Reading biographies are always a great source of inspiration - esp. if it is one of the most famous scientists of the 20th century. Walter Isaacson is a meticulous writer who keeps you gripped to the story. I have read 2 biographies by him now - Albert Einstein and Steve Jobs - and both are outstanding. Few key takeaways for me from Einstein biographies were:

1. Einstein had tough initial days and people were not willing to give him a permanent job. He had to resort to taking part-time tuition to meet his financial needs. Even though, by this time he had published his now famous 1905 paper on Special Relativity. But this didn't ruffle Einstein and he was happy publishing his papers and working on his equations.

2. Non-Conformity - Einstein had a rebellious trait and always challenged existing beliefs and authorities. It served him well, as he was able to challenge the concept of time when in those times Time was considered sacrosanct, as laid down by Newton.

3. In spite of his intelligence, he had a tough family life and had a difficult time maintaining cordial relations with his 2 wives. Shows his fallibility or human-ness. Even Einstein was not perfect.

4. He laid a lot of emphasis on individual freedom and abhorred any authoritarian regimes. He was a proponent of pacifism. Even though fate would have that, his inspiration led to the formation of the team which eventually discovered atom bomb.

5. He spent a lot of time in his later life trying to disprove quantum mechanics, though there was increasing experimental evidence in its support. Basically, after 1920 he didn't produce anything of significance. In a way, the belief that led him to discover relativity - that Nature is governed by simple, elegant laws - made it very difficult to accept that the world can be better described by probabilities of Quantum Mechanics.

In his own words " God doesn't play dice" - was his ardent belief. He believed that there is an independent "reality" which exists independent of the observer, while quantum mechanics was suggesting that - what is observed is dependent on the observer and there is no "reality" independent of the observer

These are the books I intend to read in January

• Rebooting India by Viral Shah & Nandan Nilekani
• Predictably Irrational by Dan Ariely

Occasional

• Tools of Titans by Tim Ferris

This post is a result of my new resolve to write down and analyse my experiences and learning from books or series or any other source. My intention is to force myself to have deeper thinking and forming an opinion on topics - and taking bets on them, rather than just consuming content. So here goes.

Recently finished Watching the series WestWorld and it gave me lots of food for thought. Sharing some points here.

1. Backstory

In WestWorld, all 'hosts' were given a 'backstory' which were the memories which give them a sense of conscience. How true are our memories? As Daniel Kahneman and others have shown, the stories we tell ourselves are weaved by the narrative self. It is not an accurate descriptor of our actual experience, but depends a lot on how it ended.

2. Concept of time - Is time something real or just a mental construct? - Loops in the park stories in WestWorld had many stories running parallely sometimes involving the same characters. Time Arrow

3. Anchor

4. Suffering as a key ingredient for rise of consciousness

One of the key insights of the creators of the park was that suffering led to consciousness of the AIs. We also feel more alive when we are suffering, we get a sense of our being alive. Why so? If sadness gives us consciousness, why is the world running chasing happiness?

5. Superiority of Consciousness of Human Beings vs AI - When one the AIs got consciousness, they asked Ford, the creator, what is the difference between their consciousness and human's? What are they missing? Ford said nothing, they are not missing anything. Then why do we feel that we have something which others don't? Even in Indian yoga tradition, human life is considered a special life from which there is a chance to get moksha or nirvana. Why?

Is it just because this story is created by us, so by default we are special in our own imagination.

6. What will Human Beings do - when(if) day to day struggles of earning and surviving are gone? What will be their prime driving force? - In Westworld, it was mentioned that the outside world had become "soft" and there was nothing which made people feel "alive". That's why they came to the park to do things and feel alive. What happens when people don't need to struggle for survival any more? What would they do?

Have been reading a bit about consciousness and it seems that the following topics are closely related:

1. Consciousness
2. Brain
3. Meditation/Yoga
4. Quantum Mechanics

One of the big question which prompted this line of enquiry was the discussion which I read in the book “Homo Deus” -

How does a network of billions of neurons lead to a consciousness? How does the “I” originate?

The question is more complex than it looks like and surprisingly, from what I have learned till now, there doesn’t seem to be a consensus on the answer.

Different disciplines try to approach this in different ways. The growing feeling which I get from following the different lines of thought is that the current “real world” which we perceive is a very small microcosm of the complete set of “realities” which can be there. As we relax the small set of conditions in which we spend most of our lives, the perceived reality changes dramatically.

For example, the concept of Time which we take for granted in everyday lives is not so simple. Einsteinian physics demonstrates how the concept of time changes dramatically as objects start traveling close to the speed of light. Time can dilate or run fast.

The states of awareness which we perceive when awake is just one of the many states of awareness. According to Mandukya Upanishad, there are 4 states of awareness:

1.Wakefulness

2.Dream

3.Sleep

4.Turiya - Pure Consciousness

While the first 3 are states which most of us are aware of, the 4th state is a state of complete awareness () achieved by people doing meditations. These different states are confirmed by different EEG signatures, as confirmed by many researchers on meditation. So, there is a biological correlation with different states of consciousness. But the causality is more difficult to establish.

Does the mind lead to different EEG signals, or does the different firings of neurons lead to a different level of awareness?

According to one hypothesis, the consciousness is a by-product of the humming of different neurons. It is not the intended effect but a side product which emerges in the process.

This is also the classical mind-body debate. There can be 2 solutions:

1. Monism - Only one of Mind or Body is real and the second is the manifestation of the first or vice versa
2. Dualism - Mind and Body are two different entities

Does the brain(body) give rise to mind? In that case is mind a different entity than brain?

A closely related topic, which is starkly showcased in one of the stories() in The Complete Robot by Isaac Asimov is the emergence of consciousness at advanced level of intelligence. Basically, once computers get sufficiently advanced - they develop a “consciousness” which has similar electromagnetic signatures to what we currently refer to as “consciousness”

If “consciousness” is an emergent property of a high level of intelligence, then it could be just as well possible that human beings are just highly intelligent organic computers created by some more intelligent species. Similar to how we have created computers. That lends credence to the SIM theory which even Elon Musk supports, that our current world is just a simulation.

An enquiry into these issues, makes me feel that the real world which we perceive is just so much a function of how we think about it, rather than what it actually is. The writings of Upanishads which seemed a lot of mumbo-jumbo to me some years back seems so much more insightful now - as at least their language points to ideas which I have laid out above.

As Mark Twain said -

“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”

The same seems true for Upanishads/Ancient philosophers to me.

• Einstein's biography by Walter Isaacson
• Yoga and Kriya by Swami Satyananda Saraswati

Recently Finished

• Age of Reason by Jean-Paul Sartre - 1st December 2016
• Homo Deus - November 2016