Fear of Immortality

This is in reference to a post I recently read which talks about how there will be a boom in Artificial Intelligence which would make it as intelligent as humans and soon after that a lot more intelligent than us. It talks about the exponential growth of intelligence. It shows that AI would actually reach a point where it evolves in the range of earthworm to human in few years, days or even hours. Please read the really well researched post here.

A consequence of this Artificial Superintelligence (ASI) is that we would either become immortal or extinct. While this may seem like a piece of fictional fantasy, it is extraordinarily plausible. The top people of the world in AI are not debating on whether it will come or not, but on when it will come. And that too in just the range of this century or the next. Nevertheless, we are almost sure that at least our grandchildren will get to see 'beings' hyperbolically more intelligent than them. Beings which we created. 

While this does not appeal to us as we are not used to AI super-beings other than in sci-fi movies which we dismiss as full-on fantasy, what we might appreciate is that even if we don't reach ASI soon enough, we should, in the near future, be good enough in Nanotechnology and other branches of science which would assist Biology to the point that it won't be Biology any more. We would be making our own blood, our own hands, and our own brains. If you get your hand chopped off, you can order another from Amazon. If you get a brain cancer, you don't go to a neurosurgeon but an engineer who 'repairs' it to as-good-as-new. Our cells won't age. Eternal youth, immortality would not be words we just find in books. Something which Voldemort had to lose his soul for would be available at a drug store in plastic bottles. 

This being a brief summary of (my interpretation of) the attached post, I would like to build on how the world would be when humans are immortal. I hope you appreciate that we are not talking about Elves from The Lord of the Rings, but about a very realistic scenario when "love you till eternity" could be possible literally.

Life & Mathematics

Do you think you are better than me? Or do you think I am doing better in life than you? Do you think Steve Jobs was a better human than you? Or do you think that Hitler was the worst man that ever lived?

All of us are the same. All humans. All animals. All plants. All rivers. All rocks. All mass. All energy.

It is just as it happened that you are where you are in your life, and I am where I am. What Osama Bin Laden did was something that he did because of the shoes he was in. Sachin Tendulkar is no God.

We are just fragments of humanity whose life happens to be a particular permutation based on certain probabilities, which depend on our genetic build-up and the circumstances that we are in. And on how the universe has developed right from when it began to when you read this word. Osama was just the drop of urine which bounces back on your hand when you piss in a urinal. It sucks, yes. But it had nothing to do with how it happened to be the one in a million. It was just a probabilistic event. Something that had to happen.

We say that there are murderers in our society. But then, in a population of billions, there have to be all kinds of people, right? There have to be men who rape women, and then there are men who aren’t attracted to women. There are all kinds of probabilities that can happen. Therefore they exist.

We may be moving towards a more likable environment. But our threshold of utopia is also changing. Take a Neanderthal and have him sleep on a feather mattress in a closed room next to those he loves, with all the food he needs for the next week in his kitchen. That is beyond utopia for him. That is something that he couldn’t have even imagined, sleeping in the open every day, hoping that no animal tears apart the guts of his daughter the next day.

We will always have evil in our society. Because evil is something that is on the boundaries of our definition of good. And our definition of good is getting constricted every day. With each day, a part of this evil gets chopped off due to natural de-selection. But goodness shall always have a boundary. And on the boundary shall always reside some of those who we think are evil to the world.

We might be in a rat race, but what we are trying to do is to be in this central zone, as far as we can be from the edge that is going to be chopped off in the next selection cycle. We are hoping to survive. That’s all that there is to it.

If you think that everyone dies, you are thinking on an individualistic level. All of life, is just one. You, me, your dog, the tree on which your dog pisses, everything alive, is just one. We are basically branches of the first human zygote. Which itself was a section of the first bacteria that ever lived.

But what we have is this Midas touch that is making everything non-living we touch turn into life. And that is how we are accumulating our protoplasm. But the code that lies in each nucleus is just a minor variation from our parents. And these minor variations are what we call change. Change is everything. Because that is how these permutations happen.

Change is what led our forefathers to create Gandhi, Osama, you and me. Change is the cause of all kinds of branches in the world so that evolution has options to choose. If you want the society to get better, it has to see the worse too.

I’m not asking you to stop thinking like an individual. But just expand your mind and realize that you are nothing but a tiny part of life. That all of life strives to continue living.

Also, a word on extra-terrestrial life. We are heavily biased in our definition of life by the structure of the first DNA molecule that happened to be created on Earth. It was coincidence.

Outside our planet, there might be something very different. Something which hardly looks like our definition of life, but is intelligent and is conscious of its existence. It may have resulted from a very different molecule than what we are familiar with so much. And the difference that it would result in would be something that is truly unimaginable. Just think how different an apple and you are, coming from the same molecule. Imagine if the base of all evolution was something very different. That is why we cannot perceive life outside our planet. It is because we need to open our minds, not our telescopes.

Every river and every rock is life. They may not reproduce, but they continue existing. They may not be conscious of their existence, but are we? Do we know why we breathe or why we live? We may find individual purposes to our lives. But they are just things that we want to do. Things that assist humanity and life. Nothing that gives us a reason for our existence in this universe. Nothing that tells us why the universe exists. Nothing which tells us if this is even real. Nothing which truly defines real.

But as we live in this abstracted world, we love and we laugh. Whatever this is, it feels amazing. And as we live like Schrodinger’s cats, we may as well appreciate that we are both inside the box and outside. We pretend to know if we are alive or not, but what if we are just in the heaven of a long dead Neanderthal.

Schrödinger fuction for the soul

You know, back in the days when we used to be dealing with classical physics, the concept of determinism came up. La Place said that everything in the universe obeys a set of laws. So every particle in our mind, body and soul is obeying these laws. It has no option but to follow them which leads to a singular path that it can follow. This plots our destiny.

But in this century with the germination of quantum physics, the singular path has become a singular region.

Now we can wander in our own singular regions. But at least we can wander. A light cone with us at its center surrounds us. The only region accessible to any particle of our body. And it has to obey the regional laws. Not the pathological laws.

It's like our conscious mind is a wave. It can flow here and about but it ends up oscillating about a singular path.

The waves that we experience is a clear example of how space and time, and mass and energy are interchangable.

And we oscillate not just about some event in space and time. But about 'real' things too. Like sports, music, love, science and philosophy.

But what else to do in this life?

Imagining Reality

Why do we think that the real worlds and the imaginary worlds are different? Just because the real world seems to obey a certain set of laws? Just because we are so used to bondage, that the world in which there seem to be more restricitons seems to be more real than the one that doesn't?

If we can appreciate the laws of physics, why can't we appreciate the lawlessness of our imagination? Why do we have to concentrate on living in the real world so much that we forget that there is a whole new world out there to live in. A world where there is no limits on what you think, say or do? Just because we seem to have an illusion to be able to make a difference in the real world, why should we spend our whole life trying to do that?

While we may have an illusion to have control over our thoughts, it is, in turn, our thoughts which control us. Everything that flows through our brains is nothing but a controlled dance of the many subatomic particles which make it. Why do we seem to be so engrossed in our lives that we forget that we are nothing but unliving matter flowing in the universe like any other rock. We are nothing special that we have the audacity to call ourselves living.

If we truly can't verify the reality of this world, then why even bother trying to make a difference? Do we truly believe that making a difference will lead us to some kind of happiness which is nothing but something that we feel due to the same impulses which flow through our brains due to some uncontrollable events.

Then let us continue to live in our imagination, as seriously as we live in the real world. There is no difference that we can make which will help the universe in any way more than how it is supposed to unfold. Then just get rid of all these laws which we think physics has anything to do with. Instead let's be free, as much as the illusion of control lets us be.

There is freedom trapped inside you. We just need to let it free.

Cloud Computing

Ai baadal le ja mujhe
Iss gehre saagar se
Nahi behna ab mujhe
In unchi lehron mein

Ai sooraj utha le
Mujhe apni god mein
Le ja paas uss baadal ke 
Kho jaun main jis mein

Boond mein kaid sabhi
De mujhe yeh dua
Ban jaun main nami
Bahun banke dhuan

Ro de chahe phir se
Iss des ya uss samandar
Iss baarish ya uss barf mein
Iss toofan ya uss bavandar

Behna hai dharam mera
Jhaag ho ya kohra
Chahe jaise ho karam mera
Mera baadal vo raha

Listen to the song here.

The recipe of teleportation

Ingredients:

1 mind mapping technique.

7 billion attitude changes towards what we think a person really is. To realize that a person is not his face or body. Or sex or colour or religion. A person is his thoughts.

(The former should be easier to find.)

Directions:

Say, you want to teleport to your friend in France.

You ask her if she has a friend who wants to check out what a cool place your country is, say for an hour.

She mostly would (who wouldn't want to visit another country for free?).

You set up the mind mapping equipment and transport your self (which is nothing but the composition of your neurons) to your the teleportee's body.

And for an hour, you are in France, with your friend. And she with you, all of you.

Universal Music

This is for the musicians:

In a song, there is a structure. A tempo, a beat. A scale. This forms the base, the root of the song. If you deviate from the scale, or if you miss the beat, you don't follow the rules of the song; you don't follow the laws of the universe. You have to follow the rules to maintain the aesthetics of the song, you need to follow the laws to maintain the spontaneity of the universe.

What you do within these rules is what makes the difference. It is what makes the million songs in Major scale in 4 by 4 different. There are laws, but you move freely within them.

However, this free movement is only in space. In scale. Not in time, the tempo. The tempo is what guides you and what you can't disobey. While you can even enter restricted regions of the note cycle out of the chosen scale, you can't disregard the tempo.

The tempo is time. The scale is space.

And as old songs live, new ones are born. And none die. A property of recursion.

There are variations, nonetheless.

And infinite possibilities.

Every song is a universe.

All the world's a code

This is for programmers:

Imagine a loop. A simple loop code structure.

It represents the laws of the universe.

Now the space (memory or all our spatial dimensions) is being chucked in the inputs of the program.

And then it iterates.

This iteration is in a recursive function.

This recursive function gives different data to iterate.
This different data is the variation.

In an infinite Matrix.

And we live like it's going to matter how I care what you think of this post.

The Spectrum

Infinity.

Variation.

Recursion.

Iteration.

Space.

Division.

Singularity.

The second dimension: Division

Space is the third.

Let’s take anything stupid. A phone, is basically a product of electronics interacting with each other. It’s their child. Their child which is being produced out of their love for each other.
Everything is divided. Man and machine. Animals and Plants. The Planets and the Stars. The God and the universe. The matter and the energy. The electrons and the quarks. The man and the woman. The child and the adult. The love and the hate. The good and the bad. But some are just there. They don’t have a meaning; they are just doing what they are expected to do and then you are just doing the right thing. You don’t really need to worry about the things that you can do without even knowing. So just keep doing them and don’t stop because it will keep going and when you do it you are just getting crazy so that you can do those things in the best way that you want. Mac’s keys are like pieces of cloth. They are not buttons but cells. Individual universes. Which we press and we don’t press. The on and the off. The 0 and the 1. The come and the go. The live and the die. The know and the no.

The Animals and the plants. The body and the mind. The nucleus of the cell and the rest of the cell. The nucleolus and the chromatin.

The biologists, the physicists, and the chemists. Now there are three options when we can’t really combine them. It's an anomaly.

But it isn’t. It’s biology and (physics and chemistry), and physics and chemistry. Biology has existed since we have known ourselves. And those who weren’t helping life survive, they were asking questions about the universe. They are the physicists and the chemists.

We actually break everything into two, but never in two equal halves. There is always a bigger and a larger. When life was broken into two particles, plants were over the animals. But as time proceeded, plants started to love animals more than they loved themselves. And thus were overpowered by the animals.

Just like man and woman. Man was large, but now women will be larger.

Just like parents are above the child, once. But then the child becomes large. (This is like handing the world over to our next generation. We know all of us, all of us living in the world today are going to die. But we create more life that survives. We keep handing over the baton of life. Our life.)

First, we live like it is supposed to be, and then in the way of life that cannot be. The second phase is something that you can’t imagine. Because imagination doesn’t exist there. It is a world that you cannot see, hear, feel. You can not imagine.

This is the expanding and the contracting of the universe.

We always try to achieve equilibrium. But then we exceed and move in the wrong direction, the direction in which life can’t exist. The non-spontaneous thermodynamic arrow of time.

We’re lucky we’re still expanding. But then the anthropic principle: If life can't exist somewhere, how are we lucky to not be there, as there is no life there to ask this question.

I love this life. How I live it. The things that I experience, and the things that I do. Every time when you know what to do and still don’t know if you're really in control of what you're doing. I am my consciousness and the sub-consciousness. I am and I aren't.

The senses and the muscles. Even within the senses: Sight, smell and taste, and sound and touch. Even when you sleep or wake, one remains off and one on. One and zero.

Are you a zero? Or are you the One?

The fifth dimension: Recursion

I’ll tell you why.

Our universe which we see. We used to think that there are three dimensions. But then about 199900 years after life evolved to man, someone said that time is a dimension. Time is a dimension because it is something that we can move in. That we can perceive. Change. Life. Death.

But when I say that we can move in time, it is that we cannot control the way we move. We cannot say that we are moving with this velocity or that. We can only say that we are moving. With a velocity. Just like we move along any of the space coordinates we can move in the time dimension.
Iteration is the fourth dimension.
But we are three dimensional organisms actually. Because even if we have more dimensions we cannot experience them. Time is constant. As it moves with a constant velocity.

There are organisms moving in this dimension. Which can move freely in time. Which can easily move back and forth. And stop still.

We are just one of this movement of theirs. We are just one velocity that they can take. And we are bound to move with that velocity until our universe explodes.

But one such organism. One such organism who’s controlling the flow of time, our God, is also living in a community of such organisms. It has the fate of an entire universe in itself. But it is just flowing. In a universe of its own.

That organism is in the fourth dimension. It is living in a fourth dimension. But it is trapped by another. The fifth.

But then there will be a sixth and a seventh. And by induction, till infinity. But what if infinity is the fifth dimension.

What if this recursive world of ours is the representation of the fifth dimension.

1. The way we have a God. What if there are many such Gods of various universes. And they have a universe of their own. What if they are also living in a universe in which they don’t realise that their body is a universe. And they just continue to live in their lives, praying to the God of Gods. And this recurses.
2. The way our universe is just a ball. And it has other balls. Fiery balls, calmed balls, black balls, explosive balls, tiny balls. What if these are just the sub-atomic particles of the atomic universe. Which is an atom in its own universe. And this recurses.
3. The way we might be leading a life which is a moment in the life of another organism living it’s own life. A moment, not a minute particle. And this recurses. (Now notice how the last point and this one are just the same, if you see that time and space are interchangeable. A moment is an instant of time. An atom is an instant of space. An atom is a particle of the space. A moment is a particle of time.)

Sixth may be the variations of these recursions. But I’m still working on it.

This drug called life

Are we Zombies

High on this drug called life

As God experiments

On us and mice

Or are we soldier ants

Fighting all our lives

For someone who we can't see

In the crowd

No more of them lies

No more Human inventions

No more karma and the soul

I don't want happiness

Just give me the truth

And I will go

Are we Zombies

Cooked on this drug called life

As God experiments

On us and lice

Or are we soldiers

Fighting for our lives

Against someone who we can't see

In the fog

The people who wrote our Gods

Said that the world was flat

And the Moon was a princess

Of the Sun

Just for this life

Stop making up answers

Start finding them

For once

"Fuck this shit

Stop asking

Start living

Be hap..."

Happiness is not what I want

The truth is what I need

And I won't go so easy

Them lies, no more

Human creations, no more

No more karma and the soul

It's funny how I can sing this to you

And you won't cry

Had I said this in words alone

You would have denied

Anesthetize

"I simply am not here

No way I..."

"Shut up, be happy

Stop whining please"

We are anesthetized. All of us.

Stretching the cloth

In the future, say 100 years from now, when we'd be roaming around and about land and water and the surface of the Moon, in our Bugatti Suction field S100s, and when we would need to take a turn, we wouldn't be bending our mass towards the direction, but we would be pulling the space time fabric towards us. Not turning ourselves, but pulling the universe in ourselves. Thus pulling everyone in the universe towards ourselves. Or trying to.

We would be trying. So will everyone else be. And thus we will make the universe contract.

What we deserve

All of us are entitled. All of us are privileged. All of us have been given many things that we didn’t earn. Or deserve.

Do you think you deserve everything that you currently have? Your money, your beauty, your education, your intelligence, your body, the square foot of earth that you stand on, the square metre of earth that your body will be buried in when you die? Is any of it something that you have earned by the virtue of things that you did in your life? Or was it just handed over to you by your environment which includes your parents who in turn got whatever they got in life because of their environment. Did you ever deserve to be in the college that you are in right now or the one you are going to go? I mean it was just luck that you were born with enough intelligence and means to have reached where you are right now. This moment in space-time that you can shout your thoughts about anything you want. 

Life, the Universe, everything & God

It is rather strange how we define God as the limit: 

Creator of the universe – lower limit of time. 

Destroyer of the universe – upper limit of time. 

Perpetrator of the universe – upper limit of space. 

Omnipresence – lower limit of space.

Omnipotence – upper limit of energy.  

Omniscience – lower limit of energy.

Is it because of this fear of the dark, fear of the things we don't understand which conceives our need of God? Is God just our need to have an answer for the things beyond our understanding? Is God everything we don't understand? Will God's power keep diminishing as it has since science has been encroaching His territory? Or will we find new dimensions which are so dark that we always need God to describe them? God will exist as long as our knowledge is not absolute. And our knowledge will never be absolute along any dimension that we might discover. God will always remain, thus.

But is our knowledge really eliminating God even partly? Do we know what's real and what's perceivable? Isn't science just empirically proven philosophy? And isn't philosophy just meditation on God? Isn't everything around us just something we don't truly understand? Do we really know anything? Are we really here, now?

Fuck this shit.

Put a million zeros and decimal point before whatever you are doing. That is what it amounts to. But our world is just a few hundred times that. And to make a difference in that negligible fraction, we spend all our illusory lives. But what can we do? Do we have the power to make a bigger difference? Or to expand our world in this expanding universe? Aren't we limited to just trying to survive and reproduce? And in the way asking a thousand questions? Are we really living? Or are we just impulses in our brain? Are we defined by our soul, if it exists? Is it the new or rather old dimension, science is incapable exploring, yet? Will we know the answers in our lifetime? Or the lifetime of humans? Or the lifetime of life? Or will each of our sentences keep ending with a question mark?

So, go. Live your life. That is all that you can do. That is all that matters to our mind, body and soul. Let God worry about life, universe and everything.

Dust

Is this a dream we live in

Or is it plain lunacy

Is it a life that we are living?

Or is just fantasy

What are we?

But dust

In this solar syst-

-em, which is just

more dust

in the galax-

-y which is just

more dust

Throw me out of the universe

I want to see what's out of it

Is it God

God is it

God is it me

God is it me or

God is it you

God it is you or

Is it something else

Something else

Which we call God

But what if there is nothing

Outside the universe

Then where is your God?

I'll tell you

In the dust in the dust in the dust

There is nothing

Not understandable by physics, life science, technology or philosophy

Nothing is god

But God is not nothing

Everything is nothing

God is everything

God is everywhere

Everything is God

Throw me in the dust

Let me bathe in the winds

And drown in the sand

And drink the oceans

And eat the lands

And let me die in peace.

Dream, Game, Code, Life

I have not thought of this until now and will probably forget about this in the next hour. But I thought I would tell you this, because I hardly do. In the end, life amounts to nothing. We are after all just a bunch of unliving matter moving around without any purpose whatsoever. Only our minds give us an illusion of life and the desire to do something with it. In the end everything is worthless, pointless. Every good that you did for humanity, ever penny you earned for your country will all be a big nil in its contribution to the universe when the last life dies.

But we care about each other. We shall continue perceiving the mere electrical motions in weird bundles of fiber running in a highly complex structure we call our body, as pleasure, pain, love and hatred. We forget that it is all a stupid affair of trying to find the reason of the existence of the universe.

But if not have no individuality and life is nothing but an illusion, why do we care? It is just because we have got so used to believing that this dream is reality? And get lost in the concept of the existence of reality.

And in these moments of absolute ignorance,  the ignorance which leads us to forget how we might be living in a matrix, forget how this might be a dream, forget how this might just be a simulation of a highly complex environment and characters designed for none but you to experience. Like in a video game. When none but the person sitting in front of the screen is real. And everything is just a code in a program, obeying the laws of that universe designed by that developer. By that creator. 

So, as long we live, in this dream, you have played an important part. As we move further to the end of our mental activity, no matter how much you become a person I would have hated, I would love you. Thank you for everything.

No, I am not drunk.