Fact of the Matter

1000 fall from a 50m high cliff. All perish but one.

The logical fact derived out of the above observation is, anyone will die upon falling from the cliff. The sole exception to the fact constitutes the faith in God.

Faith, which blesses one in million, is treated as param satya (the ultimate truth). Rest all is rubbished as maya (illusion). 🙏

In our irrational world, there is no absolute or perfect entity. The mathematics is closest to it but yet too far. The calculus of infinitesimals, limited by infinity, gives you very accurate approximations, which is good enough for scientific working of various machines and human generated systems with in the tolerance range required. e.g. nobody cooks a recipe to exact measurements, yet most of the time we leave dining tables licking fingers.

 It’s the little bias, or the impurity of a semiconductor, which sets the ball rolling in this universe. But why do we need to pray and revere God for this little foul play? There are zillions or infinite number of other creatures who have been carrying on without offering or sparing a single penny or thought for the invisible guy. During my last sixty years, I have seen no use of him except for the political one.

Our faiths are toxic and we need to learn to enjoy the randomness and uncertainty in life. We get one life to live in present. Past is past, future is bonus. 😊

Knotty at Sixty

At 60, the nature's eraser is working on me faster than ever before. Fading and disintegrating body contours, dimming and dulling senses and a slowing processor; the changes are for real before the complete metamorphosis of the body into ashes n dust.

With near future so ashy and khaki, no wonder we scramble to hold on to past. We cling on to the faiths of distant past.

 We think strapping up to distant past would catapult us far in future. And by stroke of luck, we may even overshoot Time and become immortal (achieve Nirvana). 

The tenacity to defy the nature's laws and the ultimate truth, the death, can stretch us to any length backwards. But the irony is, as we stretch backwards, we become rigid and more rigid. Thereby not only losing any chance of gracefully bracing what future holds for us in store, we become a stumbling block of the past. 😀😀 

So guys, have no strings on you and be worthy of a graceful exit. 🙏

Redefining Consciousness

Consciousness is, questioning the sensory information and its obvious interpretation and subsequent response generated by the brain. 

Consciousness manifests when one walks out of survival mode and merges and pulsates with the whole creation as one.

In quantum words, consciousness is when particle loses its identity and behaves as a wave.

INDEPENDENCE DAY 75 - INDIA

Years of slavery turned out to be a boon for India. People of extreme diversity from North to South and East to West of the peninsula, languishing under the extreme bondage and leading a subservient existence, united in their fight against the British rule. And when these people got independence, they chose to live together under a secular federal republic of India, barring unfortunate partition of Pakistan as an Islamic state. 

If you are looking for people, a whole range of variety viz. religions, languages, ethnicities, colour n races, customs,  social structure etc is available in India.  To keep these people of varied types and interests bound by a single constitution for 75 years is by no means a small feat. All credit goes to the early leaders like Mahatma Gandhi, JLN, Sardar Patel etc who laid the foundation of the secular and democratic republic of India. And specially, we are indebted to Baba Saheb Ambedkar for knitting the most diversity friendly constitution for the people of India. Last but not the least, kudos to the people of India for sticking together despite all their differences. 

To appreciate this great day, we must understand what freedom is. For an individual, freedom means to have greater options, choices and opportunities in day to day life. How this freedom is affected by the degree of diversity in a human society could be illustrated by the following examples. On a canvas, a painting with specific designs and patterns restricts the freedom of the brush. In a rose garden a merrigold is like an alien. While in the wild all flowers irrespective of their colours, sizes or shapes are a welcome sight. 

The fact Individual freedom is a direct function of human diversity can be explained by the laws of thermodynamics. As per the second law, increasing entropy (disorder) gives rise to greater molecular/atomic freedom and leads the system to equilibrium or greater stability. On the time arrow the entropy is bound to increase progressively. Now, in manifestation of the second law of thermodynamics if we extend the paradigm and replace entropy with diversity and atoms/molecules with people, we may deduce "more diverse human societies (or nations) which offer greater freedom of choices to people are more stable and peaceful." 

However, life on earth is governed by irrationality.  With recent call for Hindu rashtra, we have chosen to walk backward on the arrow of time which will destabilise the nation and lead to its disintegration and decay. 

Wish the sensibility prevails, and India as showcase of the human diversity.

Covid19 – Fiction and Facts

HNY 2020 started with panic. Social media was abuzz with macabre videos of people gasping for breath and dropping dead like fish on the roads of Wuhan, China. Soon the news was confirmed by the respectable and responsible media around the world. Arrival of the Novel Corona Virus, SARS CoV-2, was announced. The world trembled with the sense of déjà vu of Spanish flu of 1919.  Initially slow but later an over-reaction sent the world reeling into strict quarantine followed by a total lock down and mass hysteria. 

Living in the age of information diarrhea (often lies) has its own woes. Billions of people connected on various social media platforms got spooked by the news. Heads of states sprang into action bringing down all airlines and closing their doors and sealing their borders  for the foreign travels in an animated move. Some countries went on to impose total lock down instantaneously causing unprecedented inconvenience and harassment to local public and loss of employment and businesses. Media was adding fuel to the fire by its 24X7 (mis)reporting every silly aspect of the pandemic. Social media was going berserk with quackery. Most of the deaths can be attributed to the remedies prescribed on whatsapp and facebook. 

People scrambled for Oxygen cylinders, remdesivir, Cortisones, antibiotics, antivirals & immunity boosters, Oximeters, steamers or whatever treatment was prescribed by the whatsapp institute of medical sciences. Hospitals were flooded. So were the graveyards. The frenzy and fear were unprecedented.  

After two and half year of the onset of the Covid19 pandemic, when there is not even a murmur of the virus on the social media and business is as usual around the world, I lookback in the history to read about the previous episodes of the pandemics. 

Eversince the outbreak of Spanish flu in 1918, medical biologists have been seriously working on ways to control any pandemic from happening. But despite their best efforts the impish viruses have struck at regular intervals with impunity and crossed borders viz, 

• Asiatic Flu (H2N2) in 1957, 
• Hongkong Flu (H3N2) in 1968, 
• SARS COV1 in 2003, 
• Swine Flu (H1N1) in 2009 
• MERS-CoV2 in 2012.

But in the past no one panicked. People died in plenty but there was no commotion, no lock downs or loss of jobs. Business went on as usual despite the heightened mortality. In all the cases the virus shook hands with humanity after one or two years of hostility without any invasive intervention.

I wondered if the overload of information and technology has helped us in our fight against the Covid19 pandemic this time. To find an answer I dived into the Google sea(rch). 

I am not a biologist but I do have elementary knowledge of bio sciences. And what I found was as follows:

Every animal species hosts unique viruses that have specifically adapted to infect it. Over time, some of these have jumped to humans – these are known as ‘zoonotic’ viruses. When viruses jump to a new host, the process is called zoonosis. Because every virus has evolved to target a particular species, it’s rare for a virus to be able to jump to another species. Whenever this does happen, it’s by chance, and it has devastatingly morbid consequences. 

In comparison, malwares (computer Viruses) which are designed for Windows OS won’t work on Linux OS or a Windows virus won't harm devices running on Android or Mackintosh systems. Sounds logical as they are designed to screw the OS DNA.

Out of all the  viruses corona & Avion Influenza viruses are highly adaptable due to their rapid mutations. This is probably due to this property, Zoonosis is observed in these viruses.  

Avian influenza (HxNy) viruses are classified by a combination of two groups of proteins: hemagglutinin or “H” proteins, of which there are 16 (H1 to H16), and neuraminidase or “N” proteins, of which there are nine (N1 to N9). Many different combinations of “H” and “N” proteins are possible. Each combination is considered a different subtype and can be further broken down into different strains.  

On the other hand Corona virus is a common cold virus. SARS COV1 & 2 were crossovers from other species having a single-stranded positive-sense RNA.

These viruses have persisted from the time of origin of life on earth. It is their ability to mutate, adapt and fox the host’s immune system which make the host cough and sneeze and fall sick season after seasons. Zoonosis is once in blue moon event when the zoonotic mutants crossover to the new host species and the events take an ugly turn leading to morbid  pandemics. But at the same time these killer mutations don’t last long and the kinder variants follow as the parasite knows well it can’t thrive on the dead bodies.

However, what we saw in response to the spread of virus was a gross over-reaction, which caused more harm than good to the mankind. This overzealous game plan had been incubating in the researchers mind for a very long time. Start of this century, the researchers had their first go at it with SARS CoV1 in 2003. The story was hatched about how the virus was produced in a Chinese Lab and transported to HongKong and subsequently to Canada. After SARS CoV1 failed to takeoff, in 2009, Swine Flu was declared as a pandemic which was widely publicized by media. The idea was also promulgated by The Contagion, a movie released in 2011.

However, in January 2010, Wolfgang Wodarg, a German deputy who trained as a physician and chaired the health committee at the Council of Europe, claimed that major firms had organized a "campaign of panic" to put pressure on the World Health Organisation (WHO) to declare a "false pandemic" to sell vaccines. Wodarg said the WHO's "false pandemic" flu campaign is "one of the greatest medicine scandals of the century. 

In June 2010, Fiona Godlee, editor-in-chief of the BMJ, published an editorial which criticised the WHO, saying that an investigation had disclosed that some of the experts advising WHO on the pandemic had financial ties with drug companies which were producing antivirals and vaccines. Margaret Chan, Director-General of the WHO, replied stating, that WHO's decisions to raise the level of pandemic alert were based on clearly defined virological and epidemiological criteria. "It is hard to bend these criteria, no matter what the motive".

After 2009, the resurgence of non-respiratory virus epidemics, including Zika, Chikungunya and Ebola raised extreme concern for human public health authorities and hit the news headlines. These fetal viruses couldn't kick start a pandemics because they were far less contagious. But finally the moment of truth arrived in March, 2020. BINGO!! the alarm went off and the social media assisted Covid19 scare gripped the world. Finally Corona virus vaccines were quickly rolled out. They were made mandatory by the governments worldover in what was to become the biggest immunization program. By end of 2021, the cases and mortality dropped considerably and world resumed laissez-faire. 

The two years of chaos have left me with the following observations and doubts:

1. Covid19 deaths were mainly in the second phase of the disease ie 7-10 days after the symptoms when the virus entered into the lungs and kicked the auto immune response in host, with uncontrolled levels of cytokines released in so-called storms that killed the patient. This information was released much later after the world went on to consume Chloroquine, zinc, antibiotics, antivirals, remdesivir, immunity boosters etc. 
2. More deaths occurred in stage 3 due to black fungus formed in the lungs.
3. Many people died due to wrong line of treatment or by fear itself. 
4. My biggest doubt is on the efficacy of the Covid19 Vaccines. With Corona virus mutating so quickly, its hard to keep up with it. Considering the vaccine takes six to eight months to roll out after the first outbreak, its effectiveness on the persisting variants is highly doubtful.
5. There were many cases where people died of the disease after taking single and double doses of the vaccine. The exceptions were one too many to doubt the efficacy of it.
6. After two and half years, the mortality and morbidity due to covid19 has reduced considerably but the virus is still thriving in its benign forms as was the case in all of the previous episodes of pandemics. So how on earth could we credit the vaccine for the control of this flu related pandemic.
7. These pandemics are triggered by the zoonotic viruses. To stop the zoonosis, animal farming is looking up for reforms. Or the practice must be stopped. Staying vegan is an option.
8. Human population needs to be controlled in more humane ways.
9. On a positive note, social distancing, use of face masks and sanitization proved to be the best policies. The countries where people practiced these three rules with strictness did better than those which did not.
10. We learnt to use mobile phones to track the infection down and control it. 
11. Clusters based lockdown was more prudent approach than blanket lockdown.
12. We learnt to work from home (WFH). It has become a culture now. 
13. It showed if there is a will, tough decisions can be taken by the governments sacrificing the economic interests in larger interest of mankind.
14. Humans are today capable of moving logistics at mega scale at short notice.
15. While we saw the greedy side of the humanity, on the other side was helping approach of many who assisted others going out of the way.

Finally, we may have seen off the Covid19 pandemic but the social media pandemic persists. It’s a queer place out there with plenty of dumb forwarders and followers. They have no time to think or question. But I hope, like these highly adaptive viruses, we shall evolve and overcome someday. 

Yes, Sir - No, Sir - All Bloody Fools

Imagine being out on a space travel in a spaceship and you fall out of the ship. You are floating all alone in the starless space, OR, imagine being in the medieval era thrown in a dark dungeon by the king’s men. In both the cases the time would cease to exist for you, let alone the senses. 

Human mind is programmed to perceive and process only the relativity, an irrationality in absolute sense. It takes at least two to tango. Adam & Eve did it for us and from the irrationality of the two, we are eight billion plus today. Two are company, few dozens a society and billions of us are definitely contributing to a chaos. Nonstop cacophony on the social media is a proof of this chaos.  

To date, human mind is considered to be the best processor of information. Considering the compactness of this clever machine, its not difficult to guess that it deploys many a clever hacks and tricks in order to construct the world around us by processing the data it receives in bits and pieces through our highly limited sensory peripheral devices.

The Israeli-American psychologist and economist, Kahneman, introduces two engines that animate the mind:

• “System 1 operates automatically and quickly, with little or no effort and no sense of voluntary control. It controls the reflexes and our day to day routines and cognitive tasks, such as identify threats, navigate our way home on familiar roads, recognize friends, and so on.

• System 2 allocates attention to the effortful mental activities that demand it, including complex computations and philosophical thinking. It helps us to analyse and solve complex problems, do math exercises & crossword puzzles, and so on. The operations of System 2 are often associated with the subjective experience of agency, choice, and concentration.”

System 1 is an intuitive system that cannot be turned off; while System 2 is like putting brain in higher gear which takes effort and energy to engage. So, the brain tends to take shortcuts at the behest of System 1 and what follows is a saga of fallacies.

As we grow old, we strengthen our bents and biases by selectively savouring the information on the social media fish market served in the form of saucy fiction (Gossips or propaganda is the right expression). Out of prejudice we keep jumping onto conclusions and form new opinions consuming selective story after stories. A feeling of personal enlightenment hits us as our newfound knowledge fits into the larger story that romantically and naively endorses our age old beliefs and prejudices and thus the sense of righteousness.

This behavioral sickness of developing preferences, bents and beliefs without much thinking puts us at the risk of manipulation. By exploiting these weaknesses in the way our brains process information, social media platforms, governments, media in general, and populist leaders, are able to exercise a form of collective mind control. Most of the time we don’t understand what’s really going on. We think we’re in the driver’s seat and steering the course of our lives and nation, but we are wrong. We are the victims of illusion and vicious agenda of few.

But we aren’t helpless. We can learn to behave responsibly. Instead of being impulsive or prejudiced we can take time to dive into the vast sea of information out there on internet. Google it to read the other side of an argument or narrative.  Integrate other points of view with other perspectives without being judgemental or prejudiced.

Prompted by our CPU 1, it’s natural for us to compact the complexity of our rationality into crisp commoditized ideas. But we must remember our rationality is infact the irrationality of relativity. It is impossible for us to define rationality of an event from a single frame while it is impacting billions of other frames. There will be multiple sides of a story.

What to do in this case? Gather information from various sources (not selective); logically analyze arguments; try to avoid jumping to conclusions; don’t become a part of the fiction. 

“Question everything, learn something, answer nothing.” - Greek playwright Euripides.

P.S.: Reading about rationality and cognitive biases, after all, does not free anybody from their nasty epistemological pitfalls. So, lage rho Munna bhai.

Passion, Fear and Greed – the 3 Propellants of Life on Earth

 “Three great forces rule the world: stupidity, fear and greed.” ― Albert Einstein

I am a staunch non-believer but I am open to all faiths and beliefs because our world is full of irrationalities which logic can’t explain yet. So please allow me to bring in the invisible and irrational character, we call the creator or God, in my assessment of the sapiens history and the world beyond.

I think what made us humans so special was, despite our bodily design we were programmed to walk on twos, a highly unstable and unnatural stance. It takes almost one year for human baby to learn to walk after many falls and with lot of difficulty. The biologists argue that long time taken by the human child to walk is because in comparison to other animals the human child is prematurely delivered and most of its brain is developed later. But the fact is, the poor human kid could have never learnt to walk on twos inside the womb inspite of having a full blown brain. Standing on twos for human baby is learning by hit and trial process and not by instinct. His first few steps on earth pave the way for cognitive learning later on in life. Once up and running, the human child goes on to acquire other cognitive skills over the years through hit and trial experiences. These exercises make humans inclined to experimenting with options without being averse to failures giving them a clear c edge over the other species.

Development of speech and language gave sapiens the advantage of sharing feelings, thoughts and information efficiently. Their ability to bullshit nonstop drove the last nail in the coffin of evolution (of life) on earth. Consequently, imagination, abstract thinking and language capabilities enabled sapiens to create fictions and imagined realities. By believing in the common myths and so-called “intersubjective realities” like God, religion, money, governments, law etc, large numbers of strangers could establish trust with each other and conform to the same set of rules and standards.  And therefore cooperate successfully together. This kind of social cooperation, both flexibly and in large scale, differentiates Homo sapiens from other animals and explains the rise of Homo sapiens to the top of the food chain.

While the life on earth has always been driven by greed and fear, humans recruited stupidity too when they stood their ground on irrationality of twos. These intersubjective fictions(realities or stupidities) helped humans to find common grounds to unite and work collectively to solve various problems in quest for a better living.

On the other hand falling to intersubjective tales weaken sapiens as individuals. Imagine persuading a chimp to blow itself with a bomb in return for it getting 72 bananas in heaven after its death. No way!! Are you kidding?, says the Chimp. But sapiens do it for 72 hoors. Sadly!

We, as children, grow up believing in stories and fiction. And the passion these stories incite in us has helped us in achieving the impossible. The science came in our lives as a tool to understand and tame the physical realities (the nature) around us. Now it is helping us in realizing the fiction we grew believing in.  Also, It is helping us realize intangible dreams so dear to us.

Fear and greed both override each other and keep living beings in checks and balances to give them the best chance of survival. It’s the passion or the stupidity which drives sapiens overboard in their quest. Most of the time it works against the individuals but once in a while individual achievements help the whole community to cruise forward collectively, at times LEAP.

If we look back, we have come a long way. Today, we are the undisputable kings of the ecosystem. But looking forward, undoubtedly, driven by passion and greed, we have screwed the entire ecosystem and our survival looks imperilled. Today our emotions are resonating with those of Emperor Ashoka after the Kalinga War. What for? Where to??

God, the creator, the invisible irrational SOB, who makes us fight with each other in order to save self, BLESS US ALL!  

~ Inspired by Yuval Noah Harari - Sapiens

Human Population - "Optimum Carrying Capacity"

Neo-Malthusians wud luv to believe the moment of truth has arrived with WW-III staring at us.

There have been several deja vu for them in blood-soaked human history, which they profess optimized the human carrying capacity vis a vis other resources on our lonely planet. Yet, the human population has no looking back. It’s been cruising almost exponentially proving fears of Malthusians unfounded and baseless. Neo Malthusians heavily discount the value of humans as the prime resource on earth. 

Anti-Malthusians factor in the capability of human mind to invent means and technologies to manipulate and exploit the existing or new resources to full-fill needs of the growing population at even greater rate. 

Malthusians invent dooms day in every new technology. Like they fear, AI & Machine Learning will render the slower processing machines called human minds redundant and obsolete in time. In their propaganda against the intelligent machines, they willfully scuttle the role of imagination and ideas, the most important and exclusive faculty of human brain.

Malthusian’s is not a theory but a basic instinct of all living things. Division of resources sucks. We all wanna have the Lion’s share. Siblings if too many, are threat to each other - not by rationale but by instinct. Every day we see mortals fighting over plenty and perishing.

Driven by the instinct, the ones in power use the technology for their own benefit to create behemoths which are used by the ruling class to manipulate and keep the human herd controlled and systems of production, consumption and distribution of goods limited by brutally greedy formulas of “optimum carrying capacities” bringing humanity into greater states of enslavement and misery.

Had the technology been allowed Laissez-faire, all would have flourished and eventually stopped breeding out of frustration in a responsible manner bringing human population to “optimum carrying capacity” in more humane way than a war.