Category: Speculations

Mirrors

I was reading about ‘mirror neurons’ in V S Ramachandran’s The Tell Tale Brain: the neurons responsible for gauging other people’s intentionality by mimicking their actions in the brain. For instance, when someone reaches for an object, the same action is repeated by mirror neurons of someone watching, though there is a ‘suppression response’ that prevents the watcher from mimicking the action as well. These mirror neurons are also responsible for learning by imitation, empathy, synaesthesia, ‘cross modal abstraction’ (deriving an abstract quality from impressions between sensory and motor maps; metaphors are an example of this) that is the basis for full-fledged or high-level language, and even consciousness (self-reflective awareness).

They may be completely unrelated, but funny how the concepts and the words sound similar to advaita concepts: prakasa vimarsa, abhasa vadha, pratibimba vadha are examples (reality/consciousness is a delusion caused by the reflection of the brahman on the mind). According to pratibimba vadha, all experience is merely a projection of the mind, and reality has no objective existence.  

And Daniel Dennet’s theory of consciousness as something that is not an experience (as in the experience of the colour red, for instance) but just the physical phenomena of wavelengths and nerve excitations. This sounds like the anatma vadha of Buddhism.

If the universe were a petri dish, we’d be invisible under a microscope.

Creativity is discovery

In Carnatic music you can’t just make musical sounding sounds. There are rules, axioms, as definite and immutable as mathematical laws and equations. And just as mathematical laws are ‘apriori extant’, so are the rules of laya and sruti. They are not invented, they are discovered; just like mathematical truths.

“Everything is number,” said Pythagoras.

He found that simple fractions of wavelengths are in harmony; thus the notes of an octave. (Probably not the first or last person to discover this.) Halving the wavelength sounds the same note, an octave higher.

This is a basic truth, and it was discovered, just like the fact that shifting the ‘sa’ by one note changes one raga (for some ragas) into another (grahabedham). Or that there are 35 basic talas which can serve as the scaffolding for the sahitya. Or that there are 72 melakarta ragas.

Or the fact that the raga has an exact shape, a form as constant as the shape of a printed letter, even though it is only auditory, abstract. And manodharma is always true to this raga swarupa, even as the musician creates new phrases extempore. No, not creates but perceives. In all the infinite potentiality of sound, it is already there, the musician merely expresses it.

That is why manodharma is a process of revelation. It can possibly be a route to epiphany. I remember watching T M Krishna sing in a YouTube video, in which his eyebrows shoot up in pleased surprise at one of his own phrases. He was the singer, but he reacted like a listener, because he was not performing, he was discovering.

One meaning of the word ‘raga’ is attraction, or that which you find pleasing. There are some sounds out of the infinity possible that you find pleasing. Just as there are some equations out of the infinity possible that are logical, ‘make sense’. (The literal meaning of manodharma is mind (mano) + natural order or ‘rightness’ (dharma). That which feels right?) Why this should be so, is a mystery, at least to me*. This is part of the ultimate mystery, an aspect of it, or a manifestation of it. To experience it completely (even if you cannot explain it), with deep insight, as you potentially could with a sublime musical phrase, could unravel the whole mystery.

Walt Whitman said “all music is what awakes in you when you are reminded of it by the instruments. It is not the violins and the cornets…nor the score of the baritone singer
It is nearer and further than they.”

What awakes in you? According to Indian aesthetic theory, it is, at its most ideal, pure awareness itself. The theory of ‘rasa’ says that it goes beyond the personal, transcends taste (or vasanas) and “identifies aesthetic emotion (rasa) with that felt when the self perceives the Self.” (Ananda Coomaraswamy in ‘The Hindu View of Art’ from the collection of essays The Dance of Siva. He quotes Vishvanatha’s Sahitya Darpana: “It (Rasasvadana, or the experience of rasa) is the very twin brother of mystic experience (Brahmasvadana svarupa) and the very life of it is lokottara (beyond the physical world) wonder.”)

This aesthetic experience is independent of the theme (whether it is painful or pleasurable) or the quality of the art; It is experienced by one who is ‘sahridaya’: one with a harmonised heart, or with fine-tuned sensibilities. This, I surmise, is sensibility beyond the senses.

And music perhaps is the aesthetic experience that works best as this “point of departure to the absolute” (Ananda Coomaraswamy) for “it has no signification apart from itself” (Alan Watts in This Is It).

The purpose of art is to lead you to the experience of rasa. And the larger purpose is to show that all life is experience of rasa. There is no other signification to it. Why should there be, when this is it? All of it? It is that simple, like a gooseberry in the palm of your hand.

*This ‘one (or few) that works, out of an infinity (or nearly uncountable number) of possibilities’ is a common theme for anything to do with life, beginning with DNA – this molecule is the only one out of uncountable possibilities that can duplicate and reproduce itself efficiently (with minimal errors) in the real world (experimentally demonstrated by molecular biologists Stephen Freeland and Laurence Hurst).

Passivity

Reading is not passive. You have to actively apply your mind to convert the symbols on the page into words and the words into meaning. Two dimensional representations of concepts on the page (written words) result in images (both moving and static) and abstract thoughts in the mind. Even audio works like that – music or spoken words or audio books (you often vocalise the words that you read). I’m not sure how art and photography work, though I guess they’re not passive either – you take out more than is apparent in the picture.

Simple thought – the process of sitting quietly and thinking, is sometimes passive, sometimes active. The background chatter, thought without volition – passive. Ideation, imagination, planning, conceptualisation, meditation – active.

But video is different. You are passively consuming the moving images on the screen; there is little time or need to process them. That is why reading stimulates the mind, and video numbs it. The Internet is even worse, because your mind is manipulated and led to consume content passively, and you’re not allowed to apply the mind for sustained periods of directed attention that result in learning, insights, creativity, new neuronal connections.

Now the web 3.0 is coming, we are told (I was reading The Spatial Web by Gabriel Rene and Dan Mapes). With AR, everything you see will be tagged and loaded with information. You never see anything without passively consuming content that someone else has deemed fit for you to ingest. With VR, you will go further; you will be immersed in it, without having to make an effort to imagine, think.

I’m no luddite – AR especially is alluring. Imagine being stuck with a broken-down bike on a lonely road; an AI in the cloud sees the bike engine through your AR glasses, and walks you through the repair, with coloured arrows and interactive, dynamic exploded diagrams overlaid on the physical engine. (“Not clockwise you idiot, you’re tightening it! Anticlockwise.”) Or you look at a person and their FB profile appears, hovering over their head. (Yes, creepy.) It’s like gnanadhrishti, giving you the power to see sookshma loka.  

But what does it do the mind? In the movie WALL-E, humans become obese and incapable of moving on their own because machines do all the work. That is unlikely. What is far more likely and alarming is that human minds become incapable of thinking on their own because the web (connected, all-pervasive AI and distractions) does it all for them. And I think this has happened to a great extent already with web 2.0.

Exploration in the age of sitting

It is easier to wander in the real world than in the virtual world. For all its boundless possibilities and its absence of distance, it is quite limited. There is the small portion of the Net which could well be called the ‘known web’ to which most humans are mostly confined. And there is the rest of the Net. Vast, unexplored, trackless wastes that no one has got around to visiting and rating. For you see, the virtual world is for communities. For herds. People tend to congregate here, connect. Everyone goes to the sites that other people are going to. Everyone does the things that are done. That is why much of the Net is still virgin territory. Uninhabited, undiscovered. The age of exploration is not over.  But the question is, is there anything worth exploring?

The Kardashev H Scale

What if the Kardashev Scale were applied to individual humans? The amount of energy you can harness and expend determines your quality of life (only in the material realm, and not the actual experienced, cognized life?)

Let’s call this the KH Scale (Kardashev-Human). For instance, Type HI would be someone who can afford to escape the earth’s gravity well. Space tourists, billionaires, such like. Type HII are people who can extend their lives well beyond mortal spans (say, two or three hundred years) and expend the energy needed to do that. Type HIII, people who can live indefinitely, bend laws of physics, so they can harness and actually use galaxies’ worth of energy. They could be dematerialised intelligences or entities who need all that energy to power their vast thought processes. Though what those thoughts might be I cannot conceive.

AE

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.

No breakthroughs now

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?

Dugle Bugle

Mr. A entered the Dugle Bugle corporate headquarters from the Gummadipoondi gate. The other gates were in Vandalur, Mylapore and Singapore. There was a fifth gate somewhere in the Indian Ocean but Dugle Bugle’s official position was that it was just a rumour.

At the gate, Mr.A was required to give his fingerprints, his retinal signature, a stool sample and a blood sample, his clothes and his hearing aid. They explained that his wrist unit would repeat anything that he could not hear. The wrist unit was a green wristband.

He was strapped into an autocart and it whizzed carefully along a path between two parallel yellow lines on the smooth ground covered with concrete. The wristband spoke. “Please don’t attempt to cross yellow lines. They indicate the presence of slicer fields. Slicer fields can slice through human tissue and bones. Please don’t attempt to cross yellow lines. They indicate the presence of slicer fields. Slicer fields can slice through human bones and tissues. You are not cleared to cross yellow lines. You have been warned. You have been warned. Please say yes if you have heard and understood. Please don’t attempt…”

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