Me in Words

I am delighted to see Operation New Atheism has worked well enough to remove most of the absurdities in human thinking. It was only a while ago that I remember the whole world was ready to believe anything. Now I am glad to see that people are questioning everything.

Even people who still stick to their faiths have become moderate, and practice religion for admirable reasons like the need for social status and a feeling of moral superiority compared to their peers.

These people have started to contemplate about human suffering and how God seems to help/smite “others” but not themselves. I see this as a good sign…

Of course there are very loud fringe groups who want to make it look as if they are the mainstream. But they are obviously not going to last for long. They are going to fade away from public perception once their predictions fail systematically.

But the basic memes will remain. Which is why it is essential to have multiple memes competing for a space in the human mind, although this might seem a bit dangerous with all the weapons we own. I think as long as we tempt mankind with a future paradise on earth, they will think twice before blowing this place up.

I am very satisfied with John Grisham’s novel - The Appeal which sheds light on the sophisticated nature of American politics and right wing tactics. It is better than Runaway Jury, in that deals with a much larger picture with greater resolution.

Spoiler starts here

The story starts of where most stories end - a verdict against a large corporation by a jury. The case goes to appeal in a higher court with no jury but instead with 9 elected judges. The corporation uses political strategies similar to the ones used by President Bush in the last election, to elect a pro- business judge. The rest is up to you read on your own.

Spoiler ends here

The story raises our consciousness to many grey areas in politics. One of the most striking ones was the use pastors and christian preachers to control democracy. This is similar to what George Bush did in his elections. I have a very strong suspicion that Pastor Ted Haggard is symbolically mentioned in the novel as the fundamentalist Pastor Ted.

I’d like to say that my worries about a possible Indian hyper-inflation are becoming right. The Indian inflation has reached new record levels at 11% per annum. That is, if you owned 100 rupees as hard cash in your piggy bank last January, you’d surprised that, that 100 rupees will only get you 90 rupees worth of goodies by the end of this year.

So about 10 rupees of that is burned by inflation.

At this ceremonious occasion, I’d also like remind all investors in stocks correct every number you see with respect to money to be adjusted for inflation. Your beloved company may not have really get all the profits it claimed to have made. See everything through the lenses of inflation, because now it is starting to affect real people.

Those real estate hikes your seeing? They aren’t real hikes baby! 10% of the sky rocketing growth is inflation. The rest of it is panic and frenzy.

And cut the hype. You, indian online newspapers guys: you don’t have to spin bad economy story to sound like yet another praise of how well the economy is doing… Be responsible guys. People are really losing money.

Encourage young people to invest in value stocks or spend their salaries. And read some Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham. Thats the only way to cut down peoples spending. Interest rate hikes arent going to help.

I am reading The Appeal by John Grisham these days. I must say Grisham is a legal genius. He can imagine everything from the big picture down right to the petty details that drive individual ambitions of everyone in the plot.

And he leads his readers up and down on that ladder effortlessly without letting lesser mortals like me lose track of the situation. The story is long. It can very well be described as a perfect narration of a domino effect in legal world. A small decision that triggers events that change the course of history.

I wouldn’t have any second thoughts on paying Grisham as a legal advisor for my not-yet-formed company.

Wish I could write like he does. I’ve had lots of stories to tell too. Pity I don’t have enough imagination to describe the details like he does.

Everyone has something to say about consciousness. Here is mine: It is like two mirrors that “see” each other. Mirrors can’t see but they reflect each other to form an illusion of an infinite ability to form an image of the other, forming an image of the self, forming an image of the other, forming and image of the self ….

Alright I confess that I am not eloquent enough for a good definition, because the very constructs of language are primarily for the expression of an egocentric worldview. So that will go for a good parable.

Let me assume that you are familiar with the thermodynamic notions of environment and system. If Brain is thought of as the system, then it is capable of forming models about the environment it lives in i.e. Universe.

At some point in the history of brains, it gradually improved to have better models of its environment (so as to reliably perpetuate the phenomena of self-replicating variations in entropy a.k.a genes). And for reasons which will digress me away from the current topic, brains got exceptionally good at prediction of future outcomes of this model.

Further down in the evolutionary line, brains which had enough redundant capacities were selected for by necessity to have a lossy model of itself, which went on to have model of itself, which went on to have …

What is more remarkable is that the number of levels in the ladder of lossy self abstractions described above is variable, determined by the environment and fine tuned by evolution. Which brings me to the first prediction of hypothesis which can be experimentally verified: Under stimuli that drastically threaten the existence of a self aware individual, it will surely develop a lesser sense of self awareness.

You might ask what drives the ladder of self modelling models of the brain that models its environment. The answer is, the environment itself. Its like being water that flows between pebbles. That which drives the water to choose a certain path is not the water, but the pebbles.

Ever wondered which came first: Paulian epistles or the Gospels? All scholars agree that it was the epistles that were written first. Early Christians had a very vague idea about what Christ really said or did.

Something is not right about Paul the Apostle. He brags about not having received any of his beliefs from anyone in the Jesus movement of Jerusalem at all. (Gal 13). He claims he received it entirely through revelation. When I was a Christian, I used to accept it as truth when other people’s imaginary friends told them to proclaim that the imaginary friend is right. But not so anymore.

Paul spent 3 years after his conversion away from the Jesus movement of Jerusalem. After imaginary Jesus asked him in a revelation while in Syria to proclaim that the imaginary Jesus, to the gentiles, Paul went away to Arabia. I wish he could say at least something about what he did there. It would be nice to know. And after that came back to Syria. He is emphasizing that he was no where near Jerusalem for all that time and that he did not talk to the members of the Jesus movement at all. So after 3 years (!) he went back to Jerusalem. Thats how long it took for Paul to go back and meet the real people who knew Jesus. And spent a mere 15 days about which he says something like “… I went there and I stayed with Peter the disciple and met NO other Apostle.. oh and yeah but I did talk to James the brother of Jesus”. (LOL!).

Thats all? I mean, for a man that laid all the fundamental tenets of Christianity as we know it today, it seems a bit weird that he pulled off from his imagination. For the members of the Jesus movement, Paul was more like a random not-so-relevant freak who claims he is one of them although he has only met with them once. In fact, Paul claiming to be an apostle because he spend 15 days with Peter sounds more like Subash Chandra Bose being a true Nazi because he met with Hitler and organized the INA using brown people in South East Asia.

Alright anyways, then after the mere 15 day meeting with real people who knew Jesus he went away to Syria & Sillicia for 14 YEARS! and he was still unknown by sight to the people of the Jesus movement. They only heard it said, the one who was once trying to destroy the faith is now proclaiming it. Thats all they knew!

Then after 14 years he went back to Jerusalem a second time. In other words, he went to Jerusalem twice in 17 years. He went there in response to a revelation (hallucination) , no one told him to do it (!). Then he laid out to the people of the Jesus movement the message he was preaching to the Gentiles and mad sure he was not running in vain and made sure he was proclaiming the right thing.

Paul had a real strange relationship with the main source of the Jesus movement in Jerusalem.

Given the facts above, here are my speculations about what Paul did in Arabia:

Islam shares the same eschatology of the Bible, with the apocalyptic Jewish meme upgraded to include Jesus as the incoming saviour instead of an Angel. This sounds exactly like what Paul would preach in Arabia! It might have been the case that pre- Islamic Arabian population consisted of larger fraction of Jews and Christians as history shows. And Paul preached the Christianity he imagined out of thin air with very little influence from the original meme in Jerusalem..

But alas, the Arabian Christianity might not have lasted very long due to lack of maintenance from the engineer Paul and was eventually converted by force into Islam I am confident some tof them left to Kerala and must surely be the source of the “St. Thomas of India”..

I must say Paul was one hell of a memetic engineer.

If Memetics becomes a science it would have immense practical applications. Imagine if we were able to predict which rumors in the wild would spread faster than others, imagine the implications that would have on financial instrument speculation and banking. Predicting fashion and trends would be gold mine for business and marketing disciplines which currently rely mostly on case studies (anecdotal evidence) instead of rigorously tested tenets. Futurists will able to predict where will the future take us. This will bring in investments into the relevant fields. Consider the possibility of monitoring spread of terrorism and destructive cults not on the basis of vivid speculation but by using experimentally tested results with astonishing precision. Internet search engines and social bookmarking facilities would be able to rank which pages will become popular in the future based on characteristics of the page. Memetics will be facilitate the better teaching techniques and human resource management (i.e. getting a lot of people to do the same thing like recycling, voting).

Why can’t behavioral economics or psychological sciences include memetics within it? Why do we need a separate discipline and a new name? I believe memetics should solely deal with the phenomena of various types of replicating information with the attributes of the information being spread as the subject of scientific inquiry instead of the host of such information. I believe a lot of exploration has to be done within this set of unknowns, which would eventually render memetics as a new discipline of its own.

Memetics should lay foundations which are so abstract that it could be applied to a wide variety of information replication like computer viruses, efficient patenting and copyright laws, biological viruses, genetics, prions. Cultural memetics should lay foundations for the study of cultural artifacts in animal and especially human populations like the dynamics of animal migrations and phenomena like human language extinction. It is improtant to note that memetics should be quantitative and mathematically rigourous and not simply promote complacency with the unknowns explained using statistical results.

Further along the field it should unravel the clockwork within our brains that select for the replication certain types of information over other. Finally memetics will explain why is universe experiencing a proliferation of information replication by using the laws of physics (2nd law of thermodynamics) and whether this will lead to something like the Omega Point.

In a few words, memetics could become yet another scientific device that can satisfy our ever increasing lust for certainty and control over our destiny.

As a token of gratitude towards all FOSS programmers, I hereby release the first bash shell script I wrote under GPL 3. It converts numbers into their English names.

Download

Link: http://twit.tv/fib32

In this bit-more-technical episode of Futures in Biotech, Dr. Ronald Collman, (professor of medicine in microbiology, virus/cell/molecular core director, Penn Center for AIDS Research, University of Pennsylvania) talks about the current combination therapy in use for HIV that works by stopping evolution in the virus.

When one hears to talks like this it is amazing how real life saving techniques used in current medicine depends on the types of evolution denied by Intelligent Design proponents like Michael Behe.

Michael Behe has previously denied the evolution of HIV in interviews and in his book “Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution” when in fact HIV is observed to evolve faster than influenza virus.

I had a dream in which I am writing the next semester’s exam without preparing anything. I finished the exam comfortably, but I forgot to write my matriculation number on it, and after the exam I realized that. I was terribly sad and then suddenly I hear a loud sound far from the horizon and an exclamation from my colleagues. They were something like missiles that look like a space shuttle launch machinery without the space shuttle and there are many of them. One of them flew into the building were we where; into one of the lower floors and the top floors were we were on started shaking and was going to fall down.

It looked like a scene from the movie Cloverfield.