Happiness

Somehow, I really don't like the conclusion of my last post. I never thought of fate that way and it sortaa just popped out in my mind. But right now, for lack of better explanation or understanding about consciousness I'll put that idea on hold for a while..

What is consciousness? How important are we in this universe? What is so special about the earth? What is so special about us? Or is there anything special at all? So many questions and not many answers I guess..

Sometimes it appears so silly and foolish to go through all these trappings of modern life. All through the ages, people have been doing the same things more or less.. when it comes down to the basics, nothing much has changed really. We are faced with the same sort of problems faced by the first humans i guess.. just the scale is different! Even with all the advances in science and technology, supposedly meant to save a lot of human labor and time, we are still working all day and perhaps, we have even less of a time compared to our ancestors. Perhaps the difference is that our ancestors might have been happy for so many things, that we take for granted and no longer derive any pleasure from them. Now, we want more or rather different things that the earlier ones had no knowledge of.

In such a case, if our aim is to make this planet a nice place for everyone, are we any closer to achieve that goal than the earlier ones? At any given place, over a period of time, I would imagine there is happiness and there is misery, in roughly the same proportions. Happiness is more a state of mind than anything else.. which can be influenced by the surrounding material world, but not just that.

When a person living in a small hut suddenly acquires a palace, he will be elated and happy, but not for too long when the palace becomes granted for him and he'll soon be worried about other issues.. as worried as he was, when he was in the small hut. Eventually, he craves for other things, things which he doesn't have..

Now imagine a world in which we could get anything we wanted. Will that assure us happiness? I am not so sure. I would imagine, we would eventually get bored. Come to think of such a world, that would be even more painful than this one. Here, atleast we wish for something and strive for it anticipating the pleasure it's going to bring us. There, we don't even have that anticipation of pleasure which is very upsetting I think.

Probably, here lies the clue to our happiness.

What we want itself doesn't really matter. All the pleasure is in the sense of achievement, when we get what we desired. And the knowledge that we could have failed in achieving that, enhances the happiness we get when we really achieved it. And ofcourse, this is only one facet of happiness.

Fate, Time 'n God

It appears very counter intuitive to say we don't have choice. But do we really have? At any given time instant, we can do only one thing and not another.. and it looks like we choose to do what to do at that time instant. Now, suppose the choice is already made (not by us, but the situation demands that a particular thing is to be done and not another.. the all perfect model can theoritically predict this choice) and we dont know this. In such a situation, we feel we chose to do that particular thing, even though we really had no other choice. An illusion?? If we really have choice, then we should be able to go back in time and change our choice and do another thing at that same time instant.., which is not possible in reality.

The unidirectional time really leaves us with no choice!!

So assuming the choice is already made, the next question is who decides what choice we make? Or is there any reason for us to believe that there exists someone who decides our choices?

Hmm.. let's say all the knowledge is known and the perfect model of the universe is available. With this perfect model and the initial conditions in hand, we can predict the evolution of the universe in time. This, in effect, will help us in knowing what choices a person makes at a particular time instant. So, it doesn't look like there is someone making choices for us, but the universe once started will take care of itself, with the supply of energy.

And probably this source of energy and starter of the universe is called God by all our scriptures (atleast this is my idea of God). God as just a 'source of energy' seems to be pretty bland/lifeless. Since we humans who are a part of the universe have consciousness (now what is consciousness??), we can safely attribute this (certainly a higher level of) consciousness to the 'source of energy' and hence the all powerful God.

Hmm... it really luks like our fates depend on how God decides the universe to be!

Probability and human will

I had several thoughts going on while I was blabbering about probability. I was thinking about human will. How do we choose? Is it governed by our upbringing? Is it governed by what we are offered? Is it governed by the situation and timing? Is it governed by our mood? Is it random?

Or to put in other words, it seems to be such a complex process and it seems to be governed by so many factors that can it be modelled as a random process.. similar to our modelling the coin tossing as a random process??

Hmm.. I guess in most situations, it's heavily influenced by our upbringing and surroundings and it's not really random. So given that, we can say that we can model how we choose as a function of our upbringing and similar factors with some randomness associated with it. Given this model, we can safely predict, within the limits imposed by the randomness, how we choose in any given situation. However, the knowledge we require to model this correctly is enormous and complex.

Now imagine a world in which wehave all the knowledge that is there. What then? With this knowledge, we can model everything perfectly without a random term in the model. Now, every choice of every human being can be predicted with our model without resorting to any randomness or probabilistic explanation.. what does this imply?

Doesn't this imply there is no such thing as human will?

In effect, does it not mean we are all doing what we are predestined to do? May be, it's just our incomplete knowledge of the world that's not letting us know what we are going to do in the future.. in other words, our concept of human will seems to be just an illusion.. (like the Oracle says "Choice is an illusion")

Probability

As I keep spending more n more time on noise characteristics and its modelling, I cudn't help but wonder at how efficiently it works out in practice, not withstanding our incomplete understanding of the physical world..

Probability!! when I first studied it in school, I never imagined it wud be so useful in the practical real world.. guess it comes from my incomplete understanding of the concept. The first example everyone is told in probability class is certainly misleading.. atleast to me.. when you toss a coin, we are told it's equally probable for the outcome to be either heads or tails.. and intuitively, though it seemed true and trivial.. I had a nagging sense of doubt that if the conditions were all exactly the same, there is no reason for the outcome to be different in different experiments!

And isn't it true?? and does this not apply to any event? Why would/should there be any scope for randomness in the world? Is it not our incapability to model the complexities in modelling the coin toss correctly that is leading to this probaility explanation?

If we were to know exactly the intial conditions and the physics of tossin the coin, we should certainly be able to predict the outcome, without having to to resort to any probabilistic explanation.. so where does probability come into the picture in our coin tossing experiment?

Now let's change the experiment slightly.. let's say 1000 people are given the coins and are asked to toss without any other instructions.. then, we wud intuitively expect half the outcomes to be heads and the other half to be tails! and well, it actually does turn out to be true..

Why does this happen? as mentioned earlier, for any single toss, the outcome is not random, but is a function of how we toss the coin and what the experimental conditions are.. so there seems to be no reason to expect half the outcomes to be heads and the other half tails!! shouldn't the outcome depend on the mood of the individuals selected for the experiment and on the experimental conditions??
But assuming a random selection of individuals and normal experimental conditions, the outcome almost always adheres to our basic intuition.. so what's happening here?

Guess the theory says that the small disturbances in the experimental conditions, which affect the outcome, can be modelled as random noise which will determine the outcome as either heads or tails with equal probability and it turns out to be truel in reality.. so, in effect, our inability to exactly model the process, is overcome with this wonderful probability theory. and very often, we really don't need all the fine details of the physical process for our applications.. so we can save all our energies and time by cleverly incorporating this theory of probability!!