Of Mice and Men

Before I begin, let me point out, that I haven't actually read the book by the same name, and it's unlikely that I use the title in the same context.

I actually thought of this while reading an article in the Time magazine, about the various kinds of torture, victims of Madoff's now famous Ponzi scam wanted to put him through. It was interesting to see people, with so much hatred against one person, I've rarely seen such hatred concentrated against one person other than Hitler in my lifetime. The interesting part was, that I had just read another article on jihad and the recent Mumbai attacks. The article ended with the statement that there is a need to enhance education in order to improve people's outlooks and prospects etc. etc. Essentially, nothing that has not been said before. Though most people would say otherwise, I'd say there's an interesting parallel in both the articles. It's that we have these two groups of people, so intent on harming another group, hatred is the common thread. The means of causing the harm are different, which is expected, because of the difference of situations, but the desire is much the same, though the reasons may differ. And the plain fact is, the hatred and desire for revenge is all too prevalent in the world these days, economy being the most common grouse, it's even managed to sweep terrorism aside. The thing is, people advocate educating people to make them stop killing each other. To make them see that killing people is not the solution. But doesn't that assume that killing someone is the worst you can do to them? I mean, I concede that death is bad, even Freud said something about the guarantee of life being one of the basic psychological requirements. But isn't death better than a living hell? Take the Fritzl case for example, I definitely would recommend a death sentence for the father, crimes as heinous as those deserve it, above all law. But the thing is, the father, even in death would get a better deal, the daughter has to live the remnant of her life with the horrors. Sometimes, there are worse things than death. The human mind has limitless power to cause pain just through thought, just as it has power to give happiness and pleasure. Education, for all it's noble deeds, simply moves our means of executing our hatred to some higher level, or rather more "sophisticated" means. Nothing can extinguish the inherent hatred in us. Which brings us to the quandry, who's worse, the jihadi who massacred hundreds in Mumbai and left many harrowed families to grieve, or the man who stole so many people's life savings and left them penniless. I don't think there's a correct answer, both are bad deeds. After reading about his life story, I have some amount of understanding why he did what he did, though under no circumstances does it justify what he did, poverty can make people do amazing things. To me, what makes the jihadi's deeds reprehensible are not as much the people he killed, but rather the people left alive who were related to those dead people. Living in grief is probably worse than death, or so I feel. Madoff, we can say, acted without any such pressing needs, maybe he did, I don't know. To some that makes him the worse criminal. The only thing I can say is that, in spite of the superiority we claim over mice despite sharing ~95% of our genome with them, we may not be the better creatures. Go figure.

Conciousness, individuality and intelligence

I read recently in the papers about a study being conducted to gauge the power of the concious and unconcious mind. What they were essentially trying to see was whether our concious mind can overpower the unconcious, and hold it's own. The basis for their concern was the observation, that we don't really think when performing basic everyday tasks. It almost seems like the unconcious mind, the instinct, takes over mostly when we do everyday tasks. If you ever doubt that, try to remember what you just did when you've just finished some routine task. In all probability you won't, and if you do, you'll only remember some sketchy and vague things. Essentially you weren't really thinking when doing those tasks. The researchers tried to change a few things to force the mind to think, and voila! the areas of the brain associated with concious though lit up. So the researchers assume all's well as we do have a concious that is probably unique to each individual, and we're not being controlled by some part of our brain over which we have little control.

Why that's a big deal? we as humans base most arguments of our supremacy over animals and other beings by the argument of complex thought and decision making power. More so, we consider ourselves better than computers because we know we exist, there's a concept of self, and so on. In fact, in artificial intelligence, there's a seminal test given by one of the most influential computer scientists ever, called the Turing test. It determines whether a machine can be classified as "intelligent". The simple test just says that if you are "conversing" with something or someone beyond a wall, and cannot see the thing, if you are unable to distinguish "it" from a human, that "it" is intelligent. Simple, isn't it :D, the only nitty gritty being that I don't think it defines what the conversation method is, I think a chat would do. Getting back, we (meaning most people familiar with computers) only consider computers as a machine running certain software. Almost all computers run as some programs running over an operating system. Now for the slightly creepy part. The operating system takes care of the basic tasks, so that the applications can run with a certain level of abstraction and not care what lies underneath. Different kinds of operating systems can even tolerate certain hardware failure. Why I'm detailing such weird computer babble is that computers bear a startling resemblance to the way we function. Now most of this can obviously be owed to design, we always look to nature for inspiration for designing machines. But no one quite looks to our machines to try to understand ourselves. It's always said that the designer leaves a bit of himself/herself in their creation, making it kinda like their baby. If that's so, it's reasonable to assume, that the subconcious might also be leaving some tracks in our creations for us to follow. Why this becomes relevant is that, modern computers are developing processing units with multiple cores, essentially we're creating a spatial spread in the processing unit. So many designers are trying to design such processors in which certain parts are customized for certain tasks, like our brain does. So where does this leave us? research does point, albeit inconclusively, to the immense power of our subconcious in our functioning. What if our subconcious is our operating system and our concious merely a fledgling program running on it. Doesn't that leave our arguments for supremacy in tatters? why? because that would simply make us an operating system and hardware release by the company called nature. A release that has been around for a long time and could be up for obsoletion. Or it could even give credence to a matrix like scenario, we might simply be programs running on some machine in the future, keeping us alive in a virtual world. Or we could be no better than a program itself, a program in some system solving some problem. The wonderful part is that we would never realise if we were in a simulated environment, simply because we have never seen a "real" environment.

But more than that, an OS and application framework would also explain why most of us can agree on some things, why we have a consensus on certain issues, why we have that gaussian like distribution in nature. Plus, nature is simply not interested in an individual, it only cares about species, it always programs individuals to let a species survive. So it seems sensible on nature's part not to keep the individuality come in way of the collective. Which brings us to an interesting point, whether we're as individualistic as we assume. I mean, don't we always think, the other person doesn't get it, or we're better than the other one. Maybe that's wrong, but then how do we explain intelligent and not-so-intelligent people? The interesting thing about computers is, that manufacturing them is a very wasteful process. Only about 15% of manufactured chips are ok. You could argue that that's hardware, and well, we're "manufactured" differently. Well, in the end, it's all chemical reactions :) . Maybe one person being intelligent is just a stroke of luck, or maybe it's something they did. But whatever it may be, that hunking OS of the unconcious is behind most of it, because research does show that the concious can do very little, it's not that powerful. For example, we can work with only 8 pieces of data at a time. Our unconcious slowly learns what 8 pieces to keep and how they should be organized. It's an interesting concept, because it seems, like our senses tell us what's going on, our unconcious may be getting cues from our concious, on how to improve things. But then trying to find out about our mind is perilously difficult. Why? as any computer engineer will tell you, reverse engineering a program when you don't know the API, is bloody hard. Maybe a simple hacking technique would be interesting to try, give the program an input, and look at the output, and repeat for lots of inputs. Penny for your thoughts, or should I say, your output at time t :)

Journeys, Chapters, Actors, and Home

From my early childhood, I've had a love for travel. Nothing could match up to the rush of making the short trip to the railway station/airport, seated eagerly, waiting for the journey to start. I still love when the train starts moving or when the plane starts its sudden acceleration, quite unmatched feelings of euphoria. I can almost say that I love the journey more than the holiday itself. There's a sense of idealism in the air, and you can feel this will be a vacation to beat all else, and you have so much to look forward to. Kinda like friday evening (I've never had a school/college/work where I've had to work saturdays :) ).

Journeys are inherently interesting, to me they signal change and escape. Escape from whatever may be giving you headaches back home, and change when they mean you're moving from your home, to a new one. To tell you frankly, I never like to leave home, and I miss it a hell lot when I do. To me, vacations of rediscovering that love affair with that home you fell in love with, with all the people that make up that home. I guess places mean very little to me, only the people, but most homes tend to take a personality of their own, and become people in their own accord. But if you think I mean only the places I've stayed as my home, think again. Homes are never just houses, homes are all the places we talk about. They're that playground you used to play on, your wonderous school, or even that place you spent only a few months. A piece of us lives in each of these places, and I think you'll find, that even when you return to these places, you'll still reminesce and never find your memory's wonderland quite reflected in the actuality. That's why I feel saddened whenever a journey means leaving one of my homes, I know I'll never return to that home, only to that place, that home is forever safe in my memories. But I also feel happy, knowing I loved someone there.

Shakespeare once said that all the world's a stage, and all people are merely actors. He couldn't be more accurate. What are chapters but acts of a play, and our life lived in our various homes the settings for these acts. Each subsequent act does not make sense without the previous, but a play is simply not a single act. Each journey is a switching to a different act, set in a different home. And likewise, a play cannot make sense unless it's looked at from the spectator's point of view. One cannot make sense of anything happening in one's life unless we look at what happened dispassionately from afar, and look at how previous acts contributed to what we just saw. Just as much, we must know that no act shall be repeated, no dialogues recounted, only that fleeting memory is the life we lived. And I guess, like all great shows, an important part of a play is the cast, each one of them leaves their own indelible mark, and their place could not be taken by any other. And that their place is in their respective acts, not a moment before, not a moment after.

It lends meaning to a set of lines that's been in my head for very long, from the Lord of the Rings, "We were home. How do you pick up the threads of an old life? How do you go on... when in your heart you begin to understand... there is no going back? There are somethings that time cannot mend... some hurts that go too deep... that have taken hold." It doesn't just refer to irresverisbly and mentally damaged hobbits, it has a simple enough allegory, that you cannot and must not try, to return to an old life expecting it to be the same. Places may be the same, but they are not the same home. And my reason for writing this entry? I just made a realisation that I undertook a third kind of a journey for a second time, one that I did not realise at the time. A journey from one home to another, where both acts are running simultaneously. Life, it seems, is much more complex that any play we can write, since plays still don't, nor are likely to, have parallel acts. Nor will it have acts running that the spectators do not know about, nor even the actors.