Author: yuganka (Page 6 of 7)

Nothing, A Very Short Introduction (Frank Close)

14 September 2016 / yuganka

Too much build-up leading to nothing

Nothing, or nothing-ness, is a topic intuitively difficult to grasp. Surrounded by everyday machineries – people, electronic devices, buildings – it is relatively easy to imagine what it would be like when all of these things are removed – when all the matter, along with the air, is removed. We call it a vacuum, but it still contains electromagnetic waves and gravity waves (if they exist).

To get a grip on true nothingness, we have to remove even those fields from that space – only then can we even hope to start delving into our quest of understanding nothingness.

Naturally, when I picked up the book, I was more interested in finding answers to questions like – what does it mean for something to exist, how can something arise from nothing, does empty space have nothingness or does it have other additional characteristics, and the like. I knew most of these questions would ultimately lead me into the quantum world, and the fluctuations that characterise even seemingly empty space. The answer to nothingness lies there.

To my utter dismay, however, the author spent nearly seventy percent of the book’s length in building up to the topic. It is, finally, around page 100 that the quantum weirdness is first taken up for discussion. For a book of three or four hundred pages, it could have been tolerated. But for a book which doesn’t even reach 150 pages, this was inexcusable.

We find ourselves reading a short history of the development of science since Newton. Newtonian mechanics, concept of ether, electromagnetic theory, Michelson-Morley experiment and rejection of ether, quantum theory, Einstein’s radical thought experiment of catching up with a light-wave, and his special and general theories of relativity. Barring a few anecdotes in the first few pages, I learnt absolutely nothing in those hundred pages. What an irony it was.

Additionally, and it could be because of the sheer nature of the topic covered, there is a marked difference in the degrees of difficulty in the earlier and the later parts of the book. The earlier part can be understood even by children who have just entered the teens, but the later part requires much more mental dexterity which I clearly didn’t have. Whether I could have understood it if the author had spent more time in explaining what all was happening, is open to debate.

I feel a lot more time should have been spent in discussing the nothing-ness itself – the weird quantum world where the answers to the above questions lie. The author discusses it in the last one-third part of the book, but my dejection from the previous chapters prevented me from getting too involved with what I was reading.

All in all, the book misses the woods in trying to name the various trees it can see. The idea of nothingness is not discussed to the degree that was expected and that prevents the good parts of the book, where they do come, from having the effect they otherwise would have had.

What could have been a brilliant book turned out to be just about average, principally because there is a dissonance between the book’s title, and its content.

The Brain, A Very Short Introduction (Michael O’Shea)s

14 September 2016 / yuganka

Say “Hi” to the most complex thing in the universe

I must start by congratulating OUP (Oxford University Press). In 1995 they came up with a stupendous idea and started working on it. Today, twenty years later, millions of readers like me are hooked on to it.

A Very Short Introduction series by OUP is a series of books that cover a wide range of topics. I have read a few titles in the series earlier, but this is the first time I am reviewing one of them.

As the name suggests, each book aims to give a short introduction to a topic, assuming no prior knowledge on the part of the reader. The beauty is, the authors manage to give an introduction to even the most difficult of topics within the scope they have been given. Rarely crossing two hundred pages, and small enough to fit into the back pocket of a pair of jeans, this series is very helpful for any reader wishing to utilise the idle minutes he may find while travelling, or engaged in any other activity.

The brain. It is, within the limits of our present knowledge, the most complex thing in the universe and something that has emerged after billions of years of evolution. It has a hundred billion nerve cells – as many as there are stars in the Milky Way.

I concede that it is often difficult to really grasp the sheer ingenuity of our brain’s functioning. I can only say that, maybe, it is because our consciousness is itself an emergent property of the brain. After all, a prince needs a pauper to understand just how fortunate he is!

The book tries to give an introduction of the brain and its functioning from different perspectives – the structural perspective of neurons; the chemical perspective of neurotransmitters and receivers; the perceptual perspective of sensory processing and the perspective of how memories (both short term and long term) are formed (along with the differences in their formation and how it characterises the duration for which we can remember them).

I must admit, somewhere at the back of my head I was expecting to read a lot more about how the brain gives rise to consciousness. And a little bit less about the details of how the synapses work and get activated – the substances involved, the development of potential gradients and the like.

But the truth is, there is a certain dichotomy evident here. On the one hand, understanding the various processes going on in the brain is absolutely essential to get a grip of its internal organisation, from where we can hope to move forward in areas that could give rise to higher consciousness. We haven’t even taken the first baby steps in this direction yet. However, on the other hand, continuing research in the recent years has shown that even if we were to have a complete neurological understanding of the brain, it would still not be sufficient to explain exactly what it means to “experience a colour”, for instance.

The book mentions some exciting areas of research – such as how remarkably similar the mechanisms of memory formation are across various members of the animal kingdom. For example, research focused on observing how short term and long term memories are formed in Aplysia californica, a giant sea slug. The results can be extrapolated to humans, obviously with some necessary precautions.

The famous case of London taxi drivers having brains larger than usual is also discussed. It turns out that they have significantly larger hippocampi – a part of the brain related with storing spatial information.

The human brain, probably more than any other animal brain, is the perfect example of the marvels that natural selection can come up with, over billions of years. In fact, our brain has developed so as to relegate most of our bodily needs to our unconscious, so that our conscious thoughts can be focused on activities more crucial for our survival – dodging a car on the highway, for an instance.

Imagine being stuck in the middle of a highway, with cars whizzing past you at terrific speeds, and unable to decide whether you should be breathing at intervals of four seconds or three seconds; or when you have finally decided to make a dash for the edge of the road, your muscles start bugging you as they need extra power and, consequently, extra oxygen – and you are unable to decide whether your heart beat is increasing at the appropriate rate to deliver just that right amount of extra oxygen; or your uncertainties regarding the correct rate of blinking – you don’t want to spend too much time with your eyes closed during blinking when cars are approaching you at fifty meters a second.

In short, the brain is beautiful. It is remarkably well adapted to its purpose, unflinchingly devoted to its duty, and it is insanely underappreciated for the work it does. It never sleeps, it never stops. It creates you, and it can destroy you. If not a review, this last paragraph is certainly my short ode to the human brain.

The brain. Please appreciate it more, it deserves it!

A Brief History of Time (Stephen Hawking)

14 September 2016 / yuganka

The birth of popular cosmology

A Brief History of Time can undoubtedly be regarded as the moment when the genre of popular science (especially popular cosmology) writing came into its own and came to be accepted by the general audience. And that was principally because of the sheer profundity with which Hawking explained concepts that had hitherto been limited to the scientific community.

It is not that popular cosmology books had not been written before. A good example is The First Three Minutes, by 1979 Nobel Prize winner in Physics, Steven Weinberg. However, the way A Brief History of Time captured the imagination of the masses was unprecedented, and it is hard to find any subsequent book that has managed to do the same.

The book tried to tackle questions that are fundamental for every human, yet which take a back-seat in our everyday lives. Where did we come from? How did the universe begin? Is the universe endless? Was there a beginning of time? What is our place in the universe? Spend a few minutes staring at the night sky, preferably in a region where air pollution and smog aren’t restricting your view of the heavens, and you will find these questions resonating in some corner of your brain that has long been subdued to social networking, monthly bills and an overload of irrelevant information.

My interest in popular cosmology started when I read Hyperspace by Michio Kaku, where he discussed the possibility of the existence of higher dimensions. That was followed by The Elegant Universe by Brian Greene, which was on String Theory. I read a few more books, even read A Briefer History of Time by Hawking, which is an abridged version of this book, but somehow never got around to picking up the original one.

Having read other books on cosmology, I am now in a position to appreciate what really makes A Brief History of Time so good.

One of the more conspicuous tendencies of modern authors is to repeat things. You find yourself reading some paragraph, and suddenly realising that you had read something similar, if not identical, around a hundred and fifty pages back. Of course it is not like entire sentences are copied, but that whiff of familiarity is unquestionable.

It is not that A Brief History of Time does not have repetitions. But at least its repetitions don’t seem trivial – in contrast with those found in other books. For example, consider two questions – the existence and implications of the Cosmic Microwave Background radiation (a uniform radiation observed to be coming from all directions in the universe, and without much variation in its intensity, at a few degrees above absolute zero) and the relative abundance of force and matter particles in the universe.

In both these questions, cosmic inflation (the very initial phase in the life of the universe when, according to this hypothesis, the universe expanded extremely fast, leading to certain large scale (relative) uniformities that we observe in the universe at present) concept will need to be discussed. So although this amounts to repetition, the context in which that concept is now going to be discussed is different.

Considering the kinds of ideas that are presented in the book, Hawking does a very fine balancing job. The writing is concise and to-the-point. Hawking spends as much time on any given topic as is needed to properly explain it, and then quickly moves on to the next one. As a result, the process of reading this book has its own rhythm. Hawking doesn’t try to stretch a two hundred and fifty page book into a three hundred page one.

The one big complaint I have with Hawking is his introduction of God in the narrative. The first time he used the word, well into the second half of the book, it felt more like a restrained tongue-in-cheek comment. However, his repeated use of the word soon changed this feeling and I felt like he was saying something he actually believed in. In the few instances where he delves into the possible powers his deistic conception of god may have – for example at the beginning of the universe; or on the nature of choice he had while choosing the kind of physical laws the universe could have had to start out with – I momentarily sensed a positive Galilean twinge in his tone.

Nevertheless, reading A Brief History of Time , I felt I was back in the wonderland called cosmology which had first captivated me eight years ago in school. It was a pleasure to read it, except a couple of chapters which really went above my head, and it is going to delight any reader who likes the genre of popular science. This book opened the floodgates and paved the way for a genre where writers aim to explain the most difficult concepts at the frontiers of science to lay people, without resorting to equations at all. And thirty years back, Hawking had taken the first steps in a commendable fashion.

Ten Judgements That Changed India (Zia Mody)

14 September 2016 / yuganka

Decent overview of important judgements that have shaped India’s legal discourse

Zia Mody is a well-known leader in corporate law in India. The daughter of Soli Sorabjee, one of India’s most eminent jurists of the previous generation, Mody has tried to give an overview of ten judgements that have had a lasting impact on not just how our Constitution is interpreted, but on how it has brought large-scale changes on the ground, mostly good and, on certain rare occasions, bad (albeit, unintentionally).

In reality, it’s not just ten judgements but many more, and Mody has, quite smartly, clubbed related judgements together into single chapters.

For example, Golak Nath judgement (Fundamental Rights cannot be amended by the Parliament) is mentioned in the run up to the Kesavananda Bharti judgement (undoubtedly the most important judgement in the history of independent India, where Golak Nath was overturned and, among a host of observations, the most important one was the introduction of the basic features doctrine – some parts and ideas in the Constitution are so sacrosanct that they can’t be amended by the Parliament); S.P. Gupta vs President of India, 1981, (commonly known as First Judges Case, the most important takeaways from this judgement were, among other things, that firstly, the Executive had the final say in the appointment of judges, even if the CJI was against such an appointment ; secondly, locus standi was extended forever, meaning that a person did not have to be directly involved in a case to knock on the doors of the courts, a decision that can be said to have given birth to PILs; and, thirdly, that official correspondence between government departments could be asked to be produced in a court of law as transparency is an essential element of a democratic society, an observation that can be said to have sown the seeds of the Right to Information Act ) finds its mention in the chapter on Supreme Court Advocates-on-Record Association vs Union of India, 1993 (commonly known as the Second Judges Case, it introduced the Collegium system, where Chief Justice and the two senior-most judges (extended to four in the Third Judges Case in 1998) appoint the High Court and Supreme Court judges, thus giving to the Judiciary the final say in the appointments process).

This approach is not only smart but also constructive as each judgement is seen in the context of the time in which it was passed – what necessitated it, what was the climate, and the like.

As an instance, one cannot hope to understand why there has been so much hullabaloo over the Collegium System in the last couple of years, if we don’t know why it was introduced in the first place (in Second Judges Case, as a response to certain issues in the First Judges Case). Our understanding of the present is inevitably linked with that of the past.

The book does a decent job of covering the important cases in its understandably narrow scope. It discusses Shah Bano (which allowed female Muslim divorcees a recourse to claim maintenance from their husbands without resorting to CrPC; more importantly, it also opened up the discussion on adopting a Uniform Civil Code), Aruna Shanbaug (the debate between passive euthanasia and active euthanasia) and Indra Sawhney (reservations, and the creamy layer), among others.

However, the one complaint I have with the book is that it is not very comprehensive. Maybe that was the very aim of Mody – to give an introduction to the important judgements, without indulging in too many technical details that may repel the average reader. It is her literary freedom, and I am no-one to question that.

But, since this review is about how I experienced the book, I did feel that, without taking anything away from Mody, for judgements that changed the legal, judicial, social and cultural climate of India in such profound ways, the chapters are relatively short. That is not to say they do not cover the topics well. But it’s more like reading the contents of a really important book, rather than reading the book itself. Or like reading the recipe without tasting the dish.

In short, the book is a good introduction for those who might be interested in having a bird’s-eye view of the various cases that have shaped India’s legal environment over the years, but those looking for something a little more comprehensive should look elsewhere.

1984 (George Orwell)

14 September 2016 / yuganka

The crowning jewel of dystopian fiction

Right at the outset I must admit that I started the book with Brave New World in mind which I had read a couple of years ago. Brave New World , set in around 2540 AD, and 1984, set in its titular year, are among the foremost dystopian works of the twentieth century. It is anybody’s guess how a reversed reading order might have affected this review.

1984, at its core, is one of the most radical interpretations of left-wing excesses. In 1984, the world is divided into three super-states – Oceania, Eurasia and Eastasia. The three are constantly at war with each other, even though it is impossible for any two powers to combine and defeat the third.

Oceania is ruled by “The Party” which is led by Big Brother. It is not clear whether Big Brother is just the collective identity of the Party or an actual person and, for all purposes, the distinction is irrelevant.

The Party extends absolute control over its members, divided into Inner Party and Outer Party. These, combined, represent around fifteen percent of the population. The rest, called Proles, are “like animals that need not concern The Party’s policies”.

Proles represent the common people. They still live the way people used to live before the “revolution” – a period in which the most vocal, progressive, liberal and intellectual people having views contrary to the Party were exterminated. As a result, the proles have been reduced to a group that lacks any vision, any sense of awareness of what is happening in the world, and who still lead their lives lost in a smorgasbord of petty fights, neighbourhood chit-chat, pornography and lottery tickets. They can be easily manipulated into bouts of nationalistic frenzy as and when Big Brother finds it necessary.

However, the control of the Party over members of the Inner and Outer Party is absolute. Not even the slightest deviation from their expected demeanour is tolerated, not just in actions but even in thoughts and their body’s reflex actions – a nervous sweat, increased heart-beat, words uttered in dreams, nothing can be hidden from Big Brother, through the ever-present tele-screens which capture, apart from visuals from every house, all auditory signals “above the slightest whisper”.

There are so many parallel strands going on in 1984, that I am finding it difficult to interpret the book as a whole.

There is the dread associated with the possibility of losing ourselves completely to the control of the state; the horror of what all the state would do if we do the slightest mistake; the paradox of doublethink where the upper party members have devised a way to wilfully erase from their conscious memory all things antagonistic to Big Brother and his ideas, and even erase the very thought that they have erased something; the idea of Newspeak, how it works and how it reduces humans to “duckspeakers”; historical revisionism and how, if needed, a person can be made an “unperson” with all traces of him removed from all books, magazines, newspapers and any material ever published, and the irony of being unable to accept that the party members could be harbouring any real human emotions at all.

Indeed, the ideas of 1984 have so heavily influenced popular culture and public discourse that we have come across most of them even before having read the book. So much so, that the eponym “Orwellian” is used to refer to any overboard attempts by the state towards censorship, surveillance or restrictions of freedoms of speech and expression.

Not to forget, 1984 has given us many terms that have entered common usage like thoughtcrime, doublethink, Room 101 and, the name of the official language, Newspeak. The philosophy of Newspeak is very simple and effective. Gradually remove all those words from the English language that even slightly express ideas antagonistic to the Party and people will be unable to even conceptualise those ideas. How can you express something for which there is no word! So, almost all adjectives and most of the abstract nouns are to be removed. Science and philosophy and the arts are not to have any place.

This is by an appreciable stretch the most horrifying work of fiction I have read. Indeed, horrifying is the word many people use when referring to the work. 1984 conjures up a world where there is no place for freedom, feelings, human relationships, hopes, dreams and aspirations. It is a desolate world where, through careful manipulation since birth, each human’s basic instincts are curbed to the extent they become real puppets in the hands of the Party. They lack volition.

I have no way of knowing why Orwell chose 1984 as the designated year. In reality, the kind of technological advancements needed to have the sort of control the Party enjoys is possible but it is relatively far off into the future. In that sense, the narrative does induce a certain indifference in the reader at times.

The novel shocks us and horrifies us. It pushes us into a corner where, paralysed and petrified, we struggle to separate the flights of fictional fantasy from the foreboding of a frightening, far-away future. But in the end, it makes us introspect. And in that sense, the novel has done what it had set out to do.

Whether such a world could come to exist in the future is not the point. The real question is whether mankind will be able to safeguard the freedom and volition of its individual members, whenever the herd mentality of the collective threatens to steer them all towards destruction.

Will those voices, those dissenters, those iconoclasts be assured of their individual autonomies?

Constitutional Questions in India (A.G. Noorani)

14 September 2016 / yuganka

The Constitution has not failed us, we have failed it

AG Noorani is one of the most respected Constitutional experts of our time. In his long and distinguished career as a lawyer and historian spanning over 50 years, he has had the opportunity of observing many events that raised pertinent Constitutional questions. His voice serves as a beacon to all those errant politicians and Constitutional dignitaries, who, due to their arrogance, ignorance or sheer ineptitude, have failed to live up to the ideals of the Constitution.

This book is a collection of articles written by Noorani that appeared in various newspapers – mainly The Statesman and the fortnightly magazine Frontline – during the 1990s. They cover a host of issues – the role of the President , the position of the Governor, hung assemblies, anti-defection law (enshrined in the Tenth Schedule of our Constitution), Centre-State relations and the role of the Speaker in the Assembly, among many other things.

A country’s Constitution provides the basis for its functioning. Our founding fathers came up with our Constitution after detailed discussions and deliberations over a period of almost three years – they wanted to provide as complete a framework for the functioning of our country as possible because, being a federal state and a land of people with cultures as varied as chalk and cheese, difference in opinion was inevitable. That is why our Constitution has turned out to be the longest in the world.

However, any Constitution will also, naturally, be a snapshot of the economic, social, political, legal and scientific milieu of the time when it was made. The most the members of the Constituent Assembly can do, is to make the Constitution flexible enough that it can incorporate changes according to the requirements of the times, and rigid enough to not lose its basic ideas, philosophies and structure in the face of short-sighted and mistaken legislations and decisions.

A few patterns clearly emerge if we observe the political developments since independence, especially in the post-Nehruvian era –

States ruled by parties different from the one ruling at the Centre have often gotten a raw deal. The Centre has tried to extend influence in areas where it does not have legitimate powers by, for example, pressuring the Governors, using provisions under Article 356 of the Constitution for President’s Rule, extending its jurisdiction by an unjustifiably wide interpretation of the Concurrent Powers, and staying silent on matters it ought not to (and failing to keep its mouth shut where it should have) – all as required by its political or ideological interests.
In continuance of the aforementioned, the office of the Governor has been widely abused by the Centre which has appointed Governors close to its ideology. It has wilfully mis-interpreted the phrase that a Governor occupies his office “during the pleasure of the President”. This misinterpretation would have been funny if not for the serious consequences it entails.
The breed of honest politicians are dwindling day-by-day. Defections (sudden switching of loyalties by (an) elected legislator(s), mostly for some kind of a gain), as opposed to splits (a gradual, genuine ideological fork in a certain percentage of the members in a party), became increasingly common, leading to the Anti-Defection Law in 1985 (the problem hasn’t disappeared, though).

Noorani correctly points out that a Constitution is not meant to be interpreted literally. He quotes from somewhere that it is actually “applied politics” and any conscientious authority that applies or uses its provisions must be aware of its power to affect ground realities.

Noorani cries himself hoarse explaining, for example, that during a hung assembly, the Governor is not meant to determine if a given party or leader has a majority or not. He is only to invite the person who he thinks “is most likely to command majority”.

That any test of majority must be done in the house, as also ruled by the Supreme Court in the Bommai verdict of 1994.

That the Speaker of a house should ideally be impartial, but may not practically always be so. The authority he has under the Anti-Defection Law, where his decision is final, is antagonistic to his election by a majority vote in the house. Will he be able to rule against someone who actually voted him to the seat?

That there are double standards in treating the President and the Governor even though, under the Constitution, “The position of the Governor is exactly the same as the position of the President”, as said by B.R. Ambedkar in the Constituent Assembly on 30^th December, 1948. The Governor is often pushed into situations where no party or politician can even dream of pushing the President.

That President’s Rule can only be invoked when the administration of a state “cannot be carried out in accordance of the Constitution”. Notice the word “cannot” which obviously doesn’t imply a mere “difficulty”.

And so on…

The Constitution is lengthy no doubt, but it is certainly not as ambiguous as our politicians would want us to believe. Anybody with even basic logical capabilities will be incapable of so widely misinterpreting our Constitution, as they often do. As for the understandably technical parts, our judiciary, through its various verdicts, has mostly done a superb job of explaining and clearing them up.

Noorani’s book is a delight to read. He unravels the intricacies of Constitutional interpretation for the lay-man with finesse. Remember that these are actually articles that appeared in the newspaper, so Noorani was fulfilling, as I am sure he saw it, his duty to present the facts to the electorate and prevent them from misunderstanding the Constitution. Unfortunately, even today, a fiery speech by a leader can influence a lot of people even if it is completely incorrect in substance. Noorani has tried to correct this wrong.

The only downside, however, is that there are many repetitions. Some comments or quotes appear up to 5 times in the course of the book, many others twice or thrice. That is understandable though, as the articles were written over the course of more than a decade.

This also shows what a great medium the newspaper is for spreading ideas and educating the masses. Sadly, however, the market share of the really informative newspapers which present such incisive analysis is low. I lament at the thought that a major chunk of our growing population is missing out on such erudite articles, which could have held them in a good stead in handling the kind of problems India is going to face in the future.

Discourse on Method and Meditations (Rene Descartes)

14 September 2016 / yuganka

Modern western philosophy begins with Descartes. Do you afford to miss the opening ceremony?

Descartes has been called the father of modern philosophy. And it is not without sufficient reason.

A little background is necessary to realise the enormity of what he did – the “method” he introduced.

In Discourses, fully titled ‘Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting One’s Reason and of Seeking Truth in the Sciences”, Descartes discusses what pushed him towards his quest for a new way of thinking. Aristotelianism had been followed for nearly two millennia, with the result that each successive generation was learning its ideas without applying any critical thinking in the process. Attempts to question some of the assumptions or arguments put forward by Aristotle were not just discouraged but even throttled. In his formative years, Descartes could somewhere sense this rigidity of thought in the contemporary establishment, and, in his early 20s, he decided to do something about it. However, on closer inspection, he realized he was not yet ready for such an enormous task and so gave himself a few years’ time in which he travelled far and wide, interacted with people of different cultures and different classes in society, all the while observing their customs and ways of thinking.

“Discourse on Method…” is his exposition of the technique he developed and the circumstances and reasons which led him to it, while “Meditations..” is his attempt at applying that method in order to find certain and indubitable knowledge.

Among the many strands in his method, the common thread is of “Method of Doubt” – to doubt absolutely everything in which he is unable to claim certain knowledge, and then proceed with whatever he has left. In fact, he decided to consider statements even slightly doubtful to be on the same footing as statements that were manifestly false. This is a remarkable approach for someone living in the early 1600s.

Descartes starts by doubting everything his senses present to him, for senses often deceive us – the sun and a street lamp both look the same size when in fact they aren’t. This means he doubts he has a body; he doubts that material things exist; he doubts God for there is no proof of his existence (this consideration proves how serious Descartes was in his quest, for religion occupied a very important part in society in the early 17^th century – we all know what happened to Galileo); he even doubts mathematical truths for there is always a possibility that a devil is so deceiving him that he is able to feed this belief in his mind that mathematical statements like 2+2=4 are objectively true, when in fact they might not be.

However, even after he doubts everything, he notices that he cannot doubt the fact that he is doubting. That he is a thinking being. Thus emerged Cogito ergo sum, or “I think therefore I am”. This statement is arguably the most popular phrase ever written or said by any philosopher.

In Meditations, Descartes introduces a number of ideas – some original and some rephrased versions of those that had previously existed. For example, the Ontological proof for the existence of God had existed for a long time, and Descartes gave his own version – God is an entity greater than whom nothing can be conceived; existence is a positive trait; therefore, God without existence is inferior to God with existence, therefore the concept of God necessitates his existence.

His work also saw the emergence of two new revolutionary ideas.

The first one was Rationalism, the view that knowledge can be derived from pure reasoning and logic, without any inputs from the external physical world. Descartes never uses this term, but his methodology serves as a perfect example of this technique.

The second one was Dualism, the view that there are two types of substances – mind and matter. Humans, for example, had a thinking non-material mind and a non-thinking material body.

The rise of Empiricism in the British Isles, and Kant’s subsequent struggle to balance the two views has set the course of philosophy ever since.

The first time I had heard about his proofs for the existence of God, I had wondered how he had been called a rationalist. But what Descartes is trying to say is that a God is necessary for us to have any knowledge at all – the concept of a benevolent God ensures that I am justified in accepting the general beliefs that make life possible, for he is presenting those ideas to me and, being benevolent, he cannot be a deceiver. If I reject his existence, I cannot possibly know anything at all, as I may be being deceived at every instant of my life.

Descartes often uses long sentences, and it is a treat for the involved reader as he tries to make sense of them. Often, I would have to re-read entire paragraphs just to understand what he was saying, because they would amalgamate various issues related to the central message. If not anything else, the book would surely serve as an example of how to coherently present a set of ideas which have many strands at each level.

The importance of this work in the history of philosophy cannot be overemphasised. The two works combined barely reach a hundred and fifty pages, and it is indispensable reading for anyone even slightly interested in the history of development of human thought.

The Information (James Gleick)s

13 September 2016 / yuganka

Profoundity, Profundity

My previous three reviews have been thousand word monsters. Remarkably, a thousand words seem too less to capture what Gleick manages to achieve in the book The Information, even though all I am writing is a review. So I’ll have to find a shorter way.

Gleick begins the arduous task by trying to explain what “information” actually is. This is a difficult task in itself – for most of human history, the focus has merely been on the ways of recording information and not on the nature of information itself, whether one takes old papyrus scrolls, animal hides, cuneiform tablets, or, later on, the printing press.

He begins by examining language and how it represents information – how a finite set of symbols can in various combinations seemingly represent an infinite number of messages. From there, he charts the growth of the telegraph, developed for sending such messages over long distances. He mentions how its advent made man feel he had conquered space and time, and draws a parallel with the modern world – managing to capture the human reaction and response whenever any new paradigms in information handling, and consequently communication, have emerged.

He covers Babbage and Ada Lovelace, with the former’s conception of the Analytic Engine that could solve all sorts of problems based on “mechanical programming”. He discusses Watson and Crick’s discovery of the DNA’s structure – what genetic information is and how can an organism develop merely on the basis of the combinations of the 4 nucleobases. He discusses Turing and the history of cryptography – which began with the statistical analysis of various combinations of letters of various lengths (in a given language), followed by an algorithmic approach to find similar patterns in the encoded messages. And finally he moves on to Claude Shannon, undoubtedly the protagonist of the book (just to clear it, the book isn’t biographical in nature). Shannon, the father of Information Theory, heralded a new way of looking at information – divorce it of its meaning. For transmitting purposes, said he, “meaning” was dispensable.

In effect, all of them were trying to understand what “information” is; what forms it can take; how it can be processed, understood, analysed, and what sorts of operations are possible on it.

Dictionaries, code books for telegraphic codes, logarithm tables, programs, algorithms, DNA, internet – all of them, he says, are nothing but attempts at capturing the essence and manipulating the properties of “information”.

Towards the end he talks about the information explosion that has taken place over the last few decades. This has not only led to a (parallel) rapid advancement in technologies to handle, process, make sense of and apply that information (we live in the IT age, remember?), but it has also affected the way humans perceive information. It has clear psychological effects, which we are not in a position to understand presently.

“Information is not knowledge, and knowledge is not wisdom”.

Even if you thought you knew what ‘information’ actually is, which an overwhelming majority of us anyway don’t, it will still make you look at the idea from a new perspective. The kind of analogies, parallels and connections we are shown are too profound for a reading of one sitting. I recommend not finishing this book in a few days. Let its ideas seep into you, let the enormity of the messages conveyed make a gradual impression on your mind, and let it make you ask new questions – not just on new topics, but in new realms.

This is the second book I have read on this topic in the last 6-7 months. The other one was Information – a Very Short Introduction by Luciano Floridi. Undoubtedly that was a more erudite effort at conveying the same concepts, but due to the sheer size of the book – a book of the ‘A Very Short Introduction’ series (by Oxford University Press) rarely crosses 150 pages in page size octavo – the scope of the two works can’t be compared. Floridi tackles more of the theoretical and philosophical aspects related to information, whereas Gleick is tackling more of the historical and practical (read technological) narrative.

Pardon if my review has meandered too much. It is mostly a result of having too many thoughts and ideas from the book at the same time – and that is precisely what you’ll take back from this book.

Mankind in Amnesia (Immanuel Velikovsky)

12 September 2016 / yuganka

Velikovsky has bitten off more than he can chew

Immanuel Velikovsky has been one of the giants of pseudo-science/pseudo-history. Pseudoscience is an examination of events, happenings or phenomenon through a perspective which lacks sufficient supporting evidence, which is not verifiable to the extent required for it to be categorised as scientific, and which lacks clear and convincing proof. In essence, it fails to satisfy even the minimal conditions that the scientific community asks for before accepting any theory or explanation.

Velikovsky relies on a technique that can, at a most general level, be categorised as ‘comparative mythology’. By comparing the accounts mentioned in the earliest works of literature, the scriptures of various religions, and the myths and legends prevalent in various parts of the world, he tries to understand the world of antiquity and reconstruct events that, supposedly, actually happened, but which gradually got lost in folklore and metaphors used in all of the above works.

Velikovsky’s principal claim is that the human race has faced a series of catastrophes throughout its existence, including cosmic collisions involving inter-planetary bodies. Just like a victim of a trauma, who tends to repress memories of the event by pretending as if the event never happened, the trauma of these events has taken the form of repressed memories in the human collective, passing down from generation to generation.

Additionally, the last such cataclysm happened before effective means of recording information had developed. As a result, the knowledge of the happenings could only be passed down orally and thus took the form of legends over the centuries.

To begin with, Velikovsky must be commended for the amount of research he has done. He quotes from the Old and New Testament and from the writings of Plato with equal ease; he delves into ancient Egyptian mythology as comfortably as ancient Greek mythology. It is but obvious that rigorous research is a prerequisite for the kind of hypotheses that he puts forward, especially since it is predestined to receive intense opposition.

Therefore, the principal issue with the book is not in misrepresentation of facts, but in their misinterpretation.

Velikovsky starts off with a few pertinent ideas. For example, he says Plato was able to understand the violent past that mankind had suffered, and repeatedly tried to give such signs through his writings. However, his disciple Aristotle could never agree with his teacher and tried to spread uniformitarianism, for example, by giving the idea of Celestial Spheres, according to which the stars and planets were so placed that no collision among them was even theoretically possible – thus being diametrically opposed to the supposed ideas of his predecessor.

Again, he quotes from the journals of Darwin where he noted observing collections of bones of dead animals of a wide range of species – both extinct and extant – spread over large areas. This was clearly an indication that it was one single sudden event that led to their deaths, and very unlike the mass extinction events that took place over millions of years – for example the Permian-Triassic extinction event.

In both these cases, Velikovsky claims, Aristotle and Darwin gave ideas that were most suited to man’s sense of security.

Aristotle’s Spheres appealed to the people as it assured that they were safe – no cosmic bodies could possibly come hurtling towards them and end their lives in an instant. Similarly, Darwin’s idea of ‘survival of the fittest’ augured well for man as it almost justified the right of the more powerful and ‘fitter’ (human species) to exploit the weaker species (flora and fauna) according to its needs. Darwin’s findings, Velikovsky notes, touched such primitive parts of the human psyche, that they even readily accepted their descent from monkeys, if only it could assure them that their home, the Earth, was a safe and secure place.

However, in his zeal, Velikovsky ends up presenting such crude examples and tries to find forced patterns in such areas where, quite clearly, none exist, that the quality of the narrative nosedives into absurdity, almost amnesiac of the quality of the previous chapters.

He quotes Darkness by Lord Byron and says it is the spontaneous outpour of the repressed memories present in every human, Lord Byron in this case. He says psychiatry was capable of preventing the World Wars as the leaders were only falling prey to their darkest inner fears and repeating the mistakes mankind had made in the past. This is such a simplistic and reductionist interpretation, that even I will reduce my arguments against it. Then, he mentions the periodicity of 17 years at which locusts appear, and for which “no terrestrial or extra-terrestrial cause is obvious”, and somehow tries to draw a parallel with a periodicity of 104 years at which important wars have been fought since the start of the eighteenth century, with wars of correspondingly lesser degrees at 52 years and 26 years as well.

The appearance of locusts every 17 years has a brilliant bit of evolutionary logic behind it, which I can’t explain here due to lack of space, but maybe it had not been discovered in Velikovsky’s time. I do not know.

Then in some areas, for example Chapter 3, “In Fear and Trembling”, he goes into a frenzy of quoting from various sources. Velikovsky tries to find literal meanings in metaphorical accounts, and does this so often that it loses its novelty value.

Velikovsky’s work is pseudoscience for precisely this reason – after a point it is nothing but speculation. It stays consistent within its boundaries but the moment it steps out to be scrutinised, it stands absolutely no chance. His ideas are radical and revolutionary. But they cannot stand if there is not enough proof to support them.

The Trial (Franz Kafka)

8 September 2016 / yuganka

This review has spoilers.

Lost in Translation, Maybe?

The Trial is one of the best known works by Kafka. But it was also an unfinished one. After Kafka’s death in 1924 his friend Max Brod edited the text for publication. That probably explains why there is such a lack of consistency in the novel.

The premise of the novel is a thought provoking one. Josef K., the protagonist, is told he is accused of something. But what he is accused of, even the two people from the court who provide him this information don’t know. “It must be something serious, for why else would the court even bother to initiate proceedings!” they note.

Initially K. is skeptical. He finds their words so illogical that the only explanation, he thinks, is that it is a prank by his office colleagues. But slowly, as the plot unravels, he realizes he is in for the real deal.

Thence, K. becomes indifferent. He thinks the proceedings are a sham, and their very initiation against an innocent person like himself betrays the futility of them being taken seriously at all.

In due course, however, when acquaintances, strangers and even his business clients start expressing interest in the proceedings of his trial, he feels his reputation is at risk and decides to prove his innocence.

What follows is the portrayal of an incompetent judicial setup which works more on the basis of contacts than on the basis of justice. He is told that, for the court, his accusation is proof enough of his guilt, and it is only in legendary tales of the past that any accused has actually been acquitted by the system. The case is decided not so much inside the courtroom, but outside it through maintaining friendly relations with the court officers and the judges with the advocates playing a role of supreme importance in this machinery. So much so that Block, another client of K.’s advocate (who is very respected in his business) whom he meets at the latter’s home, has hired a few other ones as well, notwithstanding the advocate’s reputation. “We should try to get all the help we can,” he says.

Kafka takes up an issue which is as true today as it was a hundred years ago when the book was written, and has probably been true since criminal justice systems began millennia ago. That the influence an accused can wield often overpowers the principles of justice, in his favour.

But I have plenty of issues with the storyline. One often finds himself reading irrelevant scenes which have no bearing on the storyline, or even comical details which seem to make no sense at all. For example, K. has a sexual encounter with his neighbour, Fräulein Bürstner, when he goes to apologise to her for the behaviour of three of his colleagues, yet ends up kissing her on instinct which, quite strangely, she doesn’t mind. If this scene tries to show that she was attracted to him, then the presentation of this detail is rendered pointless by the fact that the next mention, of any significance, of Fräulein Bürstner occurs in the last page of the novel.

Then again, the court attendant’s wife attempts to seduce K., and is then, quite comically, carried off in arms by a student. And again, K. has a sexual encounter with Leni, his advocate’s maid, when he and his uncle visit his home. Remarkably, this happens when the two elders are conversing with the Chief Clerk of the Court, who could help in K.’s acquittal.

These and a couple of other instances seem extremely out of place with the storyline, for rarely does any of these female characters have any contribution in the bigger picture. If these are incorporated to portray K. as a philanderer, then the relevance of this trait is lost on me, in the context of the rest of the book.

And if these were metaphors, pointing towards something else that I have failed to comprehend, then of course the inadequacy is mine.

To add to that, the format of text presented a little difficulty in reading, with conversations often being presented in paragraphs, not in separate sentences one after the other. Maybe this was a hint that the conversations were difficult for K. (or he was not interested in talking with anyone), just as they were difficult for the reader to go through. But I am just speculating here.

When I reflected over all these things, I couldn’t help but wonder whether it was because I was reading a translated version. In translations, you never know how much of the author’s original creation is actually coming through, for it is conflated with the idiosyncrasies of the translator. Yet, the differences can only lie within a limited range, they cannot fundamentally alter the nature of the work.

All in all, The Trial was well below my expectations. The storyline fails to develop into a consistent whole and the irrelevant scenes spoil the continuity. But again, that could be because Kafka could never finish the work. He is brutally honest at places, and often says things that we may have felt in that position , but would never have expressed. And, occasionally, in the middle of long paragraphs, you would find pearls of wisdom, surrounded by the mediocrity of our daily lives and its harsh realities.

The Trial gets a hold on you, only to lose it, and then get it again. Disappointingly, this happens far more often than one would have wanted. Still, when you are in its hold, it provides a good reading experience.

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