Abstraction is the favourite past-time of not only scientists and java programmers but also of philosophers. But then abstraction is built into the human brain. Civilization and probably all human progress can be directly attributed to abstraction.
There is also a dark side to abstraction. Like in the previous post it is also a root for many social problems.
People will use abstraction and extrapolate the constituent's property to the whole.
A muslim terrorist evokes fear and distrust in the common man for the whole community.
A snake-charmer will cause the whole of India to be looked at as an exotic country of oriental magic.
The rest of india will see every south indian as a madrasi and all south indian languages are the same to him, the westerner will call the language the indians speak as indian.
A dumb answer by a Miss USA paegant will give an image of all Americans being stupid.
A rude Israeli tourist causes all Israelis to be adjudged as mean unfriendly people.
Shanghai makes all of China look like the land of gold and oppurtunity.
A chowkidaar at Dzongri will mistake every man not Sikkimese as Bengali:p
okay now for its dual:
If people would see unity in everything there would be peace everywhere.
People clean up their homes, every speck of dust is cleared and every corner wiped crystal, but they throw that garbage right outside their home. Why cant all of the world be their home.
Countries dump their e-waste, nuclear waste and other hazardous wastes in other third world countries.
People say hes Indian I will help him, hes American I dont like him, hes Muslim hes my brother, hes Buddhist hes infidel, he is rich I will envy him, hes poor I will show sympathy, hes evil I hate him, hes boring I will avoid him, hes this and that bla blaa blaa.
Thats a duck, I can eat it, thats a hill let me destroy it and extract aluminium, thats a tree I will cut it and make a sofa. one can go on and on.
There is a spiritual term for this: non-duality.
Duality is ofcourse the existence of 2 extremes/ends, like good and evil. But lets in this context refer to duality as multi-ality(I dont think this is a word but you understand rt)
Abstraction then is the tool with which one slides from one end of duality to the other, non-duality. It depends on how one uses it or applies it, hence it can both alleviate and increase a particular problem.
No matter how much I try to find an absolute, an objective truth I end up with a subjective,middle way path.
Sunday, December 23, 2007
variable
The root of many problems arises from the following:
People try to define something that cannot be defined, they try to make connections when the connections themselves are either invalid, non-sensible in the first place, or changing(yes analogies are dangerous), they try to bind a value to a variable thinking it is immutable, they live in the misconception that the value is the same as the variable, they cannot distinguish between the two.
Let me give some simple examples, but before that let me explain some of the terminology I have used:
Events(anything that happens) are values and Nouns(anything that is) are variables.
- Help someone, you will be termed a good man
- Steal, you will be called a thief all your life.
The action becomes the actor and vice-versa.
People try to define something that cannot be defined, they try to make connections when the connections themselves are either invalid, non-sensible in the first place, or changing(yes analogies are dangerous), they try to bind a value to a variable thinking it is immutable, they live in the misconception that the value is the same as the variable, they cannot distinguish between the two.
Let me give some simple examples, but before that let me explain some of the terminology I have used:
Events(anything that happens) are values and Nouns(anything that is) are variables.
- Help someone, you will be termed a good man
- Steal, you will be called a thief all your life.
The action becomes the actor and vice-versa.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
Life as a Dictionary
I am fond of analogies. To come up with them is fun, most are silly and are not worth recording, but this one I like, howsoever silly it may be.
This happens a lot to me.
I come across something I dont understand, lets say some word. I want to find out, what does it mean. So I pick up the dictionary, and open it, a random page, I wont find it at the first flip of the page, I flip some more, I am too far from my destination, I flip again, I reach some page and my eye rests on some interesting(curious) word, I start reading its entry, that was nice, I continue reading the words below that entry, nice, after a while I lose interest, what was I doing, ohh I was searching for a word I believe, but what was that word, I forget, I try to remember it, but it evades me, I become impatient and frustrated, what was the bloody word, after much deliberation I do recall what I was searching in the first place, I see I am not there, I flip again, and some more, my eyes are distracted by so many words, so many interesting, delicious words, waiting to be enjoyed, I stop, I indulge, reading all those words, sticking at no particular word, just sequentially start reading, sometimes darting to the next page and the next, with no sign of focus, the original aim lost in the jungle of words, its not bad, its fun for a while, one learns, but then something is missing, there is a stress that comes from not being where one should be, but why, I am confused, what am I doing, I am looking at some words, but why, why am I holding this dictionary, what was I doing, ohh I remember I was trying to search for a word, what was that word, shit, I forgot, bloody I wasted so much time, and I still havent found that word, I dont know where I am, I kick myself and curse, what was that word I was looking for........
....ad infinitum
The dictionary is your life, the words the physical , mental and the spiritual worlds and the word that the seeker was originally looking for can be the purpose of life or anything for that matter.
ps: I do always recall in the end what word I was looking for. But then on this side of the analogy things are much simpler.
pps: Djiskstra has some interesting things to say about analogies, I misplaced his article, this is a reminder for me to update this post.
This happens a lot to me.
I come across something I dont understand, lets say some word. I want to find out, what does it mean. So I pick up the dictionary, and open it, a random page, I wont find it at the first flip of the page, I flip some more, I am too far from my destination, I flip again, I reach some page and my eye rests on some interesting(curious) word, I start reading its entry, that was nice, I continue reading the words below that entry, nice, after a while I lose interest, what was I doing, ohh I was searching for a word I believe, but what was that word, I forget, I try to remember it, but it evades me, I become impatient and frustrated, what was the bloody word, after much deliberation I do recall what I was searching in the first place, I see I am not there, I flip again, and some more, my eyes are distracted by so many words, so many interesting, delicious words, waiting to be enjoyed, I stop, I indulge, reading all those words, sticking at no particular word, just sequentially start reading, sometimes darting to the next page and the next, with no sign of focus, the original aim lost in the jungle of words, its not bad, its fun for a while, one learns, but then something is missing, there is a stress that comes from not being where one should be, but why, I am confused, what am I doing, I am looking at some words, but why, why am I holding this dictionary, what was I doing, ohh I remember I was trying to search for a word, what was that word, shit, I forgot, bloody I wasted so much time, and I still havent found that word, I dont know where I am, I kick myself and curse, what was that word I was looking for........
....ad infinitum
The dictionary is your life, the words the physical , mental and the spiritual worlds and the word that the seeker was originally looking for can be the purpose of life or anything for that matter.
ps: I do always recall in the end what word I was looking for. But then on this side of the analogy things are much simpler.
pps: Djiskstra has some interesting things to say about analogies, I misplaced his article, this is a reminder for me to update this post.
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Dreams
Note: This will be an incremental post.
1. Broadly 2 types, Lucid dreams and non-lucid. Lucid dreams are easier to remember whatever little we do. Non-lucid are just random neuron activity which touches a lot of memories and probably the brain tries to stitch up a story on-the-fly in quick hindsight, making sense of things that aren't meant to be. Lucid dreams don't make more sense, but you clearly feel you're playing a part, either active or passive, either actor or observer, it feels like your watching a movie and you can analyze and respond to various scenes, you kinda know that this is a dream(some of the time) and sometimes even make it a point to remember it, only if u try real hard and tell your mind that I want to remember this dream can u hope for the tiniest recollection.
2. Different postures, different places ---> Different dreams.
If you sleep facing(feet towards) south, you will have high dream activity, you u face sleeping west probably you wont have nice dreams, facing north is normal activity, facing east don't remember, probably less dreams:p
I normally sleep over my friend's places a lot, there was one particular house of Jaat where he stayed for a year or more, I always used to get dreams of an actor or some drama, some art thing, the theme was always the same each time. Once I slept at this horrible place called Kasol in HP, which is full of pot-smoking Israelis I had the most potent dream of skulls/death/yam-dev. Every place has got an aura, certain vibrations/waves, an environment and it definitely interferes with your mind waves. Also if somebody's sleeping close by, his waves/dreams can interfere yours, I once asked Jaat did he dream of Italy and he said yes, he was enjoying the detailed architecture at Rome IIRC;).
3. There is no sense of real time in dreams. There is no relation between how much time is passing outside in the real world and within your dream.
for e.g., when I was young I often fell of my bed and every time I fell, I remember having the dream of walking on a mountain ridge, the ridge is getting thinner and then its as sharp as razor blade and then I fall, it seems like hours or at least a long time, but my falling off the bed would have been just some fraction of a second, the brain reconstructs a whole scenario, how brilliantly fooled we are by our minds:).
4. I sometimes get dreams which has to do something with what happened the previous day, that plus some hidden memory plus some activity makes up something, but most of the time my dreams main elements, actors and other components come from my long-term memory, things that have long past gone, if not that things that have/had the slightest impact on me, things that I am/was sure are not important sometimes are the main highlights, that surprises me very much, it like the brain is scanning itself and found hidden things behind the corner attic, wonder whats the trigger/key.
5. When you need to wake up at some pre-determined time, if before sleeping you make a mental note of the time you want to get up, invariably the sleep is not as deep as otherwise and astonishingly the internal wake-up call works like a charm with an error-window of an hour at the maximum. The sleep not being as deep or fulfilling one tends to get more dreams.
6. Updated [December 9th 2011]: The kind/type of dream you get also depends on the exact time at which you go to sleep. It seems like the human dream is related to the cosmic dream (what in sanskrit is called maya). Its just a bunch of waves/equations that have a lot of parameters and something inexplicable happens as the output. The same should hold for research I guess, lot of research work/reading/exploring might not give a great idea by itself, but one incident of waking at the wrong time, going to a shop in a unusual roundabout way, watching a man fall asleep on the train, might just spark an in inexplicable chain of events that lead to that idea. Well, I dont believe that so much, it has to be more deterministic, more like what Littlewood says.
[Today I went to sleep at 10AM and woke at 4pm, I dreamt something completely different from anything I remember from before, i.e. I would classify this dream in a *new* category]
1. Broadly 2 types, Lucid dreams and non-lucid. Lucid dreams are easier to remember whatever little we do. Non-lucid are just random neuron activity which touches a lot of memories and probably the brain tries to stitch up a story on-the-fly in quick hindsight, making sense of things that aren't meant to be. Lucid dreams don't make more sense, but you clearly feel you're playing a part, either active or passive, either actor or observer, it feels like your watching a movie and you can analyze and respond to various scenes, you kinda know that this is a dream(some of the time) and sometimes even make it a point to remember it, only if u try real hard and tell your mind that I want to remember this dream can u hope for the tiniest recollection.
2. Different postures, different places ---> Different dreams.
If you sleep facing(feet towards) south, you will have high dream activity, you u face sleeping west probably you wont have nice dreams, facing north is normal activity, facing east don't remember, probably less dreams:p
I normally sleep over my friend's places a lot, there was one particular house of Jaat where he stayed for a year or more, I always used to get dreams of an actor or some drama, some art thing, the theme was always the same each time. Once I slept at this horrible place called Kasol in HP, which is full of pot-smoking Israelis I had the most potent dream of skulls/death/yam-dev. Every place has got an aura, certain vibrations/waves, an environment and it definitely interferes with your mind waves. Also if somebody's sleeping close by, his waves/dreams can interfere yours, I once asked Jaat did he dream of Italy and he said yes, he was enjoying the detailed architecture at Rome IIRC;).
3. There is no sense of real time in dreams. There is no relation between how much time is passing outside in the real world and within your dream.
for e.g., when I was young I often fell of my bed and every time I fell, I remember having the dream of walking on a mountain ridge, the ridge is getting thinner and then its as sharp as razor blade and then I fall, it seems like hours or at least a long time, but my falling off the bed would have been just some fraction of a second, the brain reconstructs a whole scenario, how brilliantly fooled we are by our minds:).
4. I sometimes get dreams which has to do something with what happened the previous day, that plus some hidden memory plus some activity makes up something, but most of the time my dreams main elements, actors and other components come from my long-term memory, things that have long past gone, if not that things that have/had the slightest impact on me, things that I am/was sure are not important sometimes are the main highlights, that surprises me very much, it like the brain is scanning itself and found hidden things behind the corner attic, wonder whats the trigger/key.
5. When you need to wake up at some pre-determined time, if before sleeping you make a mental note of the time you want to get up, invariably the sleep is not as deep as otherwise and astonishingly the internal wake-up call works like a charm with an error-window of an hour at the maximum. The sleep not being as deep or fulfilling one tends to get more dreams.
6. Updated [December 9th 2011]: The kind/type of dream you get also depends on the exact time at which you go to sleep. It seems like the human dream is related to the cosmic dream (what in sanskrit is called maya). Its just a bunch of waves/equations that have a lot of parameters and something inexplicable happens as the output. The same should hold for research I guess, lot of research work/reading/exploring might not give a great idea by itself, but one incident of waking at the wrong time, going to a shop in a unusual roundabout way, watching a man fall asleep on the train, might just spark an in inexplicable chain of events that lead to that idea. Well, I dont believe that so much, it has to be more deterministic, more like what Littlewood says.
[Today I went to sleep at 10AM and woke at 4pm, I dreamt something completely different from anything I remember from before, i.e. I would classify this dream in a *new* category]
Sunday, April 08, 2007
a computer geek's analogy.
What is happiness, the word being one of the basic building blocks of the vocabulary/dictionary is a little difficult to explain/define. Lemme assume the foll meaning:
Happiness: State of Non-Conflict.
Left side of the equation: Mind in view of Buddhist/EasternPhil Ideas and the concept of Closure.
[
Meditation: Nothingness(Hindu School), Mindfullness(Buddhist School), supposedly is a state of immense calm and peace.
Closure is a term in psychology which means broadly coming to terms emotionally with tragedy, or rapidly ending the misery caused by grievous loss. People recovering from love affairs also sometimes yearn for closure. If we generalise this, we can say that any incomplete thing in ur life demands closure, its like "completing" an incomplete circle, and this drives human nature(on of the many drivers). So every human seeks closure, and until he finds that he knows no peace.
]
Right side of the equation: Operating System(Linux/Windows) Processes.
[
At any given time in the runtime of a operating-system(Computer) there are numerous processes, some active, some sleeping/waiting, some dead, some runaway(out of control). They do the computation and other work on the user's behalf, for eg: play a movie, retrieve data from archives, chat etc. Processes can spawn other child-processes and so on.
Abbr: OS = Operating System
]
Analogy(the equation):
Our Mind can be compared to a computer, an OS, managing innumerable activities and thoughts. A normal meditative state is one where no active computation is taking place. One can say all the processes are in inactive or sleeping state. The buddhist medidative mindfullness can be compared to a super-active *ps*(a command that lists all active processes) process that watches all the active processes without interfering. The human mind knows no rest and is continuously spawning new processes, each process contributing something to the mental patterns(RAM or hard-disk memory) and to the very thing it is part of. This thing(OS) keeps changing its form unlike the non-changing OS kernel that runs in a computer. New processes are spawned from the interaction of user and computer, that is the interaction between the environment/surroundings and the mind. The environment need not be external, it may also be internal(memory/RAM/hard-disk). Now normally in a computer OS there is a distinct link between the parent process and the child process, and hence its easier to control and make sense of conventional processes than the mental processes which seem intractable. In an OS, a runaway process is one which has gone awry and out-of-control, whose parent has lost it. An active runaway process, will eat away at ur computation cycles(ur mental cycles) and you wont even know it. Now lets go back to the definition of happiness and to the concept of closure. Lets say all ur active and sleeping processes are not malicious and in control, so it is the runaway processes that contribute to the state of mental conflict, bcos the concept of closure dictates that the runaway processes(incomplete) terminate(complete) normally, but u have no way to control them or you are ignorant of their existence. So a happy computer;) wud be one which has no runaway processes - state of non-conflict. Now how to close these processes?
Btw the very awareness or knowledge that there are runaway processes eating away at ur mental peace will pave the way, without which you will never get out of the conflict state.
There are two ways to obtain closure:
1. Hook into the runaway process and allow it to complete/terminate normally. Normal Closure.
2. *kill -9* (an OS command that forcefully terminates processes). Forced Closure.
Both are difficult.
Note: Incomplete, will close the blog some other day, until that day I will know no complete peace;) [EDIT: Actually thats not true, the blog post is of course still incomplete, just like most (non-mathematical) theories are.]
Happiness: State of Non-Conflict.
Left side of the equation: Mind in view of Buddhist/EasternPhil Ideas and the concept of Closure.
[
Meditation: Nothingness(Hindu School), Mindfullness(Buddhist School), supposedly is a state of immense calm and peace.
Closure is a term in psychology which means broadly coming to terms emotionally with tragedy, or rapidly ending the misery caused by grievous loss. People recovering from love affairs also sometimes yearn for closure. If we generalise this, we can say that any incomplete thing in ur life demands closure, its like "completing" an incomplete circle, and this drives human nature(on of the many drivers). So every human seeks closure, and until he finds that he knows no peace.
]
Right side of the equation: Operating System(Linux/Windows) Processes.
[
At any given time in the runtime of a operating-system(Computer) there are numerous processes, some active, some sleeping/waiting, some dead, some runaway(out of control). They do the computation and other work on the user's behalf, for eg: play a movie, retrieve data from archives, chat etc. Processes can spawn other child-processes and so on.
Abbr: OS = Operating System
]
Analogy(the equation):
Our Mind can be compared to a computer, an OS, managing innumerable activities and thoughts. A normal meditative state is one where no active computation is taking place. One can say all the processes are in inactive or sleeping state. The buddhist medidative mindfullness can be compared to a super-active *ps*(a command that lists all active processes) process that watches all the active processes without interfering. The human mind knows no rest and is continuously spawning new processes, each process contributing something to the mental patterns(RAM or hard-disk memory) and to the very thing it is part of. This thing(OS) keeps changing its form unlike the non-changing OS kernel that runs in a computer. New processes are spawned from the interaction of user and computer, that is the interaction between the environment/surroundings and the mind. The environment need not be external, it may also be internal(memory/RAM/hard-disk). Now normally in a computer OS there is a distinct link between the parent process and the child process, and hence its easier to control and make sense of conventional processes than the mental processes which seem intractable. In an OS, a runaway process is one which has gone awry and out-of-control, whose parent has lost it. An active runaway process, will eat away at ur computation cycles(ur mental cycles) and you wont even know it. Now lets go back to the definition of happiness and to the concept of closure. Lets say all ur active and sleeping processes are not malicious and in control, so it is the runaway processes that contribute to the state of mental conflict, bcos the concept of closure dictates that the runaway processes(incomplete) terminate(complete) normally, but u have no way to control them or you are ignorant of their existence. So a happy computer;) wud be one which has no runaway processes - state of non-conflict. Now how to close these processes?
Btw the very awareness or knowledge that there are runaway processes eating away at ur mental peace will pave the way, without which you will never get out of the conflict state.
There are two ways to obtain closure:
1. Hook into the runaway process and allow it to complete/terminate normally. Normal Closure.
2. *kill -9* (an OS command that forcefully terminates processes). Forced Closure.
Both are difficult.
Note: Incomplete, will close the blog some other day, until that day I will know no complete peace;) [EDIT: Actually thats not true, the blog post is of course still incomplete, just like most (non-mathematical) theories are.]
Saturday, January 13, 2007
an enlightening experiment
I found a way to get out of the 'stuck in emotion' trap.
ofcourse it can be used in other situations as wekk, for example its
a good exercise towards a quest of self-discovery/analysis.
heres how:
At any arbitrary point of time, if its possible, try to find out
what emotion ur going thru, i mean try to label the undergoing emotion
in ur mind. The moment u identify, infact the very process will pop you
out of that particular emotive state. ofcourse u can say this is nothing
but replacing ur emotive state of mind with a rational mode of 'finding out',
and hence is very obvious, the after-effect i mean. but wats perplexing is that
most people dont even seem to be even aware of such a thing, infact if u do
this often, u will have that better control over urself, u will have discovered
more abt you and hence technically you wud be farther on the road to
self-enlightenment than many. phew...thats a lot of cliches;)
pls do try this on urself. it is quite fascinating.
Disclaimer: I do not say this is original,pathbreaking stuff, I think
every Buddist and NLP practictioner must have similar exercises,
jus that im sure I didnt consciously plagiarize. But maybe it was my
unconscious which came up with this taking input from the various
eastern philosophy books I must have read.
Addon: This simple experiment probably occurred to me when I was
striving to distinguish between feeling and thinking.
ofcourse it can be used in other situations as wekk, for example its
a good exercise towards a quest of self-discovery/analysis.
heres how:
At any arbitrary point of time, if its possible, try to find out
what emotion ur going thru, i mean try to label the undergoing emotion
in ur mind. The moment u identify, infact the very process will pop you
out of that particular emotive state. ofcourse u can say this is nothing
but replacing ur emotive state of mind with a rational mode of 'finding out',
and hence is very obvious, the after-effect i mean. but wats perplexing is that
most people dont even seem to be even aware of such a thing, infact if u do
this often, u will have that better control over urself, u will have discovered
more abt you and hence technically you wud be farther on the road to
self-enlightenment than many. phew...thats a lot of cliches;)
pls do try this on urself. it is quite fascinating.
Disclaimer: I do not say this is original,pathbreaking stuff, I think
every Buddist and NLP practictioner must have similar exercises,
jus that im sure I didnt consciously plagiarize. But maybe it was my
unconscious which came up with this taking input from the various
eastern philosophy books I must have read.
Addon: This simple experiment probably occurred to me when I was
striving to distinguish between feeling and thinking.
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