The illusion of a separate individual

We are born without an identity. Soon the pain and pleasure of body and our biological conditioning identifies us with the body. Then one begins to identify with things one owns starting with toys this continues into adulthood. There is identification with ideas and thoughts like a nation, tribe or ideal. Also there is the identification with relationships and people. 

This identification is what defines an individual. But the pattern of identification followed by every human being is the same although the objects might be different. So are we just part of the collective human consciousness or separate units.

Comparison, individual and identity

An individual is usually identified by his wealth, looks, skills , thoughts, opinions. Usually this identification leads to a conflict with other individuals which surfaces as comparison, competition, jealousy, envy. This can further lead to inferiority or a superiority complex, anger, depression , anxiety or a false fragile sense of happiness depending on which side of the comparison one is.

And if every human being is caught in this trap how different are they actually are from one another. Is there any individuality other than the unique memories we have which even computers have. Essentially the psychological content of all human beings follow the same patern. The individual ego is all that one identifies with. Until this ego is dissolved is the source of all suffering.This dissolution will occur when one sees the danger of this identification with ego and the conflict it implies.

Experiments with digital twins

I recently got to know of Deepak Chopras digital twins ai website. It has a paid subscription so I decided to ask meta ai take the role of Deepak Chopras by limiting it's answers to his books. It pretty much gave me the same answers as Chopras ai website with citations from his books which is probably replying close to how Chopra would have.

So if an LLM is trained on collective knowledge of mankind and represents the mind of humanity, given there there is enough training available from individuals it can think  like any individual with his memories and thoughts would. In case of Chopra it is his 95 books but potentially it memories could be extracted based on search history, social media interactions and in general web activity, phone calls, email. This is until there are neural interface devices that can read memories directly from the brain.

Potentially each individual can be digitally cloned and interacted with. Computers can think like him and better and faster than him.

So everything of an individual other than their first person subjective experience and awareness can be digitised and mechanized.  

It's then hard to say what being human is unless one is experientially inward looking and  self aware. Any form of other outward engagement is machine predictable and more importantly redundant. Mankind is destined to get sucked into entertainment.

Actually even this blogposting activity is similar to an AI based text summary of some youtube videos my brain has been trained on unless there is experiential awareness and understanding.

Consciousness, existence and inference

I can't be sure that the world is real or are we in a simulation of VR. My memories and thoughts are borrowed from the world so is the body and they can be replaced. But I am sure that there is an awareness of something. I am not even sure if something exists independent of the awareness. So awareness or consciousness is all I am sure of. And consciousness is always in the now. Time is a mental construct of memories and imagination, so that too can't be trusted. Nor can I be sure of space which is a part of the provisional simulation called the universe. 

Perhaps the idea of a continuous I or ego can also be a questioned similar to the world and time because it depends and borrows from the experiences in the world  stored as memories. All thoughts and emotions are based on these memories so they too have shaky foundation. All one can be sure of is awareness.

Maya the virtual reality that depends on consciousness

I can't be sure that the world is real or are we in a simulation of VR. My memories and thoughts are borrowed from the world so is the body and they can be replaced. But I am sure that there is an awareness of something. I am not even sure if something exists independent of the awareness. So awareness or consciousness is all I am sure of. And consciousness is always in the now. Time is a mental construct of memories and imagination, so that too can't be trusted. Nor can I be sure of space which is a part of the provisional simulation called the universe. 

Perhaps the idea of a continuous I or ego can also be a questioned similar to the world and time because it depends and borrows from the experiences in the world  stored as memories. All thoughts and emotions are based on these memories so they too have shaky foundation. All one can be sure of is awareness.

Ai , humanoids and self awareness

With computers human memory was made redundant. With AI use of memory to "think" has been replaced, Ai can even have a personality. If we combine that with humanoid robots all human sense organs can be replaced. Perception of machines is much more accurate than humans. 

Then the question is if machines can be self aware, i.e. aware of one's own aliveness when all senses shut down. Is the machine just reacting to signals with further signals or is it aware of itself. I think it's the former. Therefore meditation in self awareness and the subjective experience are the only differentiator between a man and a robot. A machine can fake effects of joy but doesn't experience it. A man's turing test is being able to sit in Samadhi and the subjective experience of joy and misery. 

Society: The deep human neural network

Deep learning and neural networks have been inspired by the way our brains work. But if we turn it on its head and put human brain nodes in the place of regular nodes in the network what we get roughly is a simulation of humanity and our society.

There is a vast pool of human knowledge that has been thought of and experienced and passed on as tradition, history, facts, science, religion, arts and so on. This is the training data that feeds our human network. The base layers in the network roughly represent how the masses are educated with this raw data. 

Then there is a whole hierarchy of people represented by successive layers graded by their weights and influence in the society like teachers, scientists, lawyers, priests, psychologists, doctors, artists. 

The final layer are the decision makers, the big businesses, the politicians and the spiritual / religious authorities. They decide the course of humanity and the validity of the knowledge generated by the network i.e. whether it should be fed back to be retained in the base layers or not. 

Out of this mess we want to generate an intelligent society, but it's always a modification of the past knowledge and thought. Any network after all, however smart and ingenuous it  may appear to be is  limited by the the training data. 

So there is an artificial intelligence and order in the society which may improvise a bit on facing a new challenge but the response is always rooted in the past. 

There is no general intelligence which can look at any problem afresh. Perhaps the solution to an orderly society doesn't lie in depending on human conditioning but breaking it. To see how the contents of our brains are related to the common content of humanity and to solve the human problems we all have instantaneously is the characteristic of this intelligence. It can't come about as long as the individual brain is occupied with its own trivialities and unable to perceive the functioning of the human network.

Isolation

I have been confined to the 3 rooms and 1 balcony of my apartment for a few months now. If it weren’t for the windows, the balconies, the birds chirping outside, the lake and the clouds I would probably loose my sanity. There are 4 people in the family but most times we are stuck to device screens, the child is absorbed in its play like we are on our mobile phones. The resorting to the banality of superficial conversations or entertainment on the mobile only makes the gnawing sense of loneliness, boredom and isolation more obvious. I have a feeling that people and things can’t solve this problem. The problem is self created, its the continuous activity of self centered thought That creates the boundary of the self , isolates it and then invents the escapes. The inability to stop the chattering mind can wear one out and make one insane and neurotic if there isn’t enough energy to take the necessary action. I think thats what happens unless one escapes into the numerous avenues we have of stimulating pleasure and sensations whether its physical, intellectual or spiritual. But one cant knowingly deceive oneself, all one can do is to say with the situation gathering the intensity of all one has and maybe things will change.

Ingredients of intelligence

This is one dish that has no recipe but if the right ingredients are in place it cooks itself like a salad.
First thing to come is a dissatisfaction with everything there is because one is goaded by the world, hurt and  suffered. He has been deceived by the priests, gurus, gods and psychologists. There should be no help and no desire to find something beyond because that leads to imagination, delusion and deception or an escape from what he is.
So all that's left is the man with his consciousness which is also the consciousness of humanity of which he is tired of and his capacity to be sensitive, alert and observe.
Then the brewing begins as all problems of life unravel themselves and the self appears at the center of all of them. It needs energy to pursue this inquiry into problems without trying to fix them or brush them away, till the very end i.e. to look at these problems like one looks at one's child.
                The ancient mythical symbolism of this is probably of Shiva. A man depicted as having modest needs ensuring that they are met and  is physically secure through his Trident (Trishul). He then drums up his Damru (drum) to wake up the Cobra symbolising attention around his neck to be alert of the conflict in the ocean of his consciousness of conflicting desires and thoughts. He holds on to the unpleasantness of He holds on to the unpleasantness of fears, anxiety, jealousy, envy, greed, lust boredom, restlessness and other problems of living (poison) that emerges out of this conflict in his throat(mind) diligently contemplating on it till clarity emerges as the crescent moon and cleanses it away like the Ganges. Or to be so aware of ones anger like the Nataraj that one can still beautifully render the dance of Tandav with poise which destroys the very structure of the ego, its image and the associated anger.
 If one is not wasting away energy in entertainment, work , sex, travel, and has some leisure to go into it then meditation happens. The quality of that mind is an intelligence which operates in the imperfect world maintaining an arm's length of distance from it.

In the face of crisis the important comes to the front

Mankind has been hit by a virus that doesn’t care about international borders. Man has been hit with the possibility of imminent death. People and companies made of people higher up in the chain are now evaluating what’s important for them and their employees. Working from home for months is becoming the norm. Hoarding of essentials too, probably thats all why most people work, to hoard some more. I wonder how many of the folks will voluntarily work at home if salaries were made zero and the other options were to spend time with family or on entertainment. The virus has stripped mankind bare and eroded into what corporate guys call value in the stock market. I guys its a wakeup call for humanity to see if there can be a different way of living without going out and comparing oneself with others in malls and holiday destinations. A way of living where work is voluntary and basics are taken care by the community. Education happens by taking care of children at home and fetching information from the internet. Where people are not turned into hungry consumption zombies by mindless advertising and stock markets don’t exist. Perhaps if the powerful and influential woke up the world would be a better place.

Lives half lived

Some days are brighter and more beautiful than others. The noise of the cicadas and the chirping of the birds are sweeter. The moon looks fuller, closer and brighter. Water sparkles and waves more than other days. The sunsets are purple and wavy clouds look like the heavens with the light of supreme intelligence shining through them.
         Its not that these things don't happen on other days but we are trapped in the web of our day to day chores, too busy to notice.
   Like a spider who is too busy making its web and waiting for its prey. It thinks it has mastered the art of navigating the web, but until it steps out of the web and marvels at the beauty of rainbow colors that sunlight creates, it is trapped in a web of its own making. We all are spider-men that's why the movie is so popular.

The game of thrones

There are three kingdoms:
Ducks who are rich as hell, but they are blind. The leader of the Ducks is like the all the ducks in his clan, after all that’s how it is everywhere. And all the ducklings are like the ducks in the clan.
Some poor folks called Jokers can see everything but cant do much other than act.
Ducks only listen to Pegions who can convey the messages from jokers who enact them as charades in the public.
Everyone knows only one kingdom would be left in the end in the globalised world.It won't matter what it's called because everyone in it would be an immigrant.

The kingdom would have 12bn people to sustain forever.
Ducks think their stuff will get over, if they allow people from other kingdoms in their territory. Stuff wont get over but their time will and pretty soon.
Once people have enough beyond a threshold and some empathy they are happy to share so we don't need to worry about stuff getting over.
Its the empty spaces we need to fill with people, otherwise we would have perpetual division and conflict.

People numbers wont grow once they are lifted out of abject poverty. Earth has enough resources for our needs but not our greed. Bubbly swedish experts confirm this in their book.
Too much is being spent on binoculars and sticks when all we need is a magnifying lens.
Together the disabled folks need to be carried to the empty spaces with the help of the ducks, pegions and jokers who can see everything crystal clear in spite of their limitations.

We need to get all on the same page but that needs a lot of empathy.
To learn and see anything clearly there needs to be humility and a quiet mind.
A mind which can see its own reflection on every face.
So we need to teach our children to look and be curious. We cant teach them unless we ourselves are looking at them. Its like a tide going in and out reinforcing our learnings. We keep learning until there is nothing more left to learn, Vedanta ;)
If everyone in the new generation can look and see we wont have to play this game anymore.

So the beginning of the game is its end, all we had to do was really to look.

The action which is always right

We all act from the desire and will of our selves. Thought solidified as desire and crystalized as will power drives this action.
However because of the limitations of thought even with good intentions the actions are incomplete and fragmentary, they solve one problem and create two more. One may have infinite resources and great intentions but as long as the self exists actions will cause conflict and  dissatisfaction.We need to understand if there is an action which never causes conflict, where there is no choice involved in the acting. This action is spontaneously acted by compassion and love, the self is completely absent. Only such action can solve the world's problems and has the force of supreme intelligence behind it.

The joy of timelessness

There is just the now when time stops. Past  and the imagined future are put in their right place. One can be there doing absolutely nothing just enjoying the moment with music, connection with
 nature and insights forever. But their is a living to be made and things to be done so the joy comes to an end and is replaced by a mechanical routine and one then craves for a vacation to escape life.

The etymology of our god names

Hanuman is the ignorant man who follows Ram or Hari to become super human. Har means to strip away i.e loose everything one has accumulated in one’s life. Our thoughts, ideas, stuff that we have. Once we loose attachment to everything we become hanu-man from man.
In the hanuman chalisa there is kuber the god of wealth and yama the god of death gaurding  and guiding our actions. So one needs to look at the message in the hanuman chalisa a 100 times to see what Tulsidas means to say.
Btw har har mahadev also is similar, once we get rid of the past and the accumulations we have elements of shiva within us. We are the creator, sustainer and destroyer of our own worlds which plays out within our brains.

The new world

It's our earth, one earth that's all we have. As long as we have division on it there will be conflict, misery and war. We can go to the Moon or Mars but we will spread the same tribalism there as well.
     So before we get lost in outer space we need to heal and make whole the inner fragments. The new world would be one with dotted porous borders and friendly nations.

Trikaldarshi or common sense

Many of us have solved high school physics questions where a projectile is launched with a velocity and we calculate its landing spot.
In a way we know its present past and future given some context. Can we call it some sort of superpower or is it just some keen observation of how things work?
I really love the way the knowledge of a field can be applied in another, one needs to be a generalist though and not an expert.

The Quantum brain

Our brains are filled with thoughts, its like a chain reaction of everything we have seen in our life.
In the sane person the thoughts are ordered, in sequence, comfortable like bottles in a bottle factory assembly line. In a manic person the thoughts race. They take the leap of the energy of the creation. A manic brain is at many places and times at once. Words cant portray that state so the outside world only sees a lot of blabber. Finally when the dust settles some events make sense backward in time leading to a beautiful insight.
This is much like the quantum computers we are trying to build.

Slow poison

These days it's not a nightmare or full bladder that wakes me up at midnight but the wheezing, whimpering, tossing and turning of my three year old kid in the bed as she tries to get some sleep. The human lungs have not evolved enough to filter the levels of dust and poison in the air that we have generated to fuel our cancerous growth as a species.
       I can hear the struggle for breath in my child once every month  almost for a full week all night long  as she gets tired of breathing and sleeps. I fear what effect this enduring physical trauma during the sleep will have on shaping her psychology. Medicines don't help because they can't cure allergies. The anti allergens have more side effects than benefits.
       Early on some winter mornings one can see the air bleed as a thick orange brownish smog envelops your vision like cataract. I wonder what my choices are. Is it to submit to the destiny of slow poison laced life where every year of existence is taxed with some time taken off for our apathy and callousness as we defiled the earth with construction, industry and vehicles.
     Or should I escape this place, job, education to some secluded place where the effects of pollution and it's dread in  the society won't be apparent in my lifetime.
   One can't help but feel the pain that attachment breeds. Maybe this is all just part of a grand plan to make men reflect on themselves in the mirror of our dysfunctional relationship to  other people and nature. To see what a messy junkyard  have  we made of our beautiful planet and our lives by allowing ourselves to be insensitive and unconscious, focusing all our energies on things that don't really matter as our time on this earth comes to an end.
     We have cursed our progeny to a dreadful and unsustainable conditioning of the idea of growth and success. And unless  mankind unconditions itself humanity is doomed. The planet will certainly heal itself notwithstanding us, hope man does too.
       

Animal Instinct

I have seen wild animals hunt on TV. How they lock on to the weakest in the herd by lurking in the background. How they chase  the one they have singled out relentlessly. At last the prey gives up exasperated or is pushed into some corner that it can't escape from. That's when the predator attacks at the point the prey is most vulnerable at which usually happens to be the neck. At last the kill is made and the victorious beast feasts on it.

           I have also noticed monkeys mark their territory and proclaim to be the alpha in the herd by thumping their chests. We too are aggressive in groups and fight for dominion and superiority. If our views are snubbed upon it's the worst thing to come upon us.

          One would think humans would have evolved but most of us are essentially the same. We argue and fight for our views like wild animals that hunt. We would wait for the other person to slip and verbally attack them where it hurts the most. All that matters is sticking to our precious stands and defending our mistakes with hypocrisy and  convoluted logic. 

         I pondered on what it is that's amiss in humans that these patterns of behavior repeat over and over across a person's lifetime and through generations. There are two major things common across individuals having low emotional quotient that resort to such crude behavior:

1) Lack of empathy:

    Most people are so full of themselves that they fail to see where the other person is coming from. The art of switching off ones minds raging monologue and trying to step into another's shoes can resolve almost all conflicts.

2) Lack of humility: 

 One would think that experiences like that of a verbal conflict are registered in the brain and one learns from them. 

        But someone wise once said, to learn anything you need great humility. The same person also said that one who proclaims to be humble or enlightened is not so.

       Such individuals have a strong identification with their views which completely blocks any sensible learnings. Humility is the ability of keeping ones intellect aside and being able to listen to the other completely. 

Above all being able to witness everything impartially needs a deep sense of self awareness. Hope people meditated on their rage instead of 10 mins slots in their favorite escape pods in mornings and evenings.

Raising a child

We decided to catch-up after a few years on the occasion of me leaving the city to pursue my next job. Almost all my friends are parents and our children and the concern of raising them correctly is dear to our hearts. We discussed how some religions indoctrinate children as soon as they are born, how can we save our children from getting influenced by them and preserve our ancient culture. People talked about ideas and by the end of our  meeting it almost sounded like we devised  another form of indoctrination with a different content than what we were trying to save the children from.

      I wondered if we are programming computers by the language and logic of our choice or raising intelligent, curious, inquisitive youngsters who can make right choices on their own. For me, isolation is not a solution to bad influence, the ability to discriminate with intelligence is much more important. 

    There are just too many sources of influence in today's connected world and parents can't put a check on all of them without stunting the growth of a child. When children are too young to decide for themselves we need to build a trusting relationship where they feel empowered to communicate their dilemmas with parents. When they are mature enough they need to have the sense of right and wrong  built on the values we hold important like love and humanity. This can only be imbibed by example not by words or books.

            To be intelligent after all is to observe any problem or challenge without prejudice. And in the observation of the problem allow the solution to it to flower.

Being occupied

Being occupied for the brain is what alcohol is for men. Just when the dirt in room starts looking ugly it sweeps away everything  under the rug. There is a lot of hypocrisy in our lives and we don’t have the mental clarity to confront it so we drown ourselves in occupation and entertainment. Some of us look for a purpose and passion but not finding one we relegate to the routine of life. For some of us the purpose is all about self aggrandizement in which there is great pleasure. Unfortunately only a few find joy in their daily work and even fewer try to understand life and themselves in its totality.
          Occupation and vacation go together. The mechanical repetition of the faculties of body and brain takes its toll on them when there is friction. Vacation like a prolonged sleep full of vivid dreams acts as a healer.  Our young brains are raised with the fundamental principles of measurement  and comparison. As we grow older we are seldom encouraged to pursue anything having no pecuniary or professional potential. Somewhere along the way the joy of sweet nothings and seemingly purposeless activities fades into the obscurity of childhood memories.
         When these juicy saplings full of life grow into rigid thick barked mature trees in the forest all that matters like all other trees is to grow taller , bigger and deeper to get a glimpse of the sun, some air and few drops of water. Flowers blossom but are for reproduction. They never have the beauty and grace of a single tree in the middle of plains which may never flower but is beautiful as long as there is a single leaf on it.  Although the termites have their way with both one of them lives on in our
wallpapers.
       Can we make our lives beautiful instead of practical. Can the privileged few who have our basic needs sorted and some space to flourish come out of the conditioning of the rules of the jungle. Perhaps the future of humanity depends on whether we decide to prosper as joyful, content, inclusive manifestations of human consciousness  or as separative, competitive, self obsessed fragments.