A short and logical analysis of Emotional direction and Human will for the discerning reader

Credits : Sebastian Eriksson

          
                  It is said that emotions lends the drive or motivation for something to be accomplished. Like a director and limiter to rational thought, emotions have indirectly laid down the foundations of human civilization. The personality that describes a person is a mapping of his emotions to his actions. Every person will have a different mapping. In my case, while my actions are almost fully visible to anyone curious enough to observe, the same cannot be said of my emotions. If anyone were to label my psychological make up, there is a fair probability for a term like O.C.D (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder) to pop up. Even though I prefer order to disorder, I'm not a stickler for perfection. Emotional conditioning over the years have enabled me to be relatively calm in the face of chaos as opposed to my earlier self. This has been achieved by building a mind structure based on logic thought that has been trained to see the rationality and logic in even the most absurd of ideas and situations. An ability to see order in chaos. Sometimes such an approach leads to emotional ambivalence which in turn reflects in not being able to act as expected in the real world. A workaround for this is to inculcate the ability to focus on a single idea so as to not get lost in a sea of contradictions. The challenge as always lies in finding the best possible idea that helps forward one's actions in one's best interests. This is more efficiently achieved by choosing the idea that is best suited to your strongest set of emotions/beliefs. Of course the building of a strong willed mind is a precursor for this plan of action to be successful. A strong will is a simple thing for someone who has attained it. Contrary to the belief that only gifted individuals possess this elusive "power", it should be in fact as basic to life as knowing how to walk or how to talk. The only catch being that, one must dedicate himself to learning the art of strong will for a required amount of time. Once learned, it is a highly useful asset that will stay with you and help you advance your actions and ideas in the desired direction. The implementation of the the best plan of action (selected by your emotional brain) is greatly aided by the presence of a strong will.

                   In a world that is obsessed with marks and intelligence, I had ample opportunities to cram my head with sufficient amounts of data-points which can be processed as required to make logical sense of the world. But one thing that was in lacking was the raw will power to seriously pursue the best ideas that emanated from it. Fortunately the human brain is much more capable than we think. Will power can be trained into our very own highly complex biological neural net. I believe the mind structure mapping of a highly motivated person can be achieved with a moderately disciplined regimen over a reasonable period of time.

The Overrated Emo

Love - Such a romantic thing, isn't it? Well consider this. Reproduction. Does it have the same zing to it? Because the latter you must have most likely heard in a "boring" science class on how "species produce their offspring to ensure the continuity of their own genetic material". Pshewww...ma'am, take a break. However harsh it may sound, the first word 'love' is just a chemical reaction in our heads to facilitate the latter. To "live together forever". Who's gonna live forever? Of course, it is indeed our scumbag DNA forever entwined in an awkward double helical embrace. I understand your preoccupation with increasing urges to call me an idiot. "duh", you might be thinking. And that's just the reaction I was expecting. Why the preoccupation with love as something so high up on the emotional pedestal, that people are literally becoming wired from day one to think that the ultimate aim in life is to find a partner that most of us will already find even if we weren't so preoccupied with finding it? Movies, songs, fairy tales..news, magazines even god damn Nickelodeon TV... the entire entertainment industry spew out the same stuff over glorifying love and it's sleazy partner, sex. They don't even get to the part of having kids even though that's the entire point from an evolutionary and bio'logical' point of view. Almost seems like people are programmed  to 'believe in the magic of love', the fruition of which seems to be the ultimate aim of a major chunk of the world population exposed to this toxic culture. We often like to see ourselves as the spurned heroes of our own love story, at times not understanding that things would have probably worked out if we had not tried too hard to the point of acting like fucking Don Quixote fighting windmills. It's not love, more like a societal obligation to act as weird as possible until you think that the situation has crossed into 'Romeo and Juliet' territory to justify why it was not meant to be. Oh, the tragedy of a lifetime!! Only that the same person will often be seen serenading another one  immediately after they finish lamenting the loss of the 'love of their life'. The point being that there are countless number of people in the world and it's almost guaranteed that you will meet someone someday that you will feel is okay to 'start a family with'. There's no meaning in pursuing something that doesn't actually matter as much in your life contrary to how it is being portrayed. To be happy you need to put in some actual effort regardless of having a partner or not. Even in the off chance you don't actually meet anyone, then consider yourselves awesome and pursue things in life that are much more interesting than just being an intermediate carrier of DNA. Borrowing from the words of the most venerable Mark Manson , "Just don't give a fuck".
 

The Crutch of Faith

Lending from the words of Dmitry Glukhovsky, 'A dogma or belief is a crutch that facilitates human will to trudge on'. Obsession with 'a purpose' is rife at every instant in the history of mankind. Indoctrinated at a young age most humans believe that the belief imparted to them at childhood  is the one and only structure and source of support  that will let them fulfill their 'purpose' in life. To deviate from the structure is a death sentence. Words have a great power to manipulate and control people. The basis of most faiths and beliefs is the power of the 'eternal word'  , often offering no other proof or tangibility other than it's own mysterious aura. Like a primordial instinct built into the species we are drawn into this aura like flies to a lamp. An instinct to latch onto a 'reason' or a structure, however absurd, and blindly believe it to ensure the survival of the kind. The strangeness of such a structure when analysed in a less reverential manner gives rise to many humorous theories abounding in popular imagination that man is nothing but an intermediate step in the life cycle of a sperm or that humans are livestock reared for the benefit of mosquitoes. Recent findings from the world of science (a surprisingly orderly and well reasoned set of beliefs based on the very existence of the universe) that indicates the universe in which we exist  may not even exist at all, is quite remarkable considering that if this hypothesis is indeed true, it may well undermine the millenniums worth of human observation, quantification and reason explaining the very universe that holds him captive. 

The Universe might be a hologram

Emotional Mithridatism : A Note

However psychopathic or sociopathic a movie's villain (or hero) seems to be, there is bound to be at least an inkling of emotion in him that may influence his robotic decisions to freeze and his cold logic to decompose. Akin to the breakdown voltage of a zener diode, man is hardwired to breakdown emotionally once he crosses a definite tipping point. Once the stress becomes too huge, man ceases to exist as the person he was once known to be. This process often creates new entrants into the realm of the mentally disabled. The key is however to stretch your mind little by little, making a bit more space each time to accommodate future upheavals. Bit by bit the mind stretches big enough and regressive emotions cease to play a part in the logical existence of the brain. It may seem crazily villainous or even diabolic to cut off a part of your emotions from the intellectual plane,but it is to be noted that most of our lower emotions are a vestige of our ancient mammalian ancestry. A form of mithridatism even, making the fragile human mind immune to the poisonous effects of sudden emotional trauma by slowly administering diluted volumes of  trauma to the mind on a periodic basis.

The above points made are not vilifying the nature of emotions but just proposes a form of emotional exercise for the mind to be undertaken in controlled amounts. This will not only help the mind to be emotionally strong and mature but also lets it to be in control of anything and everything.

Mithridatism by Roxanne Palmer

                                        

A Platform to democratise Scientific Research

Hola, It's been a loooong time since I updated my blog. Well, as it happens, I have hit upon a wacky idea to democratize scientific research which can eventually lead to deeper scientific penetration and accelerated scientific development. Here we go :)

Scientific research. The expression itself has come to be synonymous with 'not for plebs'. But that's a thing of the past. Anything 'Scientific' or 'research' automatically registers in the mind of the general populace as something uncomprehending, which is as wrong as it's gets. After all, its millennia worth of scientific knowledge that we condense and learn in just two decades at school and that too knowledge in diverse topics. In the grand scheme of things we see that only very few people even attempt to do any form of scientific research. True, that today, scientific work is very collaborative and scientists are networking more than ever, but the fact remains that only a handful of brains would be working in a niche research field at a given time which seriously limits the diversity of ideas.

Democratizing Knowledge

 
I, by myself, is no scientist or a doctor and by no means wish to repudiate the achievements of the much revered scientific community, but I would like to propose an addition to current efforts which I believe will do good for the community as a whole ,that of Crowd-sourcing Scientific research. Contrary to popular belief, Scientific Research is not something unattainable intellectually to the masses.  The idea presented itself to me when I attended a GIAN course on Scalable Interconnects in Networking on Chips (a course that emphasizes the recent research and advancements in the the emerging research area of Networking on Chips) at IIT-G one of the most reputed technology institutes in the country. Incidentally, this was also the most attended GIAN course in the history of the institute with participants ranging from the undergraduate level to research scholars.Myself being an undergraduate student I can say that the course was so well put together that even a school student would be able to easily digest the broad concepts being taught in the course. At some point, the instructors introduced to us new models of routing systems conceptualized by recent research, some of which they themselves had worked on. As they were explaining how these models worked, many questions began to pop up from  the audience, which surprisingly, included ideas that ranged from ones that the scientific community had just started working on to ones that completely eluded those minds during all those years of research. I'm not implying that the scientific community may not have proven the practicality of some of these ideas or may not have thought of these at some point in their research, but what surprised me is the swiftness of such ideas popping up from a large group, out of which most were just recently introduced to these concepts through this course.

The human brain is such a diverse machine. We all have a system in our heads that rivals the fastest supercomputers in the world in processing capacity and the pips the most energy and area efficient man made computers by a reaaallyy big margin. No two brains are same. The conditioning and thoughts that traverse the planet's most efficient computer model is different from person to person. Even though the processing ability of all brains may be comparable, the algorithms in which each brain assesses and resolves a situation is markedly different, thanks to the independent and organic growth of the individual brain. So if we take a group of a hundred brains from as many diverse fields as possible, when presented with a diverse set of problems, the set of brains which come up with viable solutions first may be different for each problem. As the number of brains increase the probability that a solution for a problem will be found faster will also increase and that is the basis for 'the platform'.

The ultimate collaboration

The Platform
The Platform is an attempt to Crowd-Source Scientific Research. The avenues to bring cutting edge scientific research to the general public was limited in the past, mostly due to the fact that scientific knowledge was not so easily attainable. But today it is possible for anyone to share their knowledge thanks to the Internet. It is a fact that 100 page theses can be condensed into 'ideas' not exceeding one page and the complex diagrams and graphs can be condensed into simple block diagrams that can be understood by the masses. The limitations and advantages of the research model can be listed within another allotted 7-12 lines.  A platform which provides lucid information about cutting edge research in simple but meaningful words will extend the reaches of science to anyone regardless of who they are or where they are from. It doesn't end with that. The 'observers' of the document will be able to 'comment' ideas which they think can modify the existing model or work as an add on. A 'debate' tab , reminiscent of the democratic debates in ancient Greece, for people to debate and discuss the veracity of the existing model or the proposed 'comments' is another key feature. To do advanced research in one particular area one only needs to study the specialty requirements needed for that area. What we lack today is an effective method to administer these specialty requirements and through that cultivate the much needed experience in passionate individuals. For that purpose a 'learners' tab which provides information and resources on the exact requirements to understand, learn or even simulate the given research model on your own and more resources to proceed with your own research in this area should also be an integral part of this platform.

Of course as the content providers, the benefit received to the scientific community in this regard is much greater. Useful ideas from the 'comments' provided by 'Observers' can be incorporated into the respective research papers thus packing in more power for the punch. An increased participation of 'observers' will lead to a greater pace of skill development among the populace which will lead to better awareness about scientific research among the public and lead to a much more skilled industry work force and also provide quality input to the research community. It is said that it takes about 3-5 years for a good research paper to be completed, an additional 1 or 2 years for it to get recognized among the scientific community,  3-4 years for it to be adopted by companies for research for their future products and finally an additional 1-3 years for the product to come into market as a product with 'cutting edge technology'. In short it takes anywhere between 8 to 15 (or more) years for a technology to start being useful for the society. This is a highly inefficient process as it all happens sequentially. With the proposed platform, all these steps can be pipelined to bring truly cutting edge technology to humanity in 3 to 5 years or sooner. Sounds impossible? Not really. The same process that is used to optimize manufacturing processes and data transfer in computers can be implemented in the research field too with 'The Platform'.

On an ending note, I believe such a platform will have the power to transform the world of research for good and also open new vistas of knowledge to people around the globe. As time passes, science and technology have developed much beyond our wildest dreams. It is imperative that with such explosive development of technology, a similar effort should also be made to bring about radical change to the way we impart knowledge to the society, which still seems to be stuck in a bygone era from 200 years ago. Democratize Knowledge, Reap the benefits. The time is now.