Seeking a way out

The evils of a capitalist society are quite well-known and yet are often overlooked, maybe because what we’ve come up with in the last two or three centuries as panacea has been much worse: the same emphasis on capital in a different guise. We talk feminist theories and try to prove that everywhere a prejudice has always existed; we keep on focusing on the rich-poor divide and then only worsen it. And yet the unnamed monster has always been that we measure humans: in terms of their productive abilities. As long as you are productive in the sense of not creating a poem but a bushel of wheat, you can live; when you stop being productive, then there are many options: you can be killed, you can be relegated, you can be called a burden upon the society, you will get a proportion of society’s sum because you will be replaced by some others in the same position. Man does not remain free, for he has to produce to remain alive; he becomes the slave of his labour rather than his labour leading him to self-realization. The more he produces the thing considered more desirable in that particular epoch, the more “better off” he is: the problem with communism was that it never got itself rid of the prejudices for capital, and thus its start line was the acceptance that yes, more material goods is being better off. And then the fight for being better off started. Similarly with feminists, who forgot to question the basic premise of the society on which we function. It is very much like if politician A starts eating into the state’s funds, politician B starts rather quarreling as to why he also shouldn’t have a slice in the pie, too!

It is not that we haven’t ever tried a system not based on capital. The much-reviled Hindu system of caste was one such system which instead had the objective of placing the emphasis on knowledge and creation (in the sense of poem, yes). It of course had to denigrate, for people soon made it a matter of inheritance, but before trying to see why did it become so, let me take a mild digression.

Emotions are something that somehow science thought till recently “in the way of reason”: so even if they studied where in the brain they are being produced, they were always thought of as “those little inhibitors” or at best as stimuli. It is only now that the realization is seeping through across the scientific community that the emotional richness shown by the human species makes it the most intelligent species till date discovered: emotions are cues! Because of emotions we are able to take decisions, for better or for worse, related to our future; we have a “happy” memory or a sadness associated with a particular experience and which guides us in our future conduct. Think of emotions as “labels,” but as interactive labels: the ability to have, store and process them is what makes the humans able to manipulate time and space, and to construct huge projects out of thin air, to dream and to believe. And yet all along we have discounted these very emotions when we have seen man as a mere machine, as just another species of being who can be more productive than a bullock because he also has got a “brain.”

The ancient Hindus did try to break the deadlock by having instead a system wherein they defined classes based on the kind of work (and work was not defined by the money it produced) they do. So a knowledge-seeker was free to seek it, explore it; he was not constrained by having to produce. Knowledge was given the utmost importance and thus the Brahmin was on top of the social scale (instead of the rich) and he wandered about, living off food from others, who considered it a privilege, an honour to be able to give him food. Of course, the explicit hierarchy established brought very soon into being the attendant evils of this system, but here at least was an attempt to define man as more than a machine: the West often considers it another form of “division of labour” but it forgets that the Brahmin is not doing any labour in the capitalist (and thus always Western) sense of the word. It was more an attempt to free men from seeing themselves as hunter-gatherers, and use the rich resources with them to further explore truth. The problem with the Hindu system of caste lay in the confusion between atma/purusha and jivatma: I will not attempt to translate the words because the West has no such concept.

Hindus posited the system of caste on birth: thus a Brahmin’s son was automatically a Brahmin. I do not have any idea when they started doing so, because here they have got themselves confused about the theory of karma (which again is grossly misunderstood in the West, import as it is). Out of a million-odd forms of life, including that of amoeba, if you are born in the household of a Brahmin, it was considered obviously as the best chance to further try to understand universe, as you are being born to parents who already presumably know a lot and moving in a similar society: thus, if you had a good karma, your birth could be there. However, chance does not mean anything else than a chance: someone with wealth has more means to do something, but how many times have you seen it happen? By way of good karma, in its quest for self-realization, the atma will be reborn as a higher form of life; however, one must remember that man’s consciousness is jivatma, and man is completely unconscious of his atma. It is the atma that uses different life forms as tools in order to self-realize, not the other way round. What man can tap into (what in the West is called as soul) is his jivatma, his living consciousness. This jivatma dies with the man; it does not get reborn or transferred. A Brahmin's son could be as bad as anyone; karma has placed him there, but it is now up to his present karma so that the atma that thrives on his jivatma advances further on or not. It is hard to tell when the confusion between jivatma and atma arose in the Hindu thought and how; probably it was with many of the Brahmins themselves who started to seek power instead of knowledge, and thus mixing up the concepts is one of the best ways to hold power. Also, with the prevailing of Jainism all over India, Hindu cults had to spring up, and a cult inevitably means sacrifice of knowledge for power. Both Jainism and Buddhism of course themselves are nothing but cults: offshoots from Hinduism to seek power. Ignorance of one has been always the source of power for the other.

I do not know what the answer is in the present day; we don’t have an aristocracy anymore, and the illusion of freedom that democracy gives, while actually antithetical to the idea all the time, is an evil hard to fight. Because everyone loves freedom in theory, and now that we have already divided not only society into fragments of individuals but also individuals themselves into fragments of selves, the more urgent question is how to make one self conscious of the other. Our different selves are becoming our hidden, many jivatmas, which are running in parallel to each other, manifesting a terrifying lack of unity. At the back, still, of course, is our urge to seek that unity, but when society forces us to think of ourselves as labourer-gatherers, and to live accordingly, the clockwork can only become worse. For we have become clocks from humans.

How we understand the billion destinies, to shut out the billion-and-oneth

Or: the seemingly endless process of creating a repository, yet at the very start of which we set parameters for what shall be entered into it?

I could start with simple, reductionist analogies: the world is obsessed with digital and MP3. Yet the first one only means greater control (as of yet), not the richness of an analog content; the second one only means less hogging of memory resources, again not the richness of a WAV file. A computer programmer often creates a look-up table when instead of a binary logic applying to things, there is a particular case for a particular instance: the programming is only done for when and how to access the lookup table, and whether it's a dynamic or static table; whether it may grow or not; and when it grows, what will be the maximum limit before you start removing something, having an overrun? The last question is a crucial question: because every human being is a new story with the richness of his and her world; my experience is not yours, and if you have simulated mine, then you still haven't simulated as yet my daughter's. Or the one that I have not yet experienced.

What is thirst?

I have often grappled with the question and so have many. How to define it? By the words, that you feel parched? By coming up with magic Orwellian words that will tell everyone what does it mean: I wonder what will the thousand words for "love" will be if it comes to that stage of lingual foliation? By the exact knowledge of what chemicals get produced where and which impulses do those chemicals "fire"? Or, dismiss the question saying that it is merely a play-acting, a dream, that no real thirst exists, that it is either a figment of my imagination or Brahma's dream, that I know thirst by imagining it to be real and thus I know thirst - the advaita oneness? Do I? I do not want to define the sensations: I want to know what's that feeling, which if I am thirsty only then I may know (and if in my imagination, then how in my imagination that particular feeling: can I imagine how does a dog feel thirsty?). Objectifying thirst yes does give me great knowledge: knowledge that may help me preventing thirst in someone, that may help me inducing thirst in someone else, that may help me varying its degrees, that may help me play with it just as I can use my computer without understanding the bus cables in it. Will knowing all the signals be actually the knowledge, and thus make it redundant whether I experience thirst or not in life?

Daniel Dennett says, yes. Mary is the omniscient being. Or, RoboMary is the omniscient "someone." She knows what happens to other robots when they see red and thus she knows what will happen to her, by which I assume that she already has perfect knowledge of herself is what Dennett is implying. Or, rather, she doesn't need to know: her brain's simulation acts like a controlled input A and seeing red is another input B (again controlled, because she knows the results on other robots); however, the output is as yet unknown - she will only "know" it once the simulations of her brain and seeing red are run. The following questions arise:

1. The omniscient being is someone who already knows everything. RoboMary can only know about her reaction on seeing red after doing the equivalent of seeing red - running a red-seeing simulation. She cannot anticipate it; she has no way of knowing beforehand what will it be on encountering red. Doesn't contact with red give knowledge hitherto hidden to RoboMary?

2. Imagine Mary whose brain is implanted with RoboMary. Without ever encountering red, if she somehow can imagine red, she will then have the emotions of experiencing red. The crucial question is how will she imagine red? RoboMary will simply process the wavelength info of red color and thus without even knowing what red looks like, Mary may have a gamut of emotions that she would have experienced on actually seeing red with Mary's brain.

Right? Or, is there a catch? RoboMary does run simulations based on Mary's brain but the other input is all the reactions of all other people/robots. Is the output actually reflectant of Mary's brain? If 100 people did this and that with such and such elements in their brains with the red color, Mary with her particular brain should experience all this. The question is: how many people will be the deciding factor? 1000? One crore? One billion?

What Dennett does is to discount the possibility of a wider template than whatever is the number of robots RoboMary is feeding upon: or can humans with new combinations of chemicals and post-modifications of those chemicals given conditions, surroundings, etc., be not born? A billion human beings may be recorded, but who is to say that the billion-and-oneth will not have any element new (and then who is to determine if that information might not have been crucial to determining Mary's state on seeing red?); in a blind race to objectify experience, and human experience, why are we forgetting that we never created the world (even if a Creator didn't) and that we do not know what life is, what thirst is? The billion-and-oneth might yet be different: but, ah, yes, given the growing controls on me, it will be much more difficult to produce anything but my clone or my neighbour's clone.

Move on, Berni!