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.