Oh GOD

Excerpts from a beautiful article from sci-am

"In the early 17th century a demon was loosed on the world by Italian mathematician Galileo Galilei when he began swinging pendulums, rolling balls down ramps and observing the moons of Jupiter, all with an aim toward discovering regular-ities that could be codifed into laws of nature. So successful was this mechanical worldview that by the early 19th century French mathematician Pierre-Simon Laplace was able to “imagine an Intelligence who would know at a given instant of time all forces acting in nature and the position of all things of which the world consists.... Then it could derive a result that would embrace in one and the same formula the motion of the largest bodies in the uni-verse and of the lightest atoms. Nothing would be uncertain for this Intelligence.” By the early 20th century science under-took to become Laplace’s demon. It cast a wide “causal net” linking effects to causes through-out the past and into the future and sought to explain all complex phenomena by reducing them into their simpler component parts. Nobel laureate physicist Steven Weinberg captured this philosophy of reductionism poignantly: “All the explanatory arrows point downward, from societies to people, to organs, to cells, to biochemistry, to chemistry, and ultimately to physics.” In such an all-encom-passing and fully explicable cosmos, then, what place for God?Stuart Kauffman has an answer: naturalize the deity. In his new book, Reinventing the Sacred, Kauffman founding director of the Institute for Biocomplexity and Informatics at the University of Calgary in Alberta and one of the pioneers of complexity theory reverses the reduc-tionist’s causal arrow with a comprehensive theory of emergence and self-organization that he says “breaks no laws of physics” and yet cannot be explained by them. God “is our chosen name for the ceaseless creativity in the natural universe, biosphere and human cultures,” Kauffman declares.In Kauffman’s emergent universe, reductionism is not wrong so much as incomplete. It has done much of the heavy lifting in the history of science, but reductionism cannot explain a host of as yet unsolved mysteries, such as the origin of life, the biosphere, consciousness, evolution, ethics and economics. It was therefore gratifying to fnd corroboration in Kauffman’s detailed explication of why such phenomena “cannot be deduced from physics, have caus-al powers of their own, and therefore are emergent real entities in the universe.” This creative process of emergence, Kauffman contends, “is so stunning, so overwhelming, so worthy of awe, gratitude and respect, that it is God enough for many of us. God, a fully natural God, is the very creativity in the universe.” "

What a beauuuuutiful explanation. Its been a very long time, since watching matrix revolutions 5 years back to be precise, I ve always been on the lookout for such explanations. To link science with GOD, the mere thought of it is so exciting. I ve watched the movie so many times that the final dialogues come to my mind instantly.
A series of questions from Agent Smith

"Why keep fighting? Do you believe you're fighting FOR something? For more than your survival? Can you tell me what it is? Do you even know? Is it freedom or truth? Perhaps peace? Could it be for love? Illusions, Mr. Anderson. Vagaries of perception. Temporary constructs of a feeble human intellect trying desperately to justify an existence that is without meaning or purpose! And all of them as artificial as the Matrix itself although only a human mind could invent something as insipid as love. You must be able to see it,Mr. Anderson. You must know it by now. You can't win. It's pointless to keep fighting. Why, Mr. Anderson, why? Why do you persist?"
to which our "ONE" answers:
Because I choose to.

Just shows the creativity GOD, connecting science, spirituality, imagination in a movie - the least expected source. Its such a wonderful world for those who really want to kindle the thinking part of our brains just like I agreed with our great Einstein in my very first blog.I really don't know wher I am going with all this and I don't think that I'll ever know. But still I choose to write this, though this may make no sense to you readers. My only intention is to share some avenues for thinking apart from sitting before this computer crap.

Why??

An incident few months back improved my perspective of this world, especially our Indian society, with so many traditional practices which people blindly follow. Lot of these practices have changed to suite the needs and interests of people. Without knowing the true intent of such practices, following them can be of no use. Deep thoughts can actually give you some startling insights about the acute thinking of our ancestors, and many of the practices can actually hold sensible even in today's context. But more challenge lies in refining the practices to know what would have been exactly done when such a tradition began to be followed.

I attended a lecture by a person claiming to be doing research on "Life" and "Regression Therapy". He eventually started talking about meditation and the feeling of a replenished self after meditating. The next day, in a biochemistry class, my professor tried to give a scientific background to this aspect, which made me start thinking more about our traditions. He said, "when we meditate, we try to control the thinking process and try to streamline our thinking, by which brain cells get some rest as we start to use these cells in a more focused manner. This leads to replenishment of the energy within these cells eventually making us feel fresh".

A beautiful explanation to Cosmic Energy. If we start thinking parellely for other practices, we may actually start following many, more sincerely than how we do now.We have a practice of applying 'vibhoothi' to our forehead almost daily. People consider it as a protective shield bestowed by GOD himself. But the real fact can be very simple yet highly insightful. Take for instance why we are not allowed to cut nails after it gets dark, or the famous "pathu paathram", where our elders take so much care not to mix up easily degradable things like rice with longstanding things like ghee, or much more complicated things like caste system or the emergence of 'untouchables', every single aspect of our ancestral society had been conceived keeping in mind varied factors. But sadly things have been blown out of proportion and vaguely misinterpreted when being passed from one generation to another. More pathetic is when we don't even try to think about why elders tell us to do certain things. Either we do it just for the sake of respect, or we don't, also for the same reason.

Now is the time when the larger portion of the society is getting a kind of exposure that our previous generation were far behind from experiencing. There is more option to dig out reasons connecting popular beliefs and myths. Its always better to do things after we understand their real purpose. Coming out with rationalizations for a practice may enlighten even our elders and can exempt us from some really hard practices which can have no real sense in today's world. Start donning your thinking caps and lets enlighten ourselves as well as those around us. Some of them can even prove to be viable business solutions for our budding entrepreneurs.

To grow innocence

"Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius -- and a lot of courage -- to move in the opposite direction." - Einstein

I ve always tried to keep things as simple as possible (definitely not this blog), at least to myself. It has helped me a lot in dealing with some really tough situations in my educational pursuits. But the more I try to do this when dealing with my personal life, the more complicated it gets. Never a day goes by without me thinking about the strange innocence of my younger days. Things are much more complicated --- atleast its what everybody says, though I am never in a position to understand why this is so.

Chemistry seems to be much more easier when seeing myself dealing with a social situation. I am kind of stuck in an infinite loop, where none of the parties involved are able to explain the need for such a behavior and why, being "simple" is the most complicated thing in this world, filled with people ready to give in opinions wherever possible without ever realizing their "unimportance && irrelevence".

I didn't face this enigma back in college where I never bothered to interfere into issues concerning "others", whosoever it may be. The first time I tried to involve myself in bringing people together (without ever thinking about how complex things can be), I realized the web of uncertainities existing amidst people and could never understand what is required to make things work in such a society. It was definitely a rude shock and I decided that I would be better off with a book of M&B rather than "waste" my time stuck in this black hole filled with dark energy.

But being back at home it is becoming a necessity to deal with such situations where you are not given any options. Friends for that matter are a lot more flexible assets. I also feel that now is the right time to try and understand how to deal with the uncertainties, more because now I have nothing to lose as I am still in my college life, but I am slowly starting to feel that dealing with things later can be more disastrous.

Throughout my endeavors, I ve tried my best not to be like someone else. I think the most challenging task would be, how different a person I am going to evolve being surrounded by people who desperately try to find hidden meanings and interpretations to each and every action of others to justify the person they are. It is going to be the toughest fight in my life to conciously fight the influence of others and emerge as a person who can be looked up and felt as "This is what may be called as simplicity".