Tag: civilisation

  • An entropic guide to history

    In the last year, I have read four ( + one) books that I thought summed up the why-what-how of humanity’s evolution very well. Respectively, The Case Against Reality: How Evolution Hid the Truth from Our Eyes (Donald D. Hoffman), and Being You: A New Science of Consciousness (Anil Seth) (my favourite this year), The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Ian McGilchrist) (first among my favourites last year), The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous (Joseph Henrich) (don’t worry, it is inclusive enough in this context), and finally the + one The Cosmic Game: Explorations of the Frontiers of Human Consciousness (Stanislav Grof) because while it is fringe science and despite the qualitative proof, I wasn’t convinced on the existence of divinity, I think our experiences in our non-ordinary states of consciousness has a connection with the ‘why’.

    The theme that unites them is entropy and ‘order’. Haha, school stuff, I know. So here’s a quick refresher. Simplistically, entropy is the measure of the degree of disorder in a system. The second law of thermodynamics states that in any isolated system, the total entropy tends to increase or remain constant over time. Our universe is an isolated system because, as far as we know, there is nothing else other than our universe; there is no external environment that our universe can exchange matter or energy with.

    Let’s begin with Hoffman. He points out how natural selection is the only process we know that ‘fights’ entropy. It pushes organisms to higher degrees of functional order to try and delay entropy if not offset it completely. Across a vast amount of time, it has tweaked living systems to not just be fit for survival, but also reduce disorder. But there is a trade-off. We don’t see reality as it is. He posits that “some form of reality may exist, but may be completely different from the reality our brains model and perceive.” Maya, anyone? He compares this to icons on our screens that are a way of interacting with the system but don’t look/feel/behave like the system underneath. They are a user interface that spares you tiresome details on software, transistors, magnetic fields, logic gates etc. And everything we perceive around us through our sensory organs and mind is just like that – icons that help us navigate. Our perceptions don’t even have the right language to understand/describe reality. Think of it like the UI or formats we have evolved for navigating the world, and there are different ‘languages’ for different species.

    The non-ordinary experiences – courtesy psychedelics etc – that Grof writes about , I suspect, opens up our brain to a different language and thus a different interpretation of the world. A perception of reality in a different language.

    Anil Seth also touches upon how our brain is wired for survival and the functional order that natural selection is driving towards. Reality is an interpretation, and the entire process is not optimised for accuracy, it is designed for utility. ‘We perceive the world not as it is, but as it is useful to us.’ A mechanism of making it seem real so we respond to it. Additionally, perception is a ‘controlled hallucination’ (phrase by Chris Frith), an active construction as opposed to a passive registering of an external reality. The brain constantly makes predictions about the causes of its sensory signals through a Bayesian process in which the sensory signals (also) continuously rein in the brain’s various hypotheses. Perception is thus a continual process of prediction error minimisation (reducing the difference between what the brain expects and what the signal provides) because lesser error, more order, lesser entropy.

    McGilchrist ‘s work goes deeper into the functioning. The right is present and pays attention to the world outside, the left re-presents. The differences between them are less about what they do and more about how they approach something. A fascinating perspective on how the two halves of our brain have quite different worldviews – the “left hemisphere is detail-oriented, prefers mechanisms to living things, and is inclined to self-interest, where the right hemisphere has greater breadth, flexibility, and generosity.” Relatively, mechanisms offer more control (order) and predictability than living things. Thanks to its ability to break things down into simple answers and better articulation, the left hemisphere has been able to grab control at an accelerated pace since the Industrial Revolution, and create a world where it prizes precisely these capabilities in individuals, institutions, and culture at large.

    And finally, Henrich, overlapping with McGilchrist, shows how cultural learning adaptively rewires our brains and biology to calibrate them for navigating our culturally constructed worlds. “Unlike other animals, we have evolved genetically to rely on learning from others to acquire an immense amount of behavioural information, including motivations, heuristics, and beliefs that are central to our survival and reproduction.” From kinship altruism and pair bonding to our own motor patterns to projectile technology and food processing to grammar and social norms. When you look around, the dominant narrative is the WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic) one. Broadly, individualism and personal motivation (self focus, guilt over shame, dispositional thinking – based on intent not context, low conformity, self regulation and control and patience, time thrift, value of labour, desire for control and choice), impersonal pro-sociality (impartial principles, trust, honesty and cooperation with strangers and impersonal institutions, emphasising mental states in moral judgment, not revengeful but willing to punish third parties for not sticking to principles, reduced in-group favouritism, free will, belief in moral truths like physics principles, linear time), and perceptual and cognitive abilities and biases (analytical over holistic thinking, attention to foreground and not surroundings, endowment effect, overconfidence on own abilities) are all features of this, and the correlation with higher functional order is evident.

    If I look around the metro crowd in India and across the world, the optimisation for WEIRD is rising. As I wrote in Kaumpromise, we can still see an alternate way in patches. It’s interesting how with the rise of AI, we are at once creating even more order in many ways but at the same time ceding control to blackboxes. That requires some thought, and another post!

    P.S. There is a nice time dimension to this as well, brought out in monochronic and polychronic cultures. Read more here.

  • Relative..reality

    For some strange reason, I’ve read Pankaj Mishra’s books in reverse order..well, almost. I read The Romantics first, a long time before, and it remains a book I’m very attached to. Its a good book, but I’ve never figured out the exact reason for this strange bond, in spite of making a rare exception and reading it a second time. Maybe it was the time I first read it (a stage of life) or its characters or its title, someday I hope to know, it will tell me a bit more about myself, perhaps. But meanwhile, from The Romantics, I was lured straight to ‘Temptations of the West‘. A few months later, I read ‘An End to Suffering‘, which served as a kind of introduction to Buddhism for me, as Mishra mapped it on to his own spiritual evolution. I finally completed his first book, ‘Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in small town India’ more recently. Though its title would indicate so, calling it a travelogue would be a gross injustice, as it also manages to recreate the India of the 90’s. So, yes, it is a travelogue, but like many of its ilk, it works in space and time. No, this is not really a review. 🙂

    I’m quite glad that I read his books in the order I did. If I read it earlier, I might have been irritated by the cynicism in the book. But having read his later books, I felt almost as though I was with him, as his thoughts and personality evolved. The book gives you loads of nostalgia triggers – from Baba Sehgal’s ‘Main bhi Madonna’ (i still remember the Magnasound casette cover :D) to mentions of Nonie and Mamta Kulkarni, it draws upon tiny incidents of those forgotten days.

    Many of you may not be able to associate at all with those three people mentioned above, for me, they bring back an era, their importance is relative. I even wondered whether, in future, we will have nostalgia townships, like we have the amusement parks now. The 70s, 80s, 90s re-created in terms of people, music, movies, fashion and all the elements of pop culture that can be attributed to an era. So, when you have those nostalgia pangs, you can call a few friends and take a vacation to bring back a period in your life. 🙂

    A common theme struck me as I ‘moved’ through the book’s pages. Mishra mentions Murshidabad looking towards Calcutta in hope, for job prospects and a better life in general. In many people’s perception, Kolkata is perhaps the worst of the metros on those terms. He writes about the ‘immense cultural vacuum of North india’, and ‘looking towards Bengal for instruction’, and the decline of Allahabad and Benaras. But I realised that for me, those two places were perhaps teeming with culture and history. Again, in Murshidabad, he talks to a person who considers the Babri Masjid as just another mosque, while a nation still burns at regular intervals – the repercussions of an act long ago. The common theme is the relative nature of these things – they means different things to different people, all relative versions of the same thing equally real, when considered from each point of view.

    I remember thinking about progress during my Andaman visit. I saw it in its current state, and can visualise it in the years to come, as tourism becomes a larger factor in the scheme of things, and the changes it will invariably bring in, into a way of life. To quote from the book we’ve been discussing

    Civilisation, however, is on the move, and as E.M.Cioran remarks, nothing more characterises the civilised man than the zeal to impose his discontents on those so far exempt from them.

    When the tourist money flows into the system, it will help the locals afford many things that they perhaps didn’t have access to. But even those who do not wish to change might be sucked into this new way of life because it would be a question of survival. Were they better off and happier before all this happens to them? I don’t know, because after all, even happiness is so relative now.

    Objectivity –  based on observable phenomena and uninfluenced by emotions or personal prejudices, and not the result of any judgments made by a conscious entity. But everything is relative. Things not seen from one’s own perspective don’t seem to matter, and objectivity’s definition would suggest “no one’s perspective”. Maybe that’s why we don’t care for it much anymore?

    until next time, time, space and relativism