Unreal Blog has been chosen as one of the top 50 philosophy blogs in the world! It came as a surprise when the Zen College Life listed this blog (at least the philosophy section of it). Listing it as the 21st in their list, they say of Unreal Blog, “Where philosophy meets physics and they live happily ever after.”
Photo by h.koppdelaney 
Unreal Blog has moved to a more powerful server at Arvixe. [Disclosure: All the server links in this article are affiliate links.] For those interested in moving your hosting to a new server, I thought I would describe the “gotchas” involved.
This gotcha got me during a test migration of my old posts to the new server. I had over 130 posts to migrate. When I moved them to the new blog on the new server, they looked like new posts. To the unforgiving logic of a computer (that defies common sense and manages to foul up life), this pronouncement of newness is accurate, I have to admit — they were indeed new posts on the new server. So, on the 10th of January, my regular readers who had signed up for updates received over 100 email notifications about “new posts” on my blog. Needless to say I started getting angry emails from my annoyed regulars demanding that I remove their names from my “list.excessive” (as one of them put it). If you were one of those who got excessive emails, please accept my apologies. Rest assured that I have turned off email notifications, and I will look and hard into the innards of my blog before turning it back on. And when I do turn it on, I will prominently provide a link in each message to subscribe or unsubscribe yourself.
As you grow your web footprint and your blog traffic, you are going to have to move to a bigger server. In my case, I decided to go with Arvixe> because of the excellent reviews I found on the web. The decision of what type of hosting you need makes for an interesting topic, which will be my next post.
I first heard of “Cloud Computing” when my friend in Trivandrum started talking about it, organizing seminars and conferences on the topic. I was familiar with Grid Computing, so I thought it was something similar and left it at that. But a recent need of mine illustrated to me what cloud computing really is, and why one would want it. I thought I would share my insight with the uninitiated.
Before we go any further, I should confess that I write this post with a bit of an ulterior motive. What that motive is is something I will divulge towards the end of this post.
Let me start by saying that I am no noob when it comes to computers. I started my long love affair with computing and programming in 1983. Those late night bicycle rides to CLT and stacks of Fortran cards – those were fun-filled adventures. We would submit the stack to the IBM 370 operators early in the morning and get the output in the evening. So the turn around time for each bug fix would be a day, which I think made us fairly careful programmers. I remember writing a program for printing out a calendar, one page per month, spaced and aligned properly. Useless really, because the printout would be on A3 size feed rolls with holes on the sides, and the font was a dirty Courier type of point size 12 in light blue-black, barely legible at normal reading distance. But it was fun. Unfortunately I made a mistake in the loop nesting and the calendar came out all messed up. Worse, the operator, who was stingy about the paper usage, interrupted the output on the fourth month and advised me to stop doing it. I knew that he could not interrupt it if I used only one Fortran PRINT statement and rewrote the program to do it that way. I got the output, but on the January page, there was this hand-written missive, “Try it once more and I will cancel your account.” At that point I ceased and desisted.
I started using email in the late eighties on a cluster of Vaxstations that belonged to the high-energy physics group at Syracuse University. At first, we could send email only to users on the same cluster, with DecNet addresses like VAX05::MONETI. And a year later, when I could send a mail to my friend in the next building with an address like IN%”naresh@ee.syr.edu” or something (the “IN” signifying Internet), I was mighty impressed with the pace at which technology was progressing. Little did I know that a few short years later, there would be usenet, Mosaic and e-commerce. And that I would be writing books on financial computing and WordPress plugins in PHP.
Despite keeping pace with computing technology most of my life, I have begun to feel that technology is slowly breaking free and drifting away from me. I still don’t have a twitter account, and I visit my Facebook only once a month or so. More to the point of this post, I am embarrassed to admit that I had no clue what this cloud computing was all about. Until I got my MacBook Air, thanks to my dear wife who likes to play sugar mama once in a while. I always had this problem of synchronizing my documents among the four or five PCs and Macs I regularly work with. With a USB drive and extreme care, I could manage it, but the MBA was the proverbial straw that broke my camel of a back. (By the way, did you know this Iranian proverb – “Every time the came shits, it’s not dates”?) I figured that there had to be better way. I had played with Google Apps for a while now, although I didn’t realize that it was cloud computing.
What I wanted to do was a bit more involved than office applications. I wanted to work on my hobby PHP projects from different computers. This means something like XAMPP or MAMPP along with NetBeans on all the computers I work with. But how do I keep the source code sync’ed? Thmbdrives and backup/sync programs? Not elegant, and hardly seamless. Then I hit upon the perfect solution – Dropbox! This way, you store the source files on the network (using Amazon S3, apparently, but that is beside the point), and see a directory (folder for those who haven’t obeyed Steve Jobbs and gone back to the Mac) that looks like suspiciously local. In fact, it is a local directory – just that there is a program running on the background syncing it with your folder on the cloud.
Dropbox! gives you 2GB of network storage free, which I find quite adequate for any normal user. (That sounds like the famous last words by Bill Gates, doesn’t it? “64KB of memory should be enough for anyone!”) And, you can get 250MB extra for every successful referral you make. That brings me to my ulterior motive – all the links to Dropbox! on this post are actually referral links. When you sign up and start using it by clicking on one of them, I get 250MB extra. Don’t worry, you get 250MB extra as well. So I can grow my online storage up to 8GB, which should keep me happy for a long time, unless I want to store my photos and video there, in which case I will upgrade my Dropbox! account to a paid service.
Apart from giving me extra space, there are many reasons you should really check out Dropbox!. I will write more on those reasons later, but let me list them here.
1. Sync your (Mac) address book among your Macs.
2. Multiple synced backups of your precious data.
3. Transparent use for IDEs such as Netbeans.
Some of these reasons are addressed only by following some tips and tricks, which I will write about.
By the way, we Indian writers like to use expressions like ulterior motives and vested interests. Do you think it is because we always have some?
I bought my first car from an Iranian girl called Sherine for $350. This was in Syracuse, NY of the late eighties. By the act of buying, the car became mine, of course; but I still used to call it Sherine’s car for a couple of months after I bought it. And I got my first traffic ticket in Sherine’s car. I was on Comstock Avenue, going past Euclid when I went through what I thought was a bright yellow light. But the cop on Euclid Avenue begged to differ. He figured it must have been red for me because it had turned green for him. So he came after me, with his red and blue lights flashing.
I had been in the US only for a couple of months, and I wasn’t sure what the flashing lights meant. They meant “pull over,” of course, but I didn’t pull over. So the cop turned on his siren and then I decided to stop, more out of curiosity, but only after turning into University Place in a vain attempt to shake him off. I switched off the ignition and stepped out — another dangerous move that could’ve gotten me killed, I was later told.
The cop looked a little displeased, understandably. He came over and uttered those four dreaded words, “License and registration please.” After a lot of fishing, I produced the documents and the cop proceeded to write up something long and yellow. It was a ticket, but I had no clue what was going on, so I studied him with unabashed curiosity. The cop, who expected passionate entreaties or even an argument about my guiltlessness, was slightly surprised, I suppose.
He then handed me the yellow slip and told me that the light had turned green for him. “So here is your ticket,” he said. I had two competing thoughts on my mind — I had to proclaim and establish my innocence, and figure out what this ticket was for. From where I came, tickets were a good thing; they portended entertainment or bus/train rides in the immediate future. I decided to give in to my curiosity and asked the cop. “Ticket? What do I do with it?”
“Don’t worry; I’m going to explain it to you. There is a date and time here. You go to the court downtown then, and pay the fine for this offense.” So this particular ticket portended no fun. Worse, I remembered Sherine warning me that moving violations meant higher insurance premiums forever. So I decided to clarify the issue with the officer right away. “Do you think my insurance premiums will go up because of this?” I asked him. For some reason, the cop looked a bit annoyed. He said, “Listen pal, I’m just a cop; I’m not your insurance agent.”
I must’ve looked hurt, for the cop soon turned friendly. Glancing at my buttoned up shirt with brown stripes at odd angles and judging accurately that my accent came from a land far away from upstate New York, he counseled, “Here’s what you do. You go to the court and tell the judge that you didn’t do it. Then they will call me, and it is going to be your word against mine. You may get away with it.”
So next Tuesday 10 AM, I went to the court downtown Syracuse. I wisely showed up a bit earlier than my appointed hour to survey the scene and learn how these things were done. My docket came up and the honorable judge, an imposing figure that looked like a female version of Morgan Freeman, started reading out with impressive dignity, “State of New York vs. Mr. Th.. Thu… Th…” The tongue-twister of a surname had her floored. She looked helplessly around trying to maintain her composure. I decided to step up and help her out. “Not guilty, your honor,” I said emphatically.
For some reason, Judge Freeman didn’t look happy. She turned to someone to her right, who later proved to be the assistant DA, and asked him to handle the situation. I stuck to my guns. “Not guilty,” I proclaimed to the DA as well. He looked amused. “All right kid, I hear you. Come with me.” He took me to a room and we embarked on a plea bargain of sorts. He offered “Driving while visibility impaired,” which horrified me. “Ability impaired” I knew meant possible jail term, and with my limited exposure to Americanese, I wasn’t sure if they were locking me up for good. But the DA assured me that it was only $25 and that they took checks. Upon further astute inquiries from my side, he revealed that my insurance premiums would stay intact as well.
All in all, it was a pleasant introduction to the American legal system, which looks formidable and scary from the outside (from John Grisham’s books, for instance). Americans are a strange bunch that way. Taken individually (granting that I have known them personally only in a university setting or as a co-passenger-in-a-flight kind of setting), they always turn out to be nice and generous souls. But embedded in a system, or as group, or even as a nation, they often come across as hard-hearted and less than generous. I wonder why…
Looking back at how I brought up my children (or, how I have been doing it, for they are still children), I have mixed feelings about how good I have been as a parent. Overall, I have been decent, slightly above average, I guess. But I have certainly formed strong opinions about what it means to be a good parent. I want to share my thoughts with my younger readers in the hope that they may find something useful in it.
In most things we do, there is a feedback, and we can use the feedback improve ourselves. For instance, if we do poorly at work, our bonuses and paychecks suffer, and we can, if we want to, work harder or smarter to remedy the situation. In our dealings with our children, the feedback is very subtle or even absent. We have to be very sensitive and observant to catch it. For instance, when my daughter was less than a year old, I noticed that she wouldn’t make eye contact when I came back late from work or when her mother came back from a business trip. To this day, I am not entirely sure that it was an expression of disapproval on her part, or fanciful imagination on mine.
Even when the children are old enough to articulate their thoughts, their feedback is often subtle to non-existent because they don’t know how to judge us, the parents. You see, they have no yardstick, no standards by which to assess our parenting qualities. We are the only parents they will ever have and, for all our follies, it is very hard for them to find any faults with us. So we have to measure up to a much higher standard — our own.
Coupled with this unvoiced feedback is the huge sense of injustice that our little unfairnesses can inflict on our children’s little hearts. As Dickens said in one of his books, small injustices loom large in the small world of a child. (I am sure he put it a lot better; I am paraphrasing.) We have to appreciate the need to be painstakingly and scrupulously fair with our children. I am not talking about being fair between children, but between us and a child. Don’t hold them to rules that you are not willing to live by. These rules can be small — like don’t watch TV while eating. If you like your TV with your dinner, don’t expect the kids to stick to the dining table. They do what we do, not always what we say.
In fact, imitating our habits and mannerisms is part of their charm for us. By nature and nurture, our kids mirror our looks and actions. If we don’t like what we see in the mirror and complain about it, we are often barking up the wrong tree. In order to improve the image, we have to improve ourselves. We have to live up to a high level of integrity and honesty. Nothing else works.
Another essential virtue for a parent is patience. In today’s busy world, with thousands of thoughts and cares and distractions all vying for our attention, it is always a tussle to be, for instance, a good blogger, a good corporate player, a good spouse and, at the same time, a good parent. One way out of this is to dedicate a certain amount of quality time for our parenting Karma. This may be the only practical advice in this post — so pay attention now. Set aside half an hour (or whatever time you can) every day for your little ones. During this time, focus your undivided attention your kids. No TV, no Internet, no phone calls — only you and your kids. If you can do it on a fairly regular basis, your kids will remember you for a long time after you are gone.
Our children are our legacy. They are what we leave behind. And they are, in many ways, our own reflections — our little addition, little pieces of colored glass in the dome of many-colored glass staining the white radiance of eternity. Let’s try to leave behind as perfect a reflection as we can.
Thinking again about all the sermonizing I did in this post, I find that it is not so specific to being a good parent. It is more about being a good person. I guess what they say (in the Zen way of looking at things) is true — how do you paint a perfect painting? Be perfect and then just paint. How to be a good parent? Be good, and then be a parent! Goodness happens in the stillness of perfection and peace where even “bad” things are good. This statement is perhaps mystical enough to wind up this post with.
We know that our universe is a bit unreal. The stars we see in the night sky, for instance, are not really there. They may have moved or even died by the time we get to see them. It takes light time to travel from the distant stars and galaxies to reach us. We know of this delay. The sun that we see now is already eight minutes old by the time we see it, which is not a big deal. If we want to know what is going on at the sun right now, all we have to do is to wait for eight minutes. Nonetheless, we do have to “correct” for the delay in our perception due to the finite speed of light before we can trust what we see.
Now, this effect raises an interesting question — what is the “real” thing that we see? If seeing is believing, the stuff that we see should be the real thing. Then again, we know of the light travel time effect. So we should correct what we see before believing it. What then does “seeing” mean? When we say we see something, what do we really mean?
Seeing involves light, obviously. It is the finite (albeit very high) speed of light influences and distorts the way we see things, like the delay in seeing objects like stars. What is surprising (and seldom highlighted) is that when it comes to seeing moving objects, we cannot back-calculate the same way we take out the delay in seeing the sun. If we see a celestial body moving at an improbably high speed, we cannot figure out how fast and in what direction it is “really” moving without making further assumptions. One way of handling this difficulty is to ascribe the distortions in our perception to the fundamental properties of the arena of physics — space and time. Another course of action is to accept the disconnection between our perception and the underlying “reality” and deal with it in some way.
This disconnect between what we see and what is out there is not unknown to many philosophical schools of thought. Phenomenalism, for instance, holds the view that space and time are not objective realities. They are merely the medium of our perception. All the phenomena that happen in space and time are merely bundles of our perception. In other words, space and time are cognitive constructs arising from perception. Thus, all the physical properties that we ascribe to space and time can only apply to the phenomenal reality (the reality as we sense it). The noumenal reality (which holds the physical causes of our perception), by contrast, remains beyond our cognitive reach.
One, almost accidental, difficulty in redefining the effects of the finite speed of light as the properties of space and time is that any effect that we do understand gets instantly relegated to the realm of optical illusions. For instance, the eight-minute delay in seeing the sun, because we can readily understand it and disassociate it from our perception using simple arithmetic, is considered a mere optical illusion. However, the distortions in our perception of fast moving objects, although originating from the same source are considered a property of space and time because they are more complex. At some point, we have to come to terms with the fact that when it comes to seeing the universe, there is no such thing as an optical illusion, which is probably what Goethe pointed out when he said, “Optical illusion is optical truth.”
The distinction (or lack thereof) between optical illusion and truth is one of the oldest debates in philosophy. After all, it is about the distinction between knowledge and reality. Knowledge is considered our view about something that, in reality, is “actually the case.” In other words, knowledge is a reflection, or a mental image of something external. In this picture, the external reality goes through a process of becoming our knowledge, which includes perception, cognitive activities, and the exercise of pure reason. This is the picture that physics has come to accept. While acknowledging that our perception may be imperfect, physics assumes that we can get closer and closer to the external reality through increasingly finer experimentation, and, more importantly, through better theorization. The Special and General Theories of Relativity are examples of brilliant applications of this view of reality where simple physical principles are relentlessly pursued using the formidable machine of pure reason to their logically inevitable conclusions.
But there is another, competing view of knowledge and reality that has been around for a long time. This is the view that regards perceived reality as an internal cognitive representation of our sensory inputs. In this view, knowledge and perceived reality are both internal cognitive constructs, although we have come to think of them as separate. What is external is not the reality as we perceive it, but an unknowable entity giving rise to the physical causes behind sensory inputs. In this school of thought, we build our reality in two, often overlapping, steps. The first step consists of the process of sensing, and the second one is that of cognitive and logical reasoning. We can apply this view of reality and knowledge to science, but in order do so, we have to guess the nature of the absolute reality, unknowable as it is.
The ramifications of these two different philosophical stances described above are tremendous. Since modern physics has embraced a non-phenomenalistic view of space and time, it finds itself at odds with that branch of philosophy. This chasm between philosophy and physics has grown to such a degree that the Nobel prize winning physicist, Steven Weinberg, wondered (in his book “Dreams of a Final Theory”) why the contribution from philosophy to physics have been so surprisingly small. It also prompts philosophers to make statements like, “Whether ‘noumenal reality causes phenomenal reality’ or whether ‘noumenal reality is independent of our sensing it’ or whether ‘we sense noumenal reality,’ the problem remains that the concept of noumenal reality is a totally redundant concept for the analysis of science.”
From the perspective of cognitive neuroscience, everything we see, sense, feel and think is the result of the neuronal interconnections in our brain and the tiny electrical signals in them. This view must be right. What else is there? All our thoughts and worries, knowledge and beliefs, ego and reality, life and death — everything is merely neuronal firings in the one and half kilograms of gooey, grey material that we call our brain. There is nothing else. Nothing!
In fact, this view of reality in neuroscience is an exact echo of phenomenalism, which considers everything a bundle of perception or mental constructs. Space and time are also cognitive constructs in our brain, like everything else. They are mental pictures our brains concoct out of the sensory inputs that our senses receive. Generated from our sensory perception and fabricated by our cognitive process, the space-time continuum is the arena of physics. Of all our senses, sight is by far the dominant one. The sensory input to sight is light. In a space created by the brain out of the light falling on our retinas (or on the photo sensors of the Hubble telescope), is it a surprise that nothing can travel faster than light?
This philosophical stance is the basis of my book, The Unreal Universe, which explores the common threads binding physics and philosophy. Such philosophical musings usually get a bad rap from us physicists. To physicists, philosophy is an entirely different field, another silo of knowledge, which holds no relevance to their endeavors. We need to change this belief and appreciate the overlap among different knowledge silos. It is in this overlap that we can expect to find great breakthroughs in human thought.
The twist to this story of light and reality is that we seem to have known all this for a long time. Classical philosophical schools seem to have thought along lines very similar to Einstein’s reasonings. The role of light in creating our reality or universe is at the heart of Western religious thinking. A universe devoid of light is not simply a world where you have switched off the lights. It is indeed a universe devoid of itself, a universe that doesn’t exist. It is in this context that we have to understand the wisdom behind the statement that “the earth was without form, and void” until God caused light to be, by saying “Let there be light.”
The Quran also says, “Allah is the light of the heavens and the earth,” which is mirrored in one of the ancient Hindu writings: “Lead me from darkness to light, lead me from the unreal to the real.” The role of light in taking us from the unreal void (the nothingness) to a reality was indeed understood for a long, long time. Is it possible that the ancient saints and prophets knew things that we are only now beginning to uncover with all our supposed advances in knowledge?
I know I may be rushing in where angels fear to tread, for reinterpreting the scriptures is a dangerous game. Such alien interpretations are seldom welcome in the theological circles. But I seek refuge in the fact that I am looking for concurrence in the metaphysical views of spiritual philosophies, without diminishing their mystical and theological value.
The parallels between the noumenal-phenomenal distinction in phenomenalism and the Brahman-Maya distinction in Advaita are hard to ignore. This time-tested wisdom on the nature of reality from the repertoire of spirituality is now being reinvented in modern neuroscience, which treats reality as a cognitive representation created by the brain. The brain uses the sensory inputs, memory, consciousness, and even language as ingredients in concocting our sense of reality. This view of reality, however, is something physics is yet to come to terms with. But to the extent that its arena (space and time) is a part of reality, physics is not immune to philosophy.
As we push the boundaries of our knowledge further and further, we are beginning to discover hitherto unsuspected and often surprising interconnections between different branches of human efforts. In the final analysis, how can the diverse domains of our knowledge be independent of each other when all our knowledge resides in our brain? Knowledge is a cognitive representation of our experiences. But then, so is reality; it is a cognitive representation of our sensory inputs. It is a fallacy to think that knowledge is our internal representation of an external reality, and therefore distinct from it. Knowledge and reality are both internal cognitive constructs, although we have come to think of them as separate.
Recognizing and making use of the interconnections among the different domains of human endeavor may be the catalyst for the next breakthrough in our collective wisdom that we have been waiting for.
We all have some genetic logic hard-coded in our DNA regarding death and how to face it — and, much more importantly, how to avoid it. One aspect of this genetic logic perplexes me. It is the meekness with which we seem to face the prospect of death, especially violent death. In violent situations, we seem bent on appealing to the assailant’s better nature to let us be. With apologies to those who may find this reference offensive, I’m thinking of the millions of people who marched quietly into the night during the holocaust, for instance. Given that the end result (death) was more or less guaranteed whether they resisted or not, why didn’t they? Why is there such a motto as “resist no evil”? Why the heck not?
Well, I know some of the answers, but let’s stack some cold and possibly inappropriate logic against these vagaries of our genetic logic. If a Bengal tiger attacks you in a forest, your best chance of survival would be to stand up and fight, I would think. It is possible, though not likely, that the tiger might consider you too much trouble and give up on you. I know the tigerologists out there would laugh at me, but I did say “not likely.” Besides, I have read this story of an Indian peasant who managed to save his friend from a tiger by scaring it off with a stick and a lot of noise. My be the peasant was just lucky that the tiger wasn’t too hungry, nonetheless… Anyhoo, I would have thought the genetic logic in our DNA would reflect this kind of fighting spirit which may improve our survival rate. Appealing to the tiger’s better nature would be somewhat less effective, in my opinion.
A similar meekness is apparent, I reckon, in our follow-the-crowd attitude toward many things in life, including our notion of morality, happiness etc. I suspect these notions are perhaps so complex and taxing to fathom that we let our intellectual laziness overtake our desire to know. My own thinking seems to lead to a dark symphony of aimlessness and lack of ethical values. I am desperately trying to find a happy note in it to wind up this series with.
The “trouble” is that most people are moral, ethical and all-round decent folks, despite the existence of death and their knowledge thereof. It is silly to dismiss it as meekness, lack of intellectual effort etc. There must be some other reason. I don’t think I will be able to find this elusive reason before the end of this series. But I have to conclude that “living everyday as your last” definitely doesn’t help. If anything, it has to be our blissful capacity to ignore death that brings about ethical rectitude. Perhaps the other motto of “living in the present moment” is just that — an appeal to ignore the future where death looms.
Death has the effect of rendering our daily existence absurd, as Sisyphus’s work on rocks. It really does make the notion of existence so absurd as to force one to justify why one should live at all. This dangerous line of thinking is something that every philosopher will have to face up to, at some point. Unless he has some answers, it would be wise to keep his thoughts to himself. I didn’t. But then, very few have accused me of the vice of wisdom.
Notwithstanding the certain rupture in the continuity of consciousness due to death, or a less certain rupture in that of a soul, we have another uninterrupted flow — that of life and of the world. This flow is the end result of a series of projections and perhaps the work of our mirror neurons. Let me explain. We know that the world doesn’t stop just because someone dies. Most of us middle-aged folks have lost a loved one, and, for all the grief, we know that life went on. So we can easily see that when we die, despite all the grief we may succeed in making our loved ones feel through our sheer good deeds, life will go on. Won’t it?
It is our absolute certainty about this continuity that prompts us to buy huge life insurances, and somewhat modulates the risk-reward analysis of our moral actions. I am not going to deny the existence of this continuity, tempted though I am to do just that. I merely want to point out certain facts that may prevent us from accepting it at its face value. The evidence for the world going on after our death is simple, too simple perhaps: We have seen people die; but we live on. Ergo, when we die, other people will live on. But you see, there is a profound difference between somebody else’s death and your death. We are thinking of death as the end of our consciousness or mind. Although I loosely group your mind and my mind as “our” mind in the previous sentence, they are completely different entities. In fact, a more asymmetric system is hard to imagine. The only mind I know of, and will ever know of, is my own. Your mind has an existence only in mine. So the demise of my mind is literally the end of your mind (and indeed all minds) as well. The world does come to an end with my death, quite logically.
This argument, though logical, is a bit formal and unconvincing. It smacks of solipsism. Let’s approach the issue from a different angle. As we did earlier in this essay, let’s think of death as dreamless slumber. If you are in such a state, does the world exist for you? I know the usual responses to this question: Of course it exists; just because you cannot feel it, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist. You know it exists, and that is enough. Now, who is this you that knows?
Therein lies the real rub. Once you cease to have a consciousness, be it thanks to sleep or death, you lose the ability to experience everything, including the existence of anything (or lack thereof). Now, we can take the normal approach and just assert that things have an existence independent of your experiencing it; that would the natural, dualistic view — you and everything else, your experiences and their physical causes, cause and effect, action and reaction, and so on. Once you begin to doubt the dualistic worldview and suspect that your experiences are within your consciousness, and that the so-called physical causes are also your cognitive constructs, you are on a slippery slope toward another worldview, one that seriously doubts if it makes any sense to assert that the world goes on after your death.
The world is merely a dream. What sense could a dead man’s dream possibly make?
One simple way of reinstating an absolute form of morality (as opposed to a relative, risk-reward kind) is to postulate continuity beyond death. The notion of a “soul,” as proposed in almost all religions, serves this purpose. Soul is also the substantive (albeit ethereal) representation of the otherwise elusive consciousness of ours, which is an entity that has no right to exist or be real because it fails all possible tests for real existence, yet is supremely real to each one of us. In fact, consciousness is more than real, it is the arena in which our reality plays out its act. It is so fundamental to our experience and existence that we have a hard time accepting its ephemerality.
I, for one, believe logically that when I die, everything I will have known and experienced till then will just disappear. I believe that death is like an eternal dreamless sleep. Logically. But logic has very little to do with what I can feel and accept, emotionally. I don’t like to drag in the concept of “emotion” here; I am thinking of what I can accept at a gut-level. “Primally” would perhaps be a better word to use, but I am not sure. Any way, once we have conscious awareness, and develop a sense of temporal continuity about things and experiences around us, we cannot help assigning continuity to the backdrop of it all — our consciousness. Continuity of selfhood is encoded into our mind. Primally — yes, that would be the right word.
Logic and rationality, which come after the primal plumbing of the mind, consciousness, selfhood etc. (which may all ultimately mean the same thing) is already in place, can influence our thinking only to a limited extent. Mind grasps at anything that offers a semblance of eternal continuity. Enter religions.
All conventional religions have some notion of a “soul,” which comes in different forms and with a multitude of meanings and contexts, although, logically, it can only mean our consciousness, or an entity holding our consciousness and pretty much nothing else. Thanks to our primal need to search and find continuity, we readily buy into whatever notion of soul our parents’ religion happens to uphold, ignoring the gaping holes in logic associated with it. From the perspective of religions (speaking of religions as organizational entities with intentions and purposes), the notion of continuity implied in the concept of a soul has a great benefit — it completely alters the risk-reward analysis at the root of morality. And it takes out death (or at least, greatly diminishes its significance) in the analysis. For death is only the beginning, as the horror-comedy taught us.
If the wages of sin are eternal third-degree burns, not some material comfort followed by thirty-to-life in a federal facility till death sets you free, you do think twice before doing the crime. The “time” that you may have to do could well be an eternity. Other religions offer other kinds of divine carrots and sticks. For instance, if you are a Hindu engaged in a particularly unsavory Karma, you will reincarnate as somebody (or something) on the receiving end of the stick, roughly neutralizing your risk-reward equation. On the other hand, if you are willing to take it on your chin with some amount of fortitude, you will be upgraded to business class in your next life.
In all notions of spiritual continuity of consciousness, and/or soul, there is something I find logically wanting. It is the lack of continuity of memory. Death is still a point of phase transition where all the existing memory is erased. If we think of soul as the eternal manifestation of mind and consciousness, erasing its memory is as good or as bad as killing it, is it not?
What I find interesting in this Hindu notion is that the ultimate reward for presumably the best possible Karma is not an eternal life of comfort in heaven, but a release from the cycle of reincarnations, which, in my view, is similar to an eternal dreamless sleep — which is the only logical notion of death we can scientifically entertain. So, in the Hindu notion of the reward for ultimate good is, in some sense, the ultimate death. Makes me wonder…
The temporal aspect of punishment extends beyond the span between the crime and its punishment. The severity of the punishment is also measured in terms of its duration. And death puts a definitive end to all man-made durations. This interference of death in our temporal horizons messes up what we mean by proportional punishment, which is the reason behind the general lack of gratification on Madoff’s long sentence. If a heinous crime like a senseless murder brings about only a life-sentence, and if you know that “life” means only a couple of months or so, then the punishment in and of itself is incapable of deterring the crime. And when the crime is not as senseless, but prompted by careful material considerations, it is a deliberate risk-reward analysis that determines its commission. A comprehensive risk-reward analysis would involve, I imagine, a consideration of the probability of detection, the intensity and duration of the potential punishment, and the time one has to enjoy the spoils and/or suffer the punishment. There may be other factors to consider, of course. I wouldn’t know because I haven’t actually done such analyses. Not yet.
The smallpox story I mentioned earlier brings these considerations to the foreground, along with how the relatively high probability of death from the disease affects them. Knowing that there isn’t much time to enjoy life (or face the music), two older gentlemen of the story decide to go and feast themselves on a local prostitute of the village whom they have been eying for a while. It is not that the consequences (spousal anger, bad diseases etc.) of their action have changed. Just that their potential duration has decreased drastically because of the outbreak of smallpox. Knowledge of our death has a dramatic effect on our moral inhibitions born out of risk-reward analyses.
It is in this light that we have to examine clichéd statements like, “Live in the present moment,” or “Live everyday as though it is your last.” What do these statements really mean? The second one is especially interesting because it makes a direct reference to death. Is it asking us to shed our inhibitions vis-à-vis all our actions? If so, it may not be such a positive invitation (which, of course, is a statement of value-judgment emanating form a sense of a morality of unknown origins). Or it could be a simple exhortation not to procrastinate — a positive thing by the same uncertain morality.
“Living in the present” is even more puzzling. I guess it comes from the Zen notion of “here” and “now.” I can kind of understand the Zen notion in terms of cognitive neuroscience, although that is the sort of thing that Zen would ask us not to do — understanding one thing in terms of something else. According to the Zen school, an experience has to be assimilated before the intellect has a chance to color it in terms of preconceived notions and filters. In the absolute stillness of a mind, presumably brought about by years of introspection and intense mediation, experiences take on perceptually accurate and intellectually uncolored forms, which they say is a good thing. If the statement “Live in the present moment” refers to this mode of experiencing life, fine, I can go with that, even though I cannot fully understand it because I am not a Zen master. And if I was, I probably wouldn’t worry too much about logically understanding stuff. Understanding is merely a misguided intellectual exercise in futility.
As a moral statement, however, this invitation to live in the present moment leaves much to be desired. Is it an invitation to ignore the consequences of your actions? You compartmentalize your timeline into a large past, a large future and tiny present. You ignore the past and the future, and live in the present. No regrets. No anxieties. What else could this slogan “Live in the present moment” mean?
