Total perspective vortex: A bibliography

The Total Perspective Vortex in Douglas Adams’ The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is a device capable of extrapolating a complete picture of the universe – every sun, every planet, their orbits, their composition and their economic and social history from one small piece of fairy cake.  It is a torture device. The torturer, if she or he so wishes, can plug on one end, the whole of reality as extrapolated from a piece of fairy cake, and the victim can then be plugged into the other end: so that when turned on, the victim sees, in one instant, the whole infinity of creation and their self in relation to it. The experience paralyses or even kills the victim.

Let’s attempt at putting ourselves through a very, very weak version of this device. Because nobody has tried to build these amazing devices born of Adams’ genius, we’ll have to rely on a mix of books and videos.

We can start with watching the powerful short ‘Powers of Ten’ by Charles and Ray Eames. The architect couple, famous makers of wonderful objects like the Eames chair, made this film in 1968 (releasing it in 1977), by far predating Google Maps and The Pale Blue Dot. Starting at a picnic by a lakeside, the video takes us on a quick ride to the outer edges of the universe, and then, back again, deep into the human DNA and the atoms that inform its construction. Once we have established our insignificance in spatial terms, let’s go down a temporal tunnel.

“The cosmos is also within us. We're made of star stuff. We are a way for the cosmos to know itself.” One of the most enlightening books that will put things in perspective for us would be Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, with its insistence that “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.” Let’s get on with it, then.

In an approximately 13.8 billion year old universe, our little blue rock formed around 4.6 billion (4600 million) years ago. Protons fused together in stars and new elements formed. The rich diversity of elements on earth created a possibility of millions of molecular permutations. Hydrogen reacted with carbon dioxide inside iron-sulphur bubbles, forming organic molecules like acetate, and a few hundred million years of accumulated reactions later, there were enough complex organic molecules replicating themselves. RNA and DNA evolved, and natural selection kicked in (to understand the principles of natural selection and evolution, read the very brilliantly put together ‘Introducing Evolution: A Graphic Guide’ by Dylan Evans).

Photosynthesis evolved about 3 billion years ago, simple animals about 600 million years ago, the homo-genus appeared around 2.5 million years ago, and homo sapiens started emerging 200,000 ago. It’s been only 25,000 years since the Neanderthals died out and the human being with behaviour traits similar to us today, became prevalent. Play with some evolution timelines online and let the idea of our infancy as a species sink in. I would recommend going to andabien.com, johnkyrk.com and bighistoryproject.com. My personal favourite is www.eoht.info/page/Evolution+timeline (also look up the Human Molecule, while at it).

An obvious choice, at this point, would be to dive into Bill Bryson’s greatly entertaining A Short History of Nearly Everything, but a more poetic place to go to, would be ‘The Lives of a Cell’ by Lewis Thomas - especially for its precious consolation that “There are some creatures that do not seem to die at all; they simply vanish totally into their own progeny. Single cells do this. The cell becomes two, then four, and so on, and after a while the last trace is gone. It cannot be seen as death; barring mutation, the descendants are simply the first cell, living all over again.”

Back on our timeline: it’s been about 12,000 years since the invention of agriculture in the ancient near east (roughly modern day middle east), and like all exponential consequences of accumulating reactions, this bibliography is going to explode, as well. The first thesis here, is Jared Diamond’s argument of environmental determinism, “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples' environments”, in the perfectly reasoned, (but also disappointingly Eurocentric) ‘Guns, Germs and Steel’. You could skip the book and watch the documentary instead, as with the mildly amusing ‘The Botany of Desire’ by Michael Pollan. Now, the subtle co-evolution of language, technology and the human brain, is best studied with the neuroscientists - it would be worthwhile to browse through Terry Deacon’s ‘The Symbolic Species’. Yet, the real fun begins with binging on V S Ramachandran’s absolutely incredible talks, but wait, we are skipping a step.

Why do we feel fear, joy, anger, disgust, excitement or disdain? Why do we behave the way we do? Charles Darwin in ‘The Origin of the Species’, and his following works, made the first connection between natural selection and behavior patterns. Yet, it took another century for evolutionary thinking to become the basis of studies in animal and human behaviour, and, consequently, of human interaction, relationships and society - and no book does it better than Richard Dawkins’ seminal ‘The Selfish Gene’, a masterpiece of piercing clarity and scientific reasoning, evolving the field of semiotics into memetics.

To finally counter the nihilism of this adventure, read the prophetic ‘The Last Question’ by Isaac Asimov. And if you are sufficiently inspired by Asimov's transhumanism, have a go at Kurzweil's claim that ‘Singularity is Near’.

Worrying about arthritis...

I said to Leonard Cohen, "How lonely does it get?"
Leonard Cohen said, "Insufficient data for a meaningful answer, yet."

- Posted on the go.

Location:Half asleep

TEDx

(After putting out a few ideas, I couldn't complete the streams of thought I started. I'll continue to do so in the next few days. No bumper stickers here.)

Is enlightenment googlable? Or will there come a point in time when it will be? Won’t it be cool to one day wake up and ask google what’s the meaning of life and get the perfect answer needing no further interpretation. The answer we’ll read and go… ohh, yes, of course. Is it even an appropriate question? For there is a somewhat naïve presumption here that there can be one final state of enlightenment as against a more reasonable view that there can only be a constantly evolving world view that attempts to become more and more holistic – every new theory containing the truth of its predecessor. It’s nothing more than a catchphrase, really, that I often use. The underlying question is can we attain all knowledge there is to attain, or at least have a straightforward easy access to it? Will that knowledge by itself bring happiness is another question, altogether. Philosophical questions are questions raised by children that even scholars fail to answer.

I am asking questions here, meandering from one point to another, not trying to join the dots conclusively, not giving out bumper stickers or giving out too many. I am trying to use known stories as metaphors of some new ideas. I am also trying to build a case for the responsibility of an artist and a storyteller as the viewfinder, searchglass, microscope, telescope provider. In Zen, they say, before you study Zen, rivers are rivers and mountains are mountains, while you are studying it, while you are going through the motions of refuting and deconstructing and experimenting with life and truth, rivers are not rivers and mountains are not mountains, and once you get enlightened, rivers are rivers and mountains are mountains.

We use words like cheeks, colour, inside, elephant, breakfast, toothpick, God, etc cetera everyday. But say, do you reckon a sentence like this has ever been formed before? After finishing an elephant for breakfast, all that the Gods longed for was a toothpick. Add to that some sexuality, and you have what the standups use for a blush effect. Let’s add… vagina. After finishing an elephant for breakfast, all that the Gods longed for was a toothpick and a vagina. Or the God appeared at his breakfast table, and his cheeks turned the colour of the inside of an elephant’s vagina.

Known takes us to the unknown. What we are struggling to find is a permutation. It’s amazing how we expect the very words of our finite vocabulary with their nearing infinite combinations, of course, to suddenly one day arrange themselves in a way that they will yield the perfect final answer to… well, life universe and everything. Maybe its just an equation we’re looking for? Maybe it’s a number? 42? But as Deep Thought in the Douglas Adams classic suggests – 42 IS the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe and everything. But what IS the question? For all we know answers are already out there, but are we entering the right search keywords? Are we asking the right questions?

The classic Borges story wherein the greatest cartographer alive is summoned by the king to make a map of the kingdom – a precise map with the smallest of details – the ultimate googlemap – the all encompassing answer after which there can be no questions – the cartographer sets out on this highly ambitious project like we have, adding detail after detail to the ever growing map… and by the time he is done charting one area and has moved on to another, the first area has started going through some modifications – and for the map to be perfect, the changes have to be accommodated. The map keeps growing across time and area, till it replaces the kingdom itself.

Now, it’s farfetched to imagine that the World Wide Web will replace the world itself anytime soon, but it’s imaginable that someday we might hit a point in time, where all of an individual’s memories, dreams, experiences and emotions can be archived in cyberspace. Once while working for an idea creation company, I’d created a simple idea for a cellphone software – when you get the software, you feed in forms somewhat on the lines of the EQ and other tests people take up online, but far for extensive than those. It probably takes hours to fill it up, it asks you everything it can ask you. Likes, dislikes, habits, behavior, aspirations etc. Now a unique code containing all this information is put up on a giant server. The next step is that you set up a level of connection you want to make – ranging from business finder to a little cheesy soulmate hunter. Now each time you pass a potential soulmate – sharing maybe your tastes or ideas or worldviews… in a bus or a mall or a party, both your phones beep, and give you an option of messaging each other. So often must we be crossing people, who otherwise would greatly enhance our lives or we theirs. I thought it might be a good idea to not miss out on them. Guess it might be scary for some people, but they won’t buy this in the first place.

The number of people we come across in direct contact every day, either physically or virtually, are perhaps the number of people our ancients met in their entire lifetimes. The amount of cultural exchange that has happened in the last decade itself surpasses past centuries. Human history is being documented and archived like never before. The tools for recording personal histories and experiences are available to more people than ever before. The difference between the tools used by professionals and those available to consumers is fast diminishing, and practically all of it is being put up in cyberspace.

I have been greatly inspired by Isaac Asimov’s story The Last Question. The supercomputer keeps evolving along with the human race, growing in capacities, diminishing in size, till at one point the collective human mind fuses with the super computer in hyperspace. The last question asked here repeatedly is “Can entropy be reversed?” Meaning loosely whether energy getting dispersed off be brought again, somewhat like asking can a tree become the seed again? The computer replies with the refrain, “There is as yet insufficient data for a meaningful answer.” That is a fair answer to a lot of our questions today.

I think of the map story as an interesting metaphor for our quest of finding meaning. I guess the answer will either have to be the scope of the question itself – this infinitely vast place we meander in or maybe, just an arrow sign, a pointer. But historically, it has failed us over and over – this attempt at final answers, for the idea seems to be fundamentally flawed – a map that exactly mirrors the universe has to be shifting, expanding, contracting, transforming, and it’s pretty obvious that this can be achieved only with the rigour of scientific thought open to challenge and rethinking. But along with that we also need to know the art of looking at it, the angle, the approach, the perspective.

As a corollary to the monkeys typing randomly at the typewriter, let me share an analogy a friend has given. Say you were to throw a handful of grain on a patch of floor, what are the chances that they will fall in a pattern that looks something like your face. The chances of something like that happening do exist however impossibly rare they might seem to be. One can probably test this with a software with a white grid and a few hundred pixels that get randomly dispersed on it with each click – the virtual version of seeing trains, faces and rabbits in clouds. Probably it holds in its godzillion combinations, a few hundred patterns that “mean something” to us. But what about the patterns that don’t resemble anything we have previously seen before? I am trying to suggest that they are just as unique as the ones that do mean something – if you were to try and recreate the same random arrangement again by a randomizing click, the chances of getting it again will be just as rare.

Seen from within, the pattern, however random will seem to carry “meaning”.

So instead of joining the dots, it might be more reasonable to appreciate the dots for what they are – spontaneous, random, ever changing. If I were to read to you a line from Eliot “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, has it begun to sprout?” … “what does it mean?” is a reasonable question to ask. But if I were to play you some Beethoven… it would be senseless to ask a question like “what does it mean?” All art aspires to the state of music… to the point where experience is not hindered by context. The context, as we know, is this – we are an insignificant bunch of atoms on this tiny wet rock going around a feverish star in a galaxy of billion other stars, in a universe of billion other galaxies. Nature is not teleological – it does not have a predetermined purpose or design. In other words, we would arrogant pricks to believe that the universe led up to us to be able to answer questions about itself. In absolute randomness, things came to be and here we are trying to make meaning out of some very obvious meaninglessness. We have found some amount of meaning by ways of looking and experiencing. I feel culture, with all its songs and euphemisms, plays a huge role in bringing this sense of stability.

I find romance in the trinity of Satya, Shiv, Sunder – we ought to find out whats true, how do we know what’s true? What do we do with it once we know whats true? What’s ethical? What’s moral? And while we are at it, might as well make it beautiful.

So we have a giant wiki mirroring the giant world, but we need another map to be able to read this map. We learn to see through poetry and music and art. Through stories and parables. Culture is the refresh button. A man is being chased wild through the woods by a vicious snake. He keeps running till he reaches the edge of the cliff… in Hollywood they call it the page 66 of the screenplay… this is where most chases take place in the film… so he starts climbing down the cliff, loses balance and clings on a strong branch of a tree jutting out of the cliff. He looks down and sees the ground is not too far, and just as he is contemplating whether to take that leap or not… all of us know that point in life, whether to leave that high paying job or not, whether to move to a new place or not, whether to marry or not… the ground is not too far below, in the worst case scenario he’ll break a bone or two, but surely survive it. Just then he hears a lion’s roar coming from the ground below. He doesn’t see the lion, just hears the roar. So now he has the snake still closing in, the roar of the lion and the branch he is clinging to has begun to dangle too. In the midst of all this, he spot a lovely blossomed cherry on the tree, he plucks it, eats it and attains bliss.

Most of you must have heard this parable many times before, and that’s a part of my illustration. We need metaphors to access facts. Imagination to access the truth. And the subject of intuitive experience takes us to the most fundamental questions of all. Why do we feel pleasure and pain? Food, sex, well being of kin and other activities encouraging sustenance and reproduction are awarded with an inbuilt incentive of pleasure. Sorrow and pain are warning signs at a core level. Why should we continue to reproduce and sustain? What are we? Are we an individual or a cumulative – a system – a colony? We are born sterile, but within hours are inhabited by billions of bacteria. We have more bacteria in our body than cells, and its reasonable to think that we won’t survive without them. Is it also not reasonable to imagine that the cumulative that we call mind, is made up of functions of many chemicals, living cells and bacteria. In other words, our some of our thoughts just might be what the bacteria want us to think.

If we were to look at the resemblance of collective intelligence at the level of a single cellular lifeform, it won’t seem like a totally absurd proposition.

This is from Wikipedia. Cordyceps Unilateralis is a parasitoid fungus. The fungus's spores enter the body of the insect, usually an ant through respiration, where they begin to consume the non-vital soft tissues. When the fungus is ready to spore, its mycelia enter the ant's brain and change how it perceives pheromones, causing the insect to climb up the stem of a plant. Infected ants bite the leaf veins with abnormal force. The fungus then kills the ant, and continues to grow as its mycelia invade more soft tissues and structurally fortify the ant's exoskeleton. More mycelia then sprout out of the ant. When the fungus is ready to reproduce, its fruiting bodies grow from the ant's head and rupture, releasing the spores.

Seems like a very complicated way of achieving something that could probably be done rather simply. Seems like something only humans do. Like the Rube Goldberg illustrations.

It’s a great story that nature tells us and perhaps it needs no further reinterpretation. But there are hundreds of thousands such stories already out there that do. Seemingly random and absurd, without great morals to take away or bumper stickers to wear on t-shirts. While science is busy unifying theory and make enlightenment googlable, art ought to be busy finding the right search keywords, the right questions and the unique ways of looking. It’s the job of the artist as a scientist to discover and deconstruct, as a philosopher to reflect and challenge and as an artist to show us if it’s beautiful or not.

Thank you very much.

(Update: A ver. 2 of this talk became my INK Talk, here- http://recyclewala.blogspot.in/2013/11/there-is-no-free-will-but-you-have.html)

The God Himself...

After long, I'm reading a book that I am finding impossible to put down! Asimov's The Gods Themselves is his best according to him and hell, do I agree! It's so brilliant it's making me feel incompetent... I'll have to read something mediocre, or at least achievable, to feel capable of writing again! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gods_Themselves