I sure am not talking about Clint Eastwood's wild west cowboy blockbuster. This is a concept that caught my interest, about how gradually we develop inveterated opinions about the Good, the Bad and the Ugly things in the world, while those are entirely relativistic terms and it seems almost impossible at the first thought to accept that the way we live may be totally unacceptable to some one else in this world.
You probably know what I mean when we consider arranged marriages, sexual orientations, laws, customs, traditions accross different parts of the world. But then who are we to question other's beliefs, right? Is there such a thing as an absolute Truth, absolute Right and Wrong?
I think not. I think anything and everything is relative. You can spend some time and come up with the most abominable thing you can think of and I am sure there is a way to justify it.
When I think more about it, then it occured to me that it is the majority's opinion about what is good or bad. In fact, even better description would be to say it is majority's convenience resulting out of your actions, most of the times. The society, over time, tried out all combinations of behaviours and the path that gives least trouble to everyone else is the "best" path. I guess it fits the purpose Man being a social animal and all.
So what happens to one's creativity when we take up the "best" path? I can't help but remember how my wife runs for the nearest peice of wood like the wood must be scared, whenever I say anything remotely connected to a bad omen like death etc. She touches it and says "touch wood". What's more she is making me touch the wood these days. That way she is naturally controlling my urge to discuss anything out-of-whack with her. I am still working on a plan to discuss our life insurance policies with her, which probably will only happen after our rates increase due to old age. But that's a digression we don't need now.
I fear that we will become products of a society that likes nothing to change. Change is dreaded by most of us, because change brings the unknown and we are scared of the unknown. We worship the unknown (which is also called God in a sense, read my other article "Is Atheism Logical" for more details) and pray that the unknown does not turn out bad for us.
I feel that Beliefs, Traditions, Customs, Orientations are knowledge hinderers. They constrain our thought process, kill our creativity and stunt out ability to ask the right questions. Right remains right and so does wrong, while everyone else is busy in keeping it that way. One may say it's a way-of-life, but why do you need a way of life - only because you don't want to rethink your priorities. Nothing wrong with that, but in the process, more often than not we end up inheriting priorities from the culture we are in. They are not YOUR priorities!
So what's wrong in living like that? Accepting everything and taking a guided tour through life? Why do we have to reinvent the wheel, when smarter people have already tried and are willing to share their experiences in the name of religion and laws and what not. Do I think I can do something that they could not? I don't feel that I know the answer to that question, but it seems very difficult to follow a rules book for some reason.
-Sridhar
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Monday, October 29, 2007
Is Atheism Logical?
I think yes sometimes and no some other times, these days however my belief in an almighty is being heavily influenced by my wife furiously searching for the latest bollywood movie to go to on a saturday evening, exactly when I am settling down for an interesting history channel article with a glass of wine.
I can joke all I want, but the ultimate question is ultimately an unanswered question. Tell you the truth, it is designed in such a way that you will never get an answer. It feels terrible to live amidst of the vast set of unknowns with so little truth to any of the things that we actually claim we know.
I realize more on every passing thought, that "Life" can be described as a chemical reaction with it's own life cycle, with a definitive start and end points. But this is an interesting thought, I think, because then we can derive some mathematical theories about life.
Consider this one, for instance. We know that chemical reactions are very causal processes, meaning one thing leads to the other and everything can be traced back to it's cause. We are going to have to imagine access to some crazy computing paraphernalia here to make progress, after all, this is a thought experiment. So imagine a great computer that has unlimited storage and infinite processing power. Now have this computer store all the knowledge of the entire universe, like masses of celestial bodies, their compositions, their positions and relative movements and so on.
With all the data at hand, say we can project the next big event such as the "big bang" because it is nothing but a chemical reaction inside the Sun. Then we can project some more about when life begins on earth and extrapolating the super theory some more we can even project the human development. If we agree that Life is a chemical reaction, then the 'actions' performed by living organisms will be chemical reactions too, ofcourse smaller ones compared to the bigger reaction itself. But for any of these actions to occur, it is obviously a result of the environment in which the reaction is happening. If we can predict the environment's state at a given point in time, then it also means that we can predict the person's action at a given point in time.
Phew! there it is, I said it. The summary of the paragraph above is simply that there is no such thing as "free will". Anything that happens, will happen and could not have happened in any other way. I don't think any person can consciouly agree to that. Co-incidentally, this is along lines of what Bhagavad Gita already is saying for a long time, that there is no such thing as "free will". But I think of myself a modern philospher, not a classical one, so I won't go anymore into that than how much I already have.
I know my little thought experiment have many loose ends and doesn't jive with practical logic all that much, but if you think about it leaving out the logistics and details, at some level it does capture the point. Well, all said and done, what does this have anything to do with the title? There certainly is: to me,
God is nothing but the uncertainity that is created because of the lack of that super computer I talked about, it is the one that controls us and everything else in the universe. It seems random at first sight, but it is highly coordinated and closely controlled for everything we think and do is pre-determined and it could not have happened in any other way that it already did.
There are many places we could go from here. But here is one place I love. Having bought into my super theory, since everything is causal and pre-determined - do the terms Past, Present and Future mean anything? Our knoweldge is limited and our perceptions are a handful. We don't know what happened million years ago, we don't know what will happen tomorrow, all we know is NOW. But there is nothing different that's going to happen in the future that hasn't already happened, for it is pre-determined.
It gets me thinking of the concept of Einstien's time-space theory. All that happened in the past and all that is happening now and that will happen in future, are all joined end-to-end like one long deck of snapshots of the world at each infinitesimal moment world has ever seen. You could move back and forth along the "chemical reaction" and observe the different states, what happened and how it happened. So time travel don't seem that impossible now, does it? All you need is that super computer :)
The Theory of Relativity threw a monkey wrench into my thoughts that seem to have been based on classical physics, but after a lot of reading and pondering and reading some more, I am proud to say that I am no less ignorant than I was when I began. I end this article here, yet there is so much more to this rather profound concept than I can ever imagine.
Wish you good thinking!
-Sridhar
I can joke all I want, but the ultimate question is ultimately an unanswered question. Tell you the truth, it is designed in such a way that you will never get an answer. It feels terrible to live amidst of the vast set of unknowns with so little truth to any of the things that we actually claim we know.
I realize more on every passing thought, that "Life" can be described as a chemical reaction with it's own life cycle, with a definitive start and end points. But this is an interesting thought, I think, because then we can derive some mathematical theories about life.
Consider this one, for instance. We know that chemical reactions are very causal processes, meaning one thing leads to the other and everything can be traced back to it's cause. We are going to have to imagine access to some crazy computing paraphernalia here to make progress, after all, this is a thought experiment. So imagine a great computer that has unlimited storage and infinite processing power. Now have this computer store all the knowledge of the entire universe, like masses of celestial bodies, their compositions, their positions and relative movements and so on.
With all the data at hand, say we can project the next big event such as the "big bang" because it is nothing but a chemical reaction inside the Sun. Then we can project some more about when life begins on earth and extrapolating the super theory some more we can even project the human development. If we agree that Life is a chemical reaction, then the 'actions' performed by living organisms will be chemical reactions too, ofcourse smaller ones compared to the bigger reaction itself. But for any of these actions to occur, it is obviously a result of the environment in which the reaction is happening. If we can predict the environment's state at a given point in time, then it also means that we can predict the person's action at a given point in time.
Phew! there it is, I said it. The summary of the paragraph above is simply that there is no such thing as "free will". Anything that happens, will happen and could not have happened in any other way. I don't think any person can consciouly agree to that. Co-incidentally, this is along lines of what Bhagavad Gita already is saying for a long time, that there is no such thing as "free will". But I think of myself a modern philospher, not a classical one, so I won't go anymore into that than how much I already have.
I know my little thought experiment have many loose ends and doesn't jive with practical logic all that much, but if you think about it leaving out the logistics and details, at some level it does capture the point. Well, all said and done, what does this have anything to do with the title? There certainly is: to me,
God is nothing but the uncertainity that is created because of the lack of that super computer I talked about, it is the one that controls us and everything else in the universe. It seems random at first sight, but it is highly coordinated and closely controlled for everything we think and do is pre-determined and it could not have happened in any other way that it already did.
There are many places we could go from here. But here is one place I love. Having bought into my super theory, since everything is causal and pre-determined - do the terms Past, Present and Future mean anything? Our knoweldge is limited and our perceptions are a handful. We don't know what happened million years ago, we don't know what will happen tomorrow, all we know is NOW. But there is nothing different that's going to happen in the future that hasn't already happened, for it is pre-determined.
It gets me thinking of the concept of Einstien's time-space theory. All that happened in the past and all that is happening now and that will happen in future, are all joined end-to-end like one long deck of snapshots of the world at each infinitesimal moment world has ever seen. You could move back and forth along the "chemical reaction" and observe the different states, what happened and how it happened. So time travel don't seem that impossible now, does it? All you need is that super computer :)
The Theory of Relativity threw a monkey wrench into my thoughts that seem to have been based on classical physics, but after a lot of reading and pondering and reading some more, I am proud to say that I am no less ignorant than I was when I began. I end this article here, yet there is so much more to this rather profound concept than I can ever imagine.
Wish you good thinking!
-Sridhar
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