The Fear of Philosophy

I have been contemplating this colossal edifice for some time now. Though philosophy, philosophical discourse or philosophical debate does fascinate me; I find far more intriguing the sense of fear I feel among most of the people I have come into contact with whenever this topic is broached. I am fascinated by how people treat this branch of knowledge.

Many a time, I have had this thought that philosophy is inextricably linked to science, technology and life in a way that I can't even begin imagine. But I feel I have a faint glimmer of a grasp on this relationship. It stems from my first understanding that life depends on technology. Now, before you disagree with it, remember that even the clothes you wear come under the purvey of technology. Without technology we wouldn't be any different from the animals we so romantically consider ourselves superior to.

Technology in turn depends heavily on science. Rather, I'd go so far as to say that without science there'd be no technology. For in order to be able to manipulate the elements of our environment and use them to fabricate various devices (technological innovation or invention), we'd require considerable knowledge about the elements of our environment; a collection of facts if you will. Now, facts are collected first by searching for and then analysing phenomena that occur in our environment. Ergo, I feel I can safely categorize science as a search and analysis tool.

But a search in an arbitrary manner would end up being sub-optimal to the extreme. Ergo, this search and analysis tool requires directions of where and how to search for whatever is being sought. But this presumes that one already knows what one is looking for. This is the purvey of philosophy. Philosophy analyses the environment, and conveys to science the location (in the field of knowledge) where the solution being sought is most likely to be found. Ergo, science depends on philosophy.

In order to facilitate philosophy's search for a place where that which is sought is most likely to be found, one has to be able to determine that something ought to be sought. That can only be determined via the sense of some kind of shortcoming. Life's shortcomings alert us to the absence of something that would reduce the difficulty of some aspect of our life (perhaps one of our daily chores). This shortcoming would alert us to the presence of a problem that ought to be solved. Ergo, life tells philosophy that something ought to be sought: philosophy depends on life.

Assuming the accuracy of the above mentioned relationships, one can come to the conclusion that philosophy is a very important link in the cycle that facilitates the growth of our knowledge of our environment. Assuming the accuracy of the preceding statement, why do some people still fear philosophy? Philosophy does alert us to the absence of absolutes. Some people acknowledge and accept this absence, some people do not accept it, yet others refuse even to acknowledge it. The two latter categories tend to live in a varying measures of fear. But I have seen that people fear philosophy irrespective of their attitude towards the absence of absolutes.

I have invested quite a lot of my time in the study of philosophy and I find that there are five kinds of philosophies. I make no claims as to the exhaustiveness of, or the mutual exclusivity of the elements in the following list.

1. 
   
   Philosophy of science.
2. 
   
   Philosophy of society.
3. 
   
   Philosophy of space (or matter or the tangible universe).
4. 
   
   Philosophy of mind (or soul or god or spirits or the intangible universe).
5. 
   
   Philosophy of time.

I have differentiated the various philosophies into these five categories on the basis of the concepts dealt with within their domains. E.g. the philosophy of science conducts discourse on the concepts of (among other things) optimization of process, efficiency (or economy) of operation, and so on. Philosophy of society mostly conducts discourse on the concepts pertaining to the functioning of a society.

The formation of a social structure by say the division of society into various strata could be seen as the result of a mild influence of concepts falling under the purvey of the philosophy of science onto the concepts falling under the purvey of the philosophy of society. This could be ascribed the natural tendency of man to attempt to bring order to chaos. But when this tendency gives way to obsession, and the philosophy of science is imposed on the philosophy of society, cruel social doctrines and inhumane practises come into being. The most apt examples I can think of are ethnic purges, experiments in eugenics and our own caste system (which I consider a failed experiment in eugenics).

These phenomena notwithstanding, the use of concepts from one kind of philosophy to obfuscate the nuances of concepts or even whole concepts of any other kind of philosophy is not inconceivable. Ergo, it is my hypothesis that the fear of philosophy stems from the fear of the absence of absolutes among those who find cause for fear in this absence. And those who accept and acknowledge said absence, do fear philosophy because they realize that there is ample opportunity for the employ of insidious tendencies within philosophical discourse.

The Best Day of My Life

The day didn't start like any other day. I awoke at half past six in the morning, about four hours earlier than my usual wake up time. I had to meet Prof. Navjyoti Singh and we were to go to a temple nearby. To me he looks a lot like a wide-eyed Albert Einstein. We had to meet and go to a place nearby called Nanakramguda. We met at the mess, we being Prof. Navjyoti, two of my colleagues, a wise man who was visiting us- Ravindra Sharma (affectionately known as guruji) and myself. We set off after breakfast.

Prof. Navjyoti and guruji went together on my colleague's bike and me and my two colleagues were to get there, the three of us on my bike, Thumpy. Thumpy is more than capable of carrying three people but the problem was that all 3 of us were fairly big built so I had to make two trips to take both of them there. Once all of us were there, we proceeded to enter the temple. I usually do not enter temples, this time I don't know why I felt compelled to enter. And we had a chat with the head priest. He told us that the temple we were standing in now was the new one, they had to change it cos the old one had gone into disrepair. And the new structure was approximately 400 years old. We got blessings and we put on our footwear and walked into the temple garden adjacent to the well. There we sat, lit up and talked about society and the caste system and the problem of untouchability.

The place was serene, and full of greenery. Here and there through the trees we could see the glass and chrome of these really tall buildings that housed multi-national corporations- software companies. The contrast was bordering on irony. Here we had this sanctuary of serenity, spirituality and sanity amid this hustle and bustle of “modernity”. This was the first time I had been to a temple that my family was not connected to. Even the famous Tirupati temple had on its board of trustees a member of my extended family. All these factors, my being an outsider to this temple, it being more than 400 years old, my being there with two men of great wisdom and the contrast between this temple and its surroundings, made it feel really surreal to me.

When the clock struck 10, we decided we had to leave as Prof. Navjyoti had a class to take and I had a class to prepare for. At half past eleven, I headed off for my class. A friend of mine, Devansh was to make a presentation on Searle's Chinese Room Experiment, an experiment in artificial intelligence. The presentation was under the auspices of my professor and research guide Prof. Bipin Indurkhya.

The night before, I had a conversation with Devansh about the presentation and suggested a minor change that would enable him to get his point across slightly more lucidly. That did help to a certain extent, but a point after that again let the class descend into a non-terminating loop of question and answers, to me the questions that prevented the loop from terminating seemed naïve. For some reason I glanced back from my position in the front row of the class and I saw that the director of our university Prof. Rajeev Sangal had also come to listen to what Devansh had to say. I would like to think I had a premonition of what was to come.

Seeing that the class had entered a non-terminating loop, Prof. Bipin came forward and pointed out a few lacunae in our arguments and our understanding of certain things. He split the class into two groups- the Dualists (those who believe that the mind and body are two separate things , and some of them believe that the mind can never be understood), and the Monists (those who believe that the mind and body are indistinguishable and inseparable from each other, I belonged to this group). During his talk, Prof. Rajeev said he wanted to bring a point up, he took Prof. Bipin's place at the chalkboard and started speaking about the gap that sometimes exists between theory and observation.

We observe phenomena, and based on our observations, we formulate a theory. But if we ever encounter an observation that does not fit into our theory, he said that if we choose to ignore the observation for the sake of maintaining our theory we would be acting unscientifically. To elucidate, Prof. Sangal talked about seeing the external world and understanding it and that external data comes from our senses and that data is used to observe the world. At this point, Prof. Bipin countered by saying that there is no seeing and that there is not external world, it is all a representation within our own minds, furthermore it is not the sense organs that perceive the world but it is our brain that does all the perceiving.

This argument sparked of a scientific-philosophical debate of a magnitude that dwarfed my premonition like a planet dwarfs a person. I was watching two philosophies collide. Prof. Bipin is a monist, and Prof. Rajeev's talk was leaning towards dualism. I had become unaware of every other person in that class. Even their attire, Prof. Rajeev in a traditional kurta and trousers and Prof. Bipin in his usual shirt and shorts had an effect on my perception of this debate

Prof. Rajeev then talked about a hypothetical robot that can feel pain. And then he asked that when the robot's limb was pricked or subjected to some other stimulus, and the robot felt pain, which part of the robot felt it? This added a whole new dimension to the philosophical argument.For some reason, I felt that this was in invalid question.

Imagine watching a tennis match between Roger Federer and Bjorn Borg (the two greatest tennis players in my opinion). Only they were not human sized, they were super giants of astronomical size with unlimited reserves of energy and stamina, and instead of a ball, they were hitting at each other the 10 dimensional multi-verse. That was what this debate was like.

It was a clash between what seemed to be the sum of the classical theories in AI and the radical new theories championed by Cognitive Science. The class started at half past 11 and was to end at 1 but it overshot that time by half an hour and only that much because the professors said that the time is up. We wanted it to continue. We were hungry, some of us were tired, but we wanted to continue listening to this debate.

Were were talking about robots and computers, programs and circuits, but the real issue on the table was whether it is possible to understand what it means to be human. Whether it is possible to understand the human condition. Whether we are justified in approximating the function of the human brain to that of a highly complex computer. This was a debate on whether it was possible to understand the nature of the ultimate truth about ourselves.

I left the class shell-shocked. I had just been witness to a once in a lifetime event and I was reeling from the effect. I headed to lunch, where I met Prof. Navjyoti. I told him that he should have been part of the debate, as he is a professor of philosophy. The next class, after lunch was creative writing, I usually enjoy this class but today, because of the magnitude of the events that I had been through, was unable to involve myself in the class.

In the evening I only remember taking bath because my mind was wandering. I had had only 2.5 hours of sleep the previous night, I was not fatigued but I was totally mentally preoccupied. I was completely unaware of what I did till dinner time. This was the first time I had a lapse in memory without having to take marijuana.

After dinner, there was yet another meeting with guruji, I was waiting for 2030 when the meeting would begin. The first people there were Prof. Rajeev and his daughter Sapna, a good friend of mine. While I was trying to recount to her the events that transpired in the class today, Prof. Rajeev asked me what I liked about the class. I remember saying that I liked the philosophical nature of the debate and also that it showed us how people argue in academic circles regarding theories and philosophies.

Prof. Navjyoti, Prof. Sangal, guruji, two other professors, and five or six of us research scholars were part of the discussion that evening. It was mostly about society and how modernization is not always good and how traditionalism is not always bad. We talked about a few cases where certain tribal societies had been ruined because of modernization and how how traditionalism had helped keep the society intact, safe and vibrant. And how certain traditions are in place only to make sure that all members of a society have a sense of belonging and involvement.

An evening spent in the company of wise learned men, in conversation about the matters affecting today's society and life in general. We also talked a little about how the resources afforded us by modernity (technology, knowledge, etc.) could be used to make a better society.

The conversation on sociology, and the philosophical debate earlier that day and the visit to the temple at the start of the day, all three of those events are sure to leave lasting events in my mind. Each of these events enabled me to understand each other event in a way I have never seen them before.

The meeting began at 2030 and ended close to 2300. However towards the end of the meeting my sleep deprivation caught up with me and I dozed off for a while. But all in all that day the 28th of October, 2009, yesterday, was the best day of my life so far.

Truth?

The science of cognition. Cognition, as far as my analysis of the word goes, shares its root word with the words recognition and precognition. Following this line of reasoning and analysis, I have defined cognition for myself as: “the act of realizing that the observed object (it could be tangible or intangible), and the model in my mind, are the same thing”. This observed object could be something that can be touched and felt like a chair or a computer or a person, or it could be intangible like an idea or a thought or a concept or a spoken word.

I wouldn't use the word “know” to describe cognition, since I feel that it is an overloaded and ill-defined word and I am not comfortable using it to define something else.

We can argue that “to know” implies a notion of truth, and that it is not really possible to know truth. This sounds to me like another version of Meno's paradox in which Meno asks Socrates how he can know when he has arrived at the truth when he does not already know what the truth is? (Courtesy Wikipedia) In other words, in order to know anything, one must know everything.

I find that I can neither agree nor disagree with this stand. One one hand, I can see the logic and rationale behind that statement, whereas on the other hand, I can also see that no one ever tries to know everything. It is more like a progression. Our method of cognition is more like a progressive series of theories. When we don't know much, we observe the world around us and formulate a theory or a belief set T₁, then we observe something or discover something that contradicts something within this belief set and we incorporate that new knowledge into T₂: a new theory, world view, belief set, call it what you like. Carrying on like this, we continue to form a long series of theories: T₁, T₂, T₃... and it is our hope that this series will converge one fine day somewhere in the future onto the truth (if such a thing exists).

The funny thing about this process is, an intermediate theory T{T₁, T₂, T₃...} satisfies all the requirements of the believers in that epoch. They are able to interact meaningfully with the relevant environment (whatever subset of the environment their life depends on). For example, at our current belief state, we are able to do everything that our autopoietic instinct commands. Our theories about the far reaches of space may be grossly incorrect, but those reaches of space and our theories about it have little effect on our lives.

Among the various phenomena discussed in class were the interesting cutaneous rabbit illusion , the blinking dots thing, the phantom arm thing and things of this sort. I have not learned enough about them to make any comment other than that to me they are mysteries pertaining to the way our brain processes information. My best guess right now is that those phenomena are the result of the brain's mechanism of compensation for the faultiness of our sense organs. The brain knows that our senses are imperfect and prone to missing out information, hence tries to figure out what was missed even when there was nothing missed out.

As far as the concept of consciousness goes, I have an emergentistic or holistic view of the concept. I do not believe there is a consciousness center in the brain or heart or spleen or any other organ. I believe it emerges out of the various interactions that various parts of our body have with each other. No doubt, the brain is the main information processing organ in the body, but I do not believe that it alone is responsible for consciousness, it is partly responsible in the sense that it has a certain degree of control or governing ability over the interactions of our body parts with each other.

I believe that thought experiments do work, but they will work if and only if the conceptual model we have (of whatever we are contemplating) is precise or as close to precise as humanly possible. Only then will we be able to predict the outcomes of our contemplated actions with a certain degree of accuracy. But when there is a situation which we know precious little about, thought experiments will most likely fail. The best thing about thought experiments is that when conducted in tandem with physical experiments, they can lead to a much better understanding of the world.

Hope

When the systems of yore have been purged
Whern all pathways have been broken
When into chaos we've all been merged
Something there is that still enables us
To stand
To land
Softly
Sans damage
Through carnage
Escape
Unscathed
Or fight
With the might
Of infinite heroes
Or die
With Heads
Held high
When all the lands seem infertile
And we see no avenues along our path
When the oceans of isolation surround the isle
Something enables us till the very last
To hang on
To the last
Tether
To pray
To hope
When all hope seems
Lost
Distraught
Distressed
With the last drop of blood
Fuelling the heart
Enabling us
To go on
Even while facing
A sure fall
In the face of failure
We strive on
Push forward
Bash on regardless
Hope to steal a win
From te jaws of
Defeat
Hope to stand tall
In the face of a fall
When the bastions of our ideals have been overrun
We still look forward to our day in the sun
And as long as we trust in the view of our minds eye
We stand a decent chance of making it through the night

NAUGHT

What know'th the man that know'th not loss
What know'th the man that know'th not naught
Why doth he cry when he doth not know
How life was when life was naught

How doth one love when one loves not
How doth one cry when one cries not
Why does the sky seem so near
When the sky is not, the sky is naught

In a sea of mirth one is submerged
In the river of sorrow doth one bathe
The sky of rage teaches one wrath
But does it, or does it not, all come to naught

When is naught not naught
But is naught not, naught but naught
Then how does one, that once was
Come from naught, return to naught

As one goes from naught to naught
One leaves behind marks on the path
Those are seen by those who follow
And one does not end up as naught

Life?

This is one of those things that every living entity on this planet has in common. Yet we seem to be at a loss when confronted with the question, “What is life?”. I mean, it is not like a non-living entity would walk up to one of us ask with a tap on the shoulder, “Er... excuse me, but I couldn't help but notice that you have life, and I was wondering if you could enlighten me as to what life is”.

Though that situation may never arise, it would do us well to attempt an answer. It would do us well as it would enable us to see life from a new perspective. Maybe we could notice something that had remained unnoticed before. Then there would be many fundamentally different explanations and theories, we could debate them, these theories could grow in magnitude and become religions and we could go to war over the matter of “Which one of us is right?”.

On a more serious note, the answer to “What is life?” or the method of arriving at a suitable answer to it would enable us to analyze life in detail and answer many personal questions. For example, I have always asked myself why it is that we consider our kind of life the only kind of life there is (you know, carbon based, oxygen breathing organisms). Apparently the oxygen breathing part is not a sufficient condition for life as is evident thanks to the many anaerobic bacteria that have been found. So is reproduction.

No one would consider a eunuch to be a non living entity. It is no secret that eunuchs are incapable of reproduction; yet we count them under the living. Ergo reproduction too seems to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for life. So what are the sufficient conditions for life? What condition or group of conditions, which when present guarantee the presence of life?

From my currently limited perspective, I can see one thing. Living things are born, they lead a “life” and then they die; they have a life cycle. They are self sustaining; either they consume certain resources from their surroundings to ensure their own existence or they have all the resources they need for existence within themselves and they die when the resources within themselves are depleted. A partial example for the latter would be insects in the pupa state, hibernating animals, etc.

Life cycles have been ascribed for seemingly inanimate objects too. Stars seem to have a life cycle. They are said to be “born” in a nebula. They live out their lives by running nuclear fusion reactors, first by fusing hydrogen into helium, helium into carbon, carbon into neon, neon into silicon, and finally silicon into Iron. Finally they reach the stage where their core is made up of Iron or some other heavy metal, which they cannot fuse into something heavier profitably, they collapse on themselves and their “life”ends. Their “death” results in either a white dwarf or a neutron star or a black hole (depending on the size of the original star subject to the Chandrasekhar Limit).

If we think of birth as simply a kind of creation and death as simply a kind of destruction, everything around us seems to have its own cycle of creation and destruction. Therefore it does not seem too big a stretch to try and ascribe life to everything. Even man-made objects; tables for example. Tables are created (birth), they serve their purpose which is to say that they support many things on their surfaces, they get damaged and we repair them(life), they eventually fall into disrepair and we discard them, then they are taken apart. Their useful parts are recycled, their combustible parts are incinerated and the rest are discarded as waste (death). This does not seem too big a stretch.

Many living things appear inanimate when observed for just an instant. Sure when observed for prolonged periods of time we can see evidence that suggests growth, self repair and so on. My point being this: what gives us the right to classify anything other than ourselves as living or non living? There are so many things we do not know. The extent of our knowledge of the universe is grossly limited. We do not even know everything about ourselves. We still do not completely understand the workings of our own brain. We still do not know why each and every single strand of DNA on earth is a left handed helix. Well as far as we know there is no physical, structural, functional or chemical explanation for why there do not exist any right handed DNA helices. The only conclusion I can draw from that is that there seems to be some way in which right handed helices are deficient, but we do not know enough to ascertain for ourselves what that is.

When there are such serious lacunae in our knowledge; why do we consider our definition of “life” so true? It is but an assumption. An assumption that we have made based on our limited knowledge which is based on our limited view of the universe. For all you know, some time in the future, what we consider to be nonliving may very well turn out to be a living entity.

The Robots of Asimov

I plan to make a career for myself as a scientific researcher (I have already embarked on that endeavor). The domain I chose for myself is Artificial Intelligence. Many people have had many interesting things to say to me. The most disconcerting fact is that most people I have come across have said negative things to me in this connection. They did not insult me or do anything of that sort; they expressed their fears (some of them quite justifiable) about the act of empowering a machine with intelligence. They have given examples of movies like “Terminator”, “The Matrix”, “I, Robot”, etc as what could go wrong if we did (empower machines with intelligence). I myself can think of a far better example which is easier to imagine than the examples they put forth.

The story of HAL the computer from the Stanley Kubrick movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” comes to mind where a computer which is in charge of a space ship kills the crew because it calculates that the crew would be a hindrance in its functions. This to me is easier to imagine because I do not see the possibility of being able to replicate the human body using mechanical devices in the near future.

When faced with these facts and the (silent) accusation that I might be working to bring about the “end of man” or the “extinction of humans”, I turn to the works of Isaac Asimov for solace. He, in his books had formulated the 3 laws of robotics to prevent the confrontation between humans and robots. The three (slightly altered) laws are:

1. No robot shall ever harm a human being;

2. No robot shall, through action or inaction allow a human being to come to harm, except where
doing so conflicts with rule #1;

3. A robot shall protect itself from damage, except where doing so conflicts with rule #1 and
rule #2.

These 3 laws effectively prevent a robot from “hurting” its human “owners”. Then Isaac Asimov wrote two other books; one was called “Bicentennial Man” where he explores the possibility that an intelligent robot would acquire a certain level of sentience that would allow it to experiment with the ideas of “freedom”, “family” and “society”. This is depicted at many points in the novel where Andrew Martin the intelligent and sentient robot tries to buy his freedom from his master. In yet another scene, he embarks on a mission to seek out others of his kind.

The other book of by Asimov, “I, Robot”, explores the darker aspect of his “Three Laws of Robotics”. In this book, one super computer which controls all the intelligent robots uses them to stage a coup and “take over the world”. When confronted by the principal protagonist, the computer “VICI” explains that “she” decided to stage the coup because that is where a series of logical deductions starting from the 3 laws of robotics ended. I do not remember her deductions, but I definitely do remember my deductions based on my inferences from that movie. Her deductions, were because of the ambiguity of the word “harm” in rule #1. It seems that in his first rule, Asimov took the word “harm” to mean only physical harm and not emotional, psychological, mental and (maybe) spiritual harm. If all these are taken into consideration, I believe that the situation that arose in the book would not arise in real life.

Let’s say that these three laws are enforced and hard coded into the brains of each and every robot ever created. The truly pessimistic will still argue using the “what if” clause or stay just plain adamant that the events that folded out in “Terminator” and or “The Matrix” will also fold out in real life. I have the following to say to them. The hand that started the war would be human. Western philosophy is a philosophy of control. And what cannot be controlled should be feared according to western philosophy, and thanks to the proliferation of western media in the form of movies and songs and the like this ideology is spreading all over the world.

The act of empowering a machine (a robot or some other device) with intelligence is the result of an endeavor to take some responsibilities off the shoulders of humans. In other words, the creation of artificial intelligence is an act (either explicit or implicit, depending on your perspective) of relinquishing control.

Furthermore, the act of creating and AI, is the result of an endeavor to create an entity equal in intelligence to us. And once we create it as our equal, expecting it to acknowledge us as its superiors would be immoral to the point of being hypocritical. The poet Khalil Gibran once said:

“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you…”

Though he said this about the way parents should treat their children, this can be extended to pertain to AI if we humans are prepared to treat AI as the child of human intellect. AI will be created, whether we humans like it or not, we can either accept it and live with it (and I can assure you that life will be enriched beyond anyone’s wildest dreams). Or we can reject it and live a sub-standard life. There is a good chance that AI will not drive us to extinction. No truly intelligent being will cause the extinction of a species. But our lives will be filled with so much regret, hatred, animosity and depression that they will just not be worth living.

We humans definitely need a change in ideology. The concept of war is obsolete; weapons should cease being an instrument of war and start being an instrument of peace. The sooner we realize that, the better it will be for our whole race. AI is just the next step in our intellectual evolution, preventing its invention for fear of its consequences would be akin to advocating that a child should commit suicide for fear of puberty and the complications it would introduce in life.

The ramifications of AI depend heavily if not solely on the way we humans perceive it and the extent to which we are prepared to accept it.

Metal

Rock sets you free
Metal is all about ecstasy
Classical is all about the soul
Music makes you a complete whole

Rock is all about pleasure and pain
Metal sets you on a higher plane
Rock makes you open your mind
And makes you forget the daily grind
Metal fills up your senses
And neither of the two has ever been
About false pretences

Classical connects with your soul
It gives you the gift of happiness
Metal too connects with your soul
But it takes you to a darker place
That is if you associate
Carnality with darkness

Metal and classical both
Enable one to tap one’s own
Primal energy
Its an energy that nature’s provided
To every beast it has spawned
It is something primordial
It is something spiritual
And it brings out the animal
In people

I see no difference
Between metal and classical
To me metal
Is just a more aggressive version
Of classical
For both these styles of music
Transcend your physical being
And touch the life force inside

To me metal is more than just music
It is a portal
A portal that takes me to a place
Where everything is the way I need it to be
According to my specifications
A place where I can think
A place where I can meditate
And conceptualize
And develop a better understanding
Of life
Metal and classical both
Put a lot of power in your hands
And that power
Is yours to channelize

You can use it to better your life
You can use it to ruin your life
You can use it to control your mind
The choice is yours
And that is the way it ought to be
For, of what use is it to be alive
When you don’t have charge of your life?
But a catch in that there is
For, to have charge of your life
You need to be able and wise
Or you might take your life
With your own hands
Crush it into oblivion

This is a power that can’t be explained
By science or any known knowledge
Except by the ancient wisdom that
Has been passed down to us through generations.
Immaterial of where you have originated from
Your folklore is filled with such things

This power can’t be otherwise explained
And that which can’t be explained
Cannot be controlled
And it is the neo-human nature
To fear that which cannot be controlled
And that is why metal has been deemed as evil

Many have taken advantage of this
And written blood-curdling lyrics
To metal songs
But
This music has always existed
In places of worship
It has been used to draw your concentration
“Dhyaana” as it is known
Towards the deity being worshiped
It is just the modern open-mindedness
That has brought this musical style
Out of the temple
And into the studio
And given it a name,
Metal.

Rock sends you
Soaring across the sky
Metal sets you
On an orgasmic high
And that empowers you
It can enslave you
But you have to make it
Empower you
You have to be its master
It should not be yours
You should tap all its power
And make that power yours.

The Pendulum of Religion

Ok, I was reading the book called "The Mists of Avalon" by Marion Zimmer Bradley. The book is laced with references to pagan religions and what I assume to be Wiccan lore. This book also is set at such a time in Britain when Christianity is trying to make its presence more solid and its authority more totalitarian. That’s when the starkness of this contrast struck me in the face. Here is paganism, which gives more importance to the feminine. And as an opposite is Christianity which proclaims that the feminine is the root cause of all evil in this world. This started me thinking.

Maybe, there was this religion where the woman played an all important role and is given the symbolism like she is the embodiment of the divine goddess and what not, and the man is only needed for the act of procreation. Through time, maybe this idea became more and more extreme and the people ended up with the idea that men are useless except for procreation. And men were looked down upon as lesser beings. We must remember that before Christ, paganism was widespread throughout much of the western world. And this extremist idea must have cheesed off certain very shrewd people who got this idea into their head that women were the root cause of all evil and so on.

Then a further idea struck me, we all know that the masculine gender is more given to physical strength and aggression. It may be that since the dawn of time, men started ruling the roost and subjugating their feminine counterparts on the basis of physical strength. then, to reinstate their importance, some people put forth the theory that the feminine was closer to god than the masculine because after all, women are the one who give birth to the next generation, and that is the creation of new life, and it is almost difficult to overlook the similarities between the lunar cycle of waxing and waning, and women's menstrual cycles.

Hindu scriptures indirectly speak of a civilization that existed before ours and that it was destroyed in a sort of "end of the world" scenario that is called the "pralayam" in Sanskrit. Maybe, that was a male-centered civilization, which ended up being so full of aggression, unrest, war and strife, that the thinkers of the time decided that its time that the focus shifted from the sacred masculine to the sacred feminine. And maybe this "end of the world" is actually a symbolism for something like a change in ideology. And this change lasted till the dawn of Christ and Christianity which turned the tables again. Now, 2000 years after Christ, with talks of women’s rights and "equality of the sexes", are we again heading towards another "change in ideology"?

I would like to think so.

Strengths, the Human Mind and the Mahabharata

I had written a rather bland morose and uninteresting article on this topic in the month of december simply titled 'STRENGTHS'. That was the result of a random tangible idea that had come out of one of my ritual tussles with insanity. That idea sparked off a chain of thoughts which when impregnated with certain inferences have transformed into the following theory:

It is true that a human being is a multifacetted creature. There are many different levels on which the human being operates. And for each of these levels we possess a separate strength. There are five different strengths that each one of us is equipped with. There is the most obvious, the physical strength which enables us to do mechanical things like lifting and moving. The greater the magnitude of this strength, the greater the ease of those operations. Then we have the slightly more subtle psychological strength which enables us to concentrate on one particular object, be it an action or an artefat. The third would be emotional strength or the ability to control ones own and at a later stage of greater magnitude, the emotions of others. Then would come the mental strength which is the power of deduction, this strength is directly linked to the level of intelligence of the person. The last and arguably the greatest of the five strengths is spiritual strength. This is the most difficult to obtain and the most difficult to practise and ascetics in India (and around the world before the christian invasion) have spent their entire lifetime in the search of this strength. At the most mundane level it entails the ability to amplify the magnitude of the other four strengths by using the energy of the soul. And at the most lofty level it entails the ability of the soul to remain alive without the help of the body for short periods of time and even space-time manipulation.

These strengths are also linked to the five elements, each one of them representing one strength. air-mental, water-emotional, earth-physical, fire-psychological and ether-spiritual.

Ether has often been interpreted as being the stuff souls are made of. But I would like to go a step further and say that ether represents quantum foam (quantum foam is the nature of space-time at the subatomic level). I can't yet explain why I make this assumption.

The five strengths are also linked to the five pandavas (the principle protagonists of the Mahabharata) in the sense that they represent the five facets of a single man. Or in more mundane terms, the five pandavas represent a single person who had multiple personalities that were bound into one integral whole. Yuddhishthira, represented the emotional strength- he never gets swayed off the righteous path by his emotions. Bhima, obviously represents physical strength. Arjuna reprensents spiritual strength, Nakula represents psychological strength as Sahadeva represents mental strength.

Then what does the relation these five have to each other have to do with the strengths? Sahadeva and the other four are not born of the same mother, thus Mental strength is not related to the other four strengths (namely physical, psychological, emotional and spiritual) as deeply as those four are inter related to each other. Mental strength, or intelligence is a direct consequence of the physical connections made between the neurons in the brain, they can be manipulated by the soul, but the connections are very much physical, tangible and material. Whereas the other four strengths pertain to the soul alone.

Then one would be compelled to ask about Karna, he being a genetic brother to the Pandavas, what strength does he signify? Yes he does signify something but definately not a strength. Karna signifies weakness. The only weakness a righteous person can fall prey to is 'obligation to the unrighteous'.

The epic called the Mahabharata is a thorough study of human behaviour told in the form of a charming story by the means of metaphors.

Antagonise the Crime Not the Criminal

I used to think that this was just another piece of philosophical bullshit. The title is a literal translation of a saying in Hindi (India's national language) which goes like 'paap say ghrina karo, paapi say nahi'.

Then I started thinking,what is a crime? Basically, a crime is an act committed by a person. Any act by a person which causes harm and/or physical discomfort, pain, suffering to one or many persons which may or may not include the perpetrator of the act which if it satisfies some or all of the conditions mentioned above constitutes a crime. So what is the root cause of a crime? Let us exclude the criminally insane from the section of people we base this discussion on for they are a small minority of the human race.

A criminal act, or any act for that matter starts as a chain of thought processes in the mind. These processes are more often than not triggered by external stimuli, and if the stimulus is negative or painful the chain of thoughts is accompanied by a desire to cause pain/harm to the person or object which is percieved as the source of the stimulus. How often have you seen a person getting angry at an inanimate object just because he/she has either tripped over it or banged some body part against it?

Then there is the case of international terrorists who more often than not are perfectly sane people. But why do they do what they do? For some reason they feel wronged by the world in general and more often than not their claim is very legitimate. When an elephant steps on the tail of a mouse it the pachyderm might be completely oblivious of what it has trodden on, but the mouse is the one which might be in excruitiating pain. The same can be said about big countries and small. The big ones might not even notice that one or a few of its actions are detrimental to a smaller country, and even if it notices, it may consider the damage done to be insignificant, but the smaller country might have lost a lot in the deal. This is what spawns terrorists. They truly believe that they are fighting for a just cause. But the case is not so when we consider fanatics, whether religeous or otherwise.

So what we need to battle global terrorism is not a gargantuan military campaign, but a hell of a lot of understanding of why those who are doing what they are doing are doing it. Once we eliminate the reason for which people wish to make war with the rest of the world, there would not be any terrorists.

I hope I am right....lol...?!

LOVE, HATE AND AWE

The problem with this world is not about the widespread nature of hate. It is the lack of love. These days in the era of gobalisation, what we feel towards our fellow humans is very much of consequence. Walk out into the street and you see people trying to rule over those around them through hate and fear and the absence of hope. But those who have really succeeded throughout history were those who ruled through love, kindness and hope.

Recently I re-read a novel by Alistair Maclean called 'The Last Frontier'. The story was set in communist Hungary which was ruled through the medium of hate and fear of the iron curtain. Their secret service called the AVO used to pick up people who did not believe in the communist ideology and dispose of them after the usual torture. The principal protagonist of the story was a British secret agent who is in search of a man called Major General Illyurin. This man who had experienced torture of the worst kind throughout his life was hell bent on peace. He headed an organisation which saved innocent people form the clutches of the AVO. He had his share of dangerous people working for him, but he ruled with love and kindness. Seeing how those under him swore by him through thick and thin started me thinking about the power of love. If hate and fear can make people work for you can love and kindness not do the same thing. Love and kindness should bring out better better results from those whom you give a task to. Fear is negative but there is a similar positive feeling it is called awe. The facial expression of those in fear and those in awe are almost the same. But those who fear try to run away from the object of their fear and hate it but those in awe tend to approach the object of their awe and love and respect it. The object of which would you like to be? I prefer awe.

Although awe is more difficult to establish, it draws people closer to you but not too close, and it also yields better results. Awe can be looked apon as a special case of love. Awe could be approximated as being an amalgam of respect and love.

Every human knows what love is but can not say as the languages lack the words to describe it, especially love to a fellow human. But love for that special someone can not be generalised since it is unique to each and every individual couple.

Pornography and the Human Race

These days it seems the idea of romance has long since made an exit from the human psyche. All the porn that we find on the net is to serve one purpose alone- to satisfy the human carnal need no matter what the cost. This notion of taking all that is available and giving as little as possible (if not giving anything at all is out of the question) has permeated well into our outlook on sex. This fact is well evident when encountered with the fact that the number of adult sites on the internet catering to BDSM and related themes is on the rise. It is this kind of outlook that has lead us to this deplorable state of affairs we find ourselves in. To realise just how sorry the state of affairs of out supposedly advanced 'civilization' is consider the fact that we now have to purchase drinking water and eventually will have to purchase water for all needs. There are even establishments in certain cities that sell oxygen rich air. These commodities that should have been free to begin with and are abundantly available on the earth are unusable thanks to none other than ourselves.

The great Mahatma Gandhi once said "Nature can provide for mankind's need but not for its greed." Rightly said that was. There has been a recent study which said that the amount of free energy available to the human being at present is unprecedented. Another study said that we are going to run out of supply of fossil fuels in the hear future- as near as 30 years hence. All these separately do not say much. But when put together and viewed as a whole they say one thing alone. WE ARE PAVING THE WAY TO OUR OWN DESTRUCTION and god forbid- extinction. Want more evidence to the way the actions of one section of our society can obliterate the ways of life of others? Read the blog called crazylaks.blogspot.com then you will see what our blind actions do to the human race.

So what does all this have to do with pornography? Very simple. We can take it for granted that porn is the medium that reaches out to the largest section of the human population. Aye, this is because by its nature pornography caters to the most primal desire of the human animal- lust. So as a medim, the makers of pornography have a duty to see to it that the human race doesnt get reduced to a tribe of selfish and greedy individuals who will hold onto their greed obstinately even in the face of inevitalbe destruction. This they should do by stressing the importance of giving along with taking. It is the least they can do for the sake of humanity.

MUSIC AND ME

To me, music is not just a mixture of various sounds that actually end up sounding good. Music is much more. I read a piece of music like you or anyother person would read a newspaper article or a book. The way a person sings to himself/herself when alone or when in deep thought distinctly reflects the type of person he/she is. Music is a glimpse into the person's soul into the emotions that he/she is experiencing. Music can comunicate more than words since you don't listen in a cursory manner but you listen to a piece of music with your heart. It has been scientifically proven that the same region of the brain that is responsible for you appreciation of music is responsible for your ability to think logically. And i found out that this is true since I can concentrate better when i am listening to music at a low volume.

Music is a way of communicating without letting language impede the flow of your emotions. Plain music is much more transmissive than music with words.

Yes I do listen to metal as in metallica and death metal as in sepultura. But there is one factor which allows me to listen to only these bands. These bands have the most balanced songs in the industry.By balance I mean that all the negativity they propagate through those songs, they have a sense of hope in either the words or the tune to balance it. Emotional balance is what is needed in this world of heightening tensions. That is propagated by these bands even though they are said to create 'negative' music.