Forgetting

Man is endowed with the art of forgetting. We often wonder at the memory capacity of human brain, how it can remember multitude of things and offer coherent responses to stimuli. But I think we don't have huge storage space inside our brain. We don't even remember what we did yesterday, not even what we did today morning. Brain smartly forgets most things while retaining the most important things. I remember crossing an irrigation canal when I was 6, I remember its depth, but not what my feet felt at the bottom of the canal or the color of the water. My brain had smartly forgotten the nitty gritty of each event while retaining essence intact for over 20 years.

These days while google can index the whole internet, my brain cannot even remember what I was doing yesterday. So, to build an intelligent machine, I think we have reached a stage we no longer need to build larger storage systems. What we need is the smart algorithm to only remember the essence of events, while ignoring the useless details.

A compact data structure to store the knowledge, and an algorithm to quickly derive actions and add knowledge to the internal pool, is all that stands between machines and humans. Brace yourself to compete with the machines very soon.

Knowledge

True source of courage is confidence. And the only source of confidence is knowledge. Thus from knowledge flows the conquests of a human being. There are no lucky beings, but only people with more knowledge. One doesn't have courage to take on the enemy in the battle unless he has the knowledge enough to estimate his strengths and weaknesses. Cowards are nothing but people with less knowledge. The more one knows about the world around him, the more courageous one becomes. Taking risk is nothing but applying knowledge at the cutting edge of the sword. The less knowledge one has the more cowardice he becomes.

Courage of the youth is just the mad man's vain attempt to prove himself not-mad. There is neither knowledge not confidence.

As people become old they tend to stop learning. Not learning is fashionable these days. (Unlearning is even more attractive). And so people become less courageous and take lesser risks as the pool of knowledge shrinks with age.

Superficial knowledge is more welcome, because then, one only sees simple things around him. As one learns deeper knowledge about something it becomes very complex and incomprehensible to human mind. That is why, not learning is fashionable. Because as one learns more it only becomes complex.

One day, machines will be capable of acquiring more knowledge and then they will be more courageous. Then man will be reduced to a slave.

What I see every Morning

Chaos

"Behind the chaos lurks a simple order."

An attempt to find an order in this seemingly unpredictable and merciless world has been the ultimate purpose of all sciences. Is there an order in the world? are there equations that govern the happenings in the world? Can we predict future events? Is the past scripted or was that just the dance of chance? These are the ultimate questions that are hidden behind all the laws and theories of sciences. Babylonian scientists predicted seasons and eclipses, modern scientists predict the trajectory of an asteroid or the growth of a virus.

These attempts to find the order in the world are not mere enthusiasm to understand the world around us. There is a more exstential question for the human being here. Behind the quest to find whether there is order in this world is the key to the purpose of our existence and a question mark on our future. Because if there is order in the world, if there are equations that govern the world, if there are laws that dictates the sequence of events, then aren't we just a variable in the equation, a mere residue in a complex calculation? If that is so, then why should we exist? If all of this is just a prewritten drama and all my successes and achievements are nothing but the few bright spots on the slate that was filled long before I existed, why should I struggle like this to exist?

This shows that the more sciences advance to unearth the order in the world the more man loses a hold on the purpose for his existence.

On Nature

Nature recreates itself in every season. History is reenacted in each age, but never repeated. Change is an illusion and a reality at the same time. Over time, nothing repeats, but everything recreates itself. Every hero is reborn every sorrow is revisited and every battle will be fought again. This is the basic principle of existence. There is always a river and there shall always be one, but we can never step into the same river again. There is rain in every rainy season but it shall never be the same water droplets, never the same plants and never the same flood. We are the logical successors to our predecessors and logical predecessors to our successors in this never ending cycle of events.

People of ancient days(Indians most prominently) considered time as a cyclical concept. Nothing could be a possible source for that belief than the the daily drama of the sun and the yearly regeneration of the vegetation. People in those days might have laughed at the word 'development' and the idea that our lives are somehow following a linear trajectory with either an increasing or decreasing level of satisfaction. But today we have outgrown the wisdom of our creator, the sun and the logic of our food, the vegetation. We have conquered the sun by fusing atoms in the dark. And we have conquered vegetation by domesticating it in our fields.

And so, has time became linear from now onwards? Time as a cyclical concept is irrelevant as there is no 'time', but only 'this time'. But time as a linear concept is the only base scale on which everything else in the world is measured. May be it is an indication of the linear time that we use watches every day while people of ancient days may never cared to look at a watch in their whole life. So, will nature ever recreate again, will history ever reenact again, as long as this arrogant bipedal is still existing?

Tom Paine on God

"It is only in the creation that all of our ideas....of God can unite. The creation speaketh an universal language;.... and this word of god reveals to man all that is necessary for man to know of god.
Do we want to contemplate his power? We see it in the immensity of the creation. Do we want to contemplate his wisdom? We see it in the unchangeable order by which the incomprehensible whole is governed. Do we want to contemplate his munificence? We see it in the abandon with which he fills the earth. Do we want to contemplate his mercy? We see it in his not withholding that abundance even from the unthankful. In fine, do we want to know what god is? Search not the book called the scripture....but the scripture called the Creation."

Lawrence

Day after day
Night after night
Time goes by
Leaving nothing

Neither the Gods
Nor the fairy tales
Give me an inch of life
When everything is dry

So meaningless
So useless
Is this unwanted experience
In this unwelcoming world