Pride and Shame

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Once I achieved a big success.

Seeing my face beaming with pride, the Buddha said “Congratulations, for creating fantastic yourself.

Congrats for instilling willpower in yourself.

Congrats on not falling down at age 2 and being disabled.

Congrats on being born to your parents.

Congrats on growing six feet tall.

Congrats on making you in a way that you will succeed”

I said I didn’t do all that.

“Oh” Buddha said “Then tell me what is this pride about?”

One I failed miserably. Seeing my face sunken, the Buddha said “Shameful that you don’t know the future.

Shameful that you were not born perfect.

Shameful that your brain is limited in ability to think.

Shameful that your body is not that of a Superman.

Shameful that there are stupids in the world.

Shameful that you cannot please everyone and control everything.”

I said I could never do all that.

“Oh” Buddha said “Then what is this shame and guilt about?”

Everything is Same as Nothing.

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I read an interesting article on a physics related website. About Scientists studying behavior of matter, atoms and such, at extremely high temperature. There is a way the atoms distribute themselves on different energy levels. A particular pattern called Boltzmann distribution.

A weird thing happens at infinitely high temperature. This distribution, this pattern gets inverted. And it almost looks like….. extremely low temperature.

So the matter, when heated to extremely high temperature looks like it is cooled to extremely low temperature.

A paradox indeed. But not infrequently this paradox morphs in our lives.

For example, sometimes I think, more is less. Or having everything is same as nothing. Or being richest person in the world might be in some ways similar to being poorest one.

Consider “more is less”. Say you own one object that provides pleasurable experience. You value that experience and thus your value of that object depends on the quality of experience it provides to you.

Now add another object. Adding one object adds positive value to your overall experience because you have one more way of enjoying life. But then there is added logistics that comes with every new object. Keeping them working, keeping them handy so you can find them when you desire, and so on. Work gets added. That is negative value.

As you go on adding objects faster and faster, any incremental positive value starts diminishing. Because there is only so much time you have in a day, so your positive experiences have upper limit. But your negative value, the overhead of maintaining and organizing all the objects goes on increasing exponentially.

In fact at some point the overhead starts taking so much of your time that you are not left with time to enjoy the objects you own.

And soon comes a point where you own everything but you enjoy nothing. It’s as if you don’t own any objects that can give you pleasure.

Not looking at the books and accounting, but if you looked at it from the point of cognitive impact, owning everything becomes same as owning nothing.

Sometimes I think life, more like the experience of life, is like a circle more than line.

Eternal life is same as eternal death. Owning everything is like owning nothing. Ultimate pain is ultimate joy. Infinity is same as zero. Perfect success is same as perfect failure.

Best to go on with an open mind.

Advaita Vedanta and Quantum Physics

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Advaita Vedanta is a theory in Indian philosophy, literaly translated as Non Duality. The Sanskrit word Advaita is made of a two parts “dvaita’, meaning duality (notice the similarity between the words dvaita and duality, which points to relation of Sanskrit to Latin as part of Indo European family), and the negating prefix “A”.

At it’s core, the philosophy states that when the two beings, or two entities are deemed separate, the separation is only matter of perception. And the underlying entity that makes up both those things, and the forms the perception as well, is the same. The same entity, nameless, faceless, is responsible for all creation in this universe.

To put in sort of mathematical statement, when we think

1 + 1 = 2

Advaita says

1 entity + sense of being two = 2 entities

On a spiritual level, it means me and you and anyone, are animated by the same spiritual energy. Sort of like that spiritual energy having multiple personality disorder. However it would be wrong to use the word disorder here because disorder usually makes functional life impossible but in this case, this spiritual energy displaying multiple personalities makes the very life possible. Also unlike a human showing multiple personalities one after another, for this spiritual energy, multiple personalities can exist at the same time.

Advaita philosophy proposes a radical shift in perception. It moves, the very foundation  of humanity, the identity or the distinction between identities, into an abstract notion. So on some plane of existence, the differences between you and me are abstract, or a thought, or a dream, and you and me are one existence on that plane.

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Quantum physics is the branch of science that deals with atomic and subatomic level. The more we are studying quantum physics, the more things we find that straight fly in face of our intuition. Take for example the phenomena of entanglement. If you take a bundle of energy and make two particles from it, those particles somehow show some relation to one another. When you do something to affect one particle, the other particle instantaneously shows a response. As if they have a connection.

What if we separate the particle? That does not seem to make difference. You can separate them by a large distance, but the connection remains. When you “tickle” one particle, the other one “giggles”. And the tickle and giggle seem to happen instantaneously.

This is impossible according to Einstein’s theory of relativity. Nothing in this universe should travel at a speed faster than light. If tomorrow moon suddenly doubles in size, it’s gravitational pull will increase on earth. But that gravitational impact will also travel at speed of light, not faster than that. It will take some time before earth feels increased gravity.

So what kind of communication signal is transmitted between the particles that travels faster than speed of light? Not just faster than speed of light, it seems to travel at infinite speed, many many times that of the light. The very best measurement instruments on earth tried to measure this speed and still they could not. The tickle and giggle happens at very exact same moment.

So could it be that on another level of existence, the energy that makes up these particles is concrete but the space around them is an abstraction? As if the particles are one on a level but then some abstraction manifests itself as space and shape the differentiation between the two particles? So in a nutshell,

1 entity + sense of spacial differentiation = 2 entities?

Could the Quantum physics and Advaita converge into similar insight, one from material world and another from spiritual world, that we are all one under the cloak of duality?

Consciousness and Second law of Thermodynamics

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I have wondered in the past (and guess written an article somewhere on my blog) about how coming across Heisenberg uncertainty made me think that this is the first time science, especially hard science like particle physic, has brushed against the boundary of human consciousness. The more and more uncertainty is explored, especially with experiments like Wheeler delayed choice experiment, it seems to me that what creates the paradoxes that throw our intuition a curved ball is the presence of conscious observer, or more generally introduction of consciousness in the experiment. The very fact that someone is watching that experiment changes outcome of that experiment.

So Heisenberg Uncertainty principle made us confront the fact that there is consciousness in the universe, which is trying to know the universe.

Is there any other law that has come close to this area before?

I think yes. I think the second law of thermodynamics has actually come across this problem before. When consciousnes is introduced, we get into a territory that the law may or may not apply.

Second law of thermodynamics is expressed by various scientists, but I like the Uhlenbeck and Ford statement – ” In an irreversible or spontaneous change from one equilibrium state to another (as for example the equalization of temperature of two bodies A and B, when brought in contact) the entropy always increases.”

Seems rather obvious, well researched and proven beyond doubt, right? Where does the question of consciousness come here?

Aha, the word “sponteneous” is the key here. The author of this statement is acknowledging sponteneous change is the boundary. That means non sponteneous changes, such as those performed by an entity exerting its willpower, are not under the jurisdiction of the law.

This is what we clearly see. Take a ball and throw it on a slope and it will roll downhill. But a human being can push the ball up the slope. So take a state of the ball before being human started pushing up and after human done pushing up. The ball has gained energy through intervention of human consciousness.

Could the ball have gone up by itself? Yes, perhaps in case of some kind of magnetic field, or something like that. But in that case, the gain in one form of energy would come only at the cost of some other form of energy.

So if we consider the ball as a system, isolated from its environment and also excluded is the actor who can push or pull, the ball can undergo increase in entropy that cannot be explained by any of the physical properties of the ball. If there are 10 balls and a human is asked randomly to pick a ball and move it upwards so it gains potential energy, then the gain in that particular ball’s height cannot be explained by it’s physical properties alone. It can be only explained when taken into account human intention.

So consciousness can in fact result in increase entropy of a particular subsystem in the universe (but not that of the universe as a whole). Thus exposing boundaries of second law of thermodynamics.

The Best Leaders Are Those Their People Hardly Know Exist

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“The best leaders are those their people hardly know exist.
The next best is a leader who is loved and praised.
Next comes the one who is feared.
The worst one is the leader that is despised

The best leaders value their words, and use them sparingly.
When they have accomplished their task,
the people say, “Amazing!
We did it, all by ourselves!”

This is what Tao De Jing, an ancient Chinese book has to say about leadership.

While the lines 2,3,4, are fairly clear, I have often wondered what does the first line mean. The second part builds on the first line and takes it even forward.

Why would the best quality leaders be not recognized at all? Let alone be recognized for their leadership, the poem suggest they might not even get acknowledgment for their existence.

 

Then one day it struck me.

Consider a scenario where a leader is leading a bunch of people through a jungle.

Now Leader A might notice the predator from 100 meters distance and try to steer the course away. By that time the followers also noticed the predator and realize that the leader has noticed the predator and is leading them to safety.

Leader B might notice the predator from 1000 meters distance and will try to steer the course away from the predator. The followers might not notice the predator or the course correction.

In second case, the leader B excels in his or her foresight compared to leader A. Yet his or her followers actually are less likely to notice the qualities of their leader. Those followers will never know that there was any danger at all and thus will never appreciate the steering away as an act of great foresight.

This opens up a classic paradox. Sometimes on face an less-than-ordinary person might look same as extraordinary person. Sometimes signs of great success are same as signs of great failure.

All around us, the world is ripe with potential to give us this cognitive dissonance – situations where we come to wrong conclusion because we lack contextual knowledge, not because we lack analytical ability.

So many times the cognitive impact on our life is drastically different from material impact. We may not even be aware of those who changed or saved our life. On the other hand, we obsess about those who could vanish in thin air and our life will continue with a barely noticeable hiccup.

Nothing write or wrong. Such is human mind.