Author: yuganka (Page 5 of 7)

Free Will (Sam Harris)

14 September 2016 / yuganka

Even if free will were an illusion, we would not be aware of this illusion

This book made me think.

Harris’s arguments against the existence of free will rest on two main observations.

The first one is that we assign a sense of freedom to ourselves by thinking over our past actions and saying – we could have done it differently. Harris says this ex-post method of giving ourselves the notion of free will is illusionary as we did what we did and there is no way to check that we could have acted differently.

This makes sense, but only because we cannot go into the past. If I were to be presented with an absolutely identical situation a few days later, I would be free to make a different choice. But here Harris will argue something along the lines that the two situations are not identical as your brain neurons aren’t exactly as they were the last time around. How can one argue against this.

The second argument by Harris, is that the choices we make are from a specific subset of all the possible choices out there, and that subset is chosen by unconscious processes in our brain which take place beyond our control. Where is the freedom in that?

This reminds me of something I came across a while back. Many kids do not like to drink milk and no amount of coaxing or incentives will make them say yes. The parents are given a neat little trick which often works. Just ask the kid whether he wants the milk in the red cup, blue cup or the green cup. They will fall for this choice subset and end up choosing one of the colours and viola! The kid chose to drink milk without being consciously aware of it. This is the gist of the Harrisian argument.

Again, I do partly agree with Harris’s premise on our false choices, but that only makes me think a deeper introspection will make the child see through the trick. If the child fails to see the false choice he was forced to make, it wasn’t because he lacked free will, but because he lacked the sense to look deeper into the choices he was presented, which could have saved him from that glass of milk. Harris confuses an ignorance of initial conditions with an absence of free will, and this is fallacious at best.

There are a few points where Harris is irrefutable, though. He says if I make a choice driven by my physiological necessity, I am not really free at all. For example, when I extend my hand and pick up a glass of water, then bring it to my lips and drink it, I take it as an example of my free will, as I could easily have drunk it from any other glass, taken it out of any other bottle, and even drunk it at any time before or after that moment. But this freedom is fallacious. I had no choice but to drink water, drinking beer wouldn’t have sufficed. I am bound by my biology.

One recurring chain of reasoning that Harris employs is that by repeatedly asking why something happened, we will fall into infinite regress and since some of the stages in that chain are events out of our control, the action itself betrays our being “free”.

Why did I choose A over B, given that no physiological reason compelled me to it – for example, why did I get down from the left side of my bed in the morning and not the right side? Maybe it was sheer habit. Or even if it wasn’t, we chose one due to some spontaneous thought in our brain which we had no control over (we didn’t choose that we wanted to get down from the left side), and then labelled our actions as suggesting free will in an ex-post-facto basis.

In short, Harris says events beyond our control (electrical connections in our brain) lead us to some of our choices, and then we retrospectively ascribe them to our free will. We can’t choose what we want to choose.

Our brains have finite capacity to process information, and to say that my choice of a specific flavour of ice cream from a set of three flavours betrays free will because that set of three was a product of unconscious neurology is to miss the point. Maybe in my life I have had ten different flavours of ice cream, and I consciously remembered only three of them at that point. That doesn’t make me less free even though I unconsciously (and without exercising choice) reduced my possible choices from a set of ten to a set of three.

I think Harris took our physiological and neurological limitations as filters that drive our choices by presenting us partial information. I may not be free to choose what I want to choose, but I definitely am free to choose any of the things from the diminished subset that my mind provides to me. And, in fact, that should be enough as we aren’t consciously aware of the seven flavours of ice cream we forgot, so we feel free when choosing from one of the three we consciously had.

And the moment we would remember that we had forgotten seven flavours the last time, our next choice will automatically be from the entire set of ten flavours.

We are not conscious of the “illusion of free will” that Harris talks about. When we are making a choice, we don’t know that we have a diminished subset in front of us and we do feel free. Doesn’t that, then, defeat his argument?

The Outsider (Albert Camus)

14 September 2016 / yuganka

Outsiders just are, they do not choose

Society is a funny construct.

For some reason, after thousands of years of evolution, man has formed this edifice to coordinate the mutual relations between its members, and the edifice stands on the principles of uniformity, common knowledge, customs and traditions and accepted and expected behaviour.

The edifice propagates because each member learns, consciously after teenage years, and unconsciously before then, about these very principles that drive and sustain his society.

But not all people are amenable to these influences. Man is a mysterious creature, insofar as his personal convictions and inner nature are beyond the observational apparatus of society. You could be a cruel, sadistic, heartless psychopath holding malice towards one and all, but if you manage to hide all that beneath an external veneer of empathy, patience and calmness, you are good to go.

Since only your actions (or the lack of them) can affect others, as long as your actions are in line with those that the society expects, you aren’t really considered harmful. Actions take precedence.

Camus breaks this very barrier in The Outsider. The protagonist lacks any kind of filter that could separate his thoughts and his actions. It’s not his actions per se, for you could find many people like him, but the lack of a filter between his thoughts and actions that repulses the reader.

A person’s personality is basically driven by two processes – if we were to look into his brain, each electrical signal would have its unique signature, acting like an input to the chaotic system represented by the entirety of the brain. However, man’s free will provides a counter-balancing force to this randomness and gives a sense of direction to his personality. Man is, thus, a stochastic system.

Each person grows with his own brain configuration. At every step, he is moulded by society, his parents, teachers and his school and home environment. This interplay means, a person is taught to make the choices that society wants him to, and an ideal social man arises. That this should happen in such a huge majority of the cases is the actual surprise.

Given this background, and that seven billion people live on the earth, it is natural to expect some members on whom this process won’t work, some members who will remain outside such influences, the outsiders that Camus is referring to. They are different, and they are not choosing to be so. They just are.

When Meursault does not mourn the death of his mother, he is not choosing not to mourn. He just doesn’t feel mournful. In this sense, there is no malice in his actions, no ill-feelings, and no imaginary feelings of resentment against his mother can be attributed as a cause. He just isn’t what society expects him to be. He is an outsider, and he doesn’t even know.

No wonder such a person will quickly be taken as a threat to the social construct, because he indicates that the social influences approach is not fool-proof. If Mersault knowingly did the things he did, it would have been an indication of his personal choices, and as long as a person is doing things by choice, his choices can be moulded to what the society wants, through one of many means. But if a person has fallen out without exercising his choice, there really is no hope.

Camus raises some pertinent questions.

Honesty is preached as the best policy, but the moment the honesty of a person crosses certain lines, or is not in line with (pun intended) the conventions of society, it is taken as a source of moral revulsion. Meursault, unknowingly, manages to cross this line and disrobe the hypocrisy of our society.

Our social construct will happily accept the most cruel and diabolical person as a member of its own, provided he acts properly and presents a face the society wants, but that same construct will summarily reject a person who, though not in line with the conventions of society, nevertheless doesn’t hold any malice towards anyone. The cunning dishonesty of the bad is rewarded, and the innocent honesty of even a saintly outsider is punished. But, to be honest (ironical, eh?), I’m not sure we can blame our society for that.

Outsiders will always be there. The social engine isn’t fool proof, and even if it were, it cannot predict the internal workings of something as complex as a human personality. Rather than being repulsed and terrified by such outsiders, they should be accepted as a natural consequence of such a system as the human society.

We must remember that man precedes society.

The Origin of Species (Charles Darwin)

14 September 2016 / yuganka

Charles Darwin, oh what have you done!

If one were to list the most important people in the history of mankind, few people would be as assured of their place as Charles Darwin. It would be safe to admit that Darwin shall feature in the list of the top five greatest scientists of all time, along with the likes of Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein.

His magnum opus, The Origin of Species, is an astonishingly vast endeavour. Let us try to imagine man’s view of the natural system before Darwin revealed his hand.

Man had observed thousands of species in all parts of the world, all well-suited for their natural environment. Each animal was well-fitted in the economy of nature and occupied a certain place, and the mutual interactions of all the flora and fauna in any given region formed an organisational web that felt more or less complete in-itself.

For naturalists at that time, it was impossible to think that such a (visibly) perfect system could have come into existence in any way other than divine intervention, and so creationism, quite conveniently, was provided as an answer for the incomprehensible complexity of the entire web of life, throughout the world.

Some problems, though, stared them in the face. How was it possible, for example, that many European species managed to spread rapidly and even replace the endemic species of Australia? If each species had been created perfectly for the place it occupied, surely no other species could be better suited to live in that area. Additionally, if all species were specially created for any specific place, which would imply taking into account factors like climate and geography, then distinct regions of the world which had nearly identical physical and climatic conditions, for example certain regions in the Old World and New World, should have nearly identical flora and fauna. But this is far from the case, if you were to observe the fauna of, say, Australia and South America. In fact, the species residing in the plains of these continents are as different as they could possibly be. Just imagine an ant-eater and a kangaroo standing side by side.

The theory of natural selection expounded by Darwin now seems so self-evident, that it is difficult for us to fathom what reserves of imagination must have been needed to come up with it in the first place. This beautiful theory says that there is a constant struggle for resources among different species residing in any given region, and the species that are more adaptive, more receptive to change will outlive others. And as they spread far and wide they will replace the species less well adapted – extinction is an inevitable consequence of natural selection as there is only a limited number of living beings that any ecosystem can sustain.

Additionally, the species which thus kill off other species will have more members, meaning more variation and they will end up giving rise to more genera from their existing arsenal than others. In short, the more successful species will spread more widely, and determine the future rise of new genera and classes.

This idea germinated in the mind of Darwin when he noticed how, within a few centuries, breeders had managed to create so many different varieties of pigeons. The Pouter, the Fantail, the Tumbler, the Jacobin – all these varieties share a common progenitor – the rock pigeon. Darwin observed that these varieties arose when breeders mated pairs of pigeons which displayed certain characteristics very strongly – the tail feathers in the Fantail, for example. This was a clear example of artificial selection by humans, who were concentrating only on the external appearances of the creatures concerned.

Darwin deduced that a similar process was happening in the natural world, where members of the same species, and species of the same genera, were locked in a battle with each other for survival, resources and their place in the ecosystem.

In this herculean endeavour, Darwin gives details of many experiments he conducted in order to find answers to certain questions – like, plants of how many genera may grow from a given amount of soil; extrapolating the distance to which seeds of various plants could travel across the sea aided by vegetative matter, and still retain their vitality, based on conducting an experiment that was basically a stripped down version of this process; comparing half a day old chicks of various pigeon breeds to see if some of the differences present in their adult configurations have been inherited at birth, and many others.

Going through the book I wondered why the word genius isn’t traditionally associated with Darwin. Einstein introduced a paradigm shift in physics and his ideas were revolutionary to say the least, but so were Darwin’s. I think it is because even a person with average intelligence would be able to understand the ideas expounded in The Origin of Species, were he to read it, while this can surely not be said about the theory of relativity. In that sense, Darwin seems like that erudite professor who lives next door, and who shares his knowledge in engaging lectures when the two of you sit down to talk in the evening, whereas Einstein is someone whose ideas we can only appreciate from a distance, but never quite understand.

The real and timeless beauty of Darwin’s idea is that his theory isn’t just restricted to biological systems, but they represent certain foundational concepts that will come into play whenever there are competing elements vying for the same thing – so there will be social evolution due to social selection (the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer), economic evolution due to economic selection (different kinds of economic systems work in different regions of the world based on the kind of society, culture and philosophies that drive those people), political evolution due to political selection (no wonder Marx realised the significance of the idea in how political systems in a given place will change over time), and so on. The list can go on and on and on.

There are some books every person should read. This has to be one of those.

Causation, A Very Short Introduction (Stephen Mumford and Rani Lill Anjum)

14 September 2016 / yuganka

To lead or not to lead, is that causation?

Causation is one of the fundamental forces that forms the very bedrock of reality and how we experience the world. Without causation, knowledge would be impossible as we would have no way to link any one thing with another – every object and event would have had a separate existence independent of other objects and events; inference, logic, reason – every scientific edifice would crumble. It’s hard to imagine how we could have even existed then – eating food, reproducing, saving oneself from physical and mental harm, nothing would have mattered.

Wrapping one’s head around such concepts is especially difficult as they are never directly observed. This is what Hume said, that our sense of causation is nothing but an intuitively developed concept formed by seeing a given combination of events multiple times – causation has no metaphysical existence, but is only a psychological artefact of expectation within us. Causation, he said, is an illusion.

With this background, Mumford and Anjum begin their book on causation.

In the chapters that follow, some of the common ideas associated with causation are taken up – that causes precede effects, that they are near in space and time, that they always occur together and the like. At a first glance, all these are indeed the kinds of properties and relationships we expect between causes and effects.

But lo and behold! It turns out each and every one of these properties that we relate with causation is flawed as, one by one, the authors start dismantling our notions regarding this concept.

But perhaps the more difficult part was to come up with replacements to form the new foundations of the crumpled and crumbled edifice. In the past few decades, some new theories of causation have entered into the scene and the authors then go on to expound the positives and negatives of those. Some theories, like pluralism which says that causation comprises of a combination of different things which depend on the specific event, or primitivism which says causation is an un-analysable event, a sort of metaphysical atom, tantamount to accepting defeat in the quest to understand causation, whereas others, like dispositionalism which talks about the “tendency” of one thing to lead to another, stand on relatively stronger grounds. Yet, at present, there is not a single theory that manages to explain causation in its various forms.

Does causation imply necessity? But then not every match strike leads to a spark as there are extra factors like wind and wetness of the match head that we forget to take into account. Does causation imply a change from what could have been (an elk on the railway track causes the train to stop and get late; but its presence wouldn’t matter if there was also a red signal), or can causation also exist in things that don’t happen (a medicine stops the onset of a disease, so did it cause nothing?) – questions like these keep the readers occupied, and by the end of the book, short thought experiments such as these help to extract the main components of the concept of causation that one might have.

A statement like “causes precede effects” is seen as being axiomatic. And yet, it is incorrect. Causes and effects exist simultaneously. Let’s take a sugar cube dissolving in water, for instance. If the cause is “sugar coming into contact with water” and the effect is “sugar dissolving in water”, then, the authors say, all the considerations of how the sugar cube and glass of water came to be together, and how someone picked up the sugar cube and put it in the water, are irrelevant from a causation point of view. The sugar cube will only dissolve when it is in contact with water. The effect can only simultaneously exist with the cause.

Causes do not precede effects. This was one of the results that really surprised me. And that is the beauty of reading such books. You realise that there are cracks in the very foundations of your knowledge. It is one thing to not know what causes X, but an entirely different thing to not even know what causation itself really is. It opens up one’s mind to the possibility of other such cracks in one’s conception of the world, and that is enlightening.

If reading the previous nine paragraphs makes you have a re-look at your concept of causation, I wouldn’t think twice before saying it may as well have caused it.

Notes From Underground and The Double (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)

14 September 2016 / yuganka

Two tormented souls

Notes from Underground and The Double is a book that brings together two works that, among other things, focus really on the uncertain nature of the human mind. Behind the external veneer of stability and decisiveness which man manages to portray in his daily life, sometimes truthfully, there is a whole universe of conflicting thoughts, indecisions, doubts and paranoia that lurk beneath. The fact that, fortunately, most of us haven’t seen that side of ourselves, or at least not so very often, doesn’t reduce its inborn potential of wreaking havoc with our lives.

Notes from Underground

I have always been intrigued by soliloquys. The very idea that, given a chance, a person could get down to expressing the most intimate details of his life, of his emotions, of his moral transgressions, of his agony and of his anguish, and maybe find that little bit of solace at having externalised himself to the silence, gives a sort of cathartic element to them.

Man is a social creature and any society will have its unique customs and traditions. Contrasted with this is the individuality of a person – his personal interpretation and experience of life. Naturally, the society can never come to know about all the aspects of any individual’s personality, because it is not possible to decode a person through mere selective observation. When left to his own devices, a person will invariably be someone different. Loneliness, thus, brings out the real inner personality of any human, not adulterated with the burdens of duty, morality and propriety.

The unnamed narrator of Notes from Underground portrays the pinnacle of human uncertainties. One moment he decides something and vows to carry it to its completion, and the very next moment he finds himself morbidly against that very idea. Quite miraculously, armed with the weapon of selective and biased argumentation, he is able to convince himself of completely contradictory views within the space of a few minutes.

It is clear he is dejected with his life and how it has panned out. At a few places he remembers certain events from his past that left a deep impact on him, and imagines how he should have acted, and how he would act if he were to face the situation again. This continuous jugglery of incidents with intentions, the actual with the imagined, gives a memoirical tone to the work.

The work essentially becomes an amplified version of the narrator’s extreme cynicism. His uncertainties in actions and thoughts, his indecision regarding what he is going to do, all paint a tragic picture of his predicament. It reminds us how in our quest to understand the outside world and other people, their actions and motivations, often spending way more energy than needed, we often forget to understand our very own selves!

As we advance in social and technological evolution, having lesser and lesser time for interacting with our near and dear ones, much less with ourselves, such extremes of uncertainties may be attributed to the lack of a productive engagement of the mind, but I doubt it’s as simple as that. I think such uncertainties are there in every human, only their tendency to get magnified is dependent on a number of environmental and behavioural factors, one of which must surely be social isolation.

The Double

Mr. Golyadkin, a Titular Counsellor, is walking along the Neva river in St Petersburg one dark night when he comes across a person remarkably like him. Lost in his thoughts, he only observes him passively, but this event soon changes his life for ever.

The Double is a touching tale about a person who is losing his individuality. He is insecure, agitated and always in an excited state. It induces a sense of pity in the reader to see the extent to which he is willing to forego his self-respect, merely to put his words and thoughts across. Self-respect and ego, it seems, are luxuries to be foregone when a person is fighting for his very existence.

As his ‘double’ starts interacting with his co-workers and employers, Mr. Golyadkin almost goes into an existential crisis regarding how to behave with him. What follows are his efforts to make sense of his surroundings, of the people around him, of his own relationship and standing vis-à-vis them and the said double.

Both the works involve a high degree of penetration into a given individual’s thoughts. As such, there are frequent ramblings throughout the book, and on a couple of occasions, especially in The Double, I found myself wondering about the relevance of the same. But again, what would be the point of reading a book if one could know the relevance of each part as and when it happens?

All in all, Notes from Underground and The Double presents a gradual unfolding of the layers of the human mind. Both the works have a deep message to convey – the human mind is fickle, our decisions often aren’t based on as solid reasons as we would like to believe, and, perhaps most importantly, how a person behaves is dependent on how he experiences the world – if one is unable to understand someone, it could often be because one hasn’t really tried to understand him.

If we could have a chance to look inside that person’s thoughts, chances are our condescension and judgemental tendencies would melt away.

How Music Works (John Powell)

14 September 2016 / yuganka

An Arpeggio of “Aha” moments

Do you know what is an “Aha” moment? It is not a moment when you learn something completely new. No, such moments are restricted to things that you think you know (whether consciously or subconsciously), but actually don’t know. These are those light-bulb moments that suddenly illuminate a darkened room in which you had been roaming for quite some time, and you end up realising that the origami plants on the window were in fact organic (I cannot deny the possibility of some of you having an “aha” moment on reading the definition of the moment itself).

One doesn’t usually get many such moments while reading. That is because we rarely pick up books on such topics since we subconsciously feel we already know about it. So, for example, most of the science books I have read taught me new things, but almost none have made me reinterpret things I already knew, to the extent this book has. One must note that the simple moments when you understand something are radically different from light-bulb moments. For example if someone were to explain, to those of us who have never played drums, why the notes of the bass drums last so much shorter than the notes of the cymbals, we will get the feeling of having understood something new, but it will never be that light-bulb moment, for we aren’t familiar with the instrument. But if you explain the same thing to someone who has played the instrument for some time, he will start nodding vociferously with a wide grin on his face. Say hello to the “aha” moment.

Pardon me if I have spent too much time explaining a term (the “aha” moment) which many people, including some of my friends, find very irritating. But this is really a crucial aspect of my experience of reading this book. As the pages turn, Powell builds up the lay-person’s theory of music, starting from notes, the alphabets of music.

Do you know what is a note? It is any sound which has a repeating waveform – which basically means our ears receive the same information again and again many times a second. This often, though not necessarily, has a physical basis. For example, when you hit your table, it will also produce a note for the layers and particles of wood will always vibrate in the same way (provided you hit at the same point with a similar force each time). That is why most of the solid objects give, more or less, the same sound on being hit again and again. Some of these notes will be crystal clear (like tapping a piece of good quality glass) while others we will hardly characterise as notes (like asbestos) – but that is because they aren’t producing notes but noises, which are themselves a chaotic combination of notes (and a different set each time you hit them) due to which there is no repeating pattern as such.

From notes emerges the idea of the octave (do you know the relation between the various notes in an octave?); the relations between the notes in an octave lead us to keys (do you know what major and minor keys really are? Theoretically there are many other possible keys, many of which have been tried at different points in history, and the fact that just two survive today is an example of musical evolution over the ages); keys lead us to chords, and chords to symphonies.

The fact that Powell has a great sense of humour adds to the experience of reading the book. It is not uncommon to find authors who try to sound funny but fail miserably. Thankfully though, Powell has a great sense of timing and execution in this regard and this lifts up his exposition by a few notches.

Reading this book was like walking into the kitchen with the chef as he told you the recipe of your favourite dish, and although you can’t make the dish yourself, you are still able to grasp the importance of each item, and its role in the final dish.

Now I know why the sound of a violin is much more rich and complex than that of a flute; why major keys seem to sound cheerful and minor keys sad; what exactly the role of a conductor in an orchestra is, and loads of other such things.

If you had asked me, a fortnight back, why plucking a particular guitar string at different places, without changing the fret, produces different sounds, I would have stared at you with a lost expression, and then blurted some random physical reason, in which I myself didn’t believe one bit. But now, I can tell you it is because plucking at different places leads to the generation of different combinations of harmonics, leading to a different sound.

Reading this book has enabled me to see an art form from a very close perspective. Many people love music, most of them listen to it passively, and that is not because they don’t want to be active listeners – they just don’t know how to interpret the structure of a given musical piece. This book is doing a great job of turning passive listeners to active listeners.

Talking about structure, there is one aspect in which the book does fall behind a bit. Towards the end the author tries to take up some topics, but does not cover them to the extent needed. As a reader I felt I would be learning them in slightly more detail, because of the importance of the topics chosen, but they are handled in a rushed, almost forced, manner.

However, that should not take anything away from the lucidity of the rest of the book and I am sure that by the time you finish reading it, you will learn a lot of new things you previously had no clue about – including why I chose this specific title for this review.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (Oliver Sacks)

14 September 2016 / yuganka

Popular neurology… what else do we need!

Oliver Sacks needs no introduction. He heralded a new generation and a fresh breed of neurologists who realised that every neurological problem, whether of deficits, excesses or something else, could not be hoped to be understood in a purely mechanistic way. Yes there are neurons in the brain, but understanding neurological disorders isn’t simply knowing which neuron does what, and then finding the anomalies in a diseased mind.

There is an inescapable need of understanding the persona, the personality, the person. It is important to step into his shoes and understand how he experiences the world, how he perceives and interprets and reacts to the world. In the absence of this approach, even attitude, one will only end up attaching a label on him and failing in one’s duty of providing any real help.

Sacks’ writing is filled with compassion, no less because that is how he interacted with his patients – seeing them as real human beings with crippling mental deficiencies and inefficiencies and not merely as a dysfunctional human body. He could feel their pain, their suffering, their loneliness and I think this helped him in improving their lives, even if a cure wasn’t possible. He repeatedly notes, during the course of the book, that patients must be observed in their natural surroundings – not in the hospital or the care centre – as only then can we see them in their true selves.

It can be difficult for the, for lack of a better term, neurologically sound person to understand what it feels like to have a neurological disorder. These aren’t the kind of problems you can imagine and get a grasp of. If we see people who have lost one or more of their limbs, we feel sympathy, but also empathy – we can imagine what it might mean to not have an arm or a leg.

But this is not the case in a neurological disorder. We cannot even imagine what the afflicted person is going through. Thus, sympathy is all we can offer. Empathy we can’t.

But do they need sympathy? No.. They need understanding and just a little bit of encouragement.

In the course of the many stories which fill the pages of this beautiful, humanist endeavour, there come sentences which touch your core. You stop being merely a reader and become a participant of the therapeutic process itself, even though, displaced in time and space, you cannot effect anything.

In the chapter discussing the titular case, Sacks hands to the patient, simply named Dr. P, a rose and asks him to explain what he sees. Now, Dr. P is suffering from visual agnosia, or the inability to recognise an object from its visual form. So he can see everything that we see, but he lacks the faculty of realising what the object really is.

Dr. P says “It is a convoluted red form with a linear green attachment”. When Sacks asks him to smell it, he quips, “An early rose! What a heavenly smell!”

Such tragicomic moments are common throughout the book, as the reader comes face to face with conditions he had never even thought could exist.

Sacks writes splendidly. His choice of words often lift up the narrative by a few notches, driving home both the debilitating and invigorating aspects of the case in question. Having said that, however, I found myself frequently referring to the dictionary to understand the medical terms that were being used. I have to admit that Sacks often doesn’t explain terms, terms which the non-specialist might be hearing for the first time. But, to be fair to Sacks, he probably chose this in order to maintain the organic cohesiveness of the cases discussed, which could have been marred in an effort to explain the terms at the same time.

Why do we read books? It is to come across works such as these that open up entire universes for us. I knew how incredible the human machine, especially the human brain, is, but did I have any clue about the kind of problems that can possibly arise in the process of a human coming into being? No! And yet, I know much more than what I knew one month back.

It is books like these that bring a smile within me, and make me want to hold those who don’t read books, by their shoulders and tell them, “This is what you are missing!”

A Tale of Two Cities (Charles Dickens)

14 September 2016 / yuganka

One of the greatest tales ever told

I had read an abridged and illustrated edition of A Tale of Two Cities when I was small. Over the last few years, whenever this work came to mind, two words would spontaneously come along – courage and self-sacrifice. I did not remember any characters barring two and I hardly remembered the plot. But whatever I had read back then had got distilled into the two words aforesaid.

A Tale of Two Cities follows the lives of a few people caught in the midst of the French Revolution of 1789. The men, and the beautiful young lady, would not have been so condemned and their lives in such a predicament, in any other time, their actions remaining the same, had the blood of the locals not been infused with the frenzy of the revolution. Public mood, so easily manipulatable even in times of peace, took such an extreme dualist form, with butchery in one breath and compassion in the next, that even the smallest and most forgotten details of the character’s lives came back to haunt them.

Some of the most glorious parts of the text come when Dickens compares the surge of people to a wave – rising and falling, ebbing and flowing. The imagery is beautiful, and one can almost imagine seeing that group of thousands of people slowly swaying to the tunes of the words of Dickens. They rise and fall, driven by an energy that feeds off the last vestiges of life left in them, for their liberty, equality and fraternity.

The beauty of any Dickensian work lies in the sheer planning that goes into the development of the plot. Every small detail is planned and developed at just the right pace (and place) so that towards the end, it all comes together beautifully. I can gauge two reasons for the success of A Tale of Two Cities, not only when it was released but even to this day. Apart from, obviously, brilliantly portraying Paris of the time, the novel manages to capture the individual human stories and feelings really faithfully. These could be two among many reasons why it is the best-selling novel in history.

This is the importance of classics, especially more so in today’s post-modern world where “every emotion and every feeling has already been expressed”. Paradoxically, we live in a time of scarcity of time. People want their demands to be met in an instant, modern means of communication like sms and emails have reduced the average number of vowels being used in words and some words and expressions are gradually dying out as they are supposedly too clichéd and anachronistic.

But those who read classics experience a bygone age when the real beauty of language was communicated to the reader, who would relish it and wait for the next offering (many of Dickens’ works were published in magazines in monthly instalments).

Using up paragraphs to convey or reflect on a feeling, long sentences to express one’s inner state, not only because fewer words were incapable, but also because the listener was intently engaged, flowery feelings that took a page to settle in, and which grew in silence, all these and much more can we find in the literary magic of these pages, much like other books written in that time. That the modern reader may not be able to relate with them is all the more reason to dwell in their beauty.

Slow down. Take a deep breath and read this book. Experience what it feels to see an atmosphere, an environment, a whole country slowly take form in front of your eyes!

The world will always ask you to hurry up, it will always demand more information in fewer words, in lesser time. But if you choose to always abide to these demands, then you will be losing out on more, than them.

Utopia (Thomas More)

14 September 2016 / yuganka

Utopia does not a perfect world make

We come across certain words during our childhood which are exotic, yet manage to find enough occasional mentions to end up leaving an impression in our minds. We may never use them by the time we reach our teenage, but we seem to understand what they mean, for the words are exotic, but not complex. Consequently, as one grows up, one forgets when one had first heard that word, even though it is not a usual word like an article or a preposition, which would naturally give that feeling.

Utopia is such a word.

Exactly half a millennium has passed, if only counting years, since this treatise was published. The scale of such a time period can easily get to the head, and even more so, when we realise that More’s words were so far ahead of his time. I’m surprised the work wasn’t labelled as being blasphemous!

More narrates the universe of Utopia through the mouth of Raphael, a sailor who claimed to have travelled with Amerigo Vespucci in the latter’s four voyages of 1507, and who was then left by him, along with 23 other men, at Cabo Frio, Brazil, for six months. From there, Raphael began his own journey and ended up reaching Utopia. By mingling his ideas with real-life events, More subtly saved himself from the aforementioned charge as he could (of course, in jest) easily attribute the ideas to (the fictional) Raphael, absolving himself.

More imagines Utopia as a place where all aspects of human society – administration, economy, polity, social cohesion, system of justice, religion, trade and commerce, employment and other such areas – are perfectly planned and perfectly implemented. Rather, optimally may be the better word.

The term “Utopia” conjures up a perfect place in our minds, where everyone is living happily, the needs of all the people are met, and there is no sadness, no misery, no agony. However, this is more a reflection of the kind of world we would ideally want, and not what this book, from where the word takes its genesis, presents.

Utopia is not a perfect world in an absolute sense of the word – it is perfect in the sense that no improvements are possible. Humans aren’t purely rational creatures. Consequently, a certain non-zero percentage of the members of our species will always end up committing crimes or transgressions of various kinds, moral or otherwise, no matter how perfectly we may manage all our other affairs. In fact, this is reflected in the very presence of a criminal justice system in Utopia. A perfect world, but with criminals? What is that!

Another issue at work is our very idea of perfection. Though it is possible to reach a consensus within a group as regards the possibility, or the lack of it, of attaining it, not a lot of us will be able to define what perfection is. We may have our different definitions or assign different meanings to it – some find it in the people around them, some find it in nature; some believe it is one quality whereas others think it is actually a set of many qualities; for some it is the process of being, for some of becoming and so on.

I have only listed this wide range of interpretations for a specific point in time, across many points in space. Just extend it to many points in time and across many points in space and you’ll see the problem. Perfection can’t even be defined.

As a species, our sensibilities, our moralities, our culture, our visions – all these change as we get exposed to new ideas and discoveries. Surely what we think as being a perfect world also changes from time to time. Equal access to technology and to the fruits of scientific progress might be something we list today, if asked to think of a perfect world, but such a thought was a logical impossibility barely a century ago.

The beauty of Utopia, therefore, doesn’t really lie in the world it presents – it has its own flaws which the modern mind would find weird, if not downright comical (for example the custom of allowing, before any marriage, the would-be groom to observe the would-be bride completely naked, accompanied in this tough circumstance by a matron; and then allowing the bride to see the groom accordingly).

What Utopia has given us is an idea – in our quest for perfection, we do not have the luxury of being indifferent to our very own nature. Utopia is administered so well not because its residents are perfect, but because they are disciplined and devoted towards their state and fellow utopians.

They are human, they have their follies. So does Utopia, but then maybe that is the whole point.

Longitude (Dava Sobel)

14 September 2016 / yuganka

Harrowed Harrison’s long and lonely battle for longitude

I have consciously nurtured an indifference towards books with tantalising taglines. I always used to think (and still do) that they are nothing more than a flourish intended at catching a potential reader’s, or should I say a buyer’s, attention. It is one of the myriad developments resulting from growing consumerism and marketing gimmickry.

So I feel at odds when I concede that my curiosity towards this particular book was aroused considerably on account of the words printed on its cover – “the true story of a lone genius who solved the greatest scientific problem of his time”. I didn’t know how grave the problem was back in the eighteenth century and I wasn’t aware that the principal solution to the problem had been the undertaking of a single man.

Longitude is a brilliant book, more so because it literally raises a man from his grave and puts him back into the limelight that he thoroughly deserves.

John Harrison was born an ordinary man, but his continuous and devoted efforts over more than half a century grinding away, gnawing away at a problem that had been confounding the greatest minds of his time, finally led him to an elegant, artistic and beautiful solution. On the first page of the book, his five major clocks, labelled H-1 to H-5, are shown. That it took him nearly forty years to move from the first to the last shows the complexity of the problem he faced. But honestly, it is very difficult for the average person today to comprehend it. Even after having read this book, I am scarcely in a position to imagine the kind of travails this man went through.

In 1707, four British warships, destined for Portsmouth, ran aground off the Isles of Scilly due to their inability to calculate their position in the seas. More than fifteen hundred sailors perished. This disaster shook the nation to such an extent that the British Parliament passed the Longitude Act of 1714, according to which a prize of twenty thousand pounds was announced for a method to accurately calculate one’s position in the seas.

First let us understand what the actual problem was. When out in the sea, the problem wasn’t of determining the real local time. That could easily be determined by calculating the angular distance of the sun or the moon from the horizon, but this wasn’t a very accurate method – there were plenty of minor variations in the movements of the sun and the moon to sabotage such efforts. However, this was the best method they had back in the day so they settled for it.

So they have their local time. Now, one option was to determine the local time back home at that very instant. They could then convert that time difference into degrees, and the degrees into a distance in miles, determining their position.

Another option was to directly calculate their longitude. At that time, the foremost method of calculating one’s longitude was the exasperating lunar method. A table was made which recorded, for a given location, the angular distance of the moon with respect to the sun and a host of other heavenly bodies, at intervals of three hours.

So, for example, if the angular distance between the moon and a given heavenly body, as measured on a ship, turned out to have a value that, for the same two bodies, was listed, for the home port, at a time that was a certain number of hours ahead or behind, the difference could be used to calculate the present longitudinal position of the ship.

The real trouble was making those detailed tables which entailed thousands of observations over many years to account for those minor variations in the orbits of the heavenly bodies. Indeed, some of the greatest astronomers of the time, including Edmund Halley, spent years recording such information.

Even with the tables in front of them, there were long calculations and it used to take up to four hours to arrive at the answer – and that was if the weather was gracious enough to allow them to measure the angular values in the sky at all.

Harrison’s solution utilised the first approach – he had to develop a machine that could keep accurate time irrespective of the changes in temperature (which could lead to expansion or contraction of the pendulum in the usual clocks of the time), the wild rolling and pitching of the ship (which could ruin any internal mechanisms which the clock used to keep its time) and which was subject to least friction (to avoid dissipatory tendencies). So that, even months into a voyage, it was ticking as it would have if it had been kept at the home port, effectively telling the crew the local time back home at that very instant.

No wonder his first attempt, the H-1, weighed seventy five pounds. H-2 was even weightier, at eighty six pounds, and H-3 was sixty pounds. It was only with H-4 that he was able to reduce the size and weight considerably though.

The book also follows the opposition Harrison’s clocks faced from the believers of the lunar method. To them, and indeed most people at the time, it seemed to be a magical device which miraculously told them the local time at their home port. To this, they favoured the astronomical method which seemed to at least show them how they were arriving at the value. Indeed, as Sobel notes, had Harrison produced his masterpiece a century before he did, he could well have been accused of witchcraft. Such was the ingenuity of his device.

The precise knowledge of one’s position in the high seas is indispensable for navigation. One wrong calculation and the butterfly effect would take us into a completely different place, especially in the eighteenth century when voyages lasted for months at a time. In that context, the work Harrison did was not only commendable, but also required courage and commitment. This was the story of one man and his lifelong effort to solve the greatest scientific problem of his time.

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