On the Order of time – Carlo Rovelli

The flow of time is an illusion that is created by imperfect information and an inadequate understanding of the system. The order of time is determined the relative confidence in the future vs the past.

When you let a future bright and prosperous dictate the actions of the present instead of an imagined past full of disappointments and failures, you take control of time. You decide to use your “power” to forget the personal losses and the unimportant details and the psychological vulnerabilities to lend colour and salience to the important lessons of the past and then use these vague ideas to live on the sure path to the future, you change the direction in which entropy increases. You change the subjective order of the flow of time. You are not struggling towards success. You are falling into its trap. Clutching at the past that was familiar but is uncertain and hazy in your head.

The order of time is the order of certainty. Create your future and time would slow down, stop and then reverse for you. Instead of becoming older, sicker and dumber you will become wiser, more beautiful and stronger in the time of your fellow human beings. You don’t have to travel at half the speed of light to slow down the relative flow of time. All that is required is faith, good intentions, purposeful disciplined actions dictated by the righteous, certain future that the higher power has in store for you. A faith that is made purer and stronger not merely by the clarity of the vision in your head, but also by the courageous, self-directed and hard sacrifices made on a continuing basis to test, strengthen and purify the faith.

Living in the future is what faith is all about. When your intentions are pure, the end goal is clear, action is decisive and fast you will manifest the power of God, the one that sees the past, the present and the future as one. He did not make a mistake. Your vulnerabilities only appear so. Forgetting, imagining and paranoia is a gift. It is what makes it possible to see what you want to see. To make sense of nature. The feminine way is to see it as it is. To understand it in order to use it. The masculine way is to make it understandable and thereby control it. Not to adapt to it. Failure to control must be seen as a failure of imagination, as an error in remembering the future and must be over-written with the correct story.

The flow of time is subjective. When you understand yourself and are able to control how you perceive things, the future, the present and the past start to come together and time ceases to flow. Achieving and maintaining this state is what spiritual practice is all about. When scientific time becomes infinite everything becomes possible… only for you.

Balance

Without the capacity to be cruel, kindness means nothing. Without the ability to hate intensely and passionately, love means nothing. Without the ability to destroy, the power to create will choke on itself. Without the ability to kill, you cannot give rise to new life and without the ability to punish, the ability to reward transmutes from real generosity to disguised cowardice.

Life is contrast and polarity. The average will never work. It is the greyness that marks the beginning of the end. The slow decay of a civilization. Balance is not grey – it is not the average.

It is the managed-conflict between the extremes – an active balance that finds its centre against external disturbances, the balance that strengthens itself from attack, the balance that turns suffering, pain and difficulty into a tool to strengthen itself, the balance that uses cold water to grow sharper in the forge of life under the hammer of self-imposed discipline, it is this active balance between the polarities that distinguishes the alive from the dead.

Growth happens at the extremes, never in the middle. Buddha was wrong! The middle-path is cancer, diabetes, cardio, “work-life balance”, depression and anxiety, mass-media, common-sense, healthy food, consumerism, the free-market and modern medicine. Be poor, be rich, whatever you do, don’t be middle-class. Live, or die, don’t grind through a declining and grey existence. If you are a man, aim for everything, or nothing. The professors were wrong, small drops will never make an ocean. It is violent and total cataclysms that do it. Don’t endure disrespect and grind through a sub-optimal situation. Burn it all down and start again. When you are winning, you will know it.

A narcissist or a salesman?

The difference between a King and a robber is intention, the difference between a Government and a criminal mafia is intention, the difference between a husband and an employer is intention, the difference between a father and a cruel teacher is intention, the difference between a competitor and an evil enemy is intention.

Suicide is not respected as much as death in combat/war. The reason is intention, ritual and politics. The absence of good intention and the willingness to fight ones poor circumstances is what distinguishes honourable and righteous action from evil.

The greatest gift is to be able to judge a person’s intention without waiting for the consequences of his actions. The ability to decide who to put your faith in and to be able to recognize evil when you see it in the eyes of someone. Life is short and there will never be enough time to make rational choices based on objective data (even if such a thing really existed).

If you fail to develop this gift you will forever be consigned to getting robbed materially and spiritually by smooth talking criminals.

If you must succeed, the first thing to do is to work on your intention and your faith. For action follows conviction which follows faith. Faith always comes first. The ability to talk it up to a burning intensity is what distinguishes moral and righteous action from its opposite. Not just consequences!

Businessmen try to sell us the notion that we must judge things by how they appear to us without regard for the intention or the motivations of the people who made it. But this is a mistake that appears to work at first. The most dangerous kind of mistake. It is too late by the time you realize it was a mistake.

A mother’s food, no matter how severe the lack of skill was in its preparation, a father’s punishment, a husband’s orders, cultural edicts, family traditions and the wisdom of the old of our blood-line will, in the end always do more good than its modern day equivalents based on “scientific” wisdom and superficially rational argument.

Love, trust and faith that has lasted for long and that is backed up by real suffering, real sacrifice, real tears and real bloodshed should be given priority over wisdom generated in factories by professionals working from 10 to 5 and corporate mission statements and modern day “risk-taking” CEOs and executives.

There might be problems with things done by people with good intentions. But they will always over the long run work better than the products and directions from the modern military-industrial complex. Respect the truly old. For time is the best test of every claim to truth.

There is always a trade-off between “Standard of Living” and freedom. Don’t let other people determine your standards for you. Take the time to understand yourself and take control of your own happiness and you will realize that you were, are and always will be free.

Problem with our approach to money

Consumption driven growth vs. savings driven growth.

Essential features of the Indian mindset

To make money you have to spend money. You have to invest. On goods and services that improve the quality of your own life and your mind and cut costs in the future and on people who are capable of exponentially increasing output and building capital assets that serve the interests of the local consumers.

But Indian society has historically been an extremely dangerous and uncertain one. The social traditions and cultural practices evolved through ages of uncertainty, poverty, violent dispossession and sudden death. Extreme uncertainty creates incentive structures that encourage people to avoid down-side risk at all costs.

Lack of trust in others, in society and the government promotes economically inefficient self-reliance, paranoia and lust for hard money.

A picture of a successful society

A society that has succeeded is one in which people have an instrumental view of money and do not see it as an end in itself. An instrument to create capital structures and new real wealth that improves society and makes things better for the future. As a tool that is used to signal value and coordinate supply chains. As a tool that can be used to enable real production and reward mindful consumption and good decision making.

This tool will work when it is combined with a moral culture that celebrates success, punishes jealousy and recognizes that some principles are more important than money.

There are two things that you can do with money. Bury it and try to keep it safe or spend/invest it. Spending is for things that make you feel good in the moment and investing is for things that will generate a return in money or cut spending requirements in the future. Stories and social conditioning can be used to make people enjoy investing more than spending.

What happens when trust erodes

But to invest there must be some guarantee that you will be able to generate a return. To generate a return you must be able to predict the future. If you can’t predict the future, then, at the very least you must be able to be secure in the knowledge that if and when you succeed the rewards will not get stolen.

If these guarantees cannot be put in place by the government, then people will rely on cutting costs and cornering hard assets to save money instead of on investment to make new capital assets. Some of these costs that they cut will be neutral or even good from an economic stand-point. Like choosing to skip a pizza or a jalebi. But some of them might be counterproductive and even destructive in the long run. For example, if a family chooses to cut costs by refusing to buy any books for the children or buy them nutritious food it will destroy value in the long run.

Saved money cannot just sit in a vault. The economy cant grow that way. The people will just work harder and harder and gradually impoverish themselves off the material factors that are important for their own well-being in exchange for currency to pay taxes.

So, the saved money has to be somehow invested to increase the volume of goods and services that can be bought with money. This will cause the value of money itself to increase which can then be used to print more money and grow the economy. The economy can be either directly taxed to provide public services or indirectly taxed by printing money for government spending.

Centralized Capital Allocation

If the people won’t invest it then the banks and the government have to do it. This will centralize decision making and risk taking. In a society that has an unhealthy obsession with money and gold and a generally low standard for moral behavior and selfless thinking this will create serious problems.

The people controlling these few big taps of money wield enormous power. Power doesn’t rest easy in the hands of insecure and selfish people. Instead of a self-sacrificing elite society, India has in recent history had a parasitic class of professional butt-lickers and back-stabbers in the form of a brahmin elite that served as the whip of the British masters.

Worship of power and proximity to white humans coupled with extreme fear and subservience to authority regardless of its legitimacy has been programmed into the Indian lower classes through millennia of casteism and automatic hierarchies based on birth.

Power and wealth are in more enlightened societies, seen as a tool that can be used to create a positive impact on society. But in India, ‘the good life” is not something people aspire to since most people don’t know what it means. Living in healthy, clean conditions in a peaceful society with a healthy and beautiful body and mind is not something that most Indians aspire to. What they want is power. Power to improve things? To make their own situation better? No. Since most Indians don’t know how to make themselves feel good they try to make other people suffer so that they can feel less shitty about themselves. For them life is all about competition. If Sharmaji has a Zen, we should buy an Esteem, if they have 2 bedrooms we must have three. And if we can’t have these things we must somehow destroy their stuff. That is the value of wealth and the power it can buy, from an Indian perspective.

In such an environment concentrating economic decision making in an elite at the top of a political hierarchy is asking for trouble. Forget preserving wealth. The money can actually be used to entrench and secure the interests of the parasitic, self-absorbed and insular elite and to isolate themselves from the suffering of the masses.

In such a scenario the value of money doesn’t grow. In fact the value of the paper money actually goes down because the people holding it didn’t earn it by making something useful, but by stealing it from deserving people. Once the volume of currency held in such hands crosses a critical threshold confidence in the currency collapses. Either suddenly or gradually. The steadily increasing price of gold in India is hard evidence for the fact that people don’t trust the economic system.

Betting real wealth on statues and bullet trains vs. just burying it

I used to laugh at my grandma for washing hands all the time and running to the jewelry and buying a little bit of gold every time she got some money. She is nearly a 100 now and has managed to survive all these years without asking anyone for any help and is quite wealthy now. It is after the recent pandemic and witnessing the central government’s response to it that I realized the value of her wisdom and her paranoia. The government, the system and the society cannot be trusted in India. Any store of value that relies on a functioning social system is quite vulnerable in a country like this. Trying to achieve growth without first prioritizing wealth preservation is asking for trouble.

Yes, it does create a problem for the commons. The vast quantities of wealth locked down in the form of unmonetized gold is a big loss for the country. It prevents growth. A loss! That is how I used to think about all this gold lying in lockers and buried underground and hidden in walls all over the country. But then I figured out that preservation of wealth is more important than growing it. Gold is the weak and uneducated man’s protection against the caprices of the sometimes educated but always uncultured and predominantly criminal elite of the country. Maybe the secret piles can’t be used to create gold backed currency that can be used to grow the economy. But at least it can’t be wasted or siphoned off or used to win power by the unscrupulous politicians and businessmen that have made India a living hell.

It might be better to let the wealth rot underground than to give it to criminals. That will just make everything a lot worse. Until the system improves and decentralized investments have a fighting chance it is best to sequester the wealth in places and forms that make it invulnerable to confiscation by a ruthless and rapacious ruling class.

Like always, grandma is right again!

Special is not what you are, it is what you do

Source of great ideas

Where do great ideas originate? What is genius? Why do some people seem to come up with ideas easily and effortlessly?

People spend a lot of time examining their brains, studying their habits and trying to copy their practices. Genius and creativity are usually considered to be the properties of a particular person and some people think that their own productivity can be improved by copying certain aspects of their behavior. “How to engineer your life to enable creativity?” I think it is worth spending some time thinking about this question.

The myth

There is a tendency to anthropomorphize the flow of history. To tell stories that privilege the point of view of particular human beings. Stories where there is a hero and there is a great problem and with heroic struggle the hero conquers the problem.

As much as this story appeals to our emotional selves, it is finally a story that at best offers only a partial picture of the process that is involved in discovering great principles. Every picture, every model and every theory by necessity has to be incomplete. But the utility of a model lies in its ability to make valuable predictions about the future. In its ability to help ourselves make an impact by following the directives of the model.

If you measure the utility of models, of theories and stories in this particular way, then there is some harm in this particular method of story-telling. Of telling stories that emphasize the importance of the individual and the inner mind in the story of discoveries.

A story like that will motivate people to work hard and try to focus on themselves and what is going on within themselves. To focus on their feelings, perceptions and thought patterns. This reflexive pattern of thinking and the disconnect from the real world it can create can cause feedback loops to develop that can lead people along paths that make them unhappy in the long run. For example, someone might be depressed because he is not effective. This might cause the person to withdraw from engaging with the problems and to distract himself with counter-productive behavior intended to temporarily relieve the bad feeling. This can range from self-destructive behavior like making excuses for poor decisions, self-medicating with drugs or alcohol or trying to feel better by pulling other people down. All these things make the problems worse in the long run. This might go on until the person passes the point of no return.

The possible truth

But the secret to creativity or success doesn’t lie within. It lies without. Great ideas can never be derived from existing principles. They are almost always the product of random events and mistakes. Rationality, mathematical reasoning and straight-forward thinking can act only as a negative filter. It can tell you what will not work. It cannot lead you step-by-step to the next  great discovery.

The process of innovation is inherently non-linear, chaotic and unpredictable. The key to coming up with great ideas is to leave some space in our lives for luck to work. Make sure the environment you are in is dynamic, fluid and dangerous to the extent that it will not kill you. Keep pushing your boundaries and never plan too much.

Some people might read this and think that hard work and planning is useless. That is entirely the wrong message. Hard work, extreme dedication and a certain kind of planning are required for success in life. The question is how you should work and what you should focus on.

Here is my take on these most important questions:

You have to work hard on developing your store of knowledge and the basic skills and intuition required to recognize a great idea when you see one. We go through our lives every day unconsciously doing incredibly complicated and clever things without realizing their significance or their practical applications in other areas of life.

People might have been rubbing their hands together for millennia to warm themselves. But it was only recently that somebody documented the fact that heat might not be related to combustion and that the coincidence hides a deeper mystery about the physics of heat. That recognition is what is important. Not the rubbing together of hands. Ideas have to be recognized and articulated using the language of technology for that idea to get developed into a practical application.

People knew about the law of large numbers for ages. And at least intuitively everyone understands the principle of averaging to reduce noise. But someone applied this prehistoric idea after combining it with the concept of the information content of a random process to a sequence of bits and he became the “Father of information theory”. Another guy applied it to economics and that became the “Efficient market hypothesis”. 

Einstein was sitting in a patent office and going through countless papers discussing clever things and he was reading material describing results from experiments that other people were doing. Again and again people were implying that the speed of light didn’t seem to change no matter how you measured it. He just articulated clearly what everyone was implying and then proceeded to use straight-forward mathematical techniques to work out all the potential implications and on reconciling it with the existing frame-work of physics.

Now, after the fact, people are studying Einstein’s brain size, anecdotes from his child-hood, grade cards from school and his musical predilections and trying to copy all these things in an effort to become an Einstein themselves.

Maybe if I grow my hair, look weird and play the violin, I might change physics as we know it today? Maybe. But your chances will be lot better if you try to replicate the essential features of Einstein’s environment and his natural curiosity instead of some superficial personal characteristics or other incidental details of his personal history. Myth-making and story-telling are fun. But sometimes they can mislead young minds into thinking that being weird in a particular way is what it takes to become special.

Before wondering why you can’t come up with something like the theory of relativity while watching cricket and eating chips have you first made sure that you have access to the same quality and quantity of privileged information that Einstein did?

When Feynman hit a dead end in his career he didn’t sit down and try harder to come up with something new. He just said, ” If I can’t solve this problem right now I will not waste my time keeping on trying again and again until I am fully extinguished. Instead I will find some other way to make myself useful and in the process, maybe, learn something new. I will teach! When I explain things to other people I will be forced to look at things from their point of view and the fresh perspective might help me get some new ideas!”(paraphrased, obviously!)

He understood something about the state of mind required to solve problems that require an oblique approach and how to achieve it. The kind of things that you can do which can help you achieve a state of flow. Where your ego expands to include the problem and you feel connected and everything just sort of happens automatically.

There is no harm in trying to emulate great people. But if you look at the wrong things you might just wind up wasting time on music lessons and dressing in turtle necks without actually accomplishing anything in life.

The mother lode

Every great idea in science and technology is basically the recognition of a pattern that was identified in some other area like humanities which deals with the study of naturally occurring complexity and patterns. The reason for it is very simple. Nature has the right mix of noise injection(random mutations and disasters) and diversity of cost and fitness functions that has been allowed to operate for billions of years. This has resulted in complexity, patterns and innovations of stunning and breath-taking beauty and power. By developing your arsenal of mathematical and scientific tools that can be used to reject spurious patterns and see through correlations that can sometimes obscure chains of causation we can exploit this nearly infinite mine of ideas to come up with stuff that can shock  and awe people.

To properly take advantage of this gift of optionality you must work hard. Not on coming up with great ideas, but on learning to recognize one when you see it. When the idea is seductive enough the aggression required to capture, subdue, exploit and control it will come automatically.

The simplicity of the idea doesn’t matter. What matters is the scale of application of that idea. And scale requires a proper appreciation and grasp of all the essential features of that idea and the ability to ignore the unimportant details. In other words, be able to articulate the idea in the most general terms possible. And then, hold it in your head at all times and recognize diverse situations where it can be applied to make a difference.

Prepare yourself for the moment of insight as well as you can. It can feel overwhelming when it strikes you. Keep developing newer ways of looking at the same phenomenon. And, most  importantly,

“leave enough space in your life for luck to work its magic”.

Mother Night

I am a part of the part that at first was all, part of the darkness that gave birth to light, that supercilious light which now disputes with Mother Night her ancient rank and space, and yet can not succeed; no matter how it struggles, it sticks to matter and can’t get free. Light flows from substance, makes it beautiful; solids can check its path, so I hope it won’t be long till light and the world’s stuff are destroyed together.

The appeal of a classic

I have spent so much time wondering about what makes someone go wow when they witness something. Anything. Maybe a feat of engineering, maybe a drawing or a film or most intriguingly the beautiful sculptures that fill up the ancient temples of India, the ones that have preserved their ability to mystify and enthrall people even after thousands of years

When people look at these sculptures, touch them and feel something stir within them they are surprised and delighted. How is it possible for something thousands of years old, worn down by the ages, abused by the ignorant and crafted by people in a supposedly unenlightened epoch to wield such a strange and powerful influence on the people fortunate enough to behold them today?

When someone struggling to make sense of a life spent in the pursuit of the material, the tangible and the concrete by following the incentives and dictates of the modern educational-industrial complex lays their eyes on a classic they are reminded of something that is missing in the story of their life, the story that they depend on to impose order, meaning and purpose on a reality that is impersonal, complex and too vast to care about the individual.

No matter the suffering, the apparent brutality or the seeming meaninglessness of everything, with the right story life becomes not only just possible, but actually enjoyable. It is man’s gift from God that he has the power to tell himself whatever story he wants. It is the greatest tragedy that so many people perceive this gift as a burden. A perception that morphs the gift into a curse. Of course organized religion, modern corporate life and the inducements of a consumerist society provide a sort of antidote to the problem.

But the power of a story to make you see the world in a beautiful way, in a uniquely human way and the ability of such a perspective to lead people to do difficult but valuable things, things that make the human story even more wonderful, is something that must be appreciated.

Whatever it is that people do, maybe they clean the floor, maybe they draw paintings, maybe they are engineers or doctors or business-men, it doesn’t matter. Every now and then someone comes along who realizes the power of being able to tell a story about themselves, their work, their place in society and their duties. A story made beautiful by the unique and intense moments in their life. A story that appeals to every human emotion in turn. Telling themselves the story as they navigate their life, they create eddies of meaning, purpose and beauty which feed back into the story.

At some point it makes them forget themselves and live life the way a human being was meant to live it. At least for a while. When they wake up from the dream the beautiful consequences of their reverie will surround them. They are reminded of the mythical paradise that was supposed to have been lost to us, forever.

The one where there was no hard-work, no suffering and no pain. Not because there was no danger or discomfort, but because one had the gift of absolute faith in a story. A story powerful enough to distort the reality around oneself and bring it in line with one’s vision.

The craftsmen who possess the gift of great art are the ones who have most fully realized the power of being able to tell a tale that reminds people of this paradise that could exist in the space between reality and their reaction to it. In the realm of perception. Where your beliefs about yourself and your reality matter the most.

The best stories make the most incomprehensible, the most impersonal, the most senseless things beautiful and meaningful to a human being. When people look at their reality in a way that makes sense to them, suddenly, they can understand it, take control of it and manipulate it to their advantage.

The power to craft this story is the most sacred thing ever. The exercise of this power and witnessing the strange and terrifying consequences that follow lie at the source of human fulfillment and happiness. All religions try to capture this magic and project it however weakly into the mind of the average person, in an attempt to prevent the individual from falling into the trap of relentlessly making naive attempts to achieve happiness by running away from pain, from one’s duty to society and from the call to make a sacrifice in service of something bigger than oneself. In order to give everyone a shot at experiencing the sense of satisfaction that can result when you focus on contributing something, however small to the story of human achievement.

But, like everything generic and dumbed down by the incompetence and stupidity of the bureaucrats and the priests the utility of organized systems of creating meaning is highly debatable.

An artist, whatever his chosen profession or his station in life, is someone who is capable of reminding everyone who looks at their work, their life, their actions –  however vaguely, however fleetingly, the mysterious and strange power of a great story, not only to make people do the impossible but to make them feel like Gods while doing it. To make them realize what is possible when you look at things the right way, the human way, your way…

 

Man’s Search For Meaning by Viktor Frankl

This might seem like a book that is too dark for a birthday-gift. But, I found its underlying message of hope independent of circumstances that is the result of a life lived in anticipation of the good one can do for one’s loved ones and one’s society to be valuable.

Meaning is, I think,  what creates fulfillment and not mere avoidance of pain or pursuit of pleasure. It is not predetermined. We have to create it ourselves. I wish you a meaningful and fulfilling life ahead!

Moon-Lake

I was looking at some pictures from several years ago which were taken during my trip to Himachal. All the treks were over and we were just visiting some lakes and small towns on our way to Manali. We were travelling along beautiful roads. I had a book with me and everyone was in a quiet and reflective mood.

We took a detour to visit the beautiful Moon-Lake(Chandratal) and spend a quiet morning there.The vehicle stopped some way away from the lake. We walked the rest of the way along a narrow gravel path in the direction of the lake.

I was waiting for the lake to come into sight. The constant scanning for the blue patch on the horizon reminded me of the cycle ride to Tso Moriri in Ladakh the previous year.

The sky in those parts can be very bright and sometimes this prevents you from really enjoying the beautiful sights once the Sun is up. But, that day, the sky was cloudy and the light was perfect.

There were small patches of grass around the lake and flocks of sheep grazing on it with shepherd dogs running about and barking at them.

Some of us took a dip in the icy water of the lake.

I just lay down in the moist grass with my book and spent some time reading and gazing out at the iridescent lake shining with a furious intensity in the many reflected colors of the sky.

As the clouds shifted in the sky the colors reflected in the lake too changed. I kept on moving around the lake to take in the sight from as many angles as possible.

The toughest part of that whole trip was the walk on the glaciers of the Pin Bhabha pass. This year, I am going again for a winter trek in Himachal. This time more of the trek will be over glaciers and it will be interesting to find out how I cope with it.

I am expecting it to be the toughest trekking expedition I have ever participated in and I can’t wait to see the sights and experience the adventure.

Come Oct, I will be on my way!

I hope that at the end of the coming trip, we will get to spend a few days roaming around and relaxing in beautiful places like this.