Stories, Mirrors, and space

Today I watched a movie I'd been planning to watch for some time, but for some reason or the other, kept putting off, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. I've planned to watch it ever since my sister recommended it to me. To use her words, it's a beautiful story about how love can overcome obstacles of any magnitude. Atleast that's how I remember it. In addition, I've been reading this novel for some time, and was wondering about this fact from a numerical computing course I took. That's quite a bit to start with, so let me begin from humble origins.

While watching a movie, reading a book, don't we always get to that point of 'eureka', when you can feel yourself as one with it, when you know the crux of the whole story is at hand. To borrow a line from the matrix, "everything you have done, has led to this". This kind of phenomenon has parallels, if you somewhat stretch the definition of parallel. One is resonance, the irritating thing we study in physics, it just means 2 bodies vibrating at the same frequency. But a simpler definition also exists, which basically means having a very good rapport with someone or something. Then the question comes that if there is this one resonant moment, what's the point of the rest of the story? That's simple, the story led you to this point. In the spirit of the stuff I learnt in the numerical computing class, lets try a more mathematical approach. The crux is simply a point in space, and the story is then simply the location of this point. As the story unfolds, a map unfolds with it, guiding you to this point. But, we know that different people experience different things with the same story, the same work of art. And this experience gives us some new insight, it changes us ever so slightly. At the risk of losing you, this is somewhat like the action of a matrix on a vector. I love SVD, and it explains the action of the matrix as follows. The vector or point is first written in the right coordinates, then we can describe easily how the matrix will change it. Once that is done, we can try to write the point back in the old coordinate system.

What I'm trying to say is, that the story is your map, it gets you to the crux, the crux then transforms you to a certain extent, and the falloff of the story tries to get you back to your own world, the key being 'tries'. To look at the actual transformation, I'm reminded of those contorted mirrors in which you look fat or short. Stories are interesting, but most of all, I think the ones you like are the ones you relate to, ones in which you see a bit of yourself, or what you would like yourself to be. In so doing, they are like contorted mirrors, they focus on a certain aspect of us, that is usually hidden from us. With that focus, we can probably get a better insight into who we are. Which would explain why people who love reading books claim it helps in character development. But some stories are simpler, they do what some of those contorted mirrors do, show us thinner or taller. What I mean is, to experience a moment of grandeur, that exquisite and exciting life we do not have in real life. A simple escape from reality which lots of other things provide as well, games, alcohol, basically any addiction. But then you might say, aren't you discounting the whole aspect of what a good writer can do? not really. A good writer is like a good map maker, but he's one better, he can make a map which can make people get to different places by following the same directions, good places at that! That's his second power, how well can he/she affect the people once they get there. The best stories leave you there, to find your way back, or to wherever you may want to go. The feeble may get lost, probably they were not meant to go there unsupervised in the first place, or they may not realise where they are. But most find a moment of clarity, and that moment is the whole point of the story for me. To put it in the best possible way, I quote : life is not the number of breaths you take, but the moments that take your breath away. An apt, if somewhat cheesy conclusion.

Love, admiration and illusions

I was reading this article on why marriages which last, do. They made an interesting claim, that marriages which go the distance rely on illusions. The people who stay married tend to do so by creating an illusion which lets them overlook their partner's faults. It was an interesting conclusion coming close on the heels of how distraction helps your will power(see previous post). It reinforced a view I've held for a long time, that your mind works by simplifying your surroundings. Your mind is very practical, but your concious cannot possibly take care of all the parameters involved in everything. Your subconcious tends to do some, lets say background work, to help you cope. Maybe these distractions and illusions are examples of our subconcious at work, it's way of telling us that the positives outweight the costs.

Which brings us to love. Interesting thing, most stated cheezy opinions about it tend to say that it makes us do somewhat unfathomable things, things no sane person would do. Applying the aforementioned conclusions, it would seem that love makes us work the same illusions that married people supposed have, illusions to distract us from all that might be negative. That is, obviously discounting the massive chemical and biological things that might underly all this. It seems to be fair to question the logic a mind would have for this. A mind is fairly practical, everyone weighs the pros and cons of everything before deciding, so there's no reason to believe our minds wouldn't either. So, under it all, to love someone, we would have to see some extreme positives to help us develop a justification for masking all the bad things. And this justification, heightened by hormones, would still have to be fairly superlative. But if you look at love in general, not just puppy love, I mean people you like and love for a long time, like family, you'll notice you can see these justifications quite simply. You'll see that one or more thing that make you admire the people you love. Even the people you're friends with, you'll find qualities in them that you admire, qualities you wish you had. And so it doesn't seem too forgone a conclusion that admiration is a cause and justification, if not the cause. Which would explain much of a leader's charm, admiration, it seems, can lead pretty easily to love, or maybe lust too. And it would also explain the reason why people break up. The admiration which lead them to love in the first place, is gone, or probably was not as superlative to begin with, but simply heightened by, well lets call it chemistry.

I like to believe that behind every face, there is this cold practicality, dealing in reasons we may not be aware of. Like when you meet people the first time, you make up your mind pretty quickly whether you're going to like that person or not, first impressions. It seems plausible, and this research suggests, that we look for clues to whether this person has something that would be useful to us, something that we like, and then we create conditions for that logic to prosper, which would make these people amenable to us, and us amenable to them.

Of Goals & fantasy worlds

We all love fantasy, at least to a certain extent. Movies, books, music, all are a certain way to escape the dreariness that engulfs our life sometimes. They're great stress busters too. I recently read about a study of will power, on kids who were left in a room with no supervision with cookies, and told they'd get 2 if they waited till the supervisor came back. Interestingly, the ones that held out, distracted themselves, or simply kept reminding themselves of what all wrong could happen if they gave in.

Children are good subjects, as they're not muddled by accessory concerns that tend to clog the adult mind. The best part about the study, I found, was the power of distraction. Distraction isn't always a bad thing, even studies of children with attention deficit disorder have revealed that the constant fidgeting actually helps the children concentrate, even though it may not seem that way to you. I, myself, have never studied without a distraction like TV or music since the past so many years. So what does this have to do with the title, you may ask. Well, we all love our fantasy worlds. Everyone has one, also known as their "happy place", and by numerous other synonyms. Fantasy worlds are our way of escape, simply moving into another dimension where you aren't worried about anything, nothing can happen to you, and you can passively enjoy the interesting twists of another's life. We need that quite simply like children need it to avoid cookies. Except, we're not trying to distract ourselves from anything good, well, mostly not, but something bad. If you've seen Coupling, you probably know about the examples of something good too. Everyone in life has certain goals, expressed in a multitude of ways, be it wanting to be an astronaut or a doctor as a kid, your wonderful "where do you see yourself in 5 years" type crappy questions, or simply a desire to achieve something. Life has a way of kicking you in all the wrong places, atleast sometimes. You have your good moments, you have your bad ones. The thing is, all these tend to remain with you, and your wonderous brain keeps dishing them out to you when you least expect. Fantasy worlds let us escape that. In this world, you can be the lord and master, people at your beck and call, where you are adored and fawned over etc. etc. To some, this escape is through books, to some like me, through movies, to others, through other forms of art. What I like about movies is the means to experience something you would probably never experience in your own life, in a way that's safe and side-effect free (see my previous post). You get transported into worlds beyond imagination, or atleast beyond anything we'll see. That is one of the big reasons I like graphics, because it gives you the power to bring things and worlds to life, that are otherwise lost, or were never there to begin with.

For all it's wonders, fantasies are simply like any other addiction. Like booze, cigarettes and the like, they offer an easy quickfix, and consistent usage eventually tends to start affecting your life. You are but one person, and can only live fully in one world. You can extend bits of yourself into other worlds, but the demands of each can make you withdraw from some to cut your losses. That's one of the reasons I don't like games like The Sims, or Second Life. The first life you have, and the people in it have the biggest priority from you, in my opinion. The draw of these other worlds is nice, to escape everything. To some it may seem like the only option, or maybe the better option. I myself am the social hara-kiri expert :) . Movies are my guilty measure, I have probably watched more movies than the average person, even crap most people would kill themselves halfway through. And I somehow never get bored. Ever since I watched a Hindi movie called "Junoon"(A werewolf or rather were-tiger movie), at the tender age of 4, which scared me shitless, I've been able to watch any movie with aplomb and ease. I have mine, and others have theirs. I guess the key to it all is moderation, till I become that guy who does everything sitting on a couch, I'm ok. As they say, even a little bit of poison is good for you.

Perfection, stupid actions and time machines

I agree, at first glance, those 3 terms seem like they have very little to do with each other, or a lot. I was wondering the other day about all the stupid and not-so-stupid things I've done in my life, and I wasn't quite able to finish the list, there're that many. I guess everyone's done their share of stupid things, I believe I've done atleast about 2 person's worth, maybe everyone does. My problem is that with every stupid action, I tend to start off a string of corrective measures, and I can't rest until all is fixed. My stupid actions don't usually involve bodily harm, apart from a rare few, but their ramifications usually are on a pretty nice scale. I always wonder whether the corrective actions cause more damage than the initial actions themselves. One thing I'm sure of, this is one post that'll probably make sense to me, no matter what the post date is, past, present or future.

So lets get to perfection, everyone's seen the seemingly perfect people. Who are on top of everything, do everything right, and all the right things happen to them. And these people seem to exist out of fiction as well. I guess someone in another position would consider me as one of these descended-from-heaven sorts, at least for a moment. The simple fact is perfect people are god-awefully boring, there's nothing so interesting about them, you get used to them doing their tasks with immaculate precision and efficiency, in so much that you get used to it. Roger Federer in his now interrupted reign as world no. 1 is probably a good example of this. The media loves these perfect people, at least until they can find a bit of dirt on them, or they stop being perfect. Science is the pursuit of perfection, and they do pretty well. But one of my professors once remarked about the cyclical nature of research, atleast in computer hardware, and it's probably true in a sense. The essential nature of all new things we do can be classified in terms of something old, that's our nature. But all these new things begin as an aberration, almost as a stupid action. Copernicus wasn't considered as smart when he said the earth wasn't the center of the universe, Van Gogh wasn't considered a great artist during his lifetime. It seems all new things derive from the certain level of unhappiness with the status quo of perfection. Henry Ford attributed most new inventions to a lazy man looking for an easier way to do something.

Coming to time machines, I always feel the ardent desire to have a time machines to fix all the stupid things I've done till now, after I've done something stupid. It only lasts for a while, after which slowly, it either dulls out, or becomes funny in some stupid way. It's always interesting to ponder about questions that have no answer, because if you are able to go back and change things, logic should dictate that you as you know yourself should cease to exist. Because, quite simply, you are one path through a decision tree, if one decision changes, you changed a branch, and thus you will end up on some other path. As much as I might hate the stupid things I've done, I like myself, and am rather risk averse, so that time machine scenario seems less appealing after calming down. If all this seems a little weird to you, this is either the first time you've read my blog, or never really got any of the previous posts :P . Philosophy in all its beauty, is simply the thought and pursuit of the unanswerable questions, which seem pointless to most. Coming back to stupid things and perfection, maybe to attain perfection, we must do stupid things. Else if it was a scientific path, someone would have done it already, and given a proof to fit. Maybe that's the reason artificial intelligence isn't yet able to match human "intelligence", because what may seem stupid to us may actually be perfect. Because maybe we're inherently flawed, and maybe perfection isn't the absence of flaws, or rather understanding them. In so doing, I don't quite regret the stupid things I've done, only their ramifications.

In case any of you were wondering at the beginning that they've made more stupid mistakes than me, I rest my case. Anyone who can think up such reasoning must've thought about it more than anyone else :) .

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.