A Eulogy for a Friend

Sushant. “Last seen Sun at 9:15 AM.” His unchanging Whatsapp status still declares on my phone - an epitaph etched onto a binary stone - more tenacious than granite, as fragile as memory.

“Time is but a stubborn illusion, brother.” He would have invoked his relativist hero, part in jest, part in romance, just to inspire an argument from me. 

“You don’t actually buy into unprovable useless mumbo-jumbo like nth level simulation, do you?” I would have fallen for it. 

His smile would widen ear to ear and his eyes pierce through me as he would beam at me. “No.” Gotcha! “Par dil ko khush rakhne ko Ghalib yeh khayal acchha hai (But it’s a pleasant idea to cheer the heart.)”

Sushant was made of flesh, blood and ideas. He played with ideas just like a child plays with toys, and for the same reasons - to discover, to invent and to learn. 

The distinction between success and failure didn’t matter much to him, because both lead to the same outcomes - discovery, invention and learning. If it did, it was only to the extent of arriving at places nobody else before did, so roads can be paved for the next in line.

That’s what brought us together - our desire to create infrastructure and institution for those who sought them, but found no joy in the ones that already existed. That was where we aligned - in making our lives about more than just ourselves - in our invention of meaning. Seekers of meaning may not find the meaning, but they do find each other. 

Aye, there’s the rub! For arriving first, also means gestating. It means being lonely. He stayed graceful in highs, he survived the lows, it’s the in-betweens where he froze. It’s the slings and arrows of the ordinary that he opposed the most.

When he showed me his list of fifty things he wanted to achieve in a year, I asked him what was that one thing that he wants his co-seekers to learn from his experiment.

“I want them to know that it’s possible.” He packed in more lives in an hour than most people have hours in a lifetime. He performed, he wondered, he flew. He strived to bridge the gap between ‘what is’ and ‘what can be’. 

Like the photon in a double-slit that he obsessed over, he oscillated between the profane and the profound. The man who danced to a crowd of millions was shy, the man who raged against the system was tender and the man who inspired so many to thrive was suffering. 

So let me not perpetuate the error of generations. Allow me to celebrate my peer, but let me not romanticise his suffering. Sushant killed himself. What he concealed as duality was perhaps a polarity pulling him apart. The radiance all of us witnessed, perhaps came from all the burning inside. Forgive the inelegance of my metaphor as I am trying to map a territory beyond my perception.

What switch in us triggers a desire to bow out gently into the night, we are yet to understand, but this much can be said with certainty - a call for help is not intrusive and vulnerability is not vulgar. Though sometimes it may take a gentle prodding at the crust over the molten inside.

Sushant and I would talk about inclusive fitness for hours, but I failed to ask him if he felt sufficiently included. We’d spend evenings talking about zero gravity, but I never gathered that the ground below his feet may be slipping away. We would talk endlessly about what we thought because meaning mattered so much to us, but I wish I had asked him how he felt every once in a while, recognising that no matter how much meaning we invent, life may still feel empty sometimes.

Just like a child at his toys, he would deconstruct things and piece them back together to see how things worked, and he would jump and fall over and over again without paying much heed to his scratches. What I quietly worried over and never quite looked into was if he also, driven by his unquenchable curiosity, ever put pins into live electric sockets.

The silence before he arrived is different from the silence after he left - like the silence before the sitar’s string is plucked and the silence that follows. 

In this silence, I seek solace in a place where I usually go to - biological certainty. Lewis Thomas in The Lives of a Cell, reassures me 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.”

I believe Sushant sought to extend himself memetically and not genetically. While I struggle to accept the existence of realities beyond our own, I concede to the existence of a non-transient part of our lives - the meaning we leave behind.

What survives him is the pursuit he inspired in millions - the pursuit of, to quote him, “of unknown knowns and of known unknowns.” Here’s to his pursuit, here’s to the man I knew and here’s to the man I wish I knew.

Near Singularity

There’s only one thing left to do

When your seed has taken root

Draw a map for the passerby, 

Showing how to get to fruit.

Write, write, rewrite the memoir

Hack it, crack it, cheat the meat,

For, you can only go so far

When your software’s obsolete.

The first to wake in a house of

Sleep, the first to weed the cloud,

Accident of being the first to

Shroud all doubt and doubt each shroud.

Read the leaves, the tree’s yet to write

Now, can barely play the game

You jumped ahead into the light

And there’s only you to blame.

In these instructions written with

Ink of time and starry dust

A message carved in monolith

“Well, just bow out when you must.”

Sun was captured, drop by drop, by

The very hard working green

When released from its black cell walls

Did a number on the screen.

Was it all for nothing? Perhaps.

Or could we now reimburse

The star that's entangled in breath

And wake up the universe?

An Examined Death

(This piece was written more than two weeks ago. There have been some developments recently. Also, I hope to find more time soon to reflect further on the last bit - the choice of death under coercion, duress, emotional arm twisting and mental instability).

Right to kill, but not to die

At the risk of reductionism, I am tempted to engage with an irony – we are now simultaneously a state that awards death to an individual who is very keen on living, and forces life upon an individual keen on dying. We are one of the few civilised states still practicing death penalty (which might change very soon after the Indian Law Commission recently concluded that "The death penalty does not serve the penological goal of deterrence any more than life imprisonment"), and one of the many still shirking the right to die.

We have been negotiating with decriminalisation of attempt to suicide since 2013. In Feb 2015, Ministry of Home Affairs decided to accept the recommendation of the Law Commission of India to delete Section 309 from the IPC, and drafted a proposal. I wonder if it's de facto non-punishable while we wait. We now remain, at least on paper, one of the last few countries in the world, where if you don’t die successfully, you’ll go to jail for attempting. My partner Kani tells me that can make for a good film.

Whose life is it anyway?

The fundamental function of the state is to guarantee sustenance, equality and complete civil liberty, while balancing it with checks to ensure one individual’s liberty does not violate another’s rights. It is to negotiate social contracts, warn against violation, and compensate for a breach. The state builds infrastructure and systems to fulfill its fundamental promises, and protects property, owned individually, commonly or collectively.

So how do we resolve a conflict between the state’s guarantee of the citizen’s well being and a citizen’s demand for self-annihilation? By establishing a simple inviolable boundary – the landscape of the individual. The individual (an informed, soundminded consenting adult) is the sole owner of the self, entirely responsible for the self, and not state property. The state’s duty is limited to protecting the citizen from external threats and vice versa. The state, in its traditional paternity, shall not forget, that it has limited powers and responsibilities in an individual’s choices affecting their own selves.

 “My reckless child”

The state must educate, inform and caution the citizen, but must not mistake pedagogy for paternity.

Case in example, smoking. The state directs cigarette companies to warn consumers, without ambiguity, against the risks smoking poses to their health. The state is even free to carry out educational campaigns enlightening citizens of such risks. Warned against eventual, potential fatality, the individual is still free to smoke. Not everywhere though – the state has to now step in to prevent the individual’s action from harming others, and may do so, by banning smoking in public spaces, even creating smoking booths, where smokers are welcome to injure and pleasure themselves and their compatriots.

Now, when the law fines a citizen for not wearing a seatbelt or a helmet, the only ethical explanation for such punishment is that it’s a deterrent created to lessen the burden of medical infrastructure on the exchequer, caused by the incidence of accident related fatality. (There have been arguments about smokers having to register themselves, which will limit their healthcare rights in the eventuality of developing lung cancer, but such recommendation is bound to conflict with other fundamental rights of the citizen).

Religion, morality, law

I am an atheist and I am assertively irreligious – to the extent that I am convinced that most religious and ancient philosophical systems of the world are well intended, but under-updated and stagnant, often vestigial and flawed, at times inspired, yet misinformed. I am not an advocate of freedom of religious expression, if it violates the fundamental rights of another individual (including those of non-human persons.)

In furtive didacticism, the character of Maitreya in my film Ship of Theseus often mouths my personal beliefs. One such is, “All ethics should be arrived at, in isolation of religious beliefs.” It was important for me that a monk would say this. I wanted to make sure that the central philosophical debate about identity, self and violence doesn’t get embroiled in religious politics, social practice and contemporary law. So, I hypothesized the situation within the framework of a fictitious religion, the basic principles of which were, inspired by the two Śramaṇa traditions – Jaina and Buddha. Similarly, I suggest we step away from religion for a moment, to examine the discourse around Sallekhana.

In times when we have decoded the human genome, plunged deep into the brain, deconstructed every emotion and instinct to its original evolutionary function, we have little need to fall back on ancient institutions for finding moral solutions – we can do that completely using contemporary tools of enlightenment and inquiry. (We might however, in some cases, want to dust over usable parts of intuitions and ideas from ancient wisdom.) In building a case for the right to die, I recommend that we do not let the defense get overpowered by a singular conversation around religious freedom. There is something bigger at stake here.

Bodily integrity and individual sovereignty are inalienable rights of the modern citizen. These rights are even more fundamental than the right to religious expression, and it is primarily these rights that are being challenged by the ban on Sallekhana. We have to accept and establish that the law has no moral right, whatsoever, to legally interfere with lifestyle, sexual, reproductive and death choices of informed, consenting adults, even if they are beyond fathoming of the presumably well-intended representatives of the state.

The right to religious expression follows soon after, and can be rephrased as the right to define and manifest the self, as an extension of the worldview guiding an individual’s life. How the individual sees the self – as a sum total of all the past causes, as an evolving bio-chemical cumulative with an accumulated meaning and free will, as a wave in an ocean, as a meaningful creation of a hyper intelligent entity, as a meaningless accident, as a notion, as a machine hosting a ghost, as a step towards ascension, as transient, as permanent or as an atom carrying the universe – will have to be allowed, however unacceptable it may seem to the rest of us. The individual has the right to construct their own meaning of life, and interpret their life and death in the light of that meaning. This worldview can be negotiated with, argued with, transformed, informed – but cannot be legally regulated. Not for a while, at least.

Rules of infringement – lines in sand

However, it will be puerile to brush the nuance of the dilemma under the carpet. While there is greater unanimity over a terminally ill patient’s right to die, the debate is really within the space of a physically healthy individual’s choice to terminate their life, as it raises questions of mental well being and informed consent.

Is it a stable choice, achieved after due deliberation, and profound consideration of the consequences, or is it an impulsive decision, an avoidable one, a decision made out of mental instability or a falsely perceived absence of choices? Can we establish coercion or emotional arm twisting, conclusively? (Coercion, or just a gently aggressive egging on from the family could be enough for a dependent elderly member of the family to want to die. The possibility of coercion and mental instability form the crux of the argument calling for a legal ban on death practices like Sallekhana and euthanasia). Is it the concerned individual making the choice, or is it a guardian or a caretaker ? These questions will need more inquiry and deliberation.

Meanwhile, as far as informed, sound minded, consenting adults are concerned, it’s high time the state stops criminalising their sexual choices, their aesthetic choices, their media consumption, their personal expression, how they live and how they die. 

Opposable thumbs and opposable minds!

So today, being a "writing day" break from the hectic production and post production schedules on the two films, it will take great restraint not to disappear down the 140-character-wisdom rabbit hole. Social media debates are informed largely by the same set of principles that pump the adrenaline in any sport - a sense of belonging, an idea of the "other", the sharpening of skills that seem necessary for survival, a competition between the kin and the "outsiders", a race to claim resources of survival, the preservation of your "own", an intention to leading "the team" towards a more sustainable choice, and even avenge insult or injury with a "lesson taught well" to stave off further risk of intrusion.

If I indulge in this notion beyond the obvious parallels, it would be at my own peril. The consequences of an idea can go far beyond the earliest participants exchanging it or engaging with it. While we enjoy the life sustaining and life enhancing effects of good ideas, world transforming and enlightening effects of great ones, we also suffer the repercussions of bad ones for generations. (Of course, good ideas can also have seen/unforeseen detrimental consequences). Like the appendix and the wisdom tooth, some ideas are vestigial – could have had some evolutionary benefit thousands of years ago, but have lost all reason to exist. At their best, they can be mostly harmless, at their worst, fatal.

We know now that ideas, like genes, mutate, fuse, vary, replicate themselves, inherit traits, co-evolve, and die off. Ideas are “selfish”. They can be symbiotic or parasitical to their hosts, and the paradigm that reflects the nature of this relationship is “cui bono?” – the question, “to whose benefit?”

How do we negotiate our way through this? Can we chart out a “quantum” constitution, a “manual to spaceship earth” that is in a constant state of flux, varying, evolving, contextual, while having a (more or less) solid preamble? A preamble that distills thousands of years of “good” intention into a singular aspiration – equal rights, equitably distributed resources and opportunities, future proof collective sustenance (?), prioritized anthropocentrically (?), but extending to all life.

The world exists in the continua of contradicting forces. The opposable thumb sped up the evolution of the species and so did the “opposable mind”. Here’s a wonderful thought experiment created by Loren Carpenter in 1991, examining swarm intelligence and the continuum effect of contradiction –

http://vimeo.com/78043173

(You can also start with the newer replica of the experiment here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9eVz4wBBgU )

This brings me back to my little twitter experiment in this morning. Sharing here -

Well, so much for an opposable thumb without a firm grip!

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’.

Why do I do what I do? My INK Talk...

There is no free will, but you have a choice! (And the role of memes in choice-creation)

(This is the rough draft of the piece that became my INK Talk. It's more of a roughly summed up summary of the book I am currently writing. I have shared many inferences, without having enough space to elucidate on their logical proofs. Also, given the time and space constraint, I have not sufficiently established the relationship between culture and choice-expansion, but merely hinted at it. With my book, I also intend to spend a considerable amount of time deconstructing the memeplex of religious and political institutions, which again I have only cursorily hinted at here. Finally, one of the arguments made here is actually a simple observation that the existence of choice or the possibility to choose between existing choices is not in contradiction with determinism.)

"Free Will" by Nitin Zihani Chowdhary

As a filmmaker, I feel my job has many functions – to archive, to assess, to examine, to inquire, to challenge, to propose, to simulate, to stimulate, even hope to inspire, to analyse, to reject downright, to synthesise, aspire to be enlightened and share it, to interpret new data, to assimilate the most significant breakthroughs in our thinking and knowing into metaphors, analogies and narratives that domesticate the wild physics of the Higgs Boson particle and reconstruct time capsules so they are easier to swallow.

There are a few certainties. That’s good. That’s good to work with. One, we are all going to die. (Well, some of us might go on, if Kurzweil and some others have their way, but that’s going to take a while, so even if they are, most of us are going to die.) That sucks, but there’s something that sucks even more - Life is not teleological. That is, it did not evolve with a predetermined purpose (In a deleted conversation from Ship of Theseus, Cārvāka jokingly espouses the contrary view that the earth sprouted life to evolve into human beings, who can further construct technology to colonise other planets). Matter simmered in the boiling pot of the planet, hit by lightning and UV radiation for billions of years, passing through a godzillion reactions and their accumulated residue, leading to us. All meaning is an accumulation. All purpose must be invented.

Now, here’s my problem – I have been able to articulate it somewhat through a character in my film. The monk Maitreya says at one point “I guess we agree with reason, but now it’s a matter of disposition.” I agree with the nihilists and causal determinists completely, but my emotional makeup is that of a romantic, so what can I do about it? I thought I could put myself at the service of one of the many aspirations of life – and that is a proliferation of choices. An expansion of the scope of what's possible for an organism to do. As life evolves, memory systems and their interlinking co-evolve, helping the organism make more choices. So, I choose, or rather the cumulative decision making agency that is me, chooses to work in the field of memory, simulation and most importantly, meme-creation. For it’s ideas, metaphors, memes and memeplexes that shape our choices profoundly.

Aye, there's the rub. For in that sweep of determinism, what memes may come? If the parts are guided by laws of determinism and causality, how can the whole exhibit any freedom? It's of some significance that these parts themselves are wholes, that further have parts that are not guided by laws of strict causal determinism, but follow the freedom of quantum probability. But I am getting ahead of myself. Can the whole exhibit freedom, when the parts don't seem to? Something tells us, it does. We empirically experience choice. We experience impulse, emotion, reason, dilemma, ambivalence, conflict, and the relief of making the choice. Is it an illusion then? How could the whole be greater than the some of its parts? The answer seemed simple. There is the sum of all the parts, and there is the sum of all the interactions and relationships between the parts, there is also a sum of all the interactions with the environment of the parts, and the whole is a total of all these sums. That seems to me, to be the recipe for wonder, for consciousness, for free choice. When the parts stop interacting with each other, the sum stays, but the whole vanishes. And that is a dead parrot!

The human being is made of trillions of cells, and there are about ten times more bacteria in the human body than “human” cells. In the past centuries we thought of ourselves as monolithic entities, but now we know, we are entire ecosystems. So let’s take a whole, a hundred trillionth of a human being. A bacterium swimming smoothly in water – now let’s introduce a drop of acid in its environment. A mere contact with a single molecule of a fatal substance and it will tumble around and speed in the other direction. If we were to logically break down the steps between the contact and the action of tumbling, then we get – stimulus, contact / perception, reference to memory – in this case, a genetic memory of thirty six chemicals, recognition, inference, recall of response and finally, action / response. A simple if-then program that itself would have taken billions of generations to evolve (along with it's next consequential step - the dangling else) . This, understandably has happened through completely physical, causal “unconscious” processes.

What I can’t help but suggest is an approach of looking – that biology causes a substance interference in physical laws – by pitching one against the other. This is what I mean by that statement – if a micro-body that was a chemical imitation of the bacterium, were to come in contact with the molecule of acid, it would not be repelled by it. It would be engulfed, without resistance (much like a chemical equivalent of a bird will not rise against gravity and fly). So I am rephrasing choice as the possibility of tumbling – the possibility for the bacterium to not be engulfed by the fatal substance in its environment. So, while the laws that led to this simple if-then decision making system are deterministic, a choice is created by the very existence of the decision making process.

As life evolves into more complex forms, one more step gets introduced in this process – this step is learning – storage of new data, acquired within the lifetime of the organism. Memory evolved to supply useful information to the organism’s decision-making systems, so they can change their behavior to better suit their environment, or even predict the future based on patterns of the past. But memory itself is a metaphor, it’s a snapshot of reality. An intricate system of these snapshots acquired over a lifetime provide new updated information to life’s decision making agency, sometimes contradictory to the memory genetically inherited - causing conflicts between intuition and reason, the classical “heart” and the “mind”. 

Evolution of technology - either biological or human-created is exponential, but the timelines are drastically different. Life (bio-technology) evolves on a timeline of hundreds of millions of years, while technology produced by human beings (by technology here, I mean all forms of technologies - social, political, institutional, cultural, mechanical, digital, etc.) evolves on timeline of mere centuries and decades (and soon, mere weeks). Those alive today are both anatomically and neurologically similar to those around, say, twenty thousand years ago. The environments, however, have gone through radical shifts. One is likely to encounter more people in a mall or an airport than an ancestor did in an entire lifetime. Emotions are appeal systems (response recommendations), evolved over billions of years of experiences, that can be largely understood as two kinds of appeals - incentivising like joy, happiness, excitement, and warning appeals like jealousy, sorrow, anger, etc. Impulses and emotions that evolved in the forest and savanna environments could be found to be misguided in post-agrarian societies, while many more could be argued to be increasingly vestigial, and in many cases, socially detrimental. This vast magnitude of variables cause conflicts, contradictions and dilemmas.

To better understand the nature of information density in memories and memes, let’s take the famous case study by the nobel winning ethologist Tinbergen, (subsequently cleaned up recently by Ten Cate, reconfirming the inferences of the original experiment). Within an hour of emerging from its shell, a Herring seagull chick finds its mother’s large yellow beak (with a big red dot on it) and begins pecking. It is then that the mother feeds it. Tinbergen presented a seagull chick with a disembodied beak of an adult Herring gull. The chick still pecked at the beak, hoping to be fed by it. Tinbergen had discovered the essential properties, or the recipe, for a beak that tells a chick what to peck at: high visual contrast (between the dot and the base colour of the beak), rectangular elongation and thinness, and the color red (that was replaceable with dots of other colours, as long as the contrast was maintained. The red dot, however yielded maximum interest). So he took a long stick, painted it red, and showed it to the chicks. They excitedly pecked at it. Then he added three white lines to the bottom, to enhance the contrast, and he reduced the thickness by half. When he showed this object to the chicks, they went absolutely insane, pecking in every direction as quickly as they could. Dumbs chicks, eh? Does it remind us of any of our obsessive behaviours? The way we respond, perhaps, to oil in our food, to sex and violence in our cinema, to the promise of eternal survival in the religions?

The results of this experiment have been interpreted in many ways, and have informed us profoundly about the nature of perception, memory and response. I am extrapolating a particular association from the results - That there is clearly an evolutionary function of maximising information density in small units. Information is resource expensive and biological technology precedes digital technology in this optimisation - maximising the experiences and inferences that can be contained in smaller and smaller units of memory. It's resource wise to save the information of the unique part to recognize the whole - It's resource wise for the Herring gull to store the information of the unique beak to recognise the entire bird, as the chances of an ethologist playing a disembodied beak prank in its natural environment are zero. This content-resource optimisation is the prime causal force behind the phenomenon of super-stimuli. There are many recipes to achieve this distillation - reduction, isolation (a synecdoche of a unique part representing the whole), grouping, exaggeration, imitation and condensing vast amounts of information into codes.

A recurrent aspiration, and one of the many common aspirations at that, of all intellectual endeavor – of arts and sciences – is the maximization of content density per unit. A piece of literature is great when there is a high density of experiences contained in a few passages, a photograph great, when it transcends the mere documentation of the moment it's capturing, a scientific equation great, when many other inferences are contained within it... (The information of the entire organism itself comes from a single genome).

One of my favourite parables is that of the cartographer. The emperor of the kingdom summons the great cartographer to chart a map of the kingdom. The cartographer sets upon the supertask and starts making a most intricate map. When the map is finally made, the women and men of the kingdom gather at the public hall to witness it. Some are enlightened, some awed, some confused, and some criticize the map to be fallacious or inadequate. It doesn’t begin to do any justice to the vast, rich complexity of the kingdom, some feel. The cartographer is even more aware of the shortcomings of her own map. She builds another map, this time far bigger, comprehensive, three dimensional, with miniature automata, with interactive parts and environments, replete with fountains for streams, mounds for mountains... builds towers for people to go up to, and get a bird’s eye view of their universe - a total perspective vortex. People realise their insignificance in the larger scheme of things. Family feuds end, disagreements settle, some leave the kingdom in search of meaning, some turn to science, some to religion, and a few suicides occur. But the cartographer is still unamused... She keeps building a map, more and more intricate, bigger and bigger... till the time the map replaces the kingdom, itself.

How much of the territory can truly be represented by the map? How much information can be packed into one small unit of culture? How large would the map be if it had to be really, really accurate? Can it be read without a legend? A really dense map with a huge variety of symbols will require an elaborate legend, a map for the map.  

And then there are maps of maps of maps, each level aiming towards further distillation. An equation like e = mc2 will be meaningless without a decoding legend. If Munch's “The Scream” was a dense map of experience, response, mood and context, but one had never come across it, then a Matt Groening joke on it will be lost on that person, much like this allusion will be lost on those in the audience, who have never seen an episode of the Simpsons.

I want to examine the role of information packaged in memes in the expansion of the scope of choices. More experience means more foreknowledge, more foreknowledge means an increased capability to calculate and choose accordingly for the decision-making agency. Lifetime of experiences and inferences (true or fallacious, benign or detrimental) can be packaged in capsule sized units of culture, highly condensed, easily transported, and generations have to learn only the decoding systems.

(One of the most thriving memes of known history is the idea of transcendence - God, soul, heaven, after-life, immortality, even martyrdom. We find ourselves pecking at this shtick with the insane obsession of the Herring gull chick. The promise of survival beyond individual death or dispersion appeals to the most primal driving force of existence. Promises of transcendence have evolved out of the thriving desire to ward off the inevitable threat of individual death. Most systems propose a more or less perfect immortality – one where memories, hopes, desires, knowledge and even experiences survive the death of the physical body. An engagement and acceptance of this meme makes death particularly irrelevant. The upholding of the promise at the cost of individual sacrifice becomes acceptable. Individual sacrifices even become necessary in validating the promise.)

If there are a trillion trillion parts in the equation, a trillion trillion variables, and their near infinite permutations and interactions, a vast scope of probability emerges - that can be decided for and against, all evolved out of causal deterministic forces yes, but allowing for very, very real choices. We can rephrase Cogito ergo sum, to "I think I choose, therefore I choose". The I that did not choose to be here, just happened to have arose from a really competitive sperm, born into situations, not chosen either. But the scope of choice expands for some of us, and can be expanded for everyone, if we understand the significance of technological evolution in choice-proliferation. That’s what we do, when we travel, learn, eat, make love, hoard up, give up, read stories, watch films, sign into social contracts, choose political or philosophical affiliations … we protect and expand the choices.

I left the title of my talk a bit incomplete for a bumper sticker effect (or rather a cheap play of syntax). It should have been “There is no free will, but you have a choice – well, some of you, some of the time.”