Monday, April 20, 2009

The Boy Who Knew Everything

It was only a matter of time before I began at length on the concept of causality that I have learned to so staunchly come to believe. Before I begin, I wish to make it known that the concepts and theories that you may encounter in the following article are of a queer nature. To discuss this, I have to digress, firstly onto the concept of truth.

Nearly all the definitions that you have and will encounter on my postings is of a nature that is elusive, because it is not an actual definition but a viewpoint; an opinion. In fact, all definitions, no matter how objective it may be, from the widest perspective always will be subjective in one way or the other. But, to define truth isn’t very easy. It would possibly mean that the author would have to define the word “define” with the assumption that the reader is without the knowledge of what “define” actually is; which ironically brings us to the question of how or why, the reader is reading that question in the first place. Ignoring the regressive loop of the method of defining certain terms, the term “truth” is a matter of subjectivity. It is not a matter of utility. And thus truth does not have to necessarily imply a wider form of application. But most rudimentarily put, truth is not required to have a purpose. Truth is the fabric upon which occurrences take place. And occurrence is the work of causality.

Causality is a tricky thing. Its existence is a possibility that seems to so uncannily satisfy the observations of occurrences around us. However, the knowledge of its existence is immaterial to our existence, just like how paleontology is irrelevant to your dinner tonight. They are analogous to the machinery that runs the universe. The knowledge of the machines will not have any implication on our being, but without them the universe would not exist. I cannot, for good reason, imagine anything without causality because it is like imagining a world without the space-time fabric.

I believe so staunchly in causality because I think that choice does not exist, and that the illusion of choice by itself is only the work of a cause. The germ of this article sparked as always on a bed, when the lights were off, at midnight when my mind was blank and the time was right; not because I wanted it to, but because it was meant to: Cause and effect.

The absence of choice would necessarily mean that causality exists because; there must be purpose behind an occurrence. An occurrence cannot spontaneously occur and such a system is so readily eliminated from my perceived reality that it remains to be too divergent from common sense. Each action, occurrence or activity must have a reason and purpose; and if it were to spontaneously arise, the causal energy for it to occur must have resided somewhere else before.

In the perfect order of the universal system, it seems inappropriate that there be such a distinctive and perceivable divide between the living and the non-living. Life, so it seems, is the presence of choice. Since, we can choose what we want to do; we are more alive than a rock for example. A rock behaves in a way that it is told to behave. It cannot resist or perform another task even if it wants to. Possibly, it cannot do so because it cannot want to, as it is incapable of holding that causal energy. Hence, a rock can be picked up and thrown around and its trajectory can be accurately calculated. It may seem that living-beings do not act this way because of their capacity to choose what they want to do.

What seems to be our choice is influenced (or more strongly, defined) by our principles or instinct. If not for those set of principles or instinct, we would not have made those choices. Your choices or “you” as a person are not responsible for your actions, inductively speaking, since it is the occurrence that has created your principles or instinct that is the true reason of your action. Even if instinct is something that beings are born with we can trace back to a particular event in the ancestral chain where we hit upon the reason for the development of that instinct. Similarly, principles are created through experiences and occurrences.

Now that all actions are due to occurrences, we reach the end of the rabbit hole upon understanding that an occurrence is due to causality. Chaos is when complex things arise from simple things. An occurrence is a result of complexity. Simplicity gives rise to a complex series of events which culminates in a significant occurrence which may result in any of the following that I may have mentioned afore. Thus an occurrence defined by way of chaos through and only by the method of causality brings forth all events, choices and actions in our system; be it the method of living or non-living.

In the reasoning of all events through means of causality I understand that I have obliterated the meaning of life in the process. The final part of the article will be to explain the existence of causal energy and how it differentiates a rock from an aardvark.

The term “causal energy” is something that I believe is difficult to define. However, it is something that I believe has already been understood by an ardent follower of this article. When a living being “wants” to do something, he is using the causal energy for the performance of the task such that the task is completed. This energy is derived from a previous cause, which has inflicted this effect of choice unto the person. He, however, thinks that it is him, and not the causal energy that made him perform the task. To grasp the concept of causal energy is indeed very difficult because it defines everything around us, including the very thought that enables us to comprehend this content. The ubiquity of causality and its working is of such a nature that it is the only force in the universe that governs all events.

Above the four dimensions that make up science is the force of causality. Only with causality is it possible to understand that the universe was created with the knowledge of each occurrence in the space-time frame. Each one of the trillions of atoms move about in the certain way that they have, are and will is because that they are meant to and is destines to do so. If causality holds such immense knowledge and such power; what then of individual thought and choice?

Thus this article has been, disappointingly, written by destiny herself.

Of Kimi

20 Apr 09


I would like to credit my dear friend Manmintha who inspired me to start on this project.

Saturday, March 28, 2009

84°F, partly cloudy…

Occurences are a result of cause. This paper is the reason for much of my smiles. I tried, but upon publishing this paper I have finally flouted outrightly my most basic rule in maintaining this blog. But I do so in the name of Fernando, and Fernando alone.

84°F, partly cloudy… 

84°F, partly cloudy, wind speeds of 4 mph heading west, humidity of 64% might sound very much like weather report and you might even be right. But it also describes my life and the world that I come from. As uninteresting and mundane as the weather might sound, it is in the perspective that the two extremes of boredom and ecstasy depend on; even when it comes to observing the nimbostratus or cumulonimbus.  

Born in the bustling city of Mumbai, about 18 years ago, it wasn’t too late before I was gifted with the art of jaywalking, the knack of maneuvering the conniving markets and the rich flavour of the language of my motherland. From the beginning I was forced to realise that I had to grapple with a melting pot of two distinct cultures and three different languages. As a native South Indian, unlike my neighbourhood cricket buddies, I had to speak Tamil at home, and deftly switch to the ubiquitous Hindi upon closing my house door. Apart from the language, there existed a palpable dichotomy in almost everything: TV channels, food, behaviour the English accent and so forth. To exacerbate the problem, in school I had to speak in English with my teacher and friends, in which ironically I failed miserably. After nearly 7 years of the Indian monsoon and the sweet smell of North Indian auto rickshaw pollution, I migrated to what seemed to be the paradise of Singapore.  

In my new country there existed 3 different races of people, 4 different languages and another novel culture that I had to adapt to. After 6 years of primary school I had mastered the survival techniques in the Singaporean urban jungle, and of course their own brand of "Singlish". The next 4 years in secondary school that followed turned out to be by far the most important period of my life. I formed my principles, distinct style, ambitions and dreams as a teenager within the walls of St.Joseph's Institution, my Alma Mater.  

The changing phases of my lifestyle and the various cultures that I was exposed to, during my childhood, has played a significant role in shaping my aspiration. They have engendered a form of divine creativity which I use to formulate my future. Due to the valuable opportunities that Singapore presented me with, I was able to, of course improve my English to the extent that I am now able to mimic the CNN correspondents (and write brilliant essays), but more importantly travel to Cambridge and find my vocation in molecular biology. Like the impervious land that faces the brunt of the versatile weather, my environment and the experiences that it offered has been the primary factor that shapes my past, present and future.  

As a person of many cultures, I see myself as a citizen of the world. As a versatile character and creative thinker I can brazenly dream and desire my position amongst the best scientific persons of the world. To fulfill my desire I knock upon the door and await the answer at this precise moment as I type this essay. The weather is 84°F, partly cloudy, wind speeds of 4 mph heading west, humidity of 64%; as mundane as it may seem, blue skies or thunderstorm, the future remains to be soothsaid.

Of Kimi
28 March 09

Friday, March 27, 2009

The Joker’s Guide to Ruin the World (The Memoirs from the Otherworld)

I promise, for once, that this will not be long. I never actually find the time to write. And even when I do, it is not exceptional enough for me to publish it for the reading pleasure of more than one person. All the more, I never found the reason to write a memoir; probably afraid of the fact that there will be too few who bother reading it. To fully enjoy an artifact is a difficult thing. It becomes painful when few share your views, or rather when many prefer to not find time to examine your perspective. Such a memoir, I was afraid, would only add to the growing pile of my unread masterpieces. Yet, I try to push for such brilliance. The memoir: in the reminiscence of the time that I had once experienced - the time that I had once lived through - one of the first things that come to mind would be the purpose of my survival - the purpose of our society – the purpose of my living and in the most abstract sense the purpose of my cognition.

The philosophical discussion of living and of society might not be one which I might very readily get involved in. I am not a philosopher; rather I prefer to term myself as an observer – a human, who is an organism, one amongst the myriad of the other creations; who fortunately is able to articulate his thoughts in comprehensible form: in English. I am a mechanism amongst infinite others who make the great working machine of the universe - a small and insignificant part of the framework of nature. I make the machine be as what it is and I make it work. It is a rather gratifying assumption; yet it fails to answer the question, very often encompassed by a single, yet beautiful word: why? 

I have never killed; or rather, I try not to kill on purpose. The pain of death is such that one can enjoy it only once. And much of the time I try not to be the person delivering it. I prefer not to, yet prefer not to stop one from doing so too. I fend much criticism in expressing my views and to exhibit the way that I wish to think. I do not force my mind into anyone else; for if you encounter this memoir, it is indeed by your own wish and whim. I prefer not to overrate human life, like all of society. It might be phrased otherwise as the fallacy of underrating animal life. I like to see them all the same. But that serves to be but only one of the divides that I think about. The purpose of our cognition can only be understood if we oversee these divides from the perspective of nature. In the great organism, Homo sapiens, there are many perceptible divides, which I am lazy to name. Amongst these divides there is much tension, much violence and hatred. Let’s call this simply: fragmentation. The purpose of these divides remains a mystery and for long, I believe, it will remain so.  

Recounting the flaws and downfalls of the thought and actions of human nature, another failure that comes to mind is of religion and its part in fragmentation. Religion is the instrument that rids us of helplessness, or so it seems. With the various concepts and ideologies that show us paths towards what one might call “God”, religion has handicapped our perception of ourselves. In the pursuit of realizing ourselves, we might have lost sight of respecting the intelligence of a person of our own species, largely because we fail to understand that all religion is true and that all religions are just different paths to the same entity. 

“God isn’t small enough to fit into one religion”    

It is interesting how I find myself digressing from the actual intent of my memoir and more into the purpose of the being and cognition. I see myself recounting on my experience and my meditation on this very quest for purpose, not philosophically, but realistically. It is the confused search for a reason of this very fortunate sequence of events that has led to my and everyone of your existence. The reflection on this facility that we are born with does not belong to my memoir, because this thought by itself is a gift from the otherworld. 

This reason for my discussion is of an elusive nature and I often lose track of it even now as I choose words to finish this endeavor. Knowing that I am an insignificant yet indispensable part of this system that runs around me is vastly insufficient in the quest for the reason. It is frustrating to live in this quiz where we are the masters of creating and destroying life and matter; yet we are unable to control all of the system or any of the complex questions that it poses. In the 200,000 history of our species, we have come thus far in the development of our society. Yet, as it seems to me, we haven’t gotten any closer in discovering our purpose in this universe. Before I find any critics pointing out that some individuals might have acquired/trained the extraordinary talent to discover the purpose of their existence, not many societies have done so. Or to better phrase it, those societies that have done so have not been considered superior to the rest.

It seems that everyone has discovered that the health of our societal systems is degrading. Death and destruction seem to be more pervasive and prevalent in our world. You may wish to reason such an observation to the more powerful media that reports and to a large extent sensationalizes/exaggerates facts and a larger human population. Although this is an accusation on the perspective frame of the observer and a doubt on the observation; it cannot be seen as an actual reduction in the extent of violence in the world throughout the years. Also, a larger population and a more effective pervasion of ideologies is reason enough to ensure that the ideas that are spreading throughout humanity are novel and simple enough for people to comprehend and act accordingly. It may be obvious that the ideas that I talk of are analogous to religion and the concepts and morals that they preach.

Throughout the years, with the development of religion (and consecutively of morals), there has been an ironic escalation in the number of martyrs and destruction in defense of ideology. The more we grow, the more we seem to harm ourselves. So is moral growth beneficial at all? The problem of faith is that it is in every one of us and it is a part of who we are. Since it is so close to our hearts and is the framework of our principles, ideologies and morals- a challenge to our faith seems to be a challenge to the basis of our existence.

The only constant in this system is change. To evolve is the will of this system. It is a constant force that remains to be the impetus towards the perfection of our species. Challenges to ideologies must, thus, not be met with violence but with thought. When we understand that religion is not a natural phenomenon but a man-made creation that we tend to hold so close to our hearts, we will realise that it too is allowed to evolve for the better and cannot remain a fixed constant.

However, religion is but only part of the reason for fragmentation and cannot fully encompass the entire purpose of my memoir. But before I continue to explain the methods to solve fragmentation, it seems to be a pertinent necessity that I discuss the nature of fragmentation.

I have a queer ideology. I believe that the system is a manifestation of the ultimate form of perfection. We are the products of (or better yet, part of) such a system. To accuse ourselves of imperfection is to accuse our creators of their handiwork. (Please note that it would be helpful to understand “our system” and “our creators” as the sequence of events, in the neat framework of causality, that have brought about the occurrence of the universe that we call “now”. However, nearly any rational imagery that you may employ to the two terms will help in understanding the discussion.) Therefore, fragmentation, hate, crime or any other form of negativity that we experience cannot be seen as a deviation from perfection. It is the balance of the equilibrium. However, due to the nature of good being good and bad being bad, it only makes sense that we try to tend towards positivity. In fact it even seems that our facilities were possibly designed for “thought as an individual” and not for the comprehension of the entire system. Regardless of the drawbacks of our societal system we are to strive for survival as a species. Thus, even if my ideology be queer, it still is prudent to solve fragmentation and not confuse ourselves with the issues of providence.   

The more tangible yet necessary form of fragmentation that can defeat the purpose of the “survival as a species” hypothesis is race and nationalism. The only reason that such fragmentation seems necessary today is because it is so deeply woven into our way of thought that we cannot accept that an Indian, Spaniard, Chinese, French, American and Somalian be our people all at the same time. So it seems that a certain form of violence derived from competition is inherent to our species. Humans are indeed a destructive species; but the damage that we induce is ironically self-inducing. The characteristic that makes us an entity, defeats the purpose of our maturity. But is it possible to live as a single human species, as one country, as one united people? Possibly we started out living in small clans and throughout the centuries have evolved to form the biggest of clans called countries or more recently, economic unions. The problem with fragmentation is not the divides but the consequence of the divides. Competition between “clans” can lead to hatred, distrust, violence and war.

The reasons of developing armies are beyond the purpose of defence. Regardless of the size or the significance of a nation, the development of its fighting capabilities (army, navy, air force etc) always will have a more furtive purpose. When a nation is attacked, to fight in the name of defence is inconsequential. The reason of attack is of most consequence. The only reason I accuse all nations of a shady defence aim and capability is because of the utopian proposition. If all nations were to unanimously cease productions of weapons and armaments and discard all that have thus far been produced; a possible divine peace will ensue and of course if all humans were to unite as one nation, we might find fewer reasons to fight over.

That brings us to the question of violence within nations. Even though I can quote examples almost immediately at the mentioning of ‘violence within nations’ I purposely avert them to maintain objectivity and due to the risk of ignorance of the intricate issues involved. This paper understands that the blaming ourselves for the accentuation of races is of a controversial matter. However, fragmentation brings about discord between peoples due to the perspective of races having the quality of being superior to one another. Issues of racism arise only because of this perspective and assuming that humans are of such a nature of alienating entities different from those that they identify themselves a part of, we can only accuse the development of races for fragmentation.

Assuming that the forces that shape humanity are entirely natural and come from within the human psyche we can understand that our society is subject to a constant flux. Our attitudes and principles are constantly changing, possibly due to the nature of each new generation consisting of radically different individuals who feel it necessary to not follow their predecessors. Thus, we finally arrive at the only solution to fragmentation: globalisation. Globalisation in its literal sense is the process of transformation of local or regional phenomena into global ones. It can be described as a process by which the people of the world are unified into a single society and function together. In the most utopian sense, globalisation seems to at least quell the violent nationalist pride that divides countries. The most optimistic projections might foretell a world comprising a single nation and the destruction of fragmentation.  

Globalisation, however, is still false universalism. If fragmentation has finally died, I wouldn’t be writing this paper at all. Globalisation might finally kill part of fragmentation, but not yet. Even if this magic tool, the product of high-tech innovation, works its miracles in the way that it destroys national boundaries, it cannot promise to remove racial divides. Because of the illusion of superiority mentioned afore alone, the “survival purpose” will require us to destroy the concept of race eventually; for the sake of peace and rudimentary survival.  

The journey has been an enchanting one, for the writer in particular, and I am sure not as much for the reader. It is not that I have little faith in my prowess with words, but I understand that the inertia that our environment has forced unto our throats will preserve fragmentation. It will live on for a while longer. The path of ultimate love for everyone and everything- of the system and of the ultimate creator- must remain a utopian dream for now and for a few more days to come.  

Revolution is a difficult thing. Ironically, even if change were to be the constant of the system, revolution is of a league its own. To take a system to its very brink and to push its head forcefully over the cliff and frighten it witless from the perilous drop and to coax it violently back from that brink is the method of revolution. And I, honestly (and realistically), don’t believe that this is something that I can imagine humanity to encounter anytime soon. But only at the brink, at the very precipice, will we change. This paper will not be, and was never intended to be, the spark that destroys fragmentation and brings about an eternal love in the heart of humanity- but that would be a nice thought. No?  

I am known for my uncanny ability to keep promises. That is to promise to keep promises and to sometimes break them unknowingly and to still say that I kept them and work my way out of the mess through wordplay.  

In the vastness of eternity and the greatness of the very fabric that ties every entity that has been brought into creation: love; this memoir of purpose (of humanity) is but a pathetic infinitesimally tiny attempt to force a plausible opinion. So tell me now, as promised, is it really that long?  

Of Kimi
27 Mar 09

I wish to credit Enlin Lynne for inspiring the idea of “Globalisation being another false universalism.”  


Tuesday, March 24, 2009

The Pleasure in Plagiarism

You can only get caught for plagiarism when people find the original piece of work; until then you are the genius.
-Kimi
It is somewhat an ironic form of gratification that the impetus to me writing again is an accusation of plagiarism by an anonymous comment on the tagboard which I created with the intent of appreciation. At least I know that someone is running through the posts that were meant for little more than the value of relics.

It so happens that I might be, interestingly, a very likely candidate for plagiarising items. There are many things that I wish I have done and it so happens that I wish I had written much of Stapledon and Dawkins. I find it a method to appreciate their work in what you might call an estranged and rather irritating way.

I write on plagiarism because of my fascination on the subject and my perspective of it being synonymous to inspiration. To plagiarise is to steal from the original author and claim that item to be your own. What makes the phenomenon interesting is it being a method used to steal credit and praise which does not belong. However, the controversy that I wish to so desperately introduce involves confusing plagiarism with inspiration.

For very long, I have pondered on the logic of free libraries. To read, I believe is the ultimate form of plagiarism. Through the acquisition of knowledge from a book, I am allowed to use the knowledge in the form of application without acknowledging the author or publisher. Better yet, I am even allowed to interpret more than what author means from his book; in other words using content from the book as substrate to build wisdom that which it is not designed to provide. And in this form of application or extrapolation I am allowed to write something new altogether. What other worse method can there be to steal than to obtain them free altogether from a library?

It is difficult, however, to express my surprise with the criminal dualism of libraries without which I myself would not be able to fully express this thought in a clear and concise manner. The dualism is such that firstly it lends books for free which one might have been forced to purchase if he had not read it without cost. It seems obvious, surprisingly to me alone, that authors are losing revenue because public libraries lend the books for free without paying the publishers. Secondly, and more importantly, the rudimentary reading of books by itself is a form of plagiarism as expressed earlier. To perform such a crime for free seems only that it be actually encouraged in a crooked form. It is only for the sake of an argument and a different perspective that I point out the “crime” in free lending and (the sillier) reading of books. I most certainly bask in this costless pleasure, and it is only with the confidence that the introduction of such a perspective will have no impact on the existence of libraries and books that I dare write such an outrageous paper.

Nearly all authors that we read from are liable to plagiarism. In fact if the dictionaries were to lay claim to the words that are in them, almost all forms of writing would be in some way be an offence of plagiarism. I cannot however, explain the reasons of putting up excellent excerpts from my favourite books, without the risk of sounding defensive. Apart from the fact of wishing that I had written the excerpts that I have however acknowledged to the authors that they belong to (and thus am not liable to plagiarism), I put them up for the reason of sharing its brilliance with my audience and because of their relevance to the creation of this blog: To examine the nature of life and of cognition.

It is not my purpose to justify such a crime of stealing praise. However I wish to point out that without a certain degree of plagiarism and inspiration it would be impossible to produce brilliance. In my case, to create the brilliance of “On Purpose” I cannot do it alone but have to find help from the authors that I hold so close and dear.

I have for many times considered plagiarising work for the sake of praise but I understand that the nature of “On Purpose” (I state again) is not for the benefit of my audience but for the value of it being a relic of my profound intellect. I gain little from plagiarising, but nevertheless find a certain degree of joy today with the understanding that there are people finding my endeavour useful.

It is only with the words of Newton that I mustered courage to write such an outrageous essay on partially justifying this crime. Without his greatness much of what we see today would not exist. Although I do realise that such statements nearly always remain relegated to the realms of stupidity because if not for Newton there might have been a George or Alicia who might have completed what he had done if not having reproduced his exact brilliance. Whatever the case may be, the greatness of Newton was only made possible because of his predecessors. Thus George or Alicia or Newton together with the other great technological magic that we witness today will no longer exist if not for their inspiration and derivation from the work of predecessors. After all, even you and I are today comfortably couched on the broad shoulders of giants.

Of Kimi
24 Mar 09

Epilogue
I together with all of my sane audience find it comical to add an epilogue to such a silly and short piece of writing. However, I am forced to do so because of the risk of future accusation of plagiarism.
Please note that I will hereby acknowledge the work of all authors who have contributed to my upcoming posts. This will include me, Kimi, too; that being the reason why I have signed of as “Of Kimi” at the end of this piece of work. I can only beg for your confidence to trust that such a method will avoid for future confusion. I apologise for any doubt that I may have so caused by quoting works such as “The Anaesthetic of Familiarity”.

Also I will like to especially apologise to the special people who have expected me to write an intellectually engaging artwork as promised for tonight’s selection. Unfortunately the essay “Memoirs from the Otherworld” is yet not complete and it begs more time for attaining the author’s satisfaction. I will greatly appreciate anyone who will comment on any of my articles and reward them; like now: I dedicate this essay to the anonymous person who pointed out that I be using the work of geniuses. Thank you.

Friday, March 6, 2009

In Gratitude!

Outcome is the result of actions and thought. I have always wanted to show my gratitude to so many people for what they have done to me, and there cannot be a better time than now, the third greatest day of my life! Please note that this list is non-exhaustible, and that if I missed you out, please point it out and I will make sure I add you. Everyone in this list is extremely special, and given a chance I will give my warmest hug to each one of you to show you my gratitude. Once again, thank you very much! I will be most obliged if you were to read and comment on this post.

Fernando Alonso, A.R. Rahman, Sara Tariq, Hulya Kara, Ying Hui, Terence Soon, Srinath, Heiko Zeibell, Saroj, Divya, Han Jia Jin, Leonard Yong, David Ang, Marcus, Nelson, Sky Koh, Soh Ming Quan, XL, Simin, Foong Yi Chao, Bong Tingli, Tay Geng Yu, Alex, Jing Ming Xue, Huang Jia Xi, Serene, Mirabel, Jay Fong, Feng, Tan Ying Te, Ravi, Arvind Rajagopalan, Govind, Glenn, Walter, Ong Eng Teck, Terence Koh, Mrs. Elaine Toh, Mrs. Yeo Yew Tin, Ms. Lee Lih Sin, Mrs. Lee (Math), Miss Lee Siew Lian, Mr. Eric Lam, Mr. Lim Meng Chye, Ms. Deborah Goh, Mrs. Tan Lai Kuen, Mr. Tung, Mr. Chen Ling Kwang, Mr. Brian Lagman, Mr. Jared Lee, Carlos Mejuto, Mythreyi, Natasha Dalmia, Darryl Boey, Stephen Khoon, Brian Ho, Mrs. Ellen Woo, Mr. Raymond Wong, Cheng Feng, Xiao Fan, Yang Jun, Aurilea, Valencia, Akshay Ashok, Wilson, James, Jason Sin, Ben Lee, Rayner, Alvin, Elycia, Eric Wang, Farina, Yue Zhen, Michelle, Marium, Rayshio, Hsuan Te, Zaw, Wee Jin, Samuel Tee, Augustine Chay, Aravind, Charlene, Joel Lee, Alex Jafarzadeh, Damian Boh, Siddharth Sriram, Chinmaya Joshi, Keyboard Teacher, Nick, Swoosh, Giancarlo Fisichella, Nico Rosberg, Richard Proctor, Jonathan Yarden, Paula Malai, Steve Dawson, Jing Ping, Adam, Grant Imahara, Lex Lazatin, Ivan Tsoi, David Kang, Jamie Oliver, Donovan, Darren Khee, Priscilla Cheong, Zhao Dong, Nick Haushofer, Louis, Tuck Heng, Victor Goh, Han Jia Ying, Haresh, Roger Poulier, Justin Neo, Verrel Tan, Tian Tian Zhou, Wu Yang, Chris Wymant, Hu Ching, Feng Yi Fei, Jayanth, Bernie Ecclestone, Reinhold Messner, Dip Chandra Kalika, Raju, Coldplay, The Beatles, Barack Obama, P.Chidambaram, Dr. L. Subramaniam, God, people of my blood and all the other people whom I will add as soon as I remember that I have forgotten to add your name.


I have made an effort to make this list as short as possible and to group as many people together where applicable (like Coldplay and The Beatles). Also the list is in a random order, with of course the first few being the people who come to my mind most immediately and thus the very very special. I repeat: if you are reading this you have impacted my life enough to enter my list. Thank you so very much!

Thursday, March 5, 2009

Objectivity

The nature of this blog differs from others in the fact that it was never about the actions of the creator but more about his views and opinion on a particular subject. In doing so, I have been careful to avoid, as much as possible, using the possesive pronouns such as I and us.


However, such a level of objectivity, so it seems, constricts thought and expressiveness. It is becoming increasingly difficult to speak about distinct experiences and opinions. Almost always such a discussion deserves to begin with the self, because the perception of this universe begins from the self. Any observation that I make and the consequent opinion that I create can best be expressed without diluting what I mean when recounted in the first person.


If at all anyone reads this and the other posts that have been written with a certain measure of objectivity and feels that the following posts lack in any way please do leave a comment and I will try my best to satisfy your request. Also note that I can so brazenly put forth such a proposition because of my faith in the lack of people reading my posts.


Despite my attempt to simplify my language and widen my audience, I want to make it known that the blog is more for my future recollection of thoughts than for the reading pleasure of the people who make the number on the right side tick. If you really don't like what I write, please do let me know, but also note that I am not writing for you. That still doesn't mean that I will not change something for your comment. Yes, I know, this last paragraphs confuses me too, but it is true.

Monday, February 2, 2009

Love and Such

The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.
- C.G. Jung

Love alone is capable of uniting living beings in such a way as to complete and fulfill them, for it alone takes them and joins them by what is deepest in themselves.
- Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Friday, January 16, 2009

The Anaesthetic of Familiarity

To live at all is miracle enough
Mervyn Peake
The Glassblower (1950)

We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born. The potential people who could have been here in my place but who will in fact never see the light of day outnumber the snad grains of Arabia. Certainly those unborn ghosts include greater poets than Keats, scientists greater than Newton. We know this because the set of possible people allowed by our DNA so massively exceeds the set of actual people. In the teeth of these stupefying odds it is you and I, in our ordinariness, that are here.

Moralists and theologians place great weight upon the moment of conception, seeing it as the instant at which the soul comes into existence. If, like me, you are unmoved by such talk, you still must regard a particular instant, nine months before your birth, as the most decisive event in your personal fortunes. It is the moment at which your consciousness suddenly became trillions of times more foreseeable than it was a split second before. To be sure, the embryonic you that came into existence still had plenty of hurdles to leap. Most conceptuses end in early abortion before their mother even knew they were there, and we are all lucky not to have done so. Also, there is more to personal identity than genes, as identical twins (who separate after the moment of fertilization) show us.

Nevertheless, the instant at which a particular spermatozoon penetrated a particular egg was, in your private hindsight, a moment of dizzying singularity. It was then that the odds against your becoming a person dropped from astronomical to single figures.

The lottery starts before we are conceived. Your parents had to meet, and the conception of each was as improbable as your own. And so on back, thourhg your four grandparents and eight great grandparents, back to where it doesn't bear thinking about. Desmond Morris opens his autobiography, Animal Days (1979), in characteristically arresting vein:

Napoleon started it all. If it weren't for him, I might not be sitting here now writing these words... for it was one of his cannonballs fired in the Peninsular War, that shot off the arm of my great-great-grandfather, James Morris, and altered the whole course of my family history.

Morris tells how his ancertor's enforced change of career had various knock-on effects culminating in his own interest in natural history. But he really needn't have bothered. There's no 'might' about it. Of course he owes his very existence to Napoleon. So do I and so do you. Napoleon didn't have to shoot off James Morris's arm in order to seal young Desmond's fate, and yours and mine, too. Not just Napoleon but the humblest mideval peasant had only to sneeze in order to affect something which changed something else whcih, after a long chain reaction, led to the consequence that one of your would-be ancestors failed to be your ancestor and became somebody else's instead. I'm not talking about 'chaos theory', or the equally trendy 'complexity theory', but just about the ordinary statistics of causation. The thread of historical events by which our existence hangs is wincingly tenuous.

When compared with the stretch of time unknown to us, O king, the present life of men on earth is like the flight of a single sparrow through the hall where, in winter, you sit with your captains and ministers. Entering at one door and leaving by another, while it is inside it is untouched by the wintry storm; but this brief interval of calm is over in a moement, and it returns to the winter whence it came, vanishing froum your sight. Man's life is similar; and of what follow it, or what went before, we are utterly ignorant.
The Venerable Bede,
A History of the English Church and People (731)

This is another respect in which we are lucky. The universe is older that a hundred million centuries. Within a comparable time the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or will be when its time comes, ' the present century'. Interestingly, some physicists don't like the idea of a 'moving present', regarding it as a subjective phenomenon for which they find no house room in their equations. But it is a subjective argument I am making. How it feels to me, and I guess to you as well, is that the present moves from the past to the future, like a tiny spotlight, inching its way along a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your century being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling somewhere along the road from New York to San Francisco. In other words, it is overwhelmingly probable that you are dead.

In spite of these odds, you will notice that you are, as a matter of fact, alive. People whom the spotlight has already passed over, and people whom the spotlight has not reached, are in no position to read a book. I am equally lucky to be in a position to write one, although I may not be when you aread these words. Indeed, I rather hope that I shall be dead when you do. Don't misunderstand me. I love life and hope to go on for a long time yet, but any author wants his works to reach the largest possible readership. Since the total future population is likely to outnumber my contemporaries by a large margin, I cannot but aspire to be dead when you see these words. Facetiously seen, it turns out to be no more than a hope that my book will not soon go out of print. But what I see as I write is that I am lucky to be alive and so are you.

We live on a planet that is all but perfect for our kind of life: not too warm and not too cold, basking in kindly sunshine, softly watered; a gently spinning, green and gold harvest festival of a planet. Yes, and alas, there are are deserts and slums; there is starvation and racking misery to be found. But take a look at the competition. Compared with most planets this is paradise, and parts of earth are still paradise by any standards. What are the odds that a planet picked at random would have these complaisant properties? Even the most optimistic calculation would put it at less than one in a million.

Imagine a spaceship full of sleeping explorers, deep-frozen would-be colonists of some distant world. Perhaps the ship is on a forlorn mission to save the species before an unstoppable comet, like the one that killed the dinosaurs, hits the home planet. The voyagers go into the deep-freeze soberly reckoning the odds against their spaceship's ever chancing upon a planet friendly to life. If one from each star to the next, the spaceship is pathetically unlikely to find a tolerable, let alone safe, haven for its sleeping cargo.

But imagine that the ship's robot pilot turns out to be unthinkably lucky. After millions of years the ship does find a planet capable of sustaining life: a planet of equable temperature, bathed in warm starshine, refreshed by oxygen and water. The passengers, Rip van Winkles, wake stumbling into the light. After a million years of sleep, here is a whole new fertile globe, a lush planet of warm pastures, sparkling streams and waterfalls, a world bountiful with creatures, darting through alien green felicity. Our travellers walk entranced, stupefied, unable to believe their unaccustomed senses or their luck.

As I said, the story asks for too much luck; it would never happen. And yet, isn't that what has happened to each one of us? We have woken after hundreds of millions of years asleep, defying astronomical odds. Admittedly we didn't arrive by spaceship, we arrived by being born, and we didn't burst conscious into the world but accumulated awareness gradually through babyhood. The fact that we slowly apprehend our world, rather than suddenly discover it, should not substract from its wonder.

Of course I am playing tricks with the idea of luck, putting the cart before the horse. It is no accident that our kind of life finds itself on a planet whose temperature, rainfall and everything else are exactly right. If the planet were suitable for another kind of life, it is that other kind of life that wouild have evolved here. But we as individuals are still hugely blessed. Privileged, and not just priveleged to enjoy our planet. More, we are granted the opportunity to understand why our eyes are open, and why they see what they do, in the short time before they close for ever.

Here, it seems to me, lies the best answer to those petty-minded scrooges who are always asking what is the use of science. In one of those mythic remarks of uncertain authorship, Michael Faraday is alleged to have been asked what was the use of science. 'Sir,' Faraday replied. 'Of what use is a new-born child?' The obvious thing for Faraday (or Benjamin Franklin, or whoever it was) to have meant was that a baby might be no use for anything at present, but it has great potential for the future. I now like to think that he meant something else, too: What is the use of bringing a baby into the world if the only thing it does with its life is just work to go on living? If everything is judged by how 'useful' it is - useful for staying alive, that is - we are left facing a futile circulartiy. there must be some added value. At least a part of life should be devoted to living that lie, not just working to stop it ending. This is how we rightly justify spending taxpayers' money on the arts. It is one of the justifications properly offered for conserving rare species and beautiful buildings. It is how we answer those barbarians who think that wild elephants and historic houses should be preserved only if they 'pay their way'. And science is the same. Of course sciene pays its way; of course it is useful. But that is not all it is.

After sleping through a hundred million centuries we have finally opened our eyes on a sumptuous planet, sparkling with colour, bountiful with life. Within decades we must close our eyes again. Isn't it a noble, an enlightened way of spending our brief time in the sun, to work at understanding the universe and how we have come to wake up in it? This is how I answer when I am asked - as I am surprisingly often - why I bother to get up in the mornings. To put it the other way round, isn't it sad to go to your grave without ever wondering why you were born? Who, with such a thought, would not spring from bed, eager to resume discovering the world and rejoicing to be a part of it?

The poet Kathleen Raine, who read Natural Sciences at Cambridge, specialising in Biology, found related solace as a young woman unhappy in love and desperate for relief from heartbreak:

Then the sky spoke to me in language clear,
familiar as the heart, than love more near.
The skysaid to my soul, 'You have what you desire!

'Know now that you are born along with these
clouds, winds, and stars, and ever-moving seas
and forest dwellers. This your nature is.

'Lift up your heart again without fear,
sleep in the tomb, or breathe the living air,
this world you with the flowr and with the tiger share.'

'Passion' (1943)

There is an anaesthetic of familiarity, a sedative of ordinariness, which dulls the senses and hides the wonder of existence. For those of us not gifted in poetry, it is at least worth while from time to time making an effort to shake off the anaesthetic. What is the best way of countering the sluggish habituation brought about by our gradual crawl from babyhood? We can't actually fly to another planet. But we can recapture that sense of having just tumbled out to life on a new world by looking at our own world in unfamiliar ways. It's tempting ot use an easy example like a rose or a butterfuly, but let's go straight for the alien deep end. I remember attending a lecture, years ago, by a biologist working on octopuses, and their relatives the squids and cuttlefish. He began by explaining his facination with these animals. 'You see,' he said, 'they are the Martians.' Have you ever watched a squid change colour?

Television images are sometimes displayed on giant LED (Light Emitting Diode) hoardings. Instead of a fluorescent screen with anelectron beam scanning side to side over it, the LED screen is a large array of tiny glowing lights, independently controllabel. The lights are individually brightened or dimmed so that, from a distance, the whole matrix shimmers with moving pictures. The skin of a squid behaves like an LED screen. Instead of lights, squid skin is packed with thousands of tiny bags filled with ink. Each of these ink bags has miniature private muscles to squeeze it. With a puppet string leading to each one of these separate muscles, the squid's nervous system can control the shape, and hence the visibility, of each ink sac.

In theory, if you wire-tapped the nerves leading to the separate ink ixels and stimulated them electrically via a computer, you could play out Charlie Chaplin movies on the squid's skin. The squid doesn't do that, but its brains does control the wires with precision and speed, and the skinflicks that it shows in a speeded-up film; ripples and eddies race over the living screen. The animal signals its changing emotions in quick time: dark brown one second, blanching ghostly white the next, rapidly modulating interwoven patters of stipples and stripes. When it comes to changing colour, by comparison chamaleons are amateurs at the game.

The American neurobiologist William Calvin is one of those thinking hard today about what thinking itself really is. He emphasizes, as others have done before, the idea that thoughts do not reside in particular places in the brain but are shifting patterns of activity over its surface, units which recruit neighbouring units into populations becoming the same thought, competing in Darwinian fashion with rival populations thinking alternative thoughts. We don’t see these shifting patterns, but presumably thinking alternative thoughts. We don’t see these shifting patterns, but presumably we would if neurons lit up when active. The cortex of the brain, I realize, might then look like a squid’s body surface. Does a squid think with its skin? When a squid suddenly changes its colour pattern we suppose it to be a manifestation of mood change, for signalling to another squid. A shift in colour announces that the squid has switched from an aggressive mood, say, to a fearful one. It is natural to presume that the change in mood took place in the brain, and caused the change in colour as a visible manifestation of internal thoughts, rendered external for purposes of communication. The fancy I am adding is that the squid’s thoughts themselves may reside nowhere but in the skin. If squids think with their skins they are even more ‘Martian’ than my colleague realized. Even if that is too far-fetched a speculation (it is), the spectacle of their rippling colour changes is quite alien enough to jolt us out our anaesthetic of familiarity.

Squids are not the only ‘Martians’ on our own doorstep. Think of the grotesque faces of deep-sea fish, think of dust mites, even more fearsome were they not so tiny; think of basking sharks, just fearsome. Think indeed, of chameleons with their catapult-launched tongues, swivelling eye turrets and cold, slow gait. Or we can capture that ‘strange other world’ feeling just as effectively by looking inside ourselves, at the cells that make up our own bodies. A cell is not just a bag of juice. It is packed with solid structures, mazes of intricate folded membranes. There are about 100 million million cells in a human body, and the total area of membranous structure inside one of us works out at more than 200 acres. That’s a respectable farm.

What are all these membranes doing? They seem to stuff the cell as wadding, but that isn’t all they do. Much of the folded acreage is given over to chemical production lines, with moving conveyor belts, hundreds of stages in cascade, each leading to the next in precisely crafted sequences, the whole driven by fast-turning chemical cogwheels. The Krebs cycle, the 9-toothed cogwheel that is largely responsible for making energy available to us, turns over at up to 100 revolutions per second, duplicated thousands of times in every cell. Chemical cogwheels of this particular marquee are housed inside mitochondria, tiny bodies that reproduce independently inside our cells like bacteria. As we shall see, it is now widely accepted that the mitochondria, along with other vitally necessary structures within cells, not only resemble bacteria but are directly descended from ancestral bacteria who, a billion years ago, gave up their freedom. Each one of us is a city of cells, and each cell is a town of bacteria. You are a gigantic megalopolis of bacteria. Doesn’t that life the anaesthetic’s pall?

As a microscope helps our minds to burrow thought alien galleries of cell membranes, and as a telescope lifts us to far galaxies, another way of coming out of the anaesthetic is to return, in our imaginations, through geological time. It is the inhuman age of fossils that knocks us back on our heels. We pick up a trilobite and the books tell us it is 500 million years old. But we fail to comprehend such an age, and there is a yearning pleasure in the attempt. Our brains have evolved to grasp the time-scales of our own lifetimes. Seconds, minutes, hours, days and years are easy for us. We can cope with centuries. When we come to millennia – thousands of years – our spines begin to tingle Epic myths of Homer; deeds of the Greek gods Zeus, Apollo and Artemis; of the Jewish heroes Abraham, Moses and David, and their terrifying god Yahweh; of the ancient Egyptians and the Sun God Ra: these inspire poets and give us that frission of immense age. We seem to be peering back through eerie mists into the echoing strangeness of antiquity. Yet, on the time-scale of our trilobite, those vaunted antiquities are scarcely yesterday.

Many dramatizations have been offered, and I shall essay another. Let us write the history of one year on a single sheet of paer. That doesn’t leave much room for detail. It is roughly equivalent to the lightning ‘Round-up of the Year’ that newspapers trot out on 31 December. Each month gets a few sentences. Now on another sheet of paper write the history of the previous year. Carry on back throough the years, sketching, at a rate of a year per sheet, the outline of what happened in each yar. Bing the pages into a book and number them. Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776-88) spans some 13 centuries in six volumes of about 500 pages each, so it is covering the ground at approximately the rate we are talking about.

That splendid volume The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations (1992), is itself a damned thick, square doorstop of a book, and about the right size to take us back to the time of Queen Elizabeth I. We have an approximate yardstick of time: 4 inches or 10 cm of book thickness to record the history of one millennium. Having established our yardstick, let’s work back to the alien world of geological deep time. We place the book of the most recent past flat on the ground, and then stack books of earlier centuries on top of it. We now stand beside the pile of books as a living yardstick. If we want to read about Jesus, say, we must select a volume 20 cm from the ground or just above the ankle.

A famous archaeologist dug up a bronze-age warrior with a beautifully preserved face mask and exulted: I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon.'He was being poetically awed at his penetration of fabled antiquity. To find Agamemnon in our pile of books, you'd have to sttop to a level about halfway up your shins. Somewhere in the vicinity you'd find Petra (Á rose-red city, half as old as time'), Ozymandias, king of kings ('Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair) and that enigmatic wonder of the ancient world of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. Ur of the Chaldeers, and Uruk the city of the legendary hero Gilgamesh had their day slightly earlier and you'd find tales of their foundation a little higher up your legs. Around here is the oldest date of all, according to the seventeenth-century archbishop James Ussher, who calculated 4004 BC as the date of the creation of Adam and Eve.


The taming of fire was climacteric in our history; from it stems most of technology. How high in our stack of books is the page on which this epic discovery is recorded? The answer is quite a surprise when you recall hat you could comfortably sit down on the pile of books encompassing the whole of recorded history. Archaeological traces suggest that fire was discovered by our Homo erectus ancestors, though whether they made fire, or just carried it about and used it we don't know. They had fire by half a million years ago, so to consult the volume in our analogy recording the discovery you’d have to climb up to a level somewhat higher than the Statue of Liberty. A dizzy height, especially given that Prometheus, the legendary bringer of fire, gets his first mention a little below your knee in our pile of books. To read about Lucy and our australopithecine ancestors in Africa, you’d need to climb higher than any building in Chicago. The biography of the common ancestor we share with chimpanzees would be a sentence in a book stacked twice as high again.

But we’ve only just begun our journey back to the trilobite. How high would the stack of books have to be in order to accommodate the page where the life and death of this trilobite, in its shallow Cambrian sea, is perfunctorily celebrated? The answer is about 56 kilometres, or 35 miles. We aren’t used to dealing with heights like this. The summit of mount Everest is less than 9 km above sea level. We can get some idea of the age of the trilobite if we topple the stack through 90 degrees. Picture a bookshelf three times the length of Manhattan island, packed with volumes the size of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. To read your way back to the trilobite, with only one page allotted to each year, would be more laborious than spelling through all 14 million volumes in the Library of Congress. But even the trilobite is young compared with the age of life itself. The first living creatures, the shared ancestors of the trilobite, of bacteria and of ourselves, have their ancient chemical lives recorded in volume 1 of our saga. Volume 1 is at the far end of the marathon bookshelf. The entire shelf would stretch from London to the Scottish borders. Or right across Greece from the Adriatic to the Aegean.

Perhaps these distances are still unreal. The art in thinking of analogies for large numbers is not to go off the scale of what people can comprehend. If we do that, we are no better off with an analogy that with the real thing. Reading your way through a work of history, whose shelved volumes stretch from Rome to Venice, is an incomprehensible task, just about as incomprehensible as the bald figure 4,000 million years.

Here is another analogy, one that has been used before. Fling your arms wide in an expansive gesture to span all of evolution from its origin at your left fingertip to today at your right fingertip. All the way across your midline to well past your right shoulder, life consists of nothing but bacteria. Many-celled, invertebrate life flowers somewhere around your right elbow. The dinosaurs originate in the middle of your right palm, and go extinct around your last finger joint. The whole story of Homo sapiens and our predecessor Homo erectus is contained in the thickness of one nail-clipping. As for recorded history; as for the Sumerians, the Babylonians, the Jewish patriarchs, the dynasties of Pharaohs, the legions of Rome, the Christian Fathers, the Laws of the Medes and Persians which never change; as for Troy and the Greeks, Helen and Achilles and Agamemnon dead; as for Napoleon and Hitler the Beatles and Bill Clinton, they and everyone that knew them are blown away in the dust from one light stoke of a nail-file.

The poor are fast forgotten
They outnumber the living, but where are all their bones?
For every man alive there are a million dead,
Has their dust gone into earth that it is never seen?
There should be no air to breathe, with it so thick,
No space for wind to blow, nor rain to fall;
Earth should be a cloud of dust, a soil of bones,
With no room even, for our skeletons.


Sacheverell Sitwell, ‘Ágamemnon’s Tomb’ (1933)

Not that it matters, Sitwell’s third line is inaccurate. It has been estimated that the people alive today make up a substantial proportion of the humans that have ever lived. But this just reflects the power of exponential growth. If we count generations instead of bodies, and especially if we go back beyond humankind to life’s beginning, Sacheverell Sitwell’s sentiment has a new force. Let us suppose that each individual in our direct female ancestry, from the first flowering of many-celled life a little over half a billion years ago, lay down and died on the grave of her mother, eventually to be fossilized. As in the successive layers of the buried city of Troy, there would be much compression and shaking down, so let us assume that each fossil in the series was flattened to the thickness of a 1 cm pancake. What depth of rock should we need, if we are to accommodate our continuous fossil record? The answer is that the rock would have to be about 1,000 km or 600 miles thick. This is about ten times the thickness of the earth’s crust.

The Grand Canyon, whose rocks, from deepest to shallowest, span most of the period we are now talking about, is only around one mile deep. If the strata of the Grand Canyon were stuffed with fossils and no intervening rock, there would be room within its depth to accommodate only about one 600th of the generations that have successively died. This calculation helps us to keep in proportion fundamentalist demands for a ‘continuous’ series of gradually changing fossils before they will accept the fact of evolution. The rocks of the earth simply don’t have room for such a luxury – not by many orders of magnitude. Whichever way you look at it, only an extremely small proportions of creatures has the good fortune to be fossilized. As I have said before, I should consider it an honour.

The number of the dead long exceedeth all that shall live. The night of time far surpasseth the day, and who knows when was the Aequinox? Every houre addes unto that current Arithmetique, which scarce stands one moment… Who knows whether the best of men be known or whether there be not more remarkable persons forgot than any that stand remembred in the known account of time?

Sir Thomas Browne, Urne Buriall (1658)

Of Richard Dawkins, Unweaving the Rainbow

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Is the Universe a Computer?

Either because the laws of nature are couched in mathematical symbolism, or because science cannot progress safely in the presence of ambiguity and imprecision, scientists tend to express natural laws as mathematical statements. It would be wrong, however, to read too much into this. Consider a stone tumbling down a hillside, bouncing off rocks and molehills, until it reaches its final resting place at the bottom of the slope. If the stone really is implementing mathematical laws, then in a few seconds it will have performed a series of calculations beyond the capabilities of the fastest supercomputer. But is that really what the rock is doing? Measuring its own positing to the hundreds of decimal places that we know are needed to guarantee the “correct answer”? Computing its way from collision to collision in an orgy of dynamical equations? Some physicists and philosophers think so; in their view, information, rather than matter, is the basic material of the universe. The universe itself then becomes a supercomputer of unprecedented speed and power, busily pursuing the consequences of its “program,” its program being the laws of nature.

Alternatively, the simple laws that we consider fundamental may not be fundamental at all, but just approximations of how nature behaves, or consequences of that behavior. We now know that Newton’s laws are not rigid rules that nature just obeys; they are excellent but sometimes inaccurate descriptions of what nature does. They are not nature’s laws but human laws, and like all human laws they can be broken. Indeed, according to another human law, Murphy’s, they always will be – an interesting case of self-reference. If nature breaks our laws, then our calculations will bear no relation to the way in which nature actually works. We may use the laws of dynamics to calculate where the stone will fall; but that’s not how the stone does it. It certainly can’t if we’ve got the wrong laws. The Newtonian stone has no choice; it is forced to fall wherever it does. In this view the universe is a machine rather than a computer; it is composed of matter, and it is in the nature of matter to behave in ways that happen, coincidentally, to mimic certain computations that appeal to humans.

That was a classical picture of a moving stone. The quantum picture is more subtle, and far stranger to human intuition. In a quantum view, the subatomic particles that make up the stone actually follow all possible paths, consistent with the laws of quantum mechanics. According to the quantum paradigm, what we see is the superposition of all of those potentialities. It just happens that the result of this strange process looks like a lump of rock moving under Newtonian laws. In this picture the Newtonian laws are viewed as mathematical consequences of the real quantum laws, valid for modest but bulky quantities of matter moving at moderate speeds.

In other areas of science, especially those where really accurate measurements or repeatable experiments aren’t possible, people nowadays tend to speak of “models” rather than “laws”. They look for underlying rules and regularities that explain a limited range of phenomena in simple, graspable terms. From that point of view, “laws” may be just spectacularly successful, very simple, models. The important thing is that, even though we can’t be certain that what we think of as laws of nature are actually true, we do see a lot of patterns and regularities in the world, and we can use these patterns and regularities in the world, and we can use these patterns very effectively to bring certain aspects of the world under our control. For instance, the laws of aerodynamics work sufficiently well that airplanes designed using those laws stay up. The vast bulk of evidence, while not quite so conclusive points to the flight of birds as a consequence of those same laws. However, we can’t yet start with aerodynamics and end with a proof that a bird, too, will stay up; but despite such admitted uncertainties, there still seem to be simple laws at work. It’s just that some operate further behind the scenes than others. Indeed, the further behind the scenes the laws are, the more we tend to think of them as being “fundamental”.

Monday, January 12, 2009

God of Time

In discussing the big bang, we see that space and time are much more like each other than we might at first have suspected. The view we get from Einstein is of a four-dimensional space-time rather than a three dimensional space that evolves in time. It is a rather strange picture of reality. Nothing changes in four-dimensional space-time. In order for there to be change, it must take place in time. But time is part of the four-dimensional reality we are talking about; there is no other. For this reason, many physicists talk of a “block universe,” one that contains all of space and time on an equal footing. So, for example, just as all of space exists at each point in time, so all of time exists at each point in space. Physical time is essentially static.

This is not to say that space and time are indistinguishable. They clearly are very different, as we noted in the ways in which we measure the two: a ruler in the one case, a clock in the other. Not only that, whereas one can travel no distance in a finite time (just stay still), one cannot travel a finite distance in no time. To do the latter, it would have to be feasible to travel at infinite speed.

This possibility is ruled out by another consequence of relativity theory; namely, nothing can travel faster than the speed of light (300,000 kilometers per second). This constrain means that if one represents the motion of an object through space and time by tracing out its path in four-dimensional space-time, it can lie as close as it likes to the time axis (by remaining stationary, it would lie exactly along this axis). But there is a limit to how closely it can align itself with any of the spatial axes (the closest alignment being that of a light beam). So, a study of these paths in space time would single out the time axis as different from the other three.

In addition, we have the second law of thermodynamics: Disorder increases as time increases. If we have, for example, a photograph of an intact cup and another showing the same cup smashed, we immediately know that the latter relates to a set of circumstances found at a later time; in other words, nearer to the positive end of the time axis. The spatial axes do not exhibit any such asymmetry.

So far we have talked purely in physical terms: the motions of objects and light, measurements recorded by physical rulers and clocks orderly and disorderly states. When we add to this our experience of space and time as conscious human beings, then further differences arise. In particular, as regards time, we become aware of a distinction among past, present, and future. We seem to inhabit the instant known as “now”; the past no longer existing; the future yet to exist. Moreover, we are aware of the “flow” of time. We move toward the future; we do not move toward the past (outside the realms of science fiction, that is).

Whereas we noted that according to the second law of thermodynamics there was more disorder toward one end of the time axis than toward the other, this conscious experience of time takes us in the direction that leads to more and more disorder. This inexorable movement is a feature only of time; there is nothing equivalent to compel us to travel in only one spatial direction.

We are thus confronted with two entirely different understandings of time. On the one hand, we have conscious experience presenting us with a flowing time in which the constantly moving special instant called “now” separates the totally different domains of past and future. ON the other hand, physics presents us with a static time in which no instant is singled out as in any way special, all instants of time being on an equal footing, just like all points in space. How are we to reconcile the two? How are we to see God in relation to time?

There is no easy answer. The view of time that is most readily grasped is, of course, that of conscious experience. The static idea of time is so alien and counterintuitive that even some professional scientists are inclined to dismiss it as being somehow wrong. In contrast, there are others who would claim that the scientific picture has to be correct, and it is our conscious experience of time that is illusory. But it seems to me that rejecting, or downplaying, one of these approaches to the understanding of time in favor of the other is not the right course of action.

Instead, we have to come to terms with a mystery that defies our normal categories of thought and our usual ways of organizing information. The dilemma over the two kinds of time points us toward different type of understanding, one in which we have simultaneously to hold in the mind seemingly contradictory, paradoxical conceptions, each of which embodies some of the truth but not the whole.

To get the complete picture of reality, one needs both conceptions. One has to learn to accept that this conjunction of seemingly paradoxical ideas is the explanation. It might not be the type of explanation one had been expecting, but no matter. One must allow the nature of reality to dictate not just the answer to our question but also the very form of the question we ask and the form of its answer. Constraining the outcome to fit in with our conventional notions as to what constitutes a satisfactory “explanation” can only distort the truth and leave us with an impoverished understanding.

But, for now, we note that our findings about time seem to point us in two directions at once. This in turn affects the way we ought to see God in relation to time:
God is to be found in time. He is the God to whom we pray. For prayer to be effective it must bring about change. We must, therefore, live our lives on the assumption that God does react to us; not only do we change what time but to some extent, and in some sense, he, too, changes – in answering our prayers.

But he is not just the God of mental life with its experience of flowing time and change. He is also the God of the physical world – the four-dimensional integration of all space and all time. As such, all of time is present to him; he sees it all; he knows it all. This is the aspect of God’s relationship to time that goes against the grain. It is difficult not to incorporate into our picture of God an extension of our own human limitations on knowing the future. But if we are to reach out to a more sophisticated understanding of God’s nature, this is a temptation that has to be resisted. We must allow whatever are the currently accepted best interpretations of science to be the arbiter and guide. And the fact that those interpretations appear to include a time such that, in some sense or other, all of it exists on an equal footing, surely makes it easier to accept that God has knowledge of the future.

Not, of course, that there is anything new about the idea of God knowing the future. What modern science does is to lend an added measure of credibility to this ancient insight.

The acceptance of God’s foreknowledge as something that arises from God’s ability to encompass the whole of physical time from a vantage point lying beyond such time itself, feeds back into our own personal relationship with God occurring within the type of time that is relevant to conscious experience. The God to whom we pray in that context is the God who knows what the outcome will be and who ensures that all will be well. In the same way, the God who built into the evolutionary process a measure of random chance goes beyond a God who has simply stacked the odds so that it is overwhelmingly likely intelligent life of some form will appear somewhere; he knows exactly what form that intelligent life will take.

The idea of a God holding the somewhat paradoxical engagement with time that is both within the changing, open-ended time of conscious experience and also beyond the unchanging completeness of physical time is not easy to grasp. Indeed, let us be frank: It cannot be done. It cannot be grasped in the same sense as one might be able logically to prove a geometrical theorem. It is a truth, an understanding, of God that is to be accepted rather than mastered. It is a paradox that points to the truth, rather than encompasses it. This paradoxical approach affords a way of further deepening our appreciation of the nature of God beyond that which can be achieved by the straightforward use of any single metaphor drawn from everyday human life.

Friday, January 9, 2009

God of Evolution

Earth formed some 4,600 million years ago, and it has taken that long for evolution by natural selection to transform inanimate chemicals into human beings. In fact, it has taken a total of 12,000 million years since the big bang to produce us. A long, long, time. From the vantage of this modern understanding, we have a far better appreciation of the patience and far-sightedness of God than was possible in earlier times. From God’s perspective how petty our own restive, anxious demands for immediate results and instant gratification must seem.

Second, we learn from evolution that God is willing to incorporate into the achievement of his purpose an element of chance. The mutations on which natural selection works occur randomly. There is no conscious, detailed “design” built into all the minutiae. There is a world to be itself. And yet he knows that the whole system has been set up in such a way that his broad aims eventually will be achieved. Intelligent life of one form or another will in due course emerge.

On other planets, the random events giving rise to life will be different, so humans as such will not evolve. But some form of intelligent life eventually will appear – a form of life that will at some stage begin to ask the ultimate questions concerning the purpose of life and whether relationship with God is established, which is why the world is here in the first place. In these ways, our conception of God has to broaden.

One particularly difficult problem inherent in evolutionary theory has to be mentioned. Evolution by natural selection has been characterized by phrase “survival of the fittest.” It is a crude description but has some truth to it. It is all about survival, as is plain to see from the constant engagement between predator and prey. Although it is impossible to be sure what any other animal actually feels, it seems only reasonable to conclude that evolution involves suffering on a massive scale.

Now, of course, there is nothing new about suffering. The problems of evil and suffering have been with us since time immemorial. Evil can be accounted for in terms of our own disobedience against the wholly good God, and some suffering arises directly out of evil acts or from wanton unwillingness to help those in need. But not all suffering arises in this way; even in the absence of human wickedness, there is suffering through natural causes such as earthquakes, flood, and failure of crops.

A partial explanation might lie in the need for rigid laws of nature to hold sway so that we can exercise free will in an environment in which we know what the outcome of our actions will be. Inevitably, one will sometimes fall foul of those laws working out their inexorable course. One also has to accept that in a hypothetical world where there was no suffering, it would be difficult if not impossible, to demonstrate one’s love for another (in the way one attends to his or her needs and is prepared to make sacrifices on that person’s behalf). Having said that, the sheer degree of suffering in the world has always appeared to be excessive. Now, on top of that, we have to come to terms with the fact that the very process by which intelligent beings evolve incorporates by its very nature an unavoidable degree of intense suffering. Why did God choose evolution by natural selection? Was there no other way? Clearly, we still have much to learn about the mind of God in this matter.
P.S. I will announce with pomp when I finally construct my alternative take on society. It is still in its embryonic stage.