essential that we do not lose this human essence as we migrate to the cyberspace. It is inevitable that more and more of our daily lives will be conducted online. More sensors will be capturing data about ourselves, from our own homes and within our own bodies, often without our knowledge. It is tempting to believe that this sensory data captured from us is the sum-total of our human existence. It is even more tempting to believe that this is the sum-total of other people. But this is wrong. </span></span><br />
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<span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">It is an illusion to believe we shall have a complete model of our personalities. Acknowledging this honestly will naturally cultivate humility in us. That is the first step towards meeting other human beings on their own terms, and thus building true friendships. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #282828;"><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;"><br /></span></span>
<span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">We should not force people to do this offline. It had been true in the past that we could log off from the internet and meet friends in the physical world. But this will be increasingly difficult to do in the future. Most people are unaware that they are perpetually logged onto their social networks, personal messengers and email clients. Thus, it is essential that we develop a culture where we meet people in the cyberspace and cultivate deep friendships in this process. </span></span><br />
<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;"><br /></span>
<span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">How do we do this ? I think we should go back to the dreams of the pioneers and bring back the metaphor of the bicycle. We should be unafraid of riding our rickety bicycles into the cyberspace and meeting friends. We meet other people on their own terms and on their own bicycles. We need to build a culture of sharing bicycles and helping each other with them, without imposing a common design and a common aggregation of data. Otherwise, the bicycle will be just a tentacle of the Octopus. It is possible that large software companies like Google, Facebook, Apple or Microsoft will also realize this before it is too late. At their very core, the engineers who work for these large corporations are also human beings, and they cannot deny their fundamental humanity. Most of these engineers, knowingly or otherwise, are inspired by the metaphor of the bicycle, to build a better human experience for everyone. </span><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">If we build a culture of individual expression of human experience, where the software serves as an individualized tool, we may defeat the octopus using an army of bicycles. </span></span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">PS: This post is dedicated to the memory of Doug Engelbart. </span></span><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">The</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;"> image is an art work of Alan Maia. </span></span><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;">You</span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="line-height: 20.719999313354492px;"> can buy a T-shirt of this art <a href="https://www.threadless.com/designs/octopus-bike" target="_blank">here</a>. </span></span></i>
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Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-21708505492892707312015-07-17T05:07:00.001-07:002015-07-17T05:17:30.881-07:00What is DMT doing in our brains ? It may be helping us keep time. <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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DMT stands for N,N-Dimethyltryptamine. As far as organic chemicals go, it is a fairly simple compound. It can be synthesized very easily and indeed is produced within many plants and animals. It is also a highly potent psychedelic.<br />
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It is one of the key ingredients in the hallucinogenic brews of South America e.g, Ayahuasca of Brazil. We have limited scientific evidence of its effects on the human brain. All this research has been banned because politicians got terribly scared of psychadelic drugs. Thank you, Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary, you have succeeded in making politicians shit in their pants. There's no world peace anywhere around the corner, thank you very much. <i>"Turn on, Tune in, Drop out"</i>. Crap. Due to the heroic efforts of hippies and their political antagonists, we have banned relatively harmless drugs like LSD and DMT, while allowing dangerously psychoactive and addictive drugs like alcohol. Funny times this.<br />
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If you want to read some entertaining popular accounts of what happens when DMT is ingested, go to <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/dmt-you-cannot-imagine-a-stranger-drug-or-a-stranger-experience-365" target="_blank">this article on the Vice Magazine</a>. Generally, people report seeing little men or elves, or self-bouncing basketballs.<br />
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Anyway, thankfully some research has picked up now on the effect of psychadelic drugs on the brain. It seems that LSD has therapeutic effects in getting people rid of their drug addictions or alcohol abuse. Here is a<a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/lsd-may-cure-some-addicts/" target="_blank"> popular science article by the Scientific American</a> explaining this. It is ridiculous that by banning LSD, we have arrested the development of a potential cure and condemned decades of men and women to drug addictions.<br />
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LSD got into our public consciousness earlier, but it is a rather unusual compound. But, DMT is a far simpler compound and omnipresent in many biological organisms. It is internally synthesized within our own brains. What is a highly potent psychadelic drug doing in our own brains, during day-to-day activities ?<br />
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At present, we have nothing but wild theories. Isn't it a shame? One of the recent scientific experiments on the effects of DMT is done by one Rick Strassman, who investigated its relation to "near-death experiments". The narratives of people who went through near death experiments are similar to people who took DMT. Ergo, DMT proves that post-death conscious experience exists, says Rick Strassman. He opines that DMT prepares our brain to bridge from conscious experience in this life to a post-death conscious experience. This is one such new age claptrap that is eagerly picked up by the bead-spinning, organic food buying populace.<br />
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I came across an <a href="http://www.littleatoms.com/science/psychedelic-drug-could-explain-our-belief-life-after-death?hubRefSrc=twitter#lf-content=137821766:347738337" target="_blank">interesting interview on Little Atoms from the British scientist David Luke</a>. He gives a brief overview of DMT and scientific studies related to it. DMT is found in rather large quantities in our cerebral spinal fluid. It is thought to be produced in the lungs, in the eyes, or in the pineal glands. Nobody knows where !? It is pretty silly that we are still speculating about such issues in our age of fMRI machines.<br />
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I think that the psychadelic experiences of DMT are quite entertaining, but they are very much a distraction. There has to be a mundane simple reason why DMT is used in the brain. What is it ?<br />
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My bet is that DMT is connected to the internal brain processes for keeping time. There are several internal biological clocks in our body that keep different types of circadian rhythms. Keeping time is essential to doing anything in this world, because we need to estimate velocity of objects as they move. Whether we try to bite into our food or try to escape predators, it is crucial that we keep time accurately and monitor the speed in which things are moving. The interesting thing is that we have not one clock, but multiple clocks that are related to the temporal resolution of events. Some of these clocks are accessible to conscious processes, whereas some are subconscious.<br />
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It is known that brain has at least two biological clocks. <a href="http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/your-brain-has-two-clocks/" target="_blank">There is a scientific american article that explains this</a>. One is in the Striatum and the other is in the hippocampus. The former keeps track of short durations of time, whereas the latter is responsible for longer durations. Hippocampus is also fundamental to the formation of long-term memory in the brain, as well as to our spatial orientation. It is known that as we animals evolved, we have expanded on our spatial memory capabilities to store more abstract concepts. As humans, we have highly evolved cognitive processes. Our cortical regions help us to prepare and monitor complex plans of how to do things and achieve goals in the world. In order to the execution of any of these plans, keeping time accurately is essential. The brain does this by monitoring internal physiological processes, like heart beating, blood running into the valves, respiration in the lungs etc. By keeping count of these processes and cross-checking between them, the brain knows how much time has passed.<br />
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My hypothesis is that DMT is a neurotransmitter that helps in effective monitoring of these physiological processes. These internal processes can be made into more complex models, for example, as programs running within the brain. These processes can keep track of small sensory-motor loops such as walking, talking etc. It is possible that DMT enables better signaling between these processes and thus helps bring out a global estimate of time in the brain.<br />
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Now what happens if a normal person is injected with a high dose of DMT ? This will doubtless cause a heightened awareness of these internal processes. To the conscious brain, this might be manifested as little men, elves, or (not so surprisingly) as self-bouncing basket balls.<br />
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To prove or disprove this hypothesis is a fascinating scientific experiment. I hope these questions will be resolved soon as they will help us better understand neurodegenerative diseases and help improve human cognitive abilities. I hope politicians will not destroy this research this time !<br />
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<i>PS: By the way, while we are on the new age circuit, we may talk about the variety of associations for the pineal gland in Hindu mythography. It is associated with the Ajna chakra in Yoga. It is also associated with Shiva, who is responsible for keeping time in the universe. </i><br />
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Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-83350941186146643122015-05-25T11:25:00.002-07:002015-05-27T14:46:57.404-07:00Growing old in the age of machine learning<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i><b>One of these two people will never get old </b></i></div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>"I customarily killed old women. I used to kill my aunts [classificatory aunts] when they were still moving [alive]. ... I would step on them, then they all died, there by the big river. ... I didn't use to wait until they were completely dead to bury them. When they were still moving, I would break them [their backs or necks]. .. I wouldn't care for old women; all by myself, I would stick them [with his bow]"</i></blockquote>
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I found this chilling testimony in the book <i>"The World until Yesterday"</i> by Jared Diamond, in the chapter <i>"The treatment of old people: cherish, abandon or kill ?"</i>.This a testimony from an Aché Indian man, given to anthropologists Kim Hill and A. Magdalena Hurtado.<br />
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The Aché are a nomadic people subsisting on wild forest resources. Amongst several such nomadic tribes, encouraged suicide or even ritualized murder of old people has been noted by anthropologists. This might horrify us. But as I was reading this book, I was left wondering if our modern society is any better. This is because specific cultural traits that characterize nomadic societies are increasingly getting common in our current modern society and these changes are being amplified by technology. These include unsteady systems of production, seasonal downturns from economic surplus to starvation, fierce competition for territory, and limited use of experience that comes with old age. The underlying catch-phrase to denote these changes is "<i>technological disruption</i>". But its practical effect is that our economies are resembling more those of nomadic societies than those of steady systems of production, such as based on agriculture. So with increased automation and robotization of society, will we humans be trampled as useless old people by robots ? Or will it be some fellow humans, equipped with new technologies, that trample on the rest of humans as futile competition ?<br />
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There is currently a scare in popular media about artificial intelligence (AI) and how that threatens our future as humans. I will present more discussion on this below. These scare stories about AI are nothing new and enter our popular culture in periodic waves. However, this time, there is something quite dramatic happening in many applied areas of information sciences as computing power and storage capacities of machines have crossed a threshold. As a computer scientist, I enjoy the success of this research and have the palpable sense of big changes coming. But as a regular person on the street, I believe this important discussion is distorted into extreme caricatures.<br />
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Philosophers and pundits see intelligent machines as something akin to God, with immense power to do good or bad. A more sensible view would be to consider them as artificial life forms, subject to Darwinian laws of natural selection and adaptation. Whether we can share a common environment of successful coexistence with these intelligent machines is a question that is best answered by experts in ecological biology, not philosophy. Just as there are many kinds of living organisms, there are many kinds of intelligent machines. Some are designed explicitly to alleviate the physical and mental handicaps of people. For example, new sensors and camera systems are being developed that can help the blind and partially sighted people to perceive the world. New bionic devices can help the physically handicapped people to move autonomously. But other intelligent machines and software systems (connected to the "cloud" data servers on the internet) have different objectives, not necessarily aligned to human betterment. Their intelligence is also very context-specific, suited to various ecological niches in our market economy. In light of all these aspects, we need to adopt a <i>biological / ecological </i>mindset<i> </i>when thinking about machine intelligence.<br />
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More specifically, experts in human anthropology have studied a wide range of human societies on how they cope with respect to different environmental conditions and competition. I find it unfortunate that we don't tap into their expertise to the problem of how human societies will adapt to increased automation. It is obvious that this process affects different people in different ways. It can be argued that old people will be affected in a very different manner to young people. In this aspect, it is interesting to observe how the treatment of old people varies across different societies.<br />
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In one extreme, we have nomadic tribal societies like the Aché. Other examples of nomadic tribes murdering old people include the Kaulong people of New Britain, the Chukchi people of Arctic Russia, and the inhabitants of the Banks Islands in the South Pacific. In many other nomadic tribes, old people are abandoned when the tribe shifts camp. These examples include the Lapps of northern Scandinavia, the San of the Kalahari desert, the Omaha and Kutenai Indians of North America, as well as the Aché Indians mentioned earlier. A more benign way of killing old people, practiced by far more human societies, is ignoring them i.e, letting them to starve, to wander off or to die under neglect. This is reported among the Inuit of the Arctic, the Hopi of the North American deserts, the Witoto of tropical South America, and the Aboriginal Australians.<br />
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Indeed, old people are of little value in nomadic tribes subsisting on seasonal produce. These societies also have little resources to spare to take care of them. The situation only changes when the tribes become sedentary, produce agricultural surplus, and have place for new occupations where the old people become an asset with their long life experiences, instead of being a liability due to their reduced mobility and foraging skills.<br />
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In well-established societies where the old people's lives are no longer at risk, an opposite tendency evolves, where property rights become concentrated in old people. For example, in the Confucian Chinese, southern Italians, and Mexican households, all the economic authority is vested in the "patriarch", who is the family's oldest living male. In ancient Greece, old people were effective rulers of the society in a gerontocracy. Not only the choicest land property, but also the fertile young women become the property of these old men. As women become mortgaged into relationships with men of much older age, they no longer have the opportunities to develop their intellectual faculties and engage as equals in a society. Instead, they get shunted into a purdah and become mere objects of family honor. Young men and boys become the junior partners in a relationship with older men, which often also turns into sexual subjugation. These social phenomena have been observed in a multitude of societies - Greece in the classical period, the middle east in the middle ages etc.<br />
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Thus, we see that there are two extremes with respect to how old people are treated by human societies. This is still a crude one-dimensional approximation. Importantly, the treatment of old men and old women differ in considerable ways. But it is still illuminating to pose the question as to which direction our modern society is evolving.<br />
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When we think of old age, we typically think of physical deterioration - the wrinkles on the face, the weakening muscles, or the graying hair. But more than this, we share a deeper dread about old age, that we will become irrelevant to the society. It is this feeling of isolation that makes old age unbearable and kills people. Susan Pinker, in her book <i>"Village effect"</i>, studied village societies in Sardinia where old men and women have long and fulfilling lives with complete social engagement in their neighborhoods. She argues that this social engagement is missing in North American societies, as people have become more mobile and do not have friends and family in the same city they live in. I think the social malaise is deeper, as our modern societies are increasingly resembling nomadic societies, instead of settled village societies. It is in this sense that we need to approach how automation affects the process of us humans growing old: Will it accelerate us towards it or will it completely liberate us from it and achieve immortality ?<br />
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At the outset, the second premise may sound even nonsensical to a novice reader. But there is a belief amongst technological optimists - Ray Kurzweil being the most famous exponent, about the <i>singularity</i>, which is a point in the near future when machines become more intelligent than humans. Singularity optimists believe that humans will merge with machines - nanobots cleansing our bodily organs, brains wired up to the internet, cell and gene rejuvenation by software updates etc. They hope that this will translate into vastly improved health and opportunities, a hope expressed most vividly by Peter Diamandis in his book<i> "Abundance"</i>. This hope of technological hybridization extends even to immortality as the architecture of the brain is uploaded to the cloud.<br />
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I look at this tribe of technological optimists as the followers of any other religion, framing their beliefs as a matter of faith. In reality, there is not much evidence to show for a technological rapture moment. But the elite of the software industry take this seriously. Google is closely involved with the Singularity university of Kurzweil. Just as there are singularity optimists, there are singularity pessimists. Bill Joy, co-creator of the Java programming language, wrote an influential essay in 2000 titled <i>"Why the future doesn't need us?"</i>. Philosophers such as Nick Bostrom worry about "<i>existential risk</i>", where super-human intelligence might annihilate 100% of humanity. This is taken seriously by the likes of Elon Musk. Nick Bostrom gives an analogy about chimpanzees, who are genetically very close to humans, but who depend completely on the grace of humans for their survival. So he argues, the survival of us humans will be at the grace of super-human machines. However, in order to do great harm, machines need not be "intelligent", "conscious", or even "malevolent". A rogue AI with all the intelligence of a flu virus can do great harm. This may cause collapse of economies or even the death of vast numbers of humans. But this does not qualify as "existential risk", as at least a small percentage of humans and human institutions will still be alive and functional. To compare, even climate change, one of the most severe threats facing us humans, is also not an existential risk. In contrast, a super-human AI is considered capable of destroying 100% of humanity. A comparable risk is an asteroid impact that destroys our inhabitable earth. Why are the elite of the software industry, like Elon Musk, fixated on such existential risks ? <br />
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If I want to be uncharitable, I can say that it is because it is a risk that concerns them personally. Even if 99% of the humanity gets destroyed, the elite of the industry will most likely survive. But existential risks like a hypothetical super-human AI are a different story. But I don't think it is a conscious bias. It may simply be due to the lack of a compelling alternative narrative on the risks of machine intelligence.<br />
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In fact, even short term trends about automation in the current age don't look distinctly beneficial to humans. One of the most vocal authors on the debilitating effects of automation on our economies is Martin Ford, whose new book <i>"The rise of the robots"</i> argues how intelligent machines may be shrinking our economies and raising unemployment to obscene levels.<br />
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While discussing about optimists such as Kurzweil and Diamandis, Martin Ford <span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">says,</span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: inherit;"> "<span style="color: #222222;">In general, technology optimists tend to underestimate the impact inequality. </span><span style="color: #222222;">They don't think enough about what this means for 90% of the people. </span><span style="color: #222222;">Of course, these are extra-ordinary people. Ray Kurzweil probably does not hang out with average typical people. He is living in an elitist tower."</span></span></i></blockquote>
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Ford argues for a guaranteed minimum income for all humans. This may be an improvement, but a minimal income may not necessarily mean an opportunity to rise up. A cautionary tale is what befell aboriginal peoples when they were put into reservations by colonialist powers. With their traditional ways of life destroyed and without any hope for future, most of these aboriginal people succumbed to alcoholism and other addictions. It is quite possible that such a predicament may befall a vast majority of the human race. <span style="color: #222222;">Here is another testimony from Jared Diamond himself, from his earlier book <i>"Guns, Germs and Steel"</i>. </span></span><br />
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<span style="color: #222222; font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><i><br /></i></span><span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #222222;"><i>"As a teenager, I spent the summer of 1956 in Montana, working for an elderly farmer named Fred Hirschy. Born in Switzerland, Fred had come to southwestern Montana as a teenager in the 1890s and proceeded to develop one of the first farms in the area. At the time of his arrival, much of the original Native American population of hunter-gatherers was still living there. Am</i></span><i style="color: #222222;">ong the farmhands, there was a member of the Blackfoot Indian tribe named Levi, who behaved very differently from the coarse miners - being polite, gentle, responsible, sober, and well-spoken. He was the first Indian with whom I spent much time, and I came to admire him. </i><i style="color: #222222;">It was a shocking disappointment to me when, one Sunday morning, Levi too staggered in drunk and cursing after a Saturday-night binge. Among his curses, one stood out in my memory. </i></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;"><span style="color: #222222;"><i>-"Damn you, Fred Hirschy, and damn the ship that bought you from Switzerland!" </i></span> </span></blockquote>
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<i>It poignantly brought home to me the Indians' perspective on what I, like other white schoolchildren, had been taught to view as the heroic conquest of the American west. Fred Hirschy's family was proud of him, as a pioneer farmer who had succeeded under difficult conditions. But Levi's tribe of hunters and famous warriors had been robbed of its lands by the immigrant white farmers." </i></blockquote>
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When people living in traditional societies make contact with modernity and avail themselves of modern appliances, healthcare and state-supported institutions, their material well-being undoubtedly gets better. However, this improved material well-being does not always translate into more fulfilling lives, greater social engagement, and most importantly, into greater hope and opportunities. As the modern society races past like a super-fast train, traditional people often feel left behind. They don't find the necessary means or skills to contribute to a changing society. Consequently, a lot of them suffer from addiction (this is also an under-current in the above passage by Diamond). Drugs and alcohol take a huge toll on these unfortunate people.<br />
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With the increasing success of machine learning algorithms, the whole of humanity is under a similarly grave threat of becoming obsolete and losing hope for a meaningful engagement in society. The scale of this threat is inconceivable for even highly intelligent and educated people. So we argue about what kind of education we can give for young graduates in the universities to <i>"compete against"</i> the machines. The short and simple answer is none. Nada. Zilch. There is nothing that a machine cannot do when trained on sufficient amount of data. The first jobs to get automated will be those where data is readily available or those where the salaries are at a premium: <i>"expert systems"</i> were first developed in the 1980s for automating medical guidance. Essentially, old people (experts with experience, but unable to learn new skills) will be automated first. Highly skilled engineers in many developed countries are already facing severe risks of losing their jobs as the pace of technological change is getting faster than the speed at which they can learn new skills. Thus, the allegory of the Aché Indian man murdering his aunts, related in the beginning, is applicable figuratively, though thankfully not literally, to the current situation in technological employment. It has to be noted that to be replaced by a machine, the task does not need to be completely automated, but only partially automated and thus shipped off to a human with far fewer skills, and thus willing to work for much cheaper. An analogous situation has developed in the creative sectors, where the vast majority of artists, journalists and musicians are being pushed out of professional employment and surviving on the margins of the organized economy. Intermittent work opportunities force the majority to adopt a <i>"technomadic" </i>lifestyle with few or zero social benefits. This is particularly true of work in the visual effects (VFX) industry.<br />
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Thus, it is the <i>"cool jobs"</i> that are being lost first to automation by software. There is not as much financial incentive to automate <i>"crappy jobs"</i>. It is said that robots will automate jobs with the 3 D's - Dirty, Dangerous or Drudging (Repetitive). This is no longer the priority for technology on the market. The software guru and investor Marc Andreessen famously said <i>"Software is eating the world"</i>. A more accurate saying would be <i>"Software is eating old people"</i> (By that, I mean people with skills and experience acquired over a lifetime, and with limited budget of time and resources to change). But as the cost of machine learning gets lower and lower, and data is collected from every single human individual (sometimes surreptitiously by spying), even simpler tasks will get automated. In effect, every human being will have a virtual copy of himself on the cloud, eager to perform all the tasks he is capable of, but better and vastly cheaper. As machine learning continues to get cheaper and better, the effective age of replacement by a machine will sink lower, ultimately replacing even young people. How do we create hope for humanity in such a society ? I think this is a more urgent question than worrying about the risks of a super-human AI.<br />
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Another interesting author to consider is Jaron Lanier, who specifically analyzes creative industries and the devastating effect that the internet had on musicians, artists etc. He argues for intellectual property protection and micro-payments built into the very structure of content consumption on the internet, as first devised by hypertext pioneer Ted Nelson. Property rights are an important means of protecting the interests of old people, and they arose first in agricultural societies. The desire for stronger property rights, especially on intellectual property, is greater in older economies and in countries with greater numbers of old people. But taken to the extreme, property rights stifle innovation and make the young subservient to the old. An even greater risk is that property rights don't necessarily encourage production, but merely function as a rent of passage through constrained distribution channels. This will stifle the economy. We need to create a hopeful society for both young and old humans, but with a clear understanding that nobody can ever be younger than a machine.<br />
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I don't have a solution myself. I don't know if any of those proposed solutions will work, but I agree with Ford and Lanier that we do have a grave problem ahead of us, as the age of machines need not necessarily be a good age for us humans. I am not talking about a future mythological moment where machines overtake human intelligence. I am talking about our regular computers, information processing on the internet, and machine learning applications already possible today. As a computer scientist, I believe this is an existential question that we need to face, especially those of us working in data science and machine learning applications. A gifted engineer known as Thomas Midgley had once single-handedly managed to almost destroy earth's ecosystem, by creating and spreading CFCs that ate the Ozone layer. I fear that we machine learning researchers can be unwitting successors to Midgley, if we don't pay attention.<br />
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<b>Vidliography: </b><br />
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BBC Interview of Jared Diamond at the Royal Institution (go to 22:40 for comments on treatment of elderly people)<br />
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TED talk by Peter Diamandis, about his optimistic vision for the future:<br />
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Introduction to "The World until yesterday" by VSauce, which also talks about Thomas Midgley:<br />
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Nick Bostrom talking about existential risk. Please note how the interests of future humans (progeny of the 1% of human survivors) are compared against those of the majority who perish. Existential risk for humanity is a serious issue, but thinking about this has to be tempered with a notion of democracy:<br />
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Susan Pinker on her book "The village effect", explaining how engagement in the society is essential for old people to have long fulfilling lives: </div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit;">Martin ford on his books "<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333; line-height: 17px;">Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future" and "The Lights in the Tunnel: Automation, Accelerating Technology and the Economy of the Future"</span></span><br />
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Jaron Lanier on his book "Who owns the future ?".<br />
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<a href="http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/05/jeopardy-robot-watson.html" target="_blank">The New York Magazine recently profiled the Watson program from IBM research</a> and intriguingly compared it with a youth. </div>
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<i>Dedication: This post is dedicated to the memory of John and Alicia Nash, who died recently in a tragic accident. </i></div>
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Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-37053054913811070802015-01-31T04:29:00.001-08:002015-02-02T03:08:44.348-08:00Tweedle-dee Tweedle-daa Life goes on.. <div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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These days in France, freedom of speech is on the menu. It is the sizzling <i>entrée</i> of discussion amongst friends and coworkers in offices. It is the <i>plat principal</i> of public TV debates, between distinguished people dressed in suits and spectacles. It is the <i>dessert</i> to mull over during family reunions. It is the <i>cognac</i> to wind it all down, in the comment sections of newspapers and in social media.<br />
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Every Frenchman worth his salt, and his <i>roquefort</i> cheese, is swearing on the <i>Marianne</i> herself (the grim-looking arbiter of the values of the French republic) that he will have nothing less than <i>la liberté d'expression absolue</i>. The French are generally an emotional race and when they feel very strongly about something, even a good thing, they end up doing something chop chop chop in the public square. But what exactly is getting the snip of the blade now ? <br />
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Any snaffling voices questioning the premises of this debate are getting muffled and snuffled. It is considered better to do so than ruffle any unnecessary scuffles. After the vicious attack in Paris, it became more important to show a sense of unity and stand together. Here lies the paradox. Does the liberty of expression have any relevance if there is nothing to express and nothing to squabble about ?<br />
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So what is with this liberty of expression ?<br />
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Every sod, prick and granny has an opinion. And they have an opinion about expressing opinions. The problem is that they all do so very differently. A professional sod thinks he is serially shortchanged in his life and likes to whinge about it. A professional prick thinks it is his sacred duty to annoy the hell out of other people. A professional granny wants everybody to just shut up and be quiet about it. So how do we prevent professional pricks from picking on prickly sods ? And how do we convince grannies that we don't muck about in our speaking business and be civilized about things ? This is a question that is as old as democracy, that is to say, at least two thousand years old. So inevitably, I have to talk about monkeys, gossiping, the mafia, the unconscious brain, self-censorship, and finally about Socrates (the bastard who started it all). I don't have time for all that today.<br />
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But I will relate a simple scenario that easily opens up to common sense. Imagine a regular fellow who is going about his business. Let us call him Mr. Tweedledum. As he is trodding on his daily do, roughing up his ploughs, putting two and two together about his business, imagine a large bunch of people go up to him and chant.<br />
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<i>"..Tum tum tum tum tum, Mr. Tweedledum </i><br />
<i>Careful with your bum, Mr. Tweedledum.."</i><br />
<i><br /></i><i>"..I am not your chum, Mr. Tweedledum</i><br />
<i>And careful with y'r bum, Mr. Tweedledum.."</i><br />
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If this racket goes on for long enough, it would be natural for Mr. Tweedledum to wonder if something is wrong with his bum. He may reasonably think that his bum is in some grave danger, and that somebody is out to get it.In his inner consciousness, he would see his bum getting bigger and bigger, to the point of eclipsing every other element of his body. Ultimately, he would get twitchy at the very mention of his bum. But the mental gravity over this problem has already turned so acute that there is no going back. The non-mention of the bum would be felt as severely as the mention of it.<br />
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We humans have a peculiar kind of consciousness. If we keep paying attention to a topic for long enough, it will expand in our mind and colonize all our brain cells. Movie directors know this very well and use these tricks to drive their narratives of the plot. In a grander and wickeder scale, news media drives the narrative of our social debate using similar devices.<br />
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Let's come back to Mr. Tweedledum. He has twee diddly eyes. But he still got his bum. He has a sprigly jiggly step. But he still got his bum. He has a sparkly crackly voice. You see where it is going.<br />
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You see, speech is a complicated business. And freedom is even more complicated. It is a bloody complicated world out there. We cannot just snip away all the rough edges, fold it down to an equation that explains everything, put it in an envelope, seal it, and proclaim the situation is under control. It is not.<br />
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We need to keep dribbling the trifles. Keep fiddling the befuddling stuff. Keep budging the curmudgeons. We need to keep poking at apocopia.<br />
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I just invented a word.<br />
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<b>Apocopia</b> (<i>n</i>): The tendency to chop the last letters of a word, or the last say in a debate, especially if the concept in question is infinite in length or even much longer.<br />
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I really didn't invent the word out of nothing. I don't have any copyright on this. Please refer to <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_English_apocopations" target="_blank">the list of apocopations </a>in the English language: words which are chopped up by people who think they are cool. I don't have any problem with cool people, or with chopping up words, but we should do this in moderation and remember that there is a bigger story behind.<br />
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Just like myopia, somebody suffering from apocopia will not be able to see properly. A subway sandwich and a submarine will both be "sub" for him. But only one of them is good for lunch.<br />
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I hope we remember Mr. Tweedledum for his sprigly jiggly step. Or for his twee diddly eyes. In fact, however much we may pretend otherwise, we are all Tweedledums, who keep twiddling about the riddles in this life. We keep bumbling up the big jumble of this world. We cannot know every nook in the whole gobbledygook. We are just works in progress. The situation is far from satisfactory and definitely not under our control. The best we can hope for is a good sense of humor.<br />
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Tweedle-dee Tweedle-daa.. Life goes on.<br />
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(With apologies to the Beetles, Lewis Carrol and the million other references in my not-at-all-original opinion) <br />
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Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-73642124192170977392012-09-02T07:14:00.002-07:002012-09-02T07:51:08.104-07:00Dilemmas of an environmentalist vegetarian<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
<i>"Why did you become a vegetarian ?"</i><br />
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This is a question I dread replying to, but I get asked every other time. There are two reasons I don't like this question - firstly, I don't like lecturing people on my personal habits, and secondly, I don't completely know the answer myself. <br />
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I hardly ate any meat for the first 16 years of my life as I grew up in a culturally vegetarian family in South India, though our family was not religious at all. Then I went to the university, realized I didn't have any objections to eating meat, and decided to give it a try. In the beginning, it was awfully hard; a regular meat eater cannot imagine the horror of a first timer tugging into flesh. But I slowly got used to it and rejoiced in the expansion of the menu when I ate outside.<br />
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In India, there is a long history of vegetarianism and it is quite easy to find vegetarian food wherever you go. There is indeed a prejudice against meat eaters, various communities getting placed in the caste hierarchy according to the supposed purity of their vegetarian habits. Growing up in a liberal and atheistic household, I definitely hated the squeamish habits of vegetarians and their supposed smugness and superiority. It is only as I grew older, and specifically after I came abroad, that I found other reasons to be vegetarian.<br />
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Simply put, the world eats far too much meat these days. It is not possible to sustain these habits of a highly concentrated and urbanized population, without wrecking havoc on the environment and treating animals with monstrous cruelty. That is exactly what industrial meat production does, and people buying meat on supermarket shelves are oblivious to it. For the most part of human history, people living in agricultural settlements didn't eat more than one portion of meat per week.<br />
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Eating meat has the most severe impact on the environment : both on carbon footprint and on the often-overlooked water footprint. Producing 1 kg of beef requires 15400 liters of fresh water, in terms of animal feed production etc. When meat is produced on industrial scales to cater to the daily hunger of consumers, this impact percolates globally onto the most sensitive ecosystems of the planet. Rainforest gets chopped up for animal rearing, and for soy-farming to produce animal feed. I find this unconscionable as a human being, as species-extinction rates rocket up and ecological niches shrink alarmingly small for even the surviving animal species. I know my personal eating habits can hardly change the course of human and planetary history, but I decided to be a vegetarian as a way to remind myself (daily) of this problem, as I forego meat on my dinner plate. For this same reason, I have been eating less and less meat for the last 2 years, but three months ago, I decided to call it quits and call myself an environmentalist vegetarian.<br />
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But I don't want to pontificate, or proselytize, or piss off anyone.<br />
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Everybody needs to live their lives according to their own dreams and desires. But I think it is not wrong to ask anyone to be more conscious of themselves, and of their choices, and of their impact on others. Being conscious at an intellectual level is the unique gift of human existence. To quote my favorite vegetarian - Albert Einstein <i>"..A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life
are based on the labors of other men, living and dead, and that I must
exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received and
am still receiving..."</i> I think it is not just men, but we should be equally thankful towards the various animals and plants that share this planet with us, and on whom we depend for our everyday lives. I do think meat tastes delicious. If and when I eat meat, I would at least like to relish that moment, to honor the animal that I am eating. I welcome everyone to think this way, to not eat meat as a machine but as a human, and most importantly, to not waste the meat on their plates. I don't think one needs to be a complete vegetarian to share my sentiments. <br />
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Being a vegetarian is then simply a symbolic gesture for me - an aid to remind myself of the alarming state of our environment. In this situation, being a vegetarian is not as straightforward as it is for people who are in it for other reasons - ethics, religion, animal rights etc.. I will share with you some of my dilemmas, please comment to share your thoughts on them.<br />
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<b>Dilemma #1 : What to do when meat is placed accidentally on my plate ? </b><br />
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A couple of months ago, I was in Cannes (France) for a small holiday. It is very hard to find vegetarian fare in France, but I found a place recommended on TripAdvisor - Cocoon restaurant. My dilemma stems from my experience there. I asked the lady who was the patron of the restaurant if one could find vegetarian dishes. Indeed, she said, and listed a few from the menu. There was also an item "vegetarian lasagne" that was not on the menu, but was the speciality of the day. This was fresh for me to see, who was used to hearing the only vegetarian item on a restaurant's menu being a salad or a goat-cheese. I decided to go with the "vegetarian" lasagne, but it turned out to contain some chicken. The lady apologized profusely - this was not a regular item on the menu, and she didn't know that it contained chicken that day - and offered to serve me a completely new dish. I said okay, but after a few minutes, realized that probably the plate served to me would be thrown away. I hurried to the lady and asked that I would rather eat that plate, and would not like to see the food wasted. But she convinced me that the food would not be wasted and somebody would eat it, and served me the other dish.<br />
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But this incident gave me my first dilemma with my vegetarianism, and obviously, I don't know for sure to this day if the first plate was simply dumped into a bin.<br />
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<b>Dilemma #2: Can I eat meat while flying a plane ? </b><br />
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Taking a long distance flight is probably the easiest means within the reach of a normal individual to wreck the maximum havoc onto the environment in the course of a day. On that day, one would be partially culpable of not only the fuel consumption on the flight, but also of the associated bells and whistles of keeping the airline industry up and running. If, like me, one was flying to the USA on United Airlines in economy class, one would also be up against low quality food and entertainment on the flight. The vegetarian option on the menu that day was "pasta in tomato sauce", which was the same on my return flight. I wasn't sure if I really had to eat it, or just eat the grilled chicken which was the other item on the menu, and which definitely looked a bit more appetizing. I bit my lips and swallowed the pasta. But I am not sure if it was really required when I was generally having a field day against the environment - guzzling lots of gas and swooshing up the skies. <br />
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<b>Dilemma #3: Should I eat <i>Bratkartoffeln </i>? </b><br />
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<i>Bratkartoffeln</i> are yummy potato fries served in a German Biergarten. I love them totally. They come in two varieties : simple potatoes, or potatoes with little bits of <i>speck</i> (bacon) in them - which are obviously tastier. What if the place only had the second variety ? Often, as I pondered on this dilemma, I decided to go with eating the <i>bratkartoffeln</i> with <i>speck</i>. This dish contains such a small amount of meat that it hardly has any environmental impact, but also I guess the amount of hassle needed for a small restaurant or <i>biergarten</i> to maintain two versions of <i>bratkartoffeln</i> for its consumers - more dishes, oil, cleaning liquid - would have more environmental impact.<br />
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<b>Dilemma #4: What if I am invited by someone and there are only meat-based dishes to eat ? </b><br />
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This dilemma is pretty similar to the previous one. I decided that in such a situation, I would just eat the meat, to not only reduce the hassle, but also to not unnecessarily hurt anyone who would be sad that I am not partaking their food. <br />
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<b>Dilemma #5: Should I speak or should I shut up ? </b><br />
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This is probably the biggest dilemma. What to do if somebody questions me on my vegetarianism ? I do think it will be nice if more people share my beliefs and eat less meat, may be even become vegetarians themselves. It is even necessary for our environment, and for all the animal and plant species whose survival is in precarious conditions, that such a mind shift occurs in the global human population. But at the same time, I definitely not like to see myself as "purer" or "better" than others, just because of my eating habits. I am a radical liberal, and I believe passionately that we need to accept people for what they are - irrespective of their personal beliefs and lifestyle choices. Food is one of the most personal elements of anybody's lifestyle, and I don't want to lecture anyone about it. Certainly, I don't want to go ballistic <i>a la</i> PETA. I would like to be seen as a quiet and nice guy who keeps to himself. So what should I do ?<br />
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Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-46671095705396033312012-02-26T00:29:00.017-08:002012-02-26T13:23:48.253-08:00Dystopian Nostalgia : A review of "Between the Assassinations" by Aravind AdigaI have recently begun reading the novel "Between the assassinations" by Aravind Adiga. I am now more than half-way through the novel. Reading this book has been an interesting experience for me - simultaneously producing a mellow longing for the India of my childhood years and a deeply unpleasant feeling about the troubles that benighted that era. In the book, Adiga creates a portrait during the 1980s of a middle-sized town along the southern coastal belt of India. He locates his imaginary town "Kittur" along the south-western Tulu coast near Mangalore. Even though I grew up on the other horizontal end of India, in the Godavari delta on the south-eastern coast, many of Adiga's narrative portraits apply equally well to this region. <div><br /></div><div>The assassinations in the book's title refer to those of Indira Gandhi and Rajiv Gandhi. I was less than ten years old during the timeline of this book, so I had a very vivid but childlike perspective on the happenings around me. When I grew older, I immediately left home for my education. I spent the past half of my life either living abroad or focussed on engineering and technologies; thus I hardly had any eye over the lives of real people in India. India today is quite different from the stories that Adiga narrates, but many of the portraits that he draws of people and places still remain. Furthermore, my own experiences of India remain etched in that distant memory. So reading this book has been like reliving my childhood years through an adult's eye. As one can imagine, this is hardly pleasant. </div><div><br /></div><div>Adiga reminds me of another Indian writer in English who built a distinctive portrait of south Indian life during the early 1900s - the inimitable R.K.Narayan. Narayan, of course, has imagined the charming town of Malgudi and the fascinating inner lives of its denizens. I do think Adiga's Kittur falls quite short of the narrative gifts of the earlier master, but he shows quite a promise.</div><div><br /></div><div>So what is unpleasant about Adiga's stories ? As a child, I hardly had the time to ponder about the personal lives of many of the people I encountered daily : the <i>Hamali</i> who carried two large back-breaking sacks of rice husk from the rice-flake factory (on the grounds of which we played cricket) to a distant brick kiln, the Brahmin widow who spent all her time chanting the lord's names, the pot-bellied teacher in the school who despised his pupils but at the same time tried to coax the best out of some of them, the begging children of the agricultural laborers who arrived on each harvesting season to work on the paddy fields, the little kid who cleared the tables in the breakfast hotel as hungry customers demanded their daily <i>Dosas</i>, the grocery stall owner who sold his wares in rapid-fire manner to his customers standing in long queues.. These are people who existed for me only in the fleeting moments that I passed them by. Their personal lives had no import nor relevance to my world. The characters of Adiga mirror many of these same people, and this forced me to examine their personal lives in gritty detail, as each one of them carried through a daily struggle to survive and to secure their own place in the society. As an adult, I can now see these battles for survival and the insecurities that come with them, with more sympathetic eyes and with clearer parallels to my own life.<br /><br /><!-- In a way, nostalgia is always selective. We humans have a highly selective memory. Not only do we remember a tiny portion of the past, but we also choose to see a tiny portion of the present. This selective vision is far more restrictive when it is about our own personal neighborhood. If you are asked what is unique to this blue planet we live in as compared to the rest of the universe, the few images that flip by your mind are may be those of vast green fields, of African savanna or of a tropical rainforest - images that characterize life in your opinion. An image such as a huge brood of eggs from which many octopuses are crawling out does not cross your mind. Neither does the multiplication of bacterial cells or of viruses. On the other hand, an alien visiting this planet might see exactly these things. The gift of a writer is to spot the unusual among the uninteresting, and make it interesting for the layman who would not see it otherwise. Adiga scores well in this regard.<br /></div><div> --><br /></div><div>Any writer of substance should have a keen eye for smells, as it is these smells that add colours and depth to an otherwise distant portait. Adiga is definitely a master in capturing those smells - pleasant, pungent, piquant and putrid, all of them. I am not a happier man for reading his stories, but definitely a wiser man. And may be, that's how I should judge him as a writer and this is why I am recommending him to my friends, especially to those who are living abroad and forgot a part of themselves in an India of the past. </div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div><div><br /></div>Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-80454425629131259192011-10-03T01:31:00.001-07:002011-10-03T02:29:55.930-07:00Sunday diary : Getting out of facebookI did it. I took the plunge. I bit the bullet. I belled the cat. <div><br /></div><div>I deleted my facebook account. </div><div><br /></div><div>The reasons for doing so are numerous. But at the bottom of them all is the desire to take control of my own life. Now I have fewer worries about <a href="http://the-redpill.blogspot.com/2011/05/reducing-facebook-increasing-attention.html">distractions to my concentration</a>. Fewer worries about editing privacy settings to anything I post or have posted in the past. Fewer demands to take good-looking photographs at every place I go to. Fewer worries that I would miss commenting on sharp status updates of my friends. Fewer misgivings if enough people would "like" the thing I share on my wall. Fewer demands to post "happy birthday, have fun" messages; or if I miss doing that, to post "belated birthday wishes" messages. </div><div><br /></div><div>In retrospect, I am not missing much out of my facebook account. I don't miss the annoying ticker on the top-right corner, that updates the digital life of my friends in real time. I don't miss their digital gossip on awkward photographs. I don't miss keeping up to the trend on funny videos over the web. I do miss certain events like friends' birthdays, weddings or graduation ceremonies. But seriously, I doubt if I would compensate for my physical absence by a mere textual presence on their facebook walls. </div><div><br /></div><div>Life goes on. It is surprising how much the stylesheets of facebook have carved my subconscious. Every time I open my browser window, my fingers involuntarily type 'fa..". Every time I get annoyed by somebody on the streets, my mind automatically keeps framing a pithy status update that summarizes the situation. Every time I read an interesting bit of news, I suffer the urge of sharing it on facebook, made all the more easy by the ubiquitous "share" and "like" buttons. But these withdrawal symptoms will subside at some point, and new forms of digital addiction will take over my life. </div><div><br /></div><div>I still kept my google+ account. This is not because I trust Google any more than Facebook on my privacy. But this is simply because of how little keeps happening on google+. </div><div><br /></div><div>The few people I follow hardly update their streams (excellent job folks) and it feels so snug and comfy realizing that there is nothing more you need to do to acknowledge the digital happenings of the day. Also for all its faults, google+ (and Picasa) has an excellent interface for sharing photographs. So I will keep using google+ until I find time to install my own web-server, probably powering it through <a href="https://joindiaspora.com/">Diaspora*</a> or similar open-source software. </div><div><br /></div><div>What else in life ? I have a greater desire to know people beyond all the appearances they put up in day-to-day lives. Can digital technology make it easier for us in finding deeper connections with one another ? I will try to explore this angle. One idea I have is to take portraits of people whenever I visit a new city. I will request them that I would take their portraits for my personal travelogue (I carry a pretty neat digital camera), and may be pepper them with a few questions that come to my mind.</div><div><br /></div><div>"What is your favorite place in this city ?"</div><div><br /></div><div>"What is your dream destination ? "</div><div><br /></div><div>"From which countries do your best friends come from ?"</div><div><br /></div><div>I can record their responses on my smartphone. I will send their portrait photographs later on email. The problem is this requires a lot more guts to do than just silently ogling at the passers by. So I have not yet managed to do this. But at some point, I will try to make this a habit. </div><div><br /></div>Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-75330316527321199572011-07-31T05:23:00.000-07:002012-07-29T01:26:55.226-07:00Sunday diary<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
Today I decided to open a new section in my blog called the Sunday diary, where I would just ramble on about simple nondescript things in my life. I hope this will give an inkling about my existence to my friends and pals, even though I don't think I will manage to write a blog every Sunday.<br />
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So what's happening in my life ? <br />
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Yesterday, I had the sudden urge to eat something really crunchy and fatty, so I made a "gratin aux endives". Endives are a type of salad that are quite bitter in taste. They come from the Chicory plant whose roots are blended with coffee to give its crunch taste. But tasting the leaves, you would never get this idea. I got used to the taste of endives when I was in France, but never cooked them before. But I reverse-engineered the dish, quite successfully I must say. A gratin is any dish with a lot of cream and cheese and baked in the oven. In Grenoble, the local dish was Gratin Dauphinois which was made with potatoes. Now I replaced the potatoes with endives. Since I didn't have cream, I cooked the endives with milk, putting a liberal chunk of butter inside. Once the leaves were tender, I dropped them into a casserole with some slabs of Gouda and Comte cheese, and sprinkled some garlic on the top. As this dish was getting baked, I decided to make some potato fries to give it company. In the end, I had a heavy meal of butter and cheese, and washed it down with some red wine. I was feeling quite guilty at the end of this experience, and thought I would go running the morning. </div>
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Hah, stupid me. Sunday had other plans in store for me. Running or going to the gym were of course not included in these plans. </div>
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I woke up quite late today, and after showering, was feeling so lazy I couldn't even cook food. Instead, I decided to go to the <i>Nauwieser Viertel</i> fest and catch some grub there. A <i>viertel </i>in German literally means a quarter, and the Nauwieser Viertel is this area in Saarbrücken that is generally popular with punks, new-age kids, retired hippies and other alternative crowd. I really wanted to live there, but could only find a house in its periphery. Well anyways, the Nauwieser quarter is celebrating its annual summer festival over this weekend. I went there Friday evening and met with Katrin and later with some other friends. By 8 'o clock in the evening, the place was swarming with people. A rough mixture of cologne, marijuana, sweat, fried oil, beer, tobacco and various feminine perfumes was hanging in the air. People had to go underneath each other's shoulders or thighs to get from point A to point B. It was funny to see the youngsters - the guys with preened facial hair and smelling of hair gel, the girls dripping in makeup and sizzling in their clothes - all sandwiched to each other into a viscous human jelly. It reminded me of the suburban trains in Mumbai during rush hour, where Newtonian mechanics gets suspended and Brownian motion takes over. The laws of physics give way to the laws of chemistry, and Boyle's law linking pressure and temperature of a closed system suddenly makes sense in one's head. I couldn't take this for long and promptly escaped from the fest. But today afternoon, I ventured to go there again, confident that the dispirited youngsters have not yet woken up from their hangovers. </div>
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I was not wrong. The whole place was locked in a charmed suspension. The noon was just breaking in, and the shop-keepers were gently rolling their shutters out. I walked along like a king, slowly drinking in the sights : the trinkets on sale, the faint smell of barbecue and grilled meat, the various fastfood outlets selling food from Thailand, India, Hungary, Spain, Italy etc. I settled down to eat the langos, that were recommended to me by Katrin. These are a type of dough patties from Hungary that are deep-fried in oil, a bit similarly to the Indian puris, and served with garlic cheese. I hungrily munched them on, and added on to the guilt accumulated from yesterday. </div>
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But the guilt was definitely relegated to the background, as I thoroughly enjoyed the taste and also the atmosphere. I was listening to music at a very low volume on my iPod - dreampop, david bowie, the blow monkeys, heaven 17 etc.; and it felt amazing catching all the notes and rhythm in the very same zone where agitated youngsters were jostling for space yesterday. Hah, bliss. </div>
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I took several photographs and then ventured into "Café et al." - another place recommended to me by Katrin. It is a small café selling fair-trade goods, special chocolate and spices, and generally oozing with awesomeness. I went in for some coffee, and asked if they also had some cake to go with it. The owner said yes, they had a home-made cake. I dug in; it was a sort like the French <i>millefeuille</i>, with several layers of fried dough sandwiched with cream. The cream had a faint taste of black pepper- reminding me of the "<i>junnu</i>" cheesecake that my mom made at home. The effect was fantastic, and I was pretty sure this stroke of genius came from somewhere else. So I asked the owner where he came from, and he said Iran. Oh Iran, bless you. I don't know how many times I admired the culinary mastery from that place : a lot of that trickled down into Hyderabad through loads of Iranian immigrants escaping the revolution and settling down to set up restaurants. These restaurants have basically defined the taste of the Hyderabadi biryani (which I woefully miss so much). Later on in my life, I sampled Iranian cuisine several times, and I never regretted one single moment. The man warmed up when I told him I am from India. He enquired what I am doing abouts, and when I told him I have been working here since about 5 months, he said he was greatly surprised by my German skills. This was a bit cheating on my part because my German vocabulary is quite limited and doesn't exceed into anything beyond the introductory parlance. Anyways, the guy told me he makes Iranian food occasionally for customers and that I should sample it sometime. I told him, of course, I will visit the shop again. I left with a box of peppercorns coated in chocolate. </div>
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Next to "café et al." is a whiskey shop called "Whiskey Fee". All these shops are open today, quite unusual for Sunday, because of the viertel fest. I walked in and asked the lady that I wanted to buy a single malt. She insisted that I taste a few before making my decision (thank you very much, but I am slightly drunk at the moment in the middle of the noon). I ended up with a highland malt called "Wemyss malts" - it has a slightly sharp taste and aroma. Not the taste I usually go for, but I like it nonetheless. </div>
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And then I walked back home, ruminating on Northern European summers. The skies are overcast, and have been overcast from as long as my memory goes. The spring opened up cheerfully to a bright sun, but the mood of the heavens has quickly turned to melancholy as the summer progressed. The place feels like an inverted pint of Guinness, the mushy air hangs below from the clouds and refuses to go anywhere. As I inhaled that mushy air and looked around to see how small this place is, I had this moment where it all felt so cozy. Ah, bliss. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyKU55y-a5vpKOu-JYPzZZbUlPmu58Bt1QbX2SrsOvypP3zueSCuY6bR2wD2zPNcoDnitI_UJhRcaZuRXoytzQlOLCRT2KjWb66AP3gC-8Q2VwOyAZKmPlNoR0GdDMyihxoWBZtg/s1600/IMG_1157.JPG" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635513590162270994" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhyKU55y-a5vpKOu-JYPzZZbUlPmu58Bt1QbX2SrsOvypP3zueSCuY6bR2wD2zPNcoDnitI_UJhRcaZuRXoytzQlOLCRT2KjWb66AP3gC-8Q2VwOyAZKmPlNoR0GdDMyihxoWBZtg/s320/IMG_1157.JPG" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 240px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a></div>
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Little girls selling toys at the viertel fest. </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ-100tYLIxnOuM_LcSAo_tpZnBcKLpIfh0d5LdAuYCcTl5rhAexuBLCJE9HhlA-iMNewP5__tnPf2NgSj85gA9I_tlj4Hm3yeuJmUExvpexxLOQFEYUlyLh7Y7IU2bC457dwV2w/s1600/IMG_1164.JPG" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635514742738795010" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhJ-100tYLIxnOuM_LcSAo_tpZnBcKLpIfh0d5LdAuYCcTl5rhAexuBLCJE9HhlA-iMNewP5__tnPf2NgSj85gA9I_tlj4Hm3yeuJmUExvpexxLOQFEYUlyLh7Y7IU2bC457dwV2w/s320/IMG_1164.JPG" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 239px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
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The girls are so adorable I decided to take them another picture.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9n20C_L7XfE1XDv_FoyuqnCyu3lTw37eWBvoZ8jv-yrmciYpW7DwOqkEEfnRhEz7wXVUYu8pC2pEk8JJ0zSD6TXbEvC2BvPu2KbcAbJZo-wQNAv6gcTq4x1HGFO-QReL3T9eZ3w/s1600/IMG_1162.JPG" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635514735217632018" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj9n20C_L7XfE1XDv_FoyuqnCyu3lTw37eWBvoZ8jv-yrmciYpW7DwOqkEEfnRhEz7wXVUYu8pC2pEk8JJ0zSD6TXbEvC2BvPu2KbcAbJZo-wQNAv6gcTq4x1HGFO-QReL3T9eZ3w/s320/IMG_1162.JPG" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 240px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
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These little guys are selling ties, but they didn't convince me to buy one :) yet.</div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcA7meRqUILd-TPJ5S9UKMsNursXvHnHlyj2BWnd3QZHhkAHzB-i26EJ5mZ3IfYI7kdfzHH3dadWNUMtwDB2e0XvQn48bo-oJQ8ocIdIPyXALn4BcUmnt3MoGX0I81wTKe85XIrQ/s1600/IMG_1163.JPG" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635514730441931458" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgcA7meRqUILd-TPJ5S9UKMsNursXvHnHlyj2BWnd3QZHhkAHzB-i26EJ5mZ3IfYI7kdfzHH3dadWNUMtwDB2e0XvQn48bo-oJQ8ocIdIPyXALn4BcUmnt3MoGX0I81wTKe85XIrQ/s320/IMG_1163.JPG" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 320px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 240px;" /></a><br />
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The "brunch box im viertel" is another nice shop in this area that makes good breakfasts & brunches. They specialize in takeaways, but I prefer to eat inside as their glass windows soak in a lot of sunlight. A good place to wake up on a Monday, drink some orange juice and then go to work.</div>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrUbOkuhf0h0BaW-tNesiUtWXdSSCdt8TzzkLV_YzQAG32TyDxfrlWX0DcLQFJZnSg-Jmf-hhBjGtOwIufptx9kEuJnqjtEsJZzpyuv6MJAdFQdA4ZFylbW9Kk0KEBvJ4nR4_yYA/s1600/IMG_1160.JPG" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635514730048317058" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgrUbOkuhf0h0BaW-tNesiUtWXdSSCdt8TzzkLV_YzQAG32TyDxfrlWX0DcLQFJZnSg-Jmf-hhBjGtOwIufptx9kEuJnqjtEsJZzpyuv6MJAdFQdA4ZFylbW9Kk0KEBvJ4nR4_yYA/s320/IMG_1160.JPG" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 240px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 320px;" /></a><br />
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Shops selling some trinkets. The outlet on the right is called "Govinda's Vegi" and sells samosas and mango lassi. But as far I saw, there were no Indians working there.</div>
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This is the fastfood place selling the Hungarian Langos. Yummy stuff. </div>
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These guys are selling some cakes. Katrin and I sampled some chocolate cake here on Friday, not bad but not especially good either. They set up shop next to a second hand record store. I swear I am going to buy some records in that place. Just to make a point about how much I like second hand record stores. </div>
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The shop on the right is the Whiskey Fee. But I took this photo for the picture on the left graffiti'd on to the wall. That wall belongs to the "café et al" by the way. </div>
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Interesting stuff from "café et al.". </div>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcxo-cHzf2FPFoSgAG_go5sPHtjFb9S_N1p743yUR4tMOSB8A_j7HMXxDTku0U5fM5msXXfq6gpkTi8PKZ4uh48obQxxZt-Y7obpokErLkVYYt0FLMvY6nSnE21xK4DG8NjzfRxQ/s1600/IMG_1153.JPG" onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}"><img alt="" border="0" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5635516538254403522" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcxo-cHzf2FPFoSgAG_go5sPHtjFb9S_N1p743yUR4tMOSB8A_j7HMXxDTku0U5fM5msXXfq6gpkTi8PKZ4uh48obQxxZt-Y7obpokErLkVYYt0FLMvY6nSnE21xK4DG8NjzfRxQ/s320/IMG_1153.JPG" style="cursor: pointer; display: block; height: 320px; margin-bottom: 10px; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; margin-top: 0px; text-align: center; width: 236px;" /></a></div>
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This is where you eat breakfast at "Café et al." I am rather pleased with the auto HDR photos that I took with my iPhone. </div>
</div>Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-78410234642276823352011-06-23T10:45:00.000-07:002011-06-27T04:16:36.513-07:00Rimpo and the SparrowThe mind is a labyrinth of mirrors. For Rimpo, this labyrinth is long and narrow - a straight line of a path that betrays no twists. On this path he marches everyday, towards the same point of no becoming. Measured thus against eternity, Rimpo became small and shrunk by the side of everyday objects. The axe he uses to cut wood became larger and heavier. The piece of land he tills became wider. The roof of his hut stood higher and the screeches of the birds above became more distant. And the mighty Himalayas next to his farm, he dares not even raise his eye to.<div><br /></div><div>Rimpo has been living alone ever since his mother died. He has always been considered a dullard in the village, and possessing no great property, he has never received attention from any of the girls. He had his heart broken a few times in his boyhood and then he learnt how to not make similar mistakes in judgement. Life is a slow process of learning how to avoid the traps and the temptations. Along the journey, Rimpo grew hard in his eye and sure in his step. Now that his dear parents are dead, he hardly meets the villagers. They consider his farm at the end of the village as a vestigial organ, a reminder of a time where it was a part of the social life but which has far outlived its usefulness. From beside the farm stretches the thick Himalayan jungle and down below roars the torrent from the mountains. Rimpo and his farm are transparent to the villagers, they belong neither to the village nor to the jungle.</div><div><br /></div><div>Rimpo knows every sound and color that invade the privacy of his mind. He knows their rhythm just as well as he knows the rhythm of his heart. The roar of the torrent below has a rhythm. The screeches of the birds above have a rhythm. The morning light that shines into his hut has a rhythm, and so does the breeze that comes by nightfall. Into this rhythm, he constructed his life; and into this, he weighs in his every step. </div><div><br /></div><div>Years passed by without counting, and Rimpo shrank smaller and smaller. Days became seasons and minutes became days. Like an ant that lived for an eternity, Rimpo achieved a patient and non-judgemental gaze over the world, over himself, and over the insignificance of one towards the other. In the labyrinth of his mind, the color of the seasons blended harmoniously into a gray monotone - where yesterday meets tomorrow and where sound meets silence. </div><div><br /></div><div>One day, this harmony is disturbed by a sparrow. Rimpo watched as it barged in indignantly through the window and started pecking on the pile of paddy grains that lay on the floor. Those pile of grains are his labor over the whole year, as he tilled his harsh land by the stony look of the Himalayas. He needs every grain in that pile for himself, to bear the winters to come. Rimpo knows the rhythm by which he shoos the bird away : how his hand raises up and swats the floor below, how his lips open and a sharp hiss of air whistles through his tongue. But now, he just waits and watches the sparrow. It pecks at the rice, grain by grain, as few as are needed to sate its tiny hunger. It then flaps its wings and flies away. </div><div><br /></div><div>The sparrow comes again the next day, at the very same time. Rimpo watches it peck the grains and then fly away. He now knows the rhythm, how and when this would happen again. But he cannot let this happen. So when the sparrow comes, Rimpo stands there waiting and addresses it thus. </div><div><br /></div><div>"Dear friend, I am honored by your visit to my humble abode. But I am afraid I cannot offer you enough space and succor for another day. I cannot shield you from the infinity of the world. I am a shrinking man, and soon I will be smaller than yourself. The span of your wings shall soon be greater than the stretch of my arms. Go find a bigger man for your friend, and a warmer hut to bide your winters in."</div><div><br /></div><div>Then the sparrow replies, "Rimpo, Though you have not seen me much before, know that I am your friend. I am fickle as a sparrow and I do not step into the same door twice. Many people have found me walk in but never paid me attention. But I am as much their friend as I am yours. I hop from garden to garden, from hut to hut and over streams and meadows. I stay not in the same place for long, as I love this whole infinite world. My world is not to be feared. But you do not live in the same world as mine." </div><div><br /></div><div>"What do you mean ?"</div><div><br /></div><div>"Often man hears nothing but echoes of his own voice from the past, reverberating from the walls of his memories. Man sees nothing but the reflections of his own character, breaking from the prism of his mind. And man feels nothing but the cold of his loneliness, in the vastness of existence. Every thought that he weaves is a thread to cover himself from this cold. These threads knit together into a shroud that envelopes one's mind. Through this shroud, man cannot see the world for what it is. He cannot hear the world for what it is. And he cannot smell. When was the last time you smelt something, Rimpo ?" </div><div><br /></div><div>Rimpo tries to protest. He definitely can smell, but does he care for smells ? When was the last time he cared for smells ? He answers, " I do not want to know." </div><div><br /></div><div>"Smell is the basest and the most wicked of the senses. It is how nature tells man that he is her subject, that he cannot break free from her. Would you like to see the world of smells ?"</div><div><br /></div><div>Rimpo puts on his shoes and trails the sparrow. As he comes out, he sees that spring is the season and that the Himalayan forest is full of its smells. A million shades of green lay basking in the rays of gold. Through these colors, Rimpo detects a smell that unearths a long forgotten memory from his childhood. Thread by thread, his thoughts get unravelled by the smells, exposing the core of his being to the mercy of nature. The sparrow flies above and guides him through trails that he has never taken in his life. </div><div><br /></div><div>Rimpo asks, "How big is the world that a man can experience in a moment ? " </div><div><br /></div><div>"Each man knows for himself. For the most part, a man has but four or five thoughts. They shape his goals and they mould his actions. The long threads of memories that a man weaves laboriously over his life are only felt for their weight, but never experienced in totality. But even this entire weight of memories is mocked for its finiteness by the infinity that is offered by the very moment of now. The mind is a labyrinth of mirrors, and rarely ever does one get to peer outside."</div><div><br /></div><div>For the first time in his long journey of life, Rimpo sees himself in this labyrinth. And he sees it to be not straight, but spiraling into a thousand loops. </div><div><br /></div><div>The sparrow continues, "Man becomes a slave for his own habit. Each loop creates an illusion of eternity, masking the finiteness of experience. True freedom is indeed freedom from one's own thoughts and habits. " </div><div><br />Rimpo finds himself now in a forest of Rhododendrons. The trees are in full bloom with colors of rose, white and red. The air is also lighter, the sparrow has led him up a mountain trail into a meadow. Rimpo asks, "Why do you bother yourself with me sparrow ? What makes you love me ?" </div><div><br /></div><div>"Love is but a realization that each moment in a finite existence has a window towards infinity. When I realize thus, I cannot but feel love for everything in the world. But I should leave you here, my friend. I am but a sparrow and I cannot fly any higher. Beyond this meadow, you need no friend. I bring you here so that you can see what I cannot." </div><div><br /></div><div>Thus saying, the sparrow flies back into the valley below. In that moment of clarity, Rimpo sees neither the sparrow nor the tortuous path that they have climbed together. Instead he sees a different person that has pored out of his own self - a person bigger than the mountains, and for whose step nothing is large. The labyrinth of his mind is dissolved. He sees nothing but the sun that is shining through his eyes. No mountain blocks his path nor his view. In that tiny window of time where he is truly himself, he sees that he is immortal. </div><div><br /></div>Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6014397.post-28378437335584695912011-06-19T07:58:00.000-07:002011-06-19T16:23:13.658-07:00Catching the bubbles of happinessHappiness is a substance that has some strange chemical properties. For one, it is an extremely short lived substance and disintegrates quickly into the surrounding atmosphere. It cannot be stored in a sealed container either, as it decomposes spontaneously in the absence of light. It has neither a distinctive odour nor a distinctive color. Due to its whimsical and short-lived nature, many physicists have long doubted its existence. A fringe few do so even today. <div><br /></div><div>But owing to its indirect effects on other substances in controlled lab experiments, which are carefully studied, and to its numerous sightings in the wild, the existence of happiness is now established beyond doubt. What still remain controversial, however, are procedures to synthesize happiness and its effects on human beings. </div><div><br /></div><div>Despite numerous failures in synthesizing it in a lab setting, it appears that happiness forms quite readily in nature and seems drawn towards life forms in general, and human beings in particular. The age of a person seems to be a critical factor in attracting happiness, with young children being particularly susceptible towards catching large doses of happiness when they are outdoors. </div><div><br /></div><div>The most common form of happiness is that of tiny bubbles that drift in the air. These bubbles are transparent, but they sometimes shimmer brightly in the sunlight due to certain optical properties. The human eye seems to be partially capable of detecting these shimmers, with young children reporting that they see such bubbles drifting and dancing wildly at the corners of their eyes. One is supposed to see these bubbles sideways, as a direct gaze would rend them transparent. A more successful method for catching happiness is by listening. </div><div><br /></div><div>Since the bubbles of happiness form and dissolve spontaneously, they make a curious crackling sound as they pop. A carefully trained ear can latch on to these popping sounds, and thus lead a person to the source of a large concentration of happiness. People have thus been led to happiness in very unsuspecting and nondescript places - such as the top of a crossroads, or next to a puddle in a stream. Sometimes happiness hangs in a thick cloud around a man carrying a big luggage and sweating profusely. Sometimes it trails the scent of a woman walking tip-toe on a quiet street. Sometimes it lurks behind a group of quarreling kids. And sometimes it flutters around two lovers who are lost in each other. These are by no means an exhaustive list of places where one might bump into happiness, indeed such a list would be impossible to make. With every passing day as the sun lights up the world, huge clouds of happiness condense in the atmosphere and drift around the place. Whether they do so with a pattern or just aimlessly is still open to debate. </div><div><br /></div><div>When one comes within hearing distance of happiness, a curious manoeuvre can be followed to make the happiness descend directly onto oneself. The efficacy of this manoeuvre has been known in the popular culture, but the scientific reasons behind it are still under study. One is supposed to smile widely and look sideways towards the source of happiness. A simple lip-smile will not do - it should be accompanied by an eye-smile where the eyes glint in the shimmer of the bubbles. And lo, the cloud of happiness swooshes down to one's face and runs up one's nose. The after-effects are reported as widely varied, ranging from a sudden swing in one's step to one sobbing silently. The only common effect seems to be that of a general exhilaration. </div><div><br /></div><div>It is also hypothesized that happiness is a fundamental ingredient of life, as essential as Oxygen. But the whimsical nature of its interaction with life-forms prompts many scientists to question such a strong hypothesis. If all life-forms need happiness to survive, how would they find their daily dose of happiness ? </div><div><br /></div><div>We cannot say anything about this yet. But it is generally accepted that happiness is very good for the health of human beings. So we conclude this article by giving some tips for the interested reader on how to spot happiness. </div><div><br /></div><div><ul><li>Memory seems to be bad for happiness. Most people have bad memories that inhibit them from perceiving the fullness of the world around. This prevents them from spotting happiness even when it is lurking quite nearby. </li><li>Happiness appears to be contagious. The more the people one infects with happiness, the likelier that one gets a new dose when all of one's bubbles of happiness pop out. </li><li>As a converse, selfishness is quite bad for happiness. One's happiness won't last for long when one is alone. </li><li>This can be extended to also one's thoughts and actions. The more isolated one becomes, and the more sure in this isolation one becomes, the lesser the happiness that comes one's way. </li><li>Smiles seem to be particularly good at attracting happiness, even when it is several kilometers away. </li><li>Early morning by the sunrise and the early evening by the sunset are the best times to catch happiness. </li></ul><div><br /></div></div>Ray Lightninghttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08882462553270746059noreply@blogger.com2