Author: DR (Page 2 of 4)

AE

August 27, 2022 / DR

Artificial intelligence will change computers. Artificial evolution will change us. The latter is immensely more important. Computers are fine as they are, but humans certainly need improvement, and fast. It would be nice to tinker with our own code, alter the happenstance of natural selection. Dear nature, you’ve done very well to have brought us so far, but we’ll take it from here. From now on, we will do the selecting, thank you very much.

With the superior judgment and intellect that are the results of billions of years of natural selection, we will chart the future course of human evolution. No more accidents. There has been much speculation about the new and improved species that we will become, but much of it has been wild and fanciful. Wings, larger brains, superhuman strength, all that. But I propose here a few upgrades that are more practical and useful.

To begin with, the location of the taste buds. I think they should be shifted from the tongue to the fingertips. You should taste food before you put it in your mouth, not after. Now if you can taste by touch, you won’t have to swallow food unwillingly or spit it out if it’s not to your liking. There are other pluses: if you’re watching your weight, you can taste the food without ingesting it (have your cake and not eat it too). Finger food will now be exactly that. And you can touch people to find out what they taste like, without biting them or licking them. Imagine shaking hands with someone and telling if they are sour or bitter or sweet (or if they’ve had sambar rice or biriyani for lunch).

The other thing I would like to do is bring back the tail. Natural selection had a great idea with the tail, an incredibly useful appendage. Then, for some mysterious reason, excised it from the human body. A prehensile tail would be the fifth limb that we so badly need. It could hold our phones while we type with two hands. If thick enough, it would be a third leg, so we could park ourselves comfortably on it instead of sitting, and give our buttocks a break. And we could avoid fights by wagging it when meeting strange bipeds. It could also serve as a signalling device in other ways, such as lifting it to indicate interest in mating, or tucking it between the legs to indicate the opposite.

A third change to the human form I propose has to do with the nose. We should copy the elephant trunk. A long, bendy nose would be handier than you’d think. It could function as a hand, to begin with. Just like an elephant’s trunk. They can pick up food and convey it to the mouth, leaving the hands free to do other things. It could also be equipped with enhanced olfactory functionality (elephants can smell water from up to 19 kilometres away – I found this nugget on the Net, so it might or might not be true). And since they can be used as straws to suction up drinks, they would be eco-friendly.

These are merely illustrative examples (is that a tautology?). The possibilities are limitless, of course. But AE could all too easily veer towards the frivolous or merely cosmetic, such as bigger endowments. So one has a duty to offer the right kind of examples.

Modern dinosaurs

August 24, 2022 / DR

A rich trove of fossils has been discovered while a farmer was ploughing a field for a crop of groundnuts in a field in gummadipoondi. This has dropped a stone into the still pond of dinosaur studies. Here are the new dinos.

Brontosgrandadspapasaurus (a really big one)

Aethreeaityforbreicfaustosaurus (another really big one)

Objectivorous Gigantiferous tantamountosaurus (it ate stuff, was big, and that’s about it)

Philosiraptor (it had razor sharp wisdom teeth)

Dupeterosaurus (it laid its eggs in pterosaurus nests)

Petrosaurus (it later became fossil fuel)

Bergosaurus (it led to a big spiel about dinosaurs in later times)

Dinonosaurus (a dinosaur, but not all that terrible)

Diohnosaurus (it was truly terrible)

Dodosaurus (it’s extinct)

Dinosareus (inspired a popular toy)

Stupendosaurus (so big it had to stoop to get into places)

Dianasaurus (became rather famous after it died out)

Thesaurus (the definitive dinosaur)

No breakthroughs now

August 22, 2022 / DR

The Internet is a simulation of the brain. Connections between neurons make the brain work, and generate the mind. Connections between computers generate the web. The mind is a network of neurons, and the Net is a network of minds. The Inner Net (mind: antarmukha), and the Outer Net (the web: bahirmukha).

Now the more time you spend with the Outer Net, the less time you have to strengthen the connections in the Inner Net. There are many neurons that remain unused, because they don’t fire often, even though they’re a part of the network (the neurons that fire together wire together). This applies to minds too. All minds are part of the network of minds (even without the Internet). But some minds are ‘major’ nodes, playing important roles in the cognitive machinery of humanity, because they fire more often and to greater effect. And ironically, they can only do this in isolation, because if you’re part of the noise of the Internet, you will lack the ability to make the signals. This has always been true, even when the network of minds (the Outer Net, ‘bahirmukha’) was connected by means other than the Internet.

Therefore, the more connected human society becomes, the less in touch with their consciousness and subconsciousness humans become, and proportionately less able to make the connections that are the stuff of ideas and creation (one definition of an idea is ‘a previously unseen connection between two seemingly unconnected concepts’).

And then there is the fact that we have delegated memory to hard disks and the Internet. Memories are like tools and the raw material with which we create. Someone with a paintbrush and colours can either be an artist or not. But someone without the paintbrush and colours certainly cannot be an artist.

So we don’t have the required ‘furniture’ or ‘tools’ in our heads to be creative, inventive in the same way that our ancestors were.

Memorising something requires depth of processing. That is why experts, who engage with their domain expertise and have a deep understanding of it, have a superb memory for it.

But are we not in the age of ‘exponential progress’? Aren’t breakthroughs coming at an ever-increasing rate? My theory is that they are not breakthroughs, at least in the fundamental sense that movable type printing, electricity, the theory of evolution or quantum mechanics were. We have today improvements in the technology of science (better instruments, experimentation, knowledge repositories) but not in the science of technology – the insights and brainwaves that lead to new technology and change the way we live. Speaking of which, life expectancy has either stagnated or is falling. And the quality of life is not improving . At least, the perceived quality of life is not improving. But that is a whole other question: is an hour spent surfing the web on an iPad better than an hour spent hunting for flowers in a wood?

Coincidences

June 10, 2020 / DR

I was reading Fire Down Below by William Golding. It is an account of a voyage to Australia. Set in the 19th century, I think. Then, even as I was halfway through the book, I happened to pick another one to read. It gripped me immediately, and I continued reading it after I finished the first one. The Far Country by Nevil Shute. This one is a story about settlers in Australia, set in the early part of the second half of the 20th century. They might well have been descendants of the voyagers in the first book. Uncanny. I have read about 15 pages of The Far Country. It is small, tightly set type, and its 239 pages may well reveal more unsettling secrets. I do not believe that coincidences are happenstances. They have meaning, but their significance escapes our overly rational and cynical minds. I have already made a further, remarkable discovery. Both these titles have three words and thirteen letters. I’m sure of it, I spent a long time counting them.

Another time, I was reading another book, I think it was The Hitchhiker’s Guide…, there was a place in the book when the hero looks at the clock, and the clock says 1.03 am. I stopped reading, yawned, glanced at my phone. The time…was actually 1.04 am. It could have been 1.03 am at the same moment it was 1.03 am in the book, and then, in the time it took for me to put down the book and glance at the clock, the minute hand could have moved on. Out of kindness for me, just so I was slightly less spooked than I could have been.

The other day I opened a book on my Kindle and read ‘And delight reigned. They drew the chair under the plum tree, which was snow-white with blossoms and musical with bees.’ This was in The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. And then I took a bite out of a plum. It is not often I eat a plum. I would have eaten perhaps twenty plums in all my life until the day of this coincident. And to read about a plum tree at the very moment I was eating a plum is very rum. It is worth noting.

A little later, I read this in The Canon, The Beautiful Basics of Science, by Natalie Angier: ‘John Littlewood (mathematician at the University of Cambride) blah blah blah: “You see and hear things happening at the rate of maybe one per second, amounting to 30,000 or so ‘events’ a day, or a million per month. The vast majority of events you barely notice, but every so often, from the great stream of happenings, you are treated to a marvel: the pianist at the bar starts playing a song that you’d just been thinking of, or you pass the window of a pawnshop and see the heirloom ring that had been stolen from your apartment eighteen months ago. Yes, life is full of miracles, minor, major, middling C. It’s called ‘not being in a persistent vegetative state’ and having a life span longer than a click beetle’s.”

This is incredible isn’t it? I mean, reading something about coincidences, so soon after a fantastic coincidence. What are the odds of that?

June 10, 2020 / DR

Quadzillions of quintillions of googols of 1 millionths of nanoseconds.

Midday, Sunday, in a park

June 10, 2020 / DR

This is Nageswara Rao Park. Named after a man who would not dream of lying like a corpse at midday on a cement bench worn smooth by bums over decades. There are several of them now, one of them so like a corpse that one steals by somberly, letting him rest in peace. He has a face that looks like it is hewn from Cudappah granite. Its rough, craggy features, with its black mustache on a black ground, expressionless in its repose, or perhaps it is done with emotion forever, perhaps it will never smile, or frown, or weep or snigger evermore, there is no way to tell unless one takes hold of that mustache and tweaks, or gives it a good brave tug. He is well built and looks well dressed too, unusually for a corpse impersonator in this park. An arm is flung outward, and hangs heavily, nervelessly, its dead weight dragging it towards the ground. He wears a shirt that looks fresh, only a few days unwashed, and a belt holding up, just holding actually, a pant that is brown. The belt is very broad, and has a gleaming steel buckle on which the word ‘scientist’ is etched in black letters. This is just one of those normal everyday weirdnesses. We pass on, look at a clump of bamboo, a thicket some twenty feet thick, and the very history of Madras is lodged, stuck fast, in its deep, dense, dark agglomeration of decades of growth. Its shoots shoot up from the thick tangle at their base and spread out as they soar upward, as though they can no longer bear each other’s company. Beyond their shade is the kindly, gentle, caressing warmth of the November sun. There is another clump where there is a pack of squirrels, frisky, super animated, squirrely squirrels that scurry and shoot along the bamboo shoots like dementematons. Not all the people are practicing to be dead bodies, some are playing volleyball very amateurly, and others are playing badminton badly, and others are playing football with their mouths, shouting and arguing for every goal. We sit for a while, and our mind refuses to board any train of thought to anywhere useful, so we leave.

The test

June 10, 2020 / DR

“Are you the doctor?” she asked the man who wore the white coat. He also wore a scruffy beard and a demented smile, so there was more than a hint of a doubt in her voice.

“Hee hee hee,” said the man, nodding vigorously.

“Yes, he what?” she said.

“Hee hee hee,” said the man again.

She tried a different tack. “Can you tell me the joke? It’s not good to laugh alone.”

“Which one?” said the man. “I know four.”

“Start with the first one,” she said.

“But that’s a little off colour, you know. Not with ladies present.”

“It’s ok, I’m not prudish.”

“Who are you, then?”

“I’m looking for the doctor.”

“That’s a looong name.”

“What’s yours?”

“Well, this coat. And that table. And this…but really, we own nothing. Can we take our possessions with us when we pop it? No.”

“Mummy.”

“Mummy what?”

“You know, the treasures with the mummies in the pyramids.”

“My mummy. She made laddus.”

She smiled. “Too late,” she said.

A pome

June 10, 2020 / DR

Happiness is a varicoloured butterfly
Fluttering like eyelashes, long ones
In the cold of December, eat buns
What else, what else rhymes…yes, runs
Youth is a fleeting dream, flitting
Like the butterfly aforementioned
Faded memories you carry into old age
Child of strife, a waif, ghosts by in stealth
Ho hum, a long drawn out sigh, expels breath
If this, this is all, all this is life’s sum
Then what do we do, in history’s bum
Oh look, a cotton puff cloud floating slow
Where have we come from, where to now?

Moonlit future

June 8, 2020 / DR

Today, it is pournami. There have been clouds, but they have dispersed, moved aside like curtains. The brilliance in the dark sky. The hard bright pinpoints of light. There is a temple on a street nearby, where there are no streetlights to compete with the moon. In the light of oil lamps and the moon fortune tellers line the street. In the reflected sunlight of the full moon, they claim to see the future. Dozens of them, with their cards and parrots and conch shells. It is a rare opportunity, because you can ask for the prognosis, and then get a second or third or half dozenth opinion. If they all agree, then it cannot be wrong. But there are always words to cloud the prophesies. Tricky, slippery things, words. They can say one thing and mean another. We know that. It is not fate that is inscrutable, it is words.

The door

October 9, 2015 / DR

There is a door in this world, to another world.

You can easily pass through this door into the other world.

The catch is that once you have passed into the other world, you will acquire a new identity, new memories, new ideas. You will forget all about the older you. You will think the new you is the older you. You will also forget all about the door.

The most troubling bit about all this is that you may already have walked through that doorway.

There is only one way to tell…no, not really. You’ll never know.

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