The Judgments we make.

About the Judgements we make.

No doubt, we make judgements about people. We choose to interact with people based on how we feel about them, what judgement we arrive at, about their character and about them as persons, as fellow human beings. No doubt these judgements vary from person to person. Some people are admired by the society as a whole while some people are thoroughly misjudged all their life. Below, with the help of this schematic, I will try to explain what I feel about this whole process. This is based on purely observational data and inference drawn by me (and hence, could be biased) exclusively on those occasions.  

Judgement of an object or person wholly depends on the judge’s evaluation. This evaluation (which is sometimes beyond our voluntary control), depends on the perspective of the evaluator and also the circumstances. Let’s first eliminate ‘circumstance’ as a variable for simplicity. For example, the songs I sing in the bathroom during shower could be evaluated by me as ‘superb’, but one who has musical training will judge me from that perspective as ‘below average’. Now, if you add circumstance into the mix, for example, Sir Elton John asked to judge my bathroom songs with someone pointing a gun on his forehead might deliver a positive judgement. Probably, I was successful to drive the point through.

If you are still reading, let me explain the picture. Without the circumstance, evaluation is solely dependent and tainted by the evaluator’s perspective. In the picture, I tried to depict differences in perspectives due to several factors. Some people may have a broader perspective (as in blue) and some have a narrower (as in yellow). Broader perspectives tend to have inputs from wisdom generated from life’s lessons, one’s education, and one’s ability to afford good education (pedigree), tolerance etc. On the other hand, narrower perspectives tend to have inputs from aberrant mental conditions like selfishness, jealousy etc. in addition to lac of education, pedigree etc. Sometimes these are mutually exclusive, sometimes not. It could be more complex than we think, for the purpose of discussion let’s just keep it simple. Finally, evaluation gets colored by one’s perspective. Perspectives can be many, however, again, for the sake of simplicity three basic perspectives are shown. There could be a differential mix of these three yielding many diverse perspectives. However, the outcome of Judgement is always binary. Positive or negative; it has never been intermediary, however, some people are always undecided and they tend to follow the majority in any judgmental situation.

If the judgement about a person is positive, we tend to choose from different alternatives based on the degree of positivity. If we judge positivity in arbitrary units, values near to 100 will produce celebrities and around 50 will produce peers. For example, we might rather consider hero worship than making friends with Marilyn Monroe or Mahatma Gandhi. This is admiration. However, if you think a certain someone is successful in life and you like that person, you will probably follow instead of admiring too much. However, I always found friendships blossoming between equals. Equal struggle, equal suffering, equal qualification, equal ambitions and so on.. Point to be noted, although positively judged, perspectives change, and that might alter the judgement any moment. Marriage, on the other hand tends to have the lowest positivity count on the judgement scale. It is the aspect of mystery that keeps it alive I guess, and the partners tend to adjust their perspectives in a dynamic pattern. Notwithstanding, it might go up on the positivity scale as the perspectives broaden with time.

If the judgement about a person is negative, we tend to forget that it is just a function of perspective which is again a function of evaluation that is colored by perspective. When I was little, I asked my grandfather, “Why does a thief steal when he has to hide from everybody?” He answered, “The thief probably doesn’t think he is doing anything wrong, otherwise he wouldn’t be doing it.” In a way, he was right. The thief had a different evaluation and judgement based on his perspective which is entirely different from most of us.

When we judge a person as negative, we tend to avoid or ignore them. We tend to criticize or devalue them in social situations and we try to make them a social pariah or ‘untouchable’. We label them with our own evaluation which is a function of our own perspective and hence suffers from an observational bias. When 99 out of 100 people around you think that you are a pariah, you sort of agree to that and start believing that. You try to fit into their motif and just hope that under certain circumstances you will be judged positively. Based on the degree of positivity, you might be able to get a wife, a friend or a follower. Who even dares to think of admiration?         

Doomsday is feasible

You must be thinking I am crazy. May be that's a good thing. May be you are curious. I am not writing this because I am scared of my own demise nor I have the intention to scare anybody. I genuinely think that 'doomsday' is possible; only predicting the date is the problem. I am not supporting any particular faith or community, I am just looking at it from my scientific knowledge and just by rational thinking, it seems apparent.

I am intrigued by the fact that all the major religions talk about the 'final destruction' call it doomsday or any other thing, the central idea is that the earth will be destroyed to the elements it is formed of. We laugh about it, so many doomsday predictions have gone wrong in recent times. However, it would be important to note that mere the presence of black holes and supernovas in the universe point to the fact that stars (the main source of energy in a planetary system) die. Considering the life on earth is just a happenstance owing to earths position relative to sun and all the other life supporting factors are due to that (think about water, air, the atmosphere etc.), we are in a very vulnerable situation. Any cosmic event that leads to a minor change in this situation will wipe out life from earth and that can happen anytime, any day. Scientists know, the true nature of the Universe is randomness.

Human curiosity is as old as the humans themselves. I don't know about the pre-historic man, but from the time humans started to note down their history, they also recorded events and endeavors to understand the nature. That quest seems to have been there long before modern scientific rationality was born. Considering the birth of science a gradual process from earlier methods of inquiry and if you agree that religions were just the old fashioned way to understand human existence on earth and relative to all other natural forces, then we are on the same wavelength.

Now let's look at what different religions thought about doomsday.

In Hindu philosophy, the world always means the universe. According to Hindu philosophy, Brahma is the creator of the universe and the entire life of universe is depicted as one day of Brahma. This 'day of Brahma' spans 4.32 billion years and at the end of it, the universe or the 'Brahmanda' is destroyed. However, Hindus believe that there is creation after every destruction and the new universe will be back up again from the ruins of the old one after it is destroyed. Scientists somehow agree to this concept as it goes with the 'big bang theory'. It is agreed upon that the universe is expanding after the big bang and there will come a time when it will start to contract and that is the beginning of the end. It will shrink  and shrink and shrink and become a very high energy dimensionless point. Scientists like Frank Tipler named it as 'omega point'. Don't get worried, we have only passed about 1.86 billion years in a day of Brahma. We are nowhere near the end according to it. However, I want to pint to the fact that the concept of doomsday exists in Hindu philosophy.

The Abrahamic faiths talk more about 'human' component of this destruction.
In Christianity, it is presumed that the world will end preceding the time of second coming of the Christ who will face the emergence of anti-Christ and usher in the 'kingdom of God'.

In Zoroastrianism, the end of the world is predicted when wickedness overtakes nobleness in people and that comes to a gigantic overture when the 'battle of Manichaean' is fought. At the end of the battle, all wickedness will be annihilated and the entire humanity will become like one spirit and merge with 'Ahura Mazda' for divine exaltation.

Judaism mainly talks about the 'end of the current age' and beginning of the Messianic age which will be the age of universal peace and brotherhood, prosperity and no war. The Hebrew scholars did talk about 'end of days' before this Messianic age begins.

Islamic prophecy asks to look for twelve signs ushering the end of the world. One of them being the appearence of 'Mahdi' the twelfth Imam atop a white horse. It also talks about Jesus returning and together they fight out Dajjal the false messiah and at the end, when the sun rises from the west, and a pleasant breeze blows from Yemen, trumpets will sound and the dead will be resurrected. They talk about smoke and fire too.

This concept of Mahdi is similar to Hindu Kalki avatar (reincarnation of Vishnu) who also appears with a white horse during the final moment. Hinduism talks about eight suns shining in the sky which is again similar to Buddhism that talks about the seven suns and appearence of Maitreya like Kalki or Mahdi.

According to Nordic mythology, the whole world gets submerged in ocean and destroyed. Thus, there exist this idea of cataclysm that finally brings upon a destruction and end to the world as it is known and establish a new world. I guess none of them talks about a final 'THE END'.

Taking it from here, at one point of time, considering myself a student of science, my understanding of thermodynamic equilibrium told me that this is completely feasible. The tendency of this world to go towards the lowest possible energy state to achieve more stability is always working against us. In other words, we are always working against it. In fact, life itself is a big struggle against entropy. I would prefer to call biological evolution a tendency to build higher order structures from simple structures. The more complicated, higher order structures we build, the more thermodynamically unstable they are and the tendency to come back to the minimum energy thermodynamically stable configuration increases as we climb up the energy ladder. Up to this point it makes perfect sense, but then, to transcend this idea to the global context and a synchronized destruction happening all at the same time is hard to comprehend. I mean all the high energy structures cannot explode at the same time unless, there is a threshold and every possible energy reserve on this earth crosses that threshold. Alternately, we can consider earth as a single entity comprised of several entities and it is the sub-entities that evolve into higher order structures. But in that case, the total energy of the earth goes up which is not possible since the sub-entities have initially borrowed energy from the earth in order to evolve into higher order entities. Thus the total energy of the earth must be constant and that goes with the laws of thermodynamics that states energy can neither be created nor destroyed. The total energy should remain constant. Now if we shift the reference frame from the earth to the Universe, this becomes feasible. It is possible that the earth uses simple, low energy, stable entities to create higher order structures which are thermodynamically unstable and when all the energy of the whole earth is converted to thermodynamically unstable entities and crosses a certain threshold, it can collapse. While the energy liberated from this collapse can be dissipated in the form of heat, light, sound, radiation so on and so forth leading to the death of one planet, there could be another planet born somewhere else in perfect agreement with the laws of thermodynamics.

This is the only explanation where human beings are making positive contribution to the inevitable collapse by building thermodynamically unstable high energy structures. Since this is inevitable, this contribution is only hastening the speed of reaching the threshold. Now, how much is the contribution? Is it enough to cause any major change in the overall arithmetic? Who knows?

The other feasible ways of earth's destruction has nothing to do with human contribution. Those would be more sudden and overwhelming. For example, a giant comet hitting and displacing it from the orbit. The evolution of a super bug that is resistant to all antibiotics could wipe off life on earth or a minor tilt in the axis of earth may change the weather pattern in a sudden and unpredictable way to make earth uninhabitable in every way. But those are accidents and one cannot predict them. So eat, drink and be merry and don't even think of it. It won't be bad if we die together...millions of us. What's the big deal? The dinosaurs suffered the same fate.

Finally, I will give the method of calculation used in Hindu philosophy to calculate the doomsday. It was posted by Miyuki and Kyojin on yahoo answers 6 years ago. It goes like this,"When Brahma created the universe, he put 3 diamond needles each a cubit long in a brass plate in a temple in Benares. On one needle are 64 golden discs with the largest one on the bottom and each one above it successively smaller until the samllest is on top. This is the Tower of Brahma. Priests take turns transferring discs from one needle to another day & night ceaselessly. One disc at a time must be moved, and a smaller disc can never be under a larger one. When all of the discs are moved from the original needle to another one, the world will end. If they can make one move each second, how long will that take? Try it and you'll see each transfer takes twice as many moves as before. Give the answer in years, please!"

Best of luck! Start calculating. I know he answer. In case if you want to know.

Yes you are right. Miyuki and Kyojin writes, 584,554,530,872 years, 6 months, 14 days, 14 hours, 37 minutes, 0.04 seconds. 2 to the 64th power seconds divided by 31,556,926 sec./yr gives the answer. They calculated it by hand.

Another person used Mandelbrots theorem to arrive at a different number. That is 4,320,000,000 years.

All the best!

Barack Obama's re-election.

Yes. "Four more years" that was the tweet from his account. I couldn't continue watching the news-cast as the results were pouring in and the statistics were re-calculated. I was tired from a long day's work and went to sleep. Of course I took my phone with me because I wanted the alarm to ring next morning near my ears to shake me up from my slumber. I told my wife, "Pennsylvania is blue now". She advised me to go to sleep as she had complete faith on the stupidity of the American people and in the defeat of Obama in their hands.

I was hopeful. Not only because this is the man who actually believes in what he stands for, but also he is the perfect symbol of the future America. These people need to re-elect him as their leader. Only he has the vision to see 20 years into the future and prescribe strategies to prepare for it. I wanted to know the future of the country my daughter is born into. What are the promises or challenges that are  in store for her as a Indian American. Will she be discriminated? Because she is not catholic or because she is a girl or she is not Caucasian?  Will America be able to lead the World after 20 years from now? Those were the questions waiting to be answered. This election will tell us not only about the next American President but also about the American people - how they are thinking about their own country's future - the demography, the social infrastructure, the very flesh and bone of how does it feel being an "American"?

And then my phone vibrated on my bed. It was a push notification from New York Times. Barack Obama gets re-elected. I happily went to sleep. The future won't be that bad for my daughter.....

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Wh-questions drive science

Who, what, why, when, where? If you can answer all these wh-questions pertaining to a particular object or phenomena, you will be considered wise - told one of my high school teachers. I didn't understand quite well what that means. We actually started a game finding answers to these questions for everything we see around and then gave up because we found we don't know all the answers for most of the things around us. However, now I understand the real meaning of what he meant. It is the curiosity of human mind that drives science. That has become my bread and butter now. And still we have hard time finding answers to all wh-questions pertaining to a particular object or phenomena. Amazing!   

My understanding of the concept of luck

I was always the unlucky person. Always missed the bus, left with a punctured tyre on my bicycle on an exam day, never could hit the right answers on any competitive exams and in love, never could spell out the right words at the right time...the list is endless. Even I had to and still have to fight for the slightest things that are available to the luckier herds so easily.

This made me think about the factor called luck time and again. From the perspective of mathematics, one could still explain it through the theory of probability but how about the biology of luck? Can we explain it?

Luck through the theory of probability
Its easy. The classic example of tossing a coin provided in all text books of probability says it all. If you toss a coin once you have a 50/50 chance of getting a head. You also run a 50/50 chance of having a tail. Now the lucky ones will always get a head and the unlucky ones will always have tail. However, if you toss the coin twice, you have a lucky situation of having head all 2 times and an unlucky situation of having tail twice. But it is the third situation where you end up getting head once and tail once which is more common occurrence. People get lucky in some situations and remain unlucky in others. We can increase the probability of this situation by increasing the number of attempts. For example, if you toss the coin 10 times, you probably could get lucky in 5 attempts and unlucky in the rest of them. Lucky nerds can still get lucky on all ten attempts, although a rare occurrence, still, you are in a competitive situation. Thus, we may infer that increasing the number of attempts increases our probability of getting lucky. And this is where the biological perspective becomes important.

Albert Einstein once remarked, "God doesn't play dice" and you were so wrong Mr Einstein. Yes God was always lucky. We never heard of any unlucky God in any culture. That is because of the reference frame. Its like tossing a coin with head on both sides. The plethora of life forms that surround us are the examples of God's playing dice. If we consider that evolution is in play as we continue to live our lives and it is happening right now as we speak, then the genetic recombination that gives rise to stronger, more adaptive species is continuous and expansive. The better genetic variants (luckier ones) has more survival advantage. Another example: luckier people are definitely having an edge over the unlucky ones in terms of natural selection and struggle for existence. The monkey who gets a lot of bananas all the time easily and luckily will be healthy and will give rise to a healthier offspring than the monkey who has to exhaust all his energy to fight and get a single banana and still remain hungry and irritated.

But it is a double edged sword. Although the examples I provided in the preceeding paragraph are theoretically sound and looks very advantageous for luckier people, from another perspective they may not be that advantageous. Being unlucky sometimes encourages us to explore more possibilities and to make another attempt. This endeavor actually makes us more strong finally whereas the luckier ones are more vulnerable. Genetically, the more recombination, mutation, addition etc, our genome has, the more flexible we are in terms of response to a particular environmental stimulus. That's why we are more adaptive to our environment than the Neanderthals.

So, what does it mean by the end of the day? It is good to be unlucky sometimes and take another shot instead of giving up. That makes us stronger and versatile and puts us in real advantage.