Belief

I had therefore to remove knowledge, in order to make room for belief.
-- Kant

Belief, often without a logical basis, is the foundation for human excellence. If we don't believe the impossible, we would have never achieved the impossible. Impossible is difficult to deduce from reason and evidence, by its very nature. A blind belief is the only source of inspiration to strive to achieve that impossible of yesterday, which has become possible of today. With reason alone, we would have been stuck within the circle within which deductive reasoning rules, from the available evidence, and would have waited for new evidence for achieving the impossible. In most cases, blind belief alone pushes the boundaries of possibility. What we call as human endeavor, human spirit is based on a strong faith in blind belief. Many a times, I do something, because I feel I can do it, without knowing why.
The important question is, how does mind, that deterministic thinking machine, that organic matter thinking via well defined chemical reactions, actually believe something blindly, without a basis in evidence? How does it almost always predict/believe the right thing, when it can blindly believe the opposite too. There lies the mystery of what mind is.
No matter how powerful machines can become, at thinking and inventing, it is doubtful if they can ever learn to believe in the impossible. If they cannot, then can they ever become more achieving than us?

Complexity

How do we characterize complexity? Can we give a formal definition for what we perceive as complexity in systems around us? Can we have a mathematical equation, and a mathematical truth, that can transcend differences in matter, shape, size, and can explain complexity in a system?

For a long time, I thought logarithm of number of independent systems that combine to form a larger system, gives an accurate measure of how complex a system can get. Complexity is directly proportional to the amount of effort needed to answer questions about a system. So it is very important to understand complexity, to solve the problem of finding strategy for solving problems. If what I think, i.e., logarithm of number of independent parts turns about to be correct, then all limited size problems can be solved in limited time. That way, it links space and time so tightly that they will just be treated as minor variations of essentially same thing.

State

Looking at what is happening in Iraq, Syria and Libya it is difficult to miss the necessity of State, even in its crudest form. These nations have become battlegrounds of world powers, with armed unrest everywhere, and exporting refugees to neighboring countries. Some of the Syrian cities are 90% darker now, during the night, compared to pre-war days.

At times, we get enraged hearing about atrocities of governments, jailing dissidents, torturing political prisoners and even killing normal civilians to instill fear in certain section of populace. But, all of it pales in front of the armed unrest that we see in countries like Syria. Each neighborhood of a city controlled by a different group, bombing each other on a daily basis, it is just a killing machine on the ground. There is nothing but rubble in vast swathes of cities of Syria. People live jungle life, not knowing when they get killed, in a constant fear of loosing access to basic necessities for survival. It is not difficult to imagine, what a child growing up in these cities is going to look forward to. It is a generational curse, that won't be healed for decades to come.

In these modern days, State is as necessary as it was in the days of Babylon and Nineveh, to protect the islands of civilization from advancing jungle.

New

New things have a charm with them, that they always bring some excitement, whether good or bad.

In the routine monotony of life, new things are justifiable cause for long wait and enthusiasm. With friends, it is new projects, new products, new cars, new gadgets that fill most of the conversations over lunch. At home, I have been waiting since morning to put to use the new shave gel, I bought yesterday. New year is obviously, much celebrated, for no easy reason.

The excitement for new, goes down with one's age. It becomes more and more clear that so called new, is nothing but old repeating itself or reenacting itself. New government is nothing different from old government. New guidelines are no different in impact than the old ones. New people are no different from those already we already know. New gadgets are nothing but e-waste waiting to expire. New after-shave, already turned out to be a disappointment, with no burning sensation.

That is why older people seem less excited, and call the more excited ones, childish, with a silent sense of wisdom. After living for long enough, it is difficult not to get the logic of life, how monotonous and repeating it is.  

Mathematics

As they say, mathematics is the queen of all sciences (and Gauss is the prince of mathematicians, to finish my list of list of monarchs). Long time ago, when I was still innocent, I even heard it is the language of all sciences. But my curiosity with maths did not survive for long after finishing preparing for exams. Exams were the main motivating factor besides trying to impress the teacher, and to feel like I am smart. What is smartness but a  result of constant prodding by people around us, 'all hail the smart man, the getter of highest marks, the doer of all home work, the retainer of top rank'. That is why, one should always join less popular schools to feel smart, to feel great. I have had the pleasure of joining a few of them, most of the cases. Once I feel I am useless for anything, everything is an improvement.

Coming back to maths, with its closed reasoning, seemed just awaiting death, when I sensed the openness of algorithms. Unlike maths, one can perform an much as one wants, and say that is the current worst case performance, and can be improved in the future, with respect any algorithm. That is why some algorithms survive with full respect despite being 'trivial'. But maths sees everything in black and white. The recent influx of artificially intelligently optimizing algorithms made mathematics look even ancient, and out of time. After all what is the fun in creating a few axioms(that are so obviously true, that we feel like wasting ink writing 'axiom') and playing with only the truths that can be deduced from axioms? Compare with the endless possibilities (there is one that can even drive a car) offered by inductive reasoning with every atom in the universe. Who will do the  purposeless search down the tree starting from axioms, to lemma, theorems (and corollaries)? Teach the computer to walk the rope, and it can find all the ends.

And so, I dethroned mathematics from its place thinking algorithms and inductive learning will surpass the silly search down the tree. But the silly search did hit its edge, sooner than one could have expected a few decades ago. Computing power is getting plateaued while algorithms are stuck with non deterministic polynomial time turing machines since the 70s. Algorithms and computation has hit their limit, the same one that mathematicians have been trying to solve since a few thousand years.

At the end there is only one problem, and that is search. Every other solution is a variant of the search problem. Someone once asked Diagenes why he carries a lamp with him all the time, and he said he is searching for a Man. Maths is just a way of practicing sciences in a way that gives legitimacy to our inability to solve the search problem. We just say maths is hard, instead of, well, I cannot solve the search problem. I recently fell upon the fact that Maths and computer science used to be part of same department called maths department. Let's hope both strands of smart people come together to solve the search problem, and hope they can also find the answer to why we are here, and what are are we doing here. But it should also include a caveat that kings once upon a time used put on the smart people, that either they should solve or risk being thrown out of the kingdom.

Partial Knowledge

Knowledge is the source of all intelligence. Human have the most efficient knowledge processing technology in the brain that can process vast amount of data acquired from sensory organs, extract useful information from it, reconcile new information with existing knowledge, and finally store it for efficient, almost instantaneous retrieval when needed. But, knowledge acquisition is a murky process like all the physical processes. There are lot of imperfections at all levels. Raw data is corrupted, noisy, biased, dependent on state of numerous variables. Information extraction from raw data is dependent on prior prejudices, current state of mind, and future expectations. There are always unpredictable human agents around us trying to influence how we acquire new knowledge, how we form our beliefs. In a way, mind is in a continuous struggle with past and surroundings, to make sense out of world around it.

In this scenario what helps brain is its ability to acquire partial knowledge based on partial conclusions. Partial knowledge is in a way a game of probabilities. Brain adjusts its beliefs as more and more imperfect knowledge is acquired, hoping that in the long run its beliefs are more or less in line with what is actually happening around it. Imperfect knowledge is also easy to acquire, and scalable with amount of data available. It is more difficult to form firm beliefs than to form loose beliefs that can be adjusted with time and experience. 

In contract, it is difficult for deterministic machines to form partial beliefs. It is more easy for them to believe 1+1 is 2 than to allow for other possibilities based on constantly changing variables. This is  an important reason why intelligent machines are still quite far away. They are very primitive as of now.

Speaking to the Future

Following was an excerpt of a proposed marking on a underground nuclear waste disposal facility. Not sure if it was adopted in this form, but it is interesting to see the form in which we decided to speak to our future successors.

These standing stones mark an area used to bury

radioactive wastes. The area is ... by ...

Kilometers (or ... miles or about ... times

the height of an average full grown male person)

and the buried waste is ... kilometers

down. This place was chosen to put this

dangerous material far away from people. The

rock and water in this area may not look, feel,

or smell, unusual but may be poisoned by

radioactive wastes. When radioactive matter

decays, it gives off invisible energy that can

destroy or damage people, animals, and

plants.

Do not drill here. Do not dig here. Do not do

anything that will change the rocks or water in

the area.

Do not destroy this marker. This marking

system has been designed to last 10,000 years.

If the marker is difficult to read, add new

markers in longer-lasting materials in

languages that you speak. For more information

go to the building further inside. The site

was known as the WIPP (Waste Isolation Pilot

Plant) site when it was closed in ....

Languages that we know, in the form we know may disappear with time, and future people may be curious and enthusiastic like us to explore buried objects. So, the problem how should a set of symbols be designed that convey a message that the site, though it looks clean on the top and everywhere around it, inside it has the most dangerous invisible energy. United states government constituted about 6 different expert groups to study the problem and suggest solutions.
We may think that language independent symbols like the danger sign, stop sign, arrow that convey meaning irrespective of the language spoken, would convey the meaning better than a particular language which may go out of use. Many languages and their scripts, like Sumerian, akkadian, elamite, harappan that existed 5000 years ago went out of use and forgotten without any major cultural discontinuity. So, there is no guarantee that people 10000 years(the approximate age till which the waste would remain hazardous) from now would still speak or understand our language.

But, the expert committees in fact suggested language independent symbols give no more guarantee than a particular language, that they will convey intended meaning. It is even possible people in the future may interpret them to mean the opposite of of what we intended. It is also possible, sensing no danger around the waste containers themselves, they may tend to ignore our signs and may try to extract a different meaning than what we intended. So, it seems plain text is the more reliable way of communicating to our future than the language independent symbols like nuclear trefoil. They thought there will always be humans trying to decipher old texts, and curious human beings trying to understand the meaning of cryptic words like our archaeologists.