mere pass scanner hein na

My friend, artist, and colleague Abhishekh Hazra recently made a humorous remark regarding the neurological interpretation of creative force, especially in the context of artistic expressions. This reductionist perspective has gained widespread acceptance in recent times without much critical evaluation. He humorously referred to this syndrome as "mere pass scanner hein na!" - a clever twist on the famous Hindi film dialogue "mere pass ma hein" from Amitabh Bachchan's movie.

Abhishekh stands out as one of the intellectual minds of our era who continues to approach data and information with a Marxist socio-political perspective, unlike the reductionist stance taken by neurologists from their lofty position of scientific rationality. In their view, human expressions, particularly artistic imaginations, are often regarded as neurological anomalies or phenomena. Abhishekh's satirical comment delves into our collective dissatisfaction with the lack of critical scrutiny we apply to important questions in science within our contemporary progressive society.

The notion that the creative essence of humanity can be quantified or understood in a manner akin to diagnosing an illness with the help of a graphing machine is, in fact, quite absurd on the part of scientists. It overlooks the concept of collective expression, which is fundamental to the emergence of cultural aesthetics. While individual artistic expressions are undoubtedly influenced by cognitive abilities shaped by brain functions, it is highly unreasonable, at this point in history, to argue that cognitive reductionism is the sole defining factor of artistic talent and its expressions.

Nobel prize-winning neurologist Eric R. Kandel and scientists like him contend that cognitive reductionism defines artistic ability and its expressions. However, considering the substantial gaps in our understanding of the role of neural functions in the human body, even after more than a century since neurology's inception as a scientific discipline, making such grandiose claims within this field is fraught with problems and warrants rigorous critical examination.

political leaders

In my younger days, I had great respect for leaders, specifically political leaders. I used to believe that they make our life better and that they have ideas and ideologies that can transform societies. As I grew older, although my interest in politics remains intact, I left with no respect for any political leaders. Political leaders represent nothing in their life, but their self-interests and their greed for power. They justify their every act of unethical compromise and criminal acts in their life for power as the essential price that we expected to pay for our ideology. The achievement of their greed and power, they will articulate and convince us as the triumph of our faith, so much so that they will make us sacrifice our faith in humanity and become zombies, who can hate or kill a fellow human being for their race, religion, caste, language and politics, to retain these leaders' rights to remain in their position. They will convince us that, their luxurious living in position and power, is the victory of our poverty and their ability to remain in that position is governance. They will have no morality, ethics, principles or any human values left in them once they reach their aspired positions of power. Furthermore, they will collectively represent what a human being should never be. Over a period in history, these monsters with no moral and ethical values have turned every possible society in this world into their constituencies that believe worthiness in terms of positions of power and possessions of greed in such a system is the most essential achievement of the citizen, and in turn, our normalised blue color and white color crimes in our attempt to achieve those positions become as the unavoidable "valued" reality. We start celebrating this process of our dehumanisation as the leadership quality or achievement of our lives and thereby the circle of social degeneration of the society presided over by these political leaders in power, becomes complete.

We don't realise the enormity of this degeneration until we do make attempts to reflect upon and evaluate the eagerness of the youth to spend their hard-earned money and life on drugs to become unconscious or insane. We don't realise what we have become as human beings, until somebody comes and tells us simple facts of life, such as "tell truth", "love your neighbour" and so on and so forth, that become gospels of life and those who say become messiahs. We are not shocked anymore to believe that paying a few thousand rupees to people to take a course on some method of breathing will make us happy or pay a few lakhs of rupees to do a few days of courses on some management tools called spiritual engineering will make us a person with inner bliss!

As one should reject or have no value for the political leaders for this monumental erosion of values in society and its degeneration, at the same time, one should not stop loving and respecting politics for its ability to question the power, and powerful, and make them accountable for their misdeeds. Let us not forget that politics and politics for power are two completely different things.

Issues of AI

 Although an exciting book with many thought experiments, I often get baffled by technocrats' and futurists' obsession with reductionism as a philosophy, approach and method.

Like all AI experts, he concludes that the human brain contains a hierarchy of pattern recognisers, and they are responsible for human thought.

Most design thinkers also take this easy route to deduct their analytical abilities. What these intellectuals often forget is intelligence is also about the human ability to generate lies based upon situational demand and stand with facts and truth in every situation is the role of the mind. This play of moral and ethical code of conduct between intelligence and mind is a far more complex phenomenon than mere pattern recognition or building.

Over and above, the entire architecture of artificial intelligence is modelled around the concepts of facts and truth or structures of the mind and not on the structure of intelligence. The day an algorithm starts to lie, break down a model, or conceal a truth, we will consider it as a program failure, because, in our idea of problem-solving with the least possible resources, where time is the most important factor, any interruption or delay due to an aberration(a lie) in the problem-solving is still considered a system design failure.

In other words, let us not forget that intelligence alone is not important in human life, the conscious application of intelligence is the game and unfortunately the idea of consciousness is still stuck in the old schools of spirituality and religious mysticism in our world. It will take a very long time for technology to understand and decipher this aspect of consciousness in intelligence. Until then, all these loud noises about AI are only marching towards another dot com bubble burst.

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Moon and a melting earth

Gold pigment on paper

Nature rejoices in nature

Nature subdues nature

Nature rules over nature

-Ostanes

8Sudheesh Kumar, Menaka Sugathadasa and 6 others

some excerpts from the chapter "Pattern" by Soetsu Yanagi

     

Seeing patterns, finding patterns and creating patterns by Soetsu Yanagi

...Intuition will produce knowledge, whereas knowledge rarely produces intuition...

There are many ways of seeing, but the truest and best is with intuition, for it takes in the whole, whereas the intellect only takes in a part. The pattern is born when one reproduces the intuitively perceived essence. When the intuition weakens, the pattern becomes no more than a formal design. Design as such is no more than an intellectual composition. The decay of this capacity of pattern-making today is due to a loss of the intuitive faculty.

The pattern is not a realistic depiction. It is a vision of what is reflected by intuition. It is a product of the imagination, in the sense in which William Blake used the word. The pattern is non-realistic. It may be called irrational. In a sense, it is an exaggeration. The pattern is not a scientific rendering of the original. Everyone knows that a bamboo grass pattern shows a that never could be. The pattern is the symbol of the plant, not the plant itself. It is an emblem of the bamboo, and yet the living bamboo is there in it.

The pattern contains the nature of nature.

The pattern is a summing-up of a view of nature.

On the whole, patterns tend towards symmetry. Symmetry is a natural and inevitable principle of the pattern, since it has its distant and profound origins in nature itself.

Real pattern is also the consequence of a series of technical processes.

Painting avoids patterns. The craftsman is essentially a community worker; when individualism arises, the paths of "artists" and "craftsmen" diverge.

In pattern, man gets a view of a mighty world transcending man. In pattern, we touch on the mystery of beauty. It is strange thing that nobody seems to have stated boldly that pattern and beauty are identical. To make something beautiful and to create a pattern are not two different things.

-some excerpts from the chapter "Pattern" by Soetsu Yanagi

on pattern

 (another take on the pattern of order by physicist David Bohm)

Thus far, the term order has been used in a number of contexts that are more or less known to everyone, so its meaning can be seen relatively clearly from its usage. The notion of order, however, is evidently relevant in much broader contexts. Thus, we do not restrict orders to any regular arrangement of objects or forms in lines or in rows( eg. as with grids). Rather, we can consider much more general orders, such as the order of growth of a living being, the order of evolution of living species, the order of society, the order of a musical composition, the order of painting, and the order which constitutes the meaning of communication, etc. If we wish to inquire into such broader contexts, the notion of order to which we have referred earlier in this chapter will evidently no longer be adequate. We, therefore, led to the general question: 'What is order?'

...

In this way, we are led to make an important change in the general language of description. We no longer use the term "disorder" but instead, we distinguish between different degrees of order ( going on step by step to those that have generally been called 'random').

It is important to add here that the order is not to be identified with predictability. Predictability is a property of a special kind of order such that a few steps determine the whole order but can be completed and subtle orders which are not in essence related to predictability (e.g. a good painting is highly ordered, and yet this order does not permit one part to be predicted from another)...

-David Bohm in the chapter-quantum theory as an indication of a new order.

4Sudheesh Kumar, Radhakrishnan A and 2 others