Are we responsible? - Part 1

Coming from work, you decide to have a chocolate tart. Upon checking your wallet, you find you have just enough for one from the deli down the road. You then walk up to it to find a social activist standing in front of it, asking you to donate money for a cause, in which you, incidentally, believe in strongly. You can either chose to buy the tart or put the money in the tin. The choice is completely up to you. It is your “freewill” to make a decision.

Consider this argument

(1) You do what you do — in the circumstances in which you find yourself—because of the way you then are.

(2) So if you’re going to be ultimately responsible for what you do, you’re going to have to be ultimately responsible for the way you are — at least in certain mental respects.

(3) But you can’t be ultimately responsible for the way you are in any respect at all.

(4) So you can’t be ultimately responsible for what you do.

You can’t be ultimately responsible for the way you are (mentally), because the genes you inherited and the past experiences you have been through, is not your doing. Therein lays the argument between freewill and determinism or in simpler terms, the argument between you deciding your own fate and God charting it out for you.

We believe that we are free to decide between choices. However the choices and the biases we have are the constraints that we can’t control. It’s determined by the billions of decisions made by the millions of creatures throughout time.

Let me elaborate that with the chocolate tart example, you must have felt hungry because you couldn’t eat anything with tea because you had a phone call from your client, who for some reason had decided to call at that particular moment when the tea trolley comes along. The chain could go on like that. The social activist guy decided to stand in front of the deli because of another chain of reasons. His choice of social cause to support is another chain and your inkling to that particular cause is another one (Example: The activist might be rooting to reduce cruelty against dogs because his girlfriend is into it and you might be inclined because you love dogs). There are many other chains of reasons like a cause and effect machine leading to that particular instance where you had to take a trivial decision.

The existence of freewill then becomes questionable. Mankind has attributed the job of determining the choices and creating our biases to God. This explained everything that humans couldn’t fathom and made our lives simpler.

Let’s try to bring some math into the discussion by attributing a variable to a decision. The value of the variable is inadvertently linked to the billions of decisions that led up to that particular decision. To buy the tart, donate the money, or just walk off, can be the most likely values for the chocolate tart problem. However, each decision has a probability component based on your past experiences and prejudices. We may argue that we are capable of taking rational decisions, but Freud came along and proposed that the unconscious has a bit more say in things than we perceived it to have. The existence of such a probability then definitively proves that “freewill” is a tad bit exaggerated.

Since freewill is out of the picture, then by default, God should win this argument hands down. He plans out the entire existence of nature and also makes us think that it was our own idea. Charles Baudelaire once mentioned "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn't exist”. So is God, the devil himself?

If the theory of god being responsible for everything holds water; that implicitly implies that we are not responsible for our actions. We just have to wait out this “menial” existence on earth, which will by any means, progress according to the master plan.

So the serial killer, the pedophile, even Judas all stand vindicated, as they were just pawns for something much more important.

“I believe in God, I just don’t like him”

This a two part essay.. The next part will be uploaded next week

Disconnect

Problem

• Research suggests that as compared with 410 million multi-dimensionally poor people resident in 26 of the poorest African countries there are as many as 421 million in just eight of the poorer Indian states (Bihar, Chhattisgarh, Jharkhand, Madhya Pradesh, Orissa, Rajasthan, Uttar Pradesh, and West Bengal)
• 46 per cent of the children in India are malnourished
• 10,688 lakh tonnes of foodgrains were found damaged in different FCI warehouses as on January 1, 2010
• India loses food grains worth Rs. 58,000 crore every year due to lack of storage facilities
• Food inflation has remained above the 16 per cent level for most part of the year
• India has been self sufficient in food grains since the 70s but still half of our population starve.

Reasons

• Lack of infrastructure especially inadequate storage facilities
• Public distribution system is fragmented and steeped in bureaucracy.
• Lack of a central distribution and utilisation plan.
• Movement of goods (transport through air, road, water, rail etc.) among the most inefficient in the world. 14% of our GDP is spent on logistics alone.
• Alleged existence of a private lobby that blocks PDS distribution to drive up prices

Sure, we may be

• Trying to go to the moon
• Trying for a permanent seat in the Security Council,
• A member of the “emerging countries” list
• Shipping aid to Africa and Afghanistan
• Having our own currency symbol, which some “experts” say, is a step towards becoming an important economic power
• Growing at an enviable 9%

It all just seems quite futile.

A Big Brain

Cogito Ergo Sum means ‘I think, therefore I exist (am)’. It answers the question of our existence of whether we exist or if we are characters in some chap’s wild imagination. Well now the question is- How do we think? What happens in our brilliant brains that makes us think?

Microprocessors,the brains of computers and smart devices; are made up of millions of components called transistors. Each one just makes one decision- to be in 0 or 1 state. Programmers, with help of complex algorithms employ many of these simple transistors simultaneously to create computing power.

Our brain is made up of 50-100 billion neurons connected together with 1000 trillion synaptic connections as in a microprocessor. If you take a single neuron, it doesn’t exhibit intelligence as such. When billions of them are connected together, something amazing happens- Intelligence.

Now let’s consider another network- the internet. An estimated 1.8 billion users are connected to this big web. Millions are getting hooked up every month. The advent of smart phones and cheap data rates are pushing these figures off the roof. Nowadays there are about 500-700 million transistors in a single processor. If we were to consider the trillions of transistors connected together through the internet, it does come very close to the number of neurons in our brains. Sure, the number of synapses is still very small, but wouldn’t it be enough for primary intelligence?

So the big question is, whether the internet is aware of its self? Can it think for itself? If so, by Cogito Ergo Sum, does it mean that it exists?

-This can be also explained by Swarm Intelligence, like how Craig Reynolds did with Boids to explain flocking behavior of birds-

‘80s

“I pity the fools who were born in the 80s”. Mr T would have said something like that. I bet a lot of people don’t know who Mr T is and that is exactly my point. I felt the first pang of the gender gap when I was talking to my little brother (now not-so-little). I was taken aback by his priorities, because he had them.

People born in the late 80s and the 90s( you can add 3 years to people who were bought up in villages) were exposed to a liberalized India, an India were western culture-aping was possible. This exposure, however small had a profound effect on the kids, they now had a clear direction to follow. The 80s guys are confused; they are stuck in a rut to either adhere to tradition or convention, to shake hands or to hug, Def Leppard or Lil Wayne.

This generation has a constant need of reaffirmation of their acts; they are torn between individualism and obligations. Their tryst with the ‘Culture of self’ has left them shocked and awed at the same time. They envy the people who accomplish that and condemn them for their lack of social sense.

Creating a positive anosognosia which suspends reality or rather becoming oblivious to it, to muster up a list of priorities and sticking to it seems to be the only way this generation can hope to cope.

Fickle

All the women who knew me well have complained that I am a hard hearted man and my allegiance lies with my family and nothing else. They also lament to the fact that I could not form a lasting relationship with anything albeit human or materialistic, it usually followed the lifetime of a fad. So, naturally, I didn’t have an idol, I didn’t have a favourite book, musician or car. I just changed it to suit my latest fad.

These fads are bought about by articles, books, movies, music and mostly images. Capturing a moment in time which can instil the whiffs of inspiration is truly magnificent. To me, it’s not the lighting or the tone of the image; it’s the characters the image tries to define. Here are some of those images

A clown trying to bring some cheer to children who lost their homes to the tropical storm Agatha  in Guatemala. Reminded me that there is goodness in people even in times of turmoil, rather than what Stephen King wants us to believe.

Resistance: An image from the Gaza strip, taught me that its resolve and not strength that matters. A similar image would be Tiananmen square, one which inspired a whole generation

This image represented reality- the shocking reality of malnourishment in India. It broke through the walls of my comfy cocoon and put into perspective the harsh but undeniable reailty.

Greed

1954- Endosulfan, a revolutionary new pesticide was developed

1976- Widespread use of Endosulfan in farms and plantations in India

1979- Evidence of toxicity and bio-accumulation seen with birth of malformed cattle

1990- Children born with limb malformations, congenital anomalies, mental retardation, physical deformities, cerebral palsy,epilepsy, hydrocephalus

15 villages in Kasargod district in north Kerala, owing to the presence of large cashew plantations, were among the most affected. It was described as the biggest disaster since the Bhopal gas tragedy. Endosulfan’s toxicity and its effect on humans are well documented and many other countries had to deal with the same situation.

So tell me, why India is still the largest producer of Endosulfan? We produce a whopping 9500 tonnes of it, 4000 for domestic use and 4500 for export. The companies involved in it are Excel Crop Care, Hindustan Insecticides Limited (a govt. company) and Coromandel Fertilizers. In fact, India went the extra mile to make sure that it was not included in the Stockholm and Rotterdam conventions, which aims to ban the substance throughout. In 2001 the Kerala government banned it in the state, but it is still used in the rest of the country.

Now, think of all the people still exposed to this substance without even knowing the consequences. Think of their children.

If you want to know more about this tragedy you can visit the link below. Be forewarned: It is not for the faint hearted, as the pictures in it are quite graphic

http://www.endosulphanvictims.org/index.htm

Adbusters

A suggestion from a friend introduced me to ‘Adbusters’. The tagline ‘journal of the mental environment’ best describes the magazines intentions. This particular issue talked about Ecopsychology, on how the world is coping with the bitter truth of our increasing footprint on nature, laying the contents according to the Kübler-Ross model or the more familiar, ‘Five stages of grief’- Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression and Acceptance.

The description for bargaining was what caught my eye. It’s more relevant as the world powers realise their addiction to oil and need for drastic change, case in point- Copenhagen. Freedom and abundance gave birth to generations with bottomless want of consumption, so any restrain would be cutting into freedom- a basic right. Restraints brought about by depleting resources are now more in the form of monetary measures ensuring the ‘poor man’ still struggles in the pit of economic degeneracy.

Bargaining

“In an effort to protect what matters most- we sacrifice our pawns. We lower the thermostat and ease of the gas, surrendering small degrees of comfort and time. We change the colour of our consumption, adopting a greener model of consumerism and transforming each purchase into an act of environmental defence. We pull back, surveying the board and waiting patiently for the technological salvation that will surely be delivered from distant labs and ivory towers. And when all seems lost we pray. We’ll do anything- well, almost anything- to stave off planetary death and protect our role as kings”