What do you care what other people think?

Lately, I have been thinking about life, the universe, and everything (i know the answer is close to 41 :p ). It's the time of my life when I have to make a choice... which might influence the rest of it.

During this contemplation, I was reminded of this book by Feynman called "What do you care what other people think?" (equally wonderful, but less popular than "Surely you're joking, Mr. Feynman!"). Though the book is just a collage of snippets from his life like the other book, the choice of the title hit me hard and got stuck in my mind eversince I read this book.

I still feel the same awe and burst out "Exactly!" to myself everytime I see the title as if I am seeing it the first time.

I don't see a reason why I have to bother about what other people think of me or my actions? I just have one life. I would rather play my own game, lay my own path, and live my life. New truths are not discovered by following others. We need courage to lose, fight conventions, and break away from bonds to achieve greatness, because success is the prerogative of the brave. I am not saying I will be successful or great. But I will definitely live free doing what I really want to do.

Descartes once said:

"So blind is the curiosity by which mortals are possessed, that they often conduct their minds along unexplored routes, having no reason to hope for success, but merely being willing to risk the experiment of finding whether the truth they seek lies there."

I am that curious monkey and I hope that I will never lose will to follow my own path and go where my mind takes me.

The moment you go with the flow mindlessly is also the moment you lost your self.

Dead On Arrival

When I was in school, I loved Somerset Maugham's writings. Back then, I always admired him as a sarcastic short story writer. As I grew up, I started reading his other works and realized that sarcasm and wit are just the foreground he uses to present a more profound truth in the background. One of his quotes which I thought is ridiculously funny when I first read it is...

"The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned."

But then, after a few years and more works of his, I finally found the beauty in it.
(Truth is beautiful!)

The most beautiful work of his that I read is Razor's Edge ( I am yet to read Of Human Bondage ), which is a true masterpiece.
Coming to the topic of the quote, unrequited love seems to be the deepest and the most painful emotion as people say it is. It has inspired a lot of artists and yielded a great lot of literary work over the years and I presume it will as long as evolution supports emotions.

"A mighty pain to love it is,

And 'tis a pain that pain to miss;

But of all pains, the greatest pain

It is to love, but love in vain."

My-Self

Finally, I found the perfect description of myself:

"Three passions, simple but overwhelmingly strong, have governed my life: the longing for love, the search for knowledge, and unbearable pity for the suffering of mankind. These passions, like great winds, have blown me hither and thither, in a wayward course, over a deep ocean of anguish, reaching to the very verge of despair."

-Bertrand Russell

Life

"Live as if you were to die tomorrow.
Learn as if you were to live forever."
- Gandhi

Beware of biology!

Update: Watch the TED talk about the same.

If you are following the news lately, you must have noticed the much publicized creation of synthetic dna (alternate Times link).

Another important news which didn't get much attention is the invention of yet another technique to transfer dna in to cell (this article concludes with a phrase that is ironically funny: "the equipment needed is simple, inexpensive, and portable." ).

These developments when seen together makes creating bio-forms that can be programmed at genetic level possible (yes, i am desperately waiting to be a life-programmer!). For ppl following the developments in biology, this isn't much of a surprise. And if this sounds scary to you sci-fi readers, fear more coz you can't even take refuge in the supposition that this is all a long way from now and they work only at the level of bacteria.

In fact, there are already patents on how to create synthetic 'virus-like' particles and J. C. Venter Institute filed for patent on synthetic life (bacterium) almost a year ago! If you can't recall the name, this is the institute that first sequenced complete human genome and not surprisingly, it belongs to the founder J. Craig Venter. (keep an eye on JCVI's advances for more exciting news)
We already know how to create viruses for a while now and recently scientist have tweaked bigger life forms (Engineered Mosquitoes Could Wipe Out Dengue Fever).

Before debating on how ethical it is to play with nature, remember that most of our technological advancements either mimic or tweak nature.

Look from the positive side and these technologies offer us new tools to make our lives better. They help in creating new kind of drugs, and more 'natural' ways of production. Craig Venter, in a talk few days ago, confirmed that their institute has at least one strain of bacteria that can convert cellulose to ethanol and they are working on creating other such life forms for mass production of bio-fuels.

Hundreds of researchers in synthetic/systems biology are working day and night to understand and invent new techniques from nature that might sound like sci-fiction even today.

But we should remember one thing. Apart from celebrating or fearing these innovations,
now is also the high time to think about how to control them from getting into bad hands or monopoly of a few firms. We definitely don't want another IBM or Microsoft of biosystems
(imagine reading news like "Microsoft released a new patch to fix bugs in Life 2.0").

The more powerful a technology is, the more potential it has to do good/evil.

And the ability to control life is by no means a negligible power.

Actions speak louder than words...

Enough said about problems of world in my last post, which does absolutely no good to anyone, let me initiate the action.
I do not believe in destiny like most people do.
I believe in dreams and I believe in building bridges from those dreams to reality.

I need to quote M. K. Gandhi here (thanks to sujith)

"be the change that you wish to see in the world"

Here is the link to United Nations World Food Programme
http://www.wfp.org/english/
read about it and help if u want to...

Whatever little it might be, the feeling that you might have saved a person from dying of hunger feels so good. Trust me.

An unsourced quote goes like this "let us destroy this world the day a human being dies of hunger"
in fact 25,000 people die everyday of hunger and still we live happily with our own little problems.

World is so unfair....

...and I write this in utter despair

I always wondered why we have so many problems in this world. Everybody does stumble upon this though at some point of time in their life. After all, this question is so basic and even seems solvable. Only catch being can we all agree and follow the solution in pursuit of eternal happiness?

I also wondered if evolution over time could lead to such a happy world as one elegant solution to the equation of life. But I think evolution got stuck at a local optimum like out current state. Yes, we are happy sometimes but suddenly things go devastating with out our responsibility.
But don't go into despair, for we have hope. We are gifted with a plastic brain and therefore a moldable character. We are being taught from many generations that to lead a happy life all we need are just two things: 1. be good and 2. don't act stupid.
Wait a minute!
we are still not happy. There must be something else to it. This missing ingredient of happiness eluded me. I am smitten by the fact that being good and not being stupid are not enough to be happy.
What am I missing here?
It cannot be something supernatural or mysterious or fate type stuff.
It is useless to think of such things that are not in our hands.

seriously...
"what we've got here is... failure to communicate"

not information but emotion.

and what we need is the idea of collective consciousness. I know it exits in our present society but I think it is not enough and definitely not strong enough for sustained happiness of all. A stronger version would be the one with no self. After all, what good are these egos but to suffer.

To put it in simple terms: "One for all and all for one". This seems paradoxical and almost zen-like until we realize that one is all and all is one. Alas, this is not so easy; everyone of us are so different with our own individualism.

But I guess that our ancestors have already stumbled upon this idea and constructed religions out of it for better understanding. In hinduism, we call it GOD. Unlike many other religions, in hinduism god is not a real person with certain attributes and energy. God *is* the personification of such energy and attributes. God is the personification of universal consciousness. As Joseph Campbell puts it - our present notion is that the brain is the source of consciousness but perennial philosophy says that brain is the function of consciousness, it is the encapsulation of consciousness and we are all manifestations of one universal consciousness bound to our bodies by our brains. If you think this is stupid and scientifically inaccurate, then you are missing the whole point here. I think we need god to humble ourselves; may it be the personification of truth as Gandhi puts it or of transcendental universal consciousness. It's not god that is important but the reason why we want one.

We boast that we are technologically advanced but are we any closer to achieving it's real objectives?
Advancements in science and technology are to make us all live happier and it is high time that we look back if we are really progressing in the right direction. I don't have anything against technology, in fact I adore it. But at the same time I don't want to see technology crushing it's own premise rendering itself meaningless. Think of 'why' instead of 'how' before we do anything. who wants to know about mars when we cannot make lives of our fellow beings any better?

At times, I thought my problems in life are worst of any kind (which luckily happened very few times).
Then I try to think of people who are suffering from basic needs like hunger. This makes me feel that I am no better than a filthy rich crying for another luxurious commodity while at that very moment another fellow human being is drying of hunger. how can we be so blinded by our self-love that we cannot feel for others? This needs to be dealt with first instead of super advancement in technology. In fact what good is the ability to make so many things if we have no heart to give it to the needy. Think at once.

For me, I take my refuge in religion
not as blind faith but as grand truth.

it doesn't have to be religion,
but just be courageous enough to ask why we are doing what we are doing...

after all, nothing can go wrong as long as we don't forget our premise...
happiness for one and all.

Consciousness!!!

If there is one thing that always eluded both scientists and philosophers alike, its consciousness...many scientists and philosophers tried to explain it in their own way and a few even dragged quatumn mechanics into this...
so wuts this thingie exactly???

def: "Consciousness is a quality of the mind generally regarded to comprise qualities such as subjectivity, self-awareness, sentience, sapience, and the ability to perceive the relationship between oneself and one's environment." --wikipedia.org


although the definition looks simple, there is no real test to conclude that something has consciousness (there are tests for certain aspects of it like Turing test, mirror test etc.,)
after all this hype, do u think I am gonna crack that!! that too in this lil blog :p
don't worry, here I am present my views on why consciousness could have evolved...
as usual I am not gonna use mystical things like god, spirit etc as my hypotheses...

to start with, everyone of us knew that we do certain things consciously and others unconsciously...
taking a look at our brain... It evolved in such a way tht we have 2 kinds of processes
one is unconscious way like animals (most animals don't have consciousness or atleast they did not pass the mirror and other tests and I am making an assumption that our brain is no more special than other animals except we have different count of neurons), and they are good at surviving... ('course we differ from them due to more neurons(per body weight) n connections and we have better computaional power like a better chip...)
but evolution somehow chose a second way of doing things (or controlling body)...
the conscious way... If doing things unconsciously is good enough why did we evolve consciousness in first place??

Conscious computation always does things by following the steps as u learned them... So while thinking consciously or taking decisions consciously, for eg. calculating 23 times 47 you always do the computation by reciting the steps u learned... So u calculate at the rate you speak!!! this is a limitation of conscious thinking... but definitely u can do better than that... there are living examples like savants who compute by seeing numbers (I remember a British savant doing that) and hence way faster than most of us...
moreover, our brain controls our conscious perception by allowing it to see a part of reality or sometimes distorted reality as in the case of seeing ghosts, god etc., so consciously we see wut we are allowed to see by our brain
clearly in the above 2 cases, conscious thinking is crippling our computational capacity...
this following your acts consciously to do a task is to mimic others and which is basic in humans

but there is something that dwarfened these.... It is the ability to learn frm others and to teach others
the techniques or knowledge we gained and this prevents us from reinventing the wheel. As we know tht neural networks can't give us the method/mechanism to solve but jus solves... Conscious thinking gives the method too, but at the price of our computational capacity and this ability is much more powerful than we can think of.
I think this is the reason why we more developed than other species... and so this property of consciousness evolved and survied...

In conclusion, I would like to quote my favourite person, Isaac Newton-"If I have seen a little further it is by standing on the shoulders of Giants." and that explains it all...


PS:Well... nobody really understood how brain works till now... though we know a few things abt brain, like its made up of neurons and they communicate by chemical transmitters etc.,
so this is a pure speculation of my own...

Beauty n the GOD

why do people enjoy nature?? for that matter why do we feel happy to see lush green pastures, hills or streams?
Wuts this thingie called GOD?? in atheists point of view, why does there have to be GOD and why do almost all humans no matter what background they come from have one??

i am tryin to find an answer based on the assumption that useless traits are not carried along with evolution... which is kinda valid
appreciating natural beauty seems to be coz of this... not long ago we were searching for food like our ancestral primates and running behind streams for water...lush green forests are always the source of good food either it be fruits or those small animals that eat them...
to appreciate that even today seems stupid to me... but i guess our definition of beauty changes...
may be after a few generations, those hills n streams dont make humans as merrier as the sight of restaurant or smthng, which became our source of food...

coming to god, people always like to be amused and want to believe in mysterious things...i gotta quote A.Einstein here-"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and all science."
there is a reason to it... our brain can be approximated as bayesian.( So, we try to presume things based on prior experiences rather than believe in what we see... infact our brain processes information and gives us substituted reality so that it fits in to what we know till then, phantom limbs being the best example...) so we assume things to a certain bit and any new predators or surprises are covered by our brain and are prevented from entering our conscious perception, unless they make a big impact so as to be accommodated in to our priors.
this led to selection of individuals who have affinity towards surprising/new changes/things in the environment (n apparently survived those changes/predators) ... so we are here, bound to pay attention to mysterious things which do not fit in our common sense...
coming to god, our ancestors observed patterns in environment but couldn't find proper reason as to why the world had to behave in a predictable way... they attributed it and everything which cant be explained to god... we do that even today!
this carved god as the conglomeration of mysteries and we are bound to pay so much of attention that we treat it as supreme power n all...
infact there is this thing called amygdala in our brain that some believe is responsible for such beliefs as god... also this part is resposible for our emotions like fear, pain, anxiety, pleasure etc., these emotions play a key role in deciding what memory is to be retained for long term... Interestingly enough, this region is responsible for learned fear!! does this give u any clue?? well... i think god is a kinda learned fear! its like a complex combination of mystery and fear... we are all addicted to it but we dont see it coz most of us r this way...

i dont wanna make anymore stmnts on god as its more of an emotional stuff to many...

i guess u got my point

Brave New World

these days everyone wants freedom...wtf! freedom won't feed u
but thank god...we are already moving in right direction...
we are specializing in certain skills but still its a weaker version of it...
a more stronger and better version would be like cells in multi-cellular organisms or insects in insect-colonies... in both these examples, an individual is more or less dumb n meaningless but as a colony they act intelligently and that strategy has proven to work... after all ants are here for millions of yrs... as described in BNW, why not make people specialists in more basic things like reproduction etc., this will not work in today's world coz ppl still think making someone deprived of so called freedom, sex etc., is cruel... may be it sounds like tht for u too..after all we are made to think like that... but wut if one day we can reduce testosterone n estrogen levels and make drones for work n these hormone rich individuals for procreation?? wut if we can engineer our preferences and make drones think they r the happiest creatures in the world?? why all this stupid struggle for mating n wasting time and money?? if we want to live n survive then why not do that more efficiently? i think this dream is not far way... once we reverse engineer brain, this can be possible...

Advances in neuroscience will one day make this utopian world a reality...
i am waiting for that day...
always remember...
'u can fight a lot of enemies and survive... but if u fight ur own biology or nature.. u will always lose'

PS:
I am pretty much disappointed to see BNW being categorized as dystopian!! it is in many ways similar to 1984 and i have no problem classifying 1984 as dystopian and i guess u can clearly see why...(in case u dint read 1984, it relies on forced methods and punishments to control people) but BNW doesnt force you but molds you and wuts the problem with that?
as long as people think they are happy doing something and its useful to society as a whole, it doesnt matter what they do and revolutions make no sense... who wants freedom with poverty and problems?
i think its an epitome of utopian society...

u knw why i hate this world?

i think u already guessed tht i am frustrated with this world... main reason being its not goin the way its meant to be... i know thts a bold stamnt to make but still... thts wut i feel
my assumptions/axioms in making tht stmnt are...belief in science ('course my personal rarely updated version)
i think that basic axiom itself kinda gives me the concept of 'evolution' which is inevitable...
i know tht inevitable part sounds a bit tricky but its like 'I think therfore I am'.... u cant really contradict tht stmnt, nor can u help but thinkin its trivial n stupid...
well, coming back to my point... evolution is like a searching algorithm which keeps lookin for optimal solution... but as we know successful life is such a complex equation.. it has many solutions...infact its the number of species ever lived... considering jus earth... and success in this case can be defined as being able to survive for long time... and yes bacteria n viruses won the battle already... their KISS strategy works... tht leaves us with complex life forms...
among these forms, ones with this gray fluffy substance are selected to survive...
yes, brain gives them a better chance of survival by increasin adaptability... brain initially developed due to predator-prey games... then the next kink came with social behavior... we can clearly see hw big this step is... otherwise do u think a bunch of monkeys can survive this long!! this kinda social behaviour is the best example of holism... in this case whole is a lot better than parts...
neways the point i wanna make is tht social behaviour n cooperation led to wut we r today...
and i am convinced that we can only survive collectively... now freeze this... now our domain for evolutionary change is limited to solution which survives together... and this reminds me of another analogous thing which is our body itself... note that all the cells are alive by themselves but still they live together and they played the game of life pretty successfully...
now comes the main stmnt i wanna make... takin tht analogy out to species... i make a bold conclusion that an optimal solution is when individuals specialize in certain things which are essential for survival of species... and i know tht this stmnt might remind u of Brave New World... well even i have tht in mind while writing this...

and individualism is the enemy of survival...

i have more stmnts to make... but this post is becoming tool long... hope i have this energy to continue this in my next post...

caffeine is next best thing to life...

I always wonder why caffeine is addictive... when I had my first cup, I thought I would never ever have another... well i was obviously wrong, otherwise i would'nt be writing this..
I recently came to know of some interesting facts abt coffee...

"Coffee is the second most commonly traded commodity in the world, trailing only petroleum"

"Goats actually discovered the coffee plant. Their shepherd noticed that they were getting very hyper; therefore, one day, he followed their every move, and found out that they were eating a strange berry that was keeping them awake all day and night."

"Recent research has uncovered additional stimulating effects of coffee which are not related to its caffeine content. Coffee contains an as yet unknown chemical agent which stimulates the production of cortisone and adrenaline, two stimulating hormones."

Coffee has infinite benefits... n 'course a few risks... but who cares... after all its the "GOD's Drink"

love... wuts tht?? wuteva....

Marazziti, prof of psych at univ of pisa, compared the lover's serotonin levels with those of a grp of ppl suffering from OCD(obsessive compulsive disorder) and another grp who were free from both passion and mental illness. Levels of serotonin in both the obsessive's blood and the lover's blood were 40% lower than those in her normal subjects. Translation: Love and OCD could have a similar chemical profile.
Translation: Love and mental illness may be difficult to tell apart.
Translation: Don't be a fool. Stay away.

*#@%#&$@(!!! well....apple just hit me

hmmm this is my first blog...i guess this is what most of the ppl begin there first blog with . living last sem in iits is the best thing one can ask for in life... u know...smtimes being totally jobless sucks....but well then i'll convince myself thinkin tht this is exactly wut u do in meditaion...so no regrets;) ...even aftere all this if joblessness pricks u smtimes...then my recipe helps u... jus give a break to joblessness by readin stuff like "In praise of idleness" which helps is n ways.... n i bet u dont feel bad abt being jobless 4 atleast a week :)