Penchanted

When was the last time you had a conversation with someone without thinking about tomorrow? When was the last time you poured in the exact words that you always wanted to say & didn’t have to worry about your hair-day while doing so? When was the last time you felt you were on the same emotional & intellectual level with the person you were talking to? Well in my case, it was more than a couple of years ago, when I had a real life pen pal.

Its a very interesting time when you have someone to write to, when you know that there is some person in this world, who you know would spare some time to read through the drivel you just sent her. Its a wonderful feeling that makes you write, makes you spill some coffee on your keyboard since it was 2 AM the last time you checked the watch & needed a good dose of some legally permitted intoxicants to flow freely into the night.

I am not a coffee fan, really, there was a time I used to hate that bitter taste of coffee. But ever since I had a pen pal, I allowed caffeine into my bloodstream. It works wonders at 2 in the night when all you can think of is to read that mail & to reply. There was no romance involved, might be some flirting here and there. But there was this sense of RAW conversation, which you can only have when you have dumped off all your day’s worth of load & emotional baggage. Its almost like Tyler saying, “Its not until we lose everything, we are free to do anything”.

Watching the movie ‘You’ve got mail’, for the nth time now, made me remember those glory days of email chats, waiting for the mails, replying to them, sharing thoughts, feelings, ideas, jokes, trivia, gossip, pet peeves, etc. I remember hearing as a passing reference in the movie, about George Bernard Shaw, who used to write letters to Mrs. Patrick Campbell. I believe this dude had written some 250,000 letters in his life time, personally & professionally to his friends, relatives & to whomever. In today’s terms it would easily translate into a couple of Giga bytes of correspondence.

We cannot compare our mail chats to Shaw’s flawlessly executed mails, but we can certainly relate to him when it comes sharing that feeling of writing a mail to someone, just to say Hi, & in my case just to remind that I still “am”. I had a blast, those days were fun, now we do write to each other sometimes, but its not as frequent as it used to be. Now its back to business, submissions, assignments, & in my case, mostly lethargy that keeps me from writing on a regular basis. There can be only one thing for which I can blame the internet, for ruining the essence of communication, it is ‘Instant Messenger Programs’. I wonder what happened to those long monologues people used to send in a mail & then expect a similar reply. It was fun, IM is also fun, but its almost like talking to the screen now.

A pen pal solves many social issues, you don’t have to worry about your pal judging you if you say something, since you can easily refute it later or say that you meant something else. This can be done elegantly, without facial expressions to worry about. You can drop in a line at anytime of the day whenever you feel like rattling your keyboard. You can talk tonnes of junk & not worry about it since the conversation being virtual, can easily be pointless. I have noticed this with regular face to face conversation, if we start talking crap, people lose interest. If we type the same thing & phrase it properly, it becomes cheap humour. Not that written humour is cheap, but everything is passable when it comes to typing your guts out. You don’t need to worry about someone eavesdropping on the conversation unless you are stupid enough to write your email password on a post it note & post it on the monitor.

Apart from these usual perks, there is one flaw in this whole pen / email pal concept. It can kill a lot of time, its very bad during the exams, especially when both you & your pal’s exams don’t clash. You have to be glued to the screen. You need to take time off to write. That can be a little taxing.

Another movie well executed movie about pen pals is the lake house. Apart from the movie’s ending, everything in it has been flawlessly executed except for the fact that the two pen pals don’t share the same time. The experience can be exciting, writing to someone two years in the future.

Mostly if we revisit history, we will find almost all famous people have had written letters to their dear ones or to their friends occasionally to talk, discuss, ponder over a concept, share experiences, share opinions & so on. Notably letters from Vincent Van Gogh to his brother, Nehru to Indira, Mozart to his friends, Darwin to his friends, rivals in scientific inquiry working on opposite concepts or even racing to discover a concept, there are endless examples of how people used to communicate with each other thru letters. Its amazing to read some of their memoirs in present time, especially some of them which are timeless pieces like Nehru’s letters, Van Gogh’s letters, etc.

The sheer fact that you need to communicate with someone is the essence of being a human. If there was no human form of communication, I suppose we would still be hunters & gatherers & you would be reading this on some cave wall in some form of obscure pictorial dialect.

Sudden Realization Day

Today can very well be celebrated as the “Sudden Realization Day”.

I woke up, surprisingly, at 0700 hrs sharp. My alarm was half an hour away from knocking my daylights out. There was no particular reason for this sudden wake-up incident. No dreams, no scary early morning thoughts, no prior appointments, nothing. The time was 0701 hrs when I realized, quite suddenly, that my right hand was paralyzed. Apparently, I was sleeping on it for too long & my blood lost all motivation to reach my fingers. I woke up with a numb right hand & tried to fetch my alarm clock. Even in that state of quasi sleep all I cared about was the loud alarm clock.

After the morning routine I accidentally on purpose popped in front of the mirror. There it was. That….. I still can’t forget that hideous sight. It was out there. I could see neon signs developing in my brain. Constantly flashing with a big bold font, “THE TUMMY RETURNS”. I was never a gym freak, neither did I see my tummy growing out of proportion, but this was the mother of all my tummies till now. This was definitely a bit round. Although it wasn’t much of a distraction, looked kinda cute, but it’s a tummy & there is no other option but to get rid of it. It was a spontaneous reaction; I planned a workout regime, Cardio + Tummio which includes excessive jumping & heavy sit ups. Although after a few days it will also include the upper body exercises, primarily push ups. The very basic forms of human exercises were being planned in my head. I was 1 min & 10 meters away from my breakfast. But I resisted. Never in my life was I so motivated by seeing anything other than my tummy this morning. I suddenly started day dreaming about my abs some 5 years ago. Rock solid, with 2 distinct biscuits on top. CRISP.

After my tummy realization incident & the 30 minute work out, I went to the shower. Sudden realization # 2, there was no soap bar in the soap box. I went to fetch at the usual location where the soap is stashed & the hits just kept on coming. We had run out of soap. There I was standing in my towel with my slippers on & realized that I didn’t have soap. Under ideal circumstances, I would register my disgust by making a facial expression that would make Jim Carrey reconsider his career, but this time I was calm. I changed & moved out to get a soap bar from the store. Well, after exactly 22 mins I opened the bathroom door & out came the first wave of steam & if anyone had been looking they would have found me emerging, not coming out, but emerging from the bathroom like Jeff Goldblum in the fly, when he comes out of his teleportation chamber (without the genetic defects ofcourse, its not like my DNA got fused with the soap bar or something).

Breakfast was quick, toast bread with an above average quantity of cheese & BONG, I realized that I forgot to check my weight on the scale. Now since I had my breakfast, I had second thoughts about it. I mean, how do u calculate how much breakfast you ate (in kilograms) before checking your weight? It was a scary thought & I didn’t leave it to my imagination. I just got up & took a sip at my cuppa & moved on with my life.

The weight was OK, and then I wondered why everything is suddenly looking so chubby? Is this some kind of a new illness that no one knows about or do I really need to look at my tummy from a different angle to make it look smaller? OK, I thought, I stood in front of the mirror again & tried to construct, or to be precise, name a shape for my tummy. How much hemispherical is really hemispherical? Does it look more like a boiled egg really scaled up? It was weird though, but definitely round.

Sudden Realization # 3 was a memory, the one I would never have thought of, but today was different. Few years back, I had promised myself a similar fitness regime. I had begun enthusiastically & clung to it for a week. Then I missed a day, then another & another & saw my tummy lose shape like a misshapen semi inflated balloon. This time, I knew better. Went to the PC, typed out a table listing days, numbered to 200 & hit print. BONG. Low on ink. For a second I thought all those chubby people have done voodoo on me for teasing them. I couldn’t believe, that the most important part of my fitness regime lied on my computer’s screen & I wasn’t able to materialize it.

Moved out, got a printout, and got it photocopied, in case I change my mind. Kicked back, sat on the sofa, legs stretched till infinity, opened a fresh bag of seemingly not so fresh potato chips & suddenly realized the importance of my TV’s remote control.

God's Hobby

After the world was made, after everything was created & mutated & whatever, what did god engage herself into? Does God even get bored by creating worlds, what is God’s hobby?

It’s essential to think that God has humanlike abilities, or else why would she give us the gift of rational thinking, why would she bless us with a brain that can actually bear the capacity to question her existence? It’s funny when we notice that God, by creating humans, has moved one step closer to disproving herself.

We have seen how nature has the capacity to balance itself over time. If a population of some species is on the rise, there is always someone on the top of the food chain that curbs the erratic growth, thus maintaining a sustainable balance. When humans started to think in terms of survival through adaptation, unlike other animals using artificial means to protect themselves, like medicines, weapons & so on, there must have been a slight expression of disgust on God’s face. Obviously she must have figured out the after-effects of such a development. I think God has a huge game board which has different worlds plotted on it so that she can play, create & destroy stuff in the universe with it. It’s really sad to believe that after everything has been made & done, what would God indulge herself into?

There is a theory though. Humans have outgrown any known mammals till now. Humans have this unique capacity to multiply & sustain under the harshest of the conditions. Take Eskimos for instance, living in inhuman conditions but still having a sizable population. Even if a huge chunk of us gets wiped out, by calamities like the Tsunami, or huge quakes or storms, we humans still find a way to survive, thrive & flourish out of nothing. We have noticed that several species of animals have gone extinct due to human intervention into their habitats, but humans have remained on the top of the food chain for a very very long time. Does this mean that The Human Species is indestructible?

Well not quite. There is someone on the top of the food chain, which is definitely not a human. It’s the Virus. From innocuous bacteria to kings of the animal kingdom, us, there is a virus available for everyone. Some viruses reside in different species & affect some other species altogether. It’s an elaborate mechanism, but what is it here for? Is this one of God’s hobbies?

I suppose God got really worked up about this whole human thingy and tried to formulate some way to bring the human population under control, but instead it bloated beyond her wildest dreams. So she might have created the virus, to be a brutal cure for mankind. Her hobby is to design viruses. Lethal viruses & set them free in the most remote corners of the earth, where man might eventually reach to grab a peace of that land. It’s a very elaborate scheme since it has the capacity to work to its fullest extent. Viruses have been found one by one, as mysterious diseases started to kill people across the globe on a large scale. When people or animals explored remote parts on this planet, the viruses got aboard through various contact points. They were specifically designed to jump species so that they can live in one host & jump from it to another host to do the job. It’s sort of like a well trained soldier set on a mission to destroy renegade species who don’t respect the order of existence & proportion.

To make it look less obvious, God chose other organisms as well, not in our species, so as to show that viruses don’t just affect humans, but also other species. Thereby cleverly evading any changes in belief mechanisms. The thought that viruses are created by the same god that created mankind & this whole planet, isn’t easy for believers. They can’t imagine that the hand that created the human mind has also created the Ebola virus. Whereas people like me want to believe that this is circumstantial & a perfectly natural thing to happen. Although the nature of a virus makes everyone skeptical about life itself. Richard Preston’s Hot Zone says, "Once the cells in a biological machine stop working, it can never be started again. It goes into a cascade of decay, falling toward disorder and randomness. Except in case of viruses, they can turn off and go dead. Then, if they come in contact of a living system, they switch on and multiply."

Same God, same code of living, same rules of nature, different organisms, then why these contradictory set of rules? I think its God’s way of reminding us, humans, about our own code of existence. My favorite agent, Agent Smith from The Matrix confesses to Morpheus, which goes something like, "I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure."

Now that’s what I call being subtle.

The Binary Code of Existence

Ok, so I live or I die? Is it as simple as that? No, I am not suicidal. I am just wondering is that decision so easy to make with just two outcomes; is there any middle ground that we can achieve? Fortunately for us, there isn’t any legal or moral ground which lies between these two facts of existence. Spiritually speaking, there might be certain things as spirits that might be able to transcend these boundaries, or even religiously speaking we might as well have a soul & might even be reincarnated. Ethically speaking, we might wonder what might happen to the people who depend on us. But that’s pure speculation as far as my thought chain is concerned.

Sometimes I wonder why they called it “artificial intelligence”. After all it’s a box of wires & circuits, why call it intelligent? Just because it will be able to make decisions like ‘do I need to do my laundry’, on its own? The whole concept of this computer thingy, getting all decisive rests upon a simple concept, transistors. I call it “The Stuff”.

There are two results, TRUE / FALSE. For the Stuff to work, it needs either a signal to pass through it or not. Now the funny part is, when these transistors are arranged in arrays in various combinations, they do miraculous things like calculate 10,00,00,001 multiplied by 12,34,56,789 in just about a fraction of a second. Just on the basis of TRUE FALSE, the chip does it. When it needs to pass a signal through it, it’s TRUE & when it feels lazy, its FALSE. We program it, we teach it, and we make it do what it does. Is it why they call it artificial intelligence?

Lets think about primates for instance, largely us. We assume things are complex in nature, certain things definitely are, but our decision engine, works on a very simple premise, “I want to do it OR I don’t want to do it”. Sometimes this conclusion might take a hell lot of time to occur, but when it does, that’s what we name as “CHOICE”.

I often get a little mixed up early in the morning when I make tea for myself. How much sugar is it that I want to have in my cuppa today? This is a very complex situation to deal with, since my mind has to evaluate certain basic processes like, do I have diabetes? Do I feel like having a sweet tea today? Do I really care about my paunch? Do I want less sugar in the tea today just to see how it tastes? All these go thru my mind in just about a few nanoseconds until I decide to pour in that spoonful of sugar into the boiling tea. All these primitive processes lead me to a final decision, do I need to have sugar in my tea or not. Do we deliberately complicate things or is it the nature of our biological systems to evaluate all targets for a YES/NO answer before we make every decision?

We humans believe in the complexity of nature, or rather we admire the intricate design of all natural things. How everything is connected to every other thing, how everything is mutually dependent to every other thing. This amazes us. People even go to the extent of believing that there is an intelligent designer who has masterminded all these things & have placed us bang in the middle of everything to try & make sense of it. Also leads to another vital point of belief mechanisms. Religion allows us to study the pattern of belief mechanisms to a large extent. It is so because, certain research has proven that religious beliefs can be genetically induced. Apart from the speculation, we have to look at the fact that there are TWO kinds of decisions, I believe in God, or I do not believe in God. This is another of those binary choices, making a common man’s life miserable again, trying to find the underlying reasons of his belief. Added complexity.

An artificially intelligent machine is specifically made to think on the same lines as that of a human being. For our quest to humanize every image, every random thought, every random observation, we now need a machine to make these random choices. There is some serious amount of programming required to make a simple program to try & make it think on its own. “Think” is another understatement, which makes the whole event seem more complex. To think is to drive through a series of binary questions, in order to reach a final outcome, which is in itself another outcome of a larger binary choice. This cascading of binary choices is what we call as a thought chain. I don’t claim that there isn’t any complexity at all, but to look at this complexity from a binary point of view makes it seem more manageable.

Something as random as the bourses, have made some real people build real stuff like neural networks in order to fascinatingly predict some of the future outcomes of stock prices. Darren Aranofsky’s movie, called Pi, deals with a similar scientist who creates this program to predict stock prices & tangles himself into a ‘complex’ mesh of choices where religion & science collide. What does the machine actually do, what happens under the whole fancy jargon is, that the program makes choices on the basis of some empirical data & some added spice of human error & tries to simplify the whole process by making it a ½ probability for a buy or sell choice. It isn’t as simple as it sounds, but the machine’s sole purpose is to decide whether to buy or sell. Whether the market will be bullish or bearish?

We encounter decisions of this nature & complexity every time we deal with things involving another human being. We don’t argue with the washing machine whether we want to dry our clothes or not, in the same way, when we expect to humanize a machine, what exactly are we trying to do? A machine is more capable of incorporating the binary nature of things, according to the data fed to it than a human can, since the cascading of the several internal binary choices that the machine has to make, will be programmed by a human, & would be far too less than what our brain is programmed to handle.

This tree of binary choices that lead us to our final decisions is dependent on previously made choices. We don’t learn everything right from our birth, do we? So this whole building up of choices & adding a dash of genetic traits to our thinking, how do we actually claim to design a machine which is capable to imitate our own choices? Its like having the entire population of the world pool in data about their choices made & document them & then have it fed into a machine’s memory so that machine’s program is capable enough to compute which choice to follow next including the human element of stupidity, which I cleverly concealed above by calling it an error (sometimes I can’t resist).

The whole concept of the sci-fi thriller trilogy of the Matrix, lies on this very simple premise, how much choice do we need to provide to the machine? How many levels of choices should the program have in order to reach certain outcomes independently? Also there is the ethical decision of whether a machine is allowed to just obey commands or to behave as it may just like another “human”, as we have seen in Asimov’s I, Robot? Does the machine choose to evolve? Make internal changes in it & spawn generations of its own kind? Or do we need to curb our enthusiasm & be content if it can calculate a huge multiplication on its own?

So the choice is, should it be really intelligent or not?