Noobiont@Noosphere

Jeremy Rifkin on "the empathic civilization" | Video on TED.com

2010-09-08T11:50:00.000-07:00

Jeremy Rifkin on "the empathic civilization" | Video on TED.com

one of my favorite subjects of interest.

Tom Wujec: Build a tower, build a team | Video on TED.com

2010-05-02T09:30:00.000-07:00

Ta Da!

Looks like this is how last time we got it right!

"The marshmallow problem"... prototyping is the "key" and works best when there is an "Executive Admin" in team!!

Taken by the storm - "Lets do amazing"

2010-04-30T22:42:00.001-07:00

No longer with ComputationalTeam@Cellworks.

the crazy guy visited me, guess what... I was taken by the storm.. "Lets do amazing."

Nothing endures but change.

In Rite of passage

2009-12-23T08:08:00.001-08:00

metamorphosis, transformations, knowledge, passion, respect, love, success...
Face life and rest is on it's way...

State and variable

2009-11-05T06:46:00.000-08:00

If I could prove them that I am wrong,
I convince them.
If I am wrong I could survive...
The truth is, I don’t like to prove anything...
And/But I am trying for proof, and not to prove.

Consider 'proof' is mathematical, and 'prove' is sociological.

Laplace's demon

2009-05-07T21:21:00.000-07:00

I am the Laplace's demon, but my universe is so small.

Hug a developer today

2008-09-06T22:56:00.000-07:00

what is NOT so cool... - "Tech's 10 worst entry-level jobs"

2008-05-21T09:52:00.001-07:00

Soon America's most bright-eyed graduates will enter the workforce and make their workaday homes in cubes at Google, MySpace, or Amazon.com. And they will suffer not just the indignity of having to work for a living, but also the dispiriting realization that a job at a ~~cool company~~ isn't always that hot.

-- Why is it so NOT a HOT job at these cool companies ??
read more | digg story

worked as a software engineer of web applications for QBurst Technologies for 7 months.
hobby or a job? or can both go together ??
Now I work as a computational researcher at the only systems biology company in India..
Cellworks Group Inc

Cellworks develops technology solutions which are virtual prototyping systems based on in silico platforms of disease aligned physiology.The platforms are Google maps equivalent and much more. The technology provides GPS equivalent capability by representation of relationships between the biological players using mathematics making the system dynamic.

Challenging... satisfying..
all I need out of a job
being brave to carve ones own niche... my own career!!

Systems Biology
read more | digg story

Software as a Service - A Pattern Language Approach

2007-09-30T20:15:00.001-07:00

Here is a unified presentation which brings together many best practices we have evolved in the SOA/SaaS space. Frankly, it has become almost impossible to have a meaningful conversation on many topics in this domain due to 'definition overloading'. This presentation not only attacks that issue, it also brings together into a cohesive pattern...

read more | digg story

Scientists Apply for First Patent on Synthetic Life Form

2007-06-08T13:08:00.001-07:00

There's a new wrinkle in the argument over patenting life: can you patent synthetic life?

read more | digg story

Mohammed second most popular boys' name

2007-06-06T05:04:00.001-07:00

Mohammed is likely to be the most popular name for baby boys in Britain by the end of the year.

read more | digg story

This I Believe - The Developer Edition

2007-06-03T08:50:00.001-07:00

Fantastic list of commandments, guiding principles, a belief system really, for developers to rally around and run a project on.

read more | digg story

I don’t know what I could have known.

2007-05-05T11:57:00.000-07:00

The term biont as defined by Illinois Mycological Association.

There are many philosophical problems in biology with the term "individual": what is a bush made from one rose grafted onto another? What is a mycelium that has been split into two parts, each continuing on independently (but if they meet, they will grow back together again)? What is a lichen, an "individual" or a colony? What are the component organisms of a lichen, "individual"s or just components? The term biont is an attempt to solve those problems by the time-honored method of inventing a new term and just saying that it solves the problem. Basically, it means "whatever we used to understand the word 'individual' to mean in a biological sense, back when we were naïve, before anyone started asking us these nasty questions."

We are not fungi. But we dont know what we are are becoming.
What I could have known when I was that little 'noob' struggling to make sense of things, when I made myself an avatar. But now.. 'noob'.
Who isn't a noob anyway ?
Anyone ?

The real 'Noobiont' please stand up !

Listen up, maggots...

2007-03-20T09:41:00.000-07:00

You're not your job.
You're not how much money you have in the bank.
You're not the car you drive.
You're not the contents of your wallet.
You're not your f***n' khakis.
You are not special
You are not a beautiful or unique snowflake.
You are the same decaying organic matter as everything else.
We are the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world.
We are all part of the same compost heap...
called CIVILIZATION

People are crazy and times are strange

2007-02-20T16:05:00.000-08:00

I'm locked in tight, I'm out of range
I used to care, but things have changed

I hurt easy, I just don't show it
You can hurt someone and not even know it
The next sixty seconds could be like an eternity
Gonna get low down, gonna fly high
All the truth in the world adds up to one big lie
~~I'm in love with a woman who don't even appeal to me~~

- SO WHAT ? 'I' am singing one of my favorite songs, Bob Dylan's song.

The Global Consciousness Project (GCP)

2006-12-10T09:43:00.000-08:00

Global Correlations in Random Data ?

The Electro Gaia Gram (EGG) data from a global network of Random Event Generators (REG).

The GCP Basket Observer

http://noosphere.princeton.edu/bsktobsrv/basketobserver.wall.html

A real-time indicator of global consciousness coherence

Blue is anti coherence, with a percentage greater than 90%
Green is no coherence, with a percentage between 40% and 90%
yellow is a little bit of coherence, with a percentage of 10% to 40%
orange is moderate coherence, with a percentage of 5% to 10%
red is strong coherence, with a percentage of less than 5%

The percentages are how likely the data is to be random.
There are subtle variations in color so there can be a mix of green and yellow.

The statistical methods are described in detail on Global Consciousness Project .

Life is no pain with virtual reality

2006-12-06T21:04:00.000-08:00

"Life is pain; anyone who says differently is selling something".

and those who say differently might as well sell 'virtual reality' someday.

.. a news story.

SOUL SEARCH: Paradise Regained

2006-12-02T07:54:00.000-08:00

Techno-transcendence

how technology is increasingly intruding into
the sacred space of the human body.

Back in the 1960s, Marshall McLuhan made the observation that the things we identify as technology are actually extensions of the body. Just as the wheel is an extension of the foot and telescope an extension of the eye, the global communication network is the logical extension of our nervous system.

Much later in the mid-80s, William Gibson coined the term "cyberspace" in his novel Neuromancer and flaunted the vision of a man-machine link-up suggestive of a kind of techno-transcendence. Now, barely a decade, later we have the World Wide Web or the Internet, echoing the potential of the all-knowing "matrix" of Gibson's vision of the future. Whether we like it or not, developments in digital technology are redefining almost all spheres of our lives. The recent attempts at man-machine link-ups where one is linked to the Internet through implants, making you physically here and at the same time virtually embodied in cyberspace, are a hint that the Gibsonian world of man-machine symbiosis might be just around the corner.

Science in the 20th century is based largely on what invisible to the human retinal vision and offers us a world of forces and fields and their relationships. The machines that confront us today belong to the invisible world of fields and forces with their operational limits defined through perplexing phenomena like quantum tunneling which are beyond the scope of human sensory experience. Pitted against this, our regular day-to-day reality becomes a phantom construct maintained through consensual devices like semiotic stability, cultural continuity, and uniformity of dogma to name a few.

In the vision of our future, presented by people like Gibson, technology intrudes into the hitherto sacred space of the human body to morph into a tool for achieving transformation and transcendence. The future is no longer out there, where life is full of pain and all-too human suffering, but within a digitally constructed space, melded to the nerves and guided by all-knowing machines. A venture that transgresses into the rigidly legislated domain of religion.

The emerging Noosphere

Interestingly enough, long before the arrival of digital technology and its prophets, Teilhard de Chardin, a French Jesuit priest and paleontologist, proposed a remarkable, albeit extravagant hypothesis, around 1940. Built upon the evolutionary model of Darwin, Teilhard's hypothesis intimates that mankind as a species will evolve into a “planetised” super organism consummating the evolutionary course of life on earth. His assertion is that human beings, through constant communication and a sustained exchange of information, create a sentient knowledge layer which Will usher humanity into a new level of existence.

This new level which he christened the "Noosphere" will be the next step in evolution and will exist above and beyond the biosphere that is composed of biological life forms.

The Noosphere or knowledge plane is a space composed of living knowledge which as Teilhard envisioned it, will come into being as a result of intense and ceaseless interpersonal communication among the members of humanity. But that is only the beginning. Once this knowledge layer matures and reaches its evolutionary pinnacle, this disembodied intelligence and humanity will coalesce into a super sapient being which he called the “Omegapoint”. Freeing itself finally from the fines of space and time this being will attain a god-like status of omnipresence and omniscience. Prominent among those who have spoken in support of Teilhard's Omegapoint is renowned cosmologist and astrophysicist Frank Tippler By providing mathematical proofs of such an eventuality Tippler neutralizes the religious coloration that shrouded the Omegapoint.

The arrival of the World Wide Web and the data grid of information flow powered by virtual engines seem to indicate that such a grand unification of our sensibilities is a definite possibility. The very high level of simultaneous connectivity and information exchange, where every node is constantly in touch with all other existing nodes, like the neurons in our brain, could be the ideal condition for the emergence of such a disembodied reflective intelligence embracing the entire earth.

Throughout human civilization, messages and other forms of knowledge have been exchanged through a variety of media ranging from handwritten parchments and drawings to printed documents. But once information was digitized into data, it brought the information revolution and a new paradigm which is redefining our reality. For instance DNA, which constitutes the human genetic material, is today seen as the carrier of genetic information, turning the mysterious apparatus of life into plain vanilla of information processing. Even money, the very foundation of our economic edifices, has been digitized and turned into information which migrates across databases around the globe in the form of transactions without any "real" money exchanging hands. In today's economy, knowledge-based industries dealing with information have become key players. According to corporate guru Peter Drucker, the industries that have moved into the centre of the economy in the last few decades all have as their business the production and distribution of knowledge and information rather than the production and distribution of things. This transition from the industrial society to an information society engaged in consuming information seem to be a definite heralding Teilhard's Noosphere.

Cyberspace as we experience it today is essentially a continuum of connections among individual computers scattered across the globe resulting in a data space composed of digitized information. Along with the data links that facilitate massive distributed data-bases and the formation of virtual communities, the new “science” of memes and memetics is a development that demands a second look. The term “meme” was coined by Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene where he pointed out how germs of information spread across individuals to evolve gradually into collective knowledge bases. A meme thus is a contagious information packet that replicates and spreads itself through human minds like a virus altering their host's behavior. Slogans, catch-phrases, melodies, icons, inventions, and fashions all are typical memes. All transmitted knowledge is memetic.

Memes, just like genes that carry hereditary attributes, differ in their ability to survive within the environment of human intellectual activity. Some are agile and reproduce briskly, but are very short-lived while others are hardy and slow in propagation. Sweeping trends and fashions are instances of short lived memes, while religious beliefs are prime candidates for hardy memes. In this light, memes could be regarded as living information structures, existing in the shared space of human intellectual activity.

The Web is a natural medium for the propagation of memes with individual users surfing freely among meme nodes suspended in a unified information space. In the information gathering process, meme strands organize along trajectories of specific interest. Before long, the Web with its meme-rich environment could indeed become Teilhard's primordial soup where disembodied “information life forms” can mutate and evolve into complex entities. The phenomenon of “emergence” which is gaining currency among chaos theorists and proponents of artificial intelligence seems to support such processes. According to the enthusiasts of emergence, the simplest of systems given sufficient time can give rise to unpredictable behavior and complex effects.

Post-human techno-transcendence

A major shift in our attitudes towards machines and machine intelligence is gradually but surely gaining legitimacy. Called post-humanism, this new ideology embraces and endorses the need for humans to involve machines in the human evolutionary process. That this is a direction we are moving into, was amply demonstrated by the chip implant experiment involving Kevin Warwick, a professor of cybernetics from the University of Reading, Britain. The chip implanted in his body linked him wirelessly to the network, made his office welcome him in the morning, switched on his computer, switched on the lights in the corridor, opened doors and even helped his secretary track him wherever he was.

The proponents of post-humanism define techno-transcendence as using technology to overcome our physical and mental limits. As machines continue their rapid evolution and as we keep tinkering with our bodies and brains to repair and improve them, this will become more and more feasible. For instance, the problem of how to increase human intelligence is being approached from various angles. One approach is the use of chemicals like Vasopressin to enhance already existing processes in the brain, such as, memory. The other is an attempt to link the brain directly to computers. Such brain-computer interfaces could amplify the processes that constitute the human mind to unimaginable levels. The computers could be small enough to be implanted within the body of the user. By far the most ambitious project of this kind is “migration through silicon” or “uploading,” which involves putting the mind into a machine, the machine being a computer designed specially for this purpose.

According to post-human thinker Max More, “A human brain reasons, creates, feels, plans, calculates, appreciates. These properties of living, conscious beings result from the immensely complicated connections among our billions of neurons. An individual neuron by itself displays no consciousness, reasoning ability or creativity. The neuron is a biochemical machine. We should therefore be able to replace or repair damaged neural tissue with implants and supplement biological neurons with synthetic neurons while retaining the same functions. We should be able to add memory, processing power, and new abilities by supplementing natural neurons with synthetic neurons. In principle, we could replace all our neurons until we had an entirely synthetic or prosthetic brain. If the new neurons worked similarly to the old, and were connected up the same, we would never notice a difference.”

Uploading or “migration through silicon” plainly means transferring or duplicating the mental processes of a living person along with his/her identity on to a specially designed computer. Once a mind is successfully transferred on to silicon, one could modify that mind by increasing the scope of the senses or even by adding new senses. The memory functions could be enhanced by creating remote links to all existing records in human cultural and intellectual history. You could eliminate unnecessary activities like sleeping, or eliminate unwanted personality traits, install new ones, invent new emotions, dream while fully awake, choose what emotions and moods to experience, inhabit artificial bodies of either sex or of completely new sexes, experience completely imaginary states of being, and so on.

There you have it. Immortality and a superhuman existence freed from the mortal embrace of matter achieved through technology leading to techno-transcendence. Possibilities that were once hinted at by other-worldly mystics and offered conditionally by the religious establishment. For some of us at least, techno-transcendence would mean regaining of the paradise.

SOUL SEARCH: Paradise Lost

2006-12-02T06:02:00.000-08:00

Religion Vs Science

After centuries of acrimony, religion and modern science are joining hands
instead of crossing swords.

The 2004 Indian Ocean earthquake, which had a magnitude of 9.3, triggered a series of lethal tsunamis on December 26, 2004 that killed approximately 230,000 people (including 168,000 in Indonesia alone), making it the deadliest tsunami as well as one of the worst natural disasters in recorded history. The tsunami killed people over an area ranging from the immediate vicinity of the quake in Indonesia, Thailand and the north-western coast of Malaysia to thousands of kilometers away in Bangladesh, India, Sri Lanka, the Maldives, and even as far as Somalia, Kenya and Tanzania in eastern Africa.

The tidal fury seemed to be Mother Nature's parting gift to the world.
Or could it be God's?

Philosophers and theologians in the Middle Ages would have ascribed a cataclysm such as the one that hit the Indian coast to divine retribution. An act of the designer we know now to be God.

About 500 years after the passing of the medieval period, modern scientists tell us with quiet conviction that it was generated when the sea floor abruptly deformed and vertically displaced the overlying water. Whatever the magnitude of the violence or the destruction it wrought, God had nothing to do with it. It happened by chance.

That was only to be expected. Much of the scientific caboodle, particularly in the West, still refuse to accept God as the universal judge. In fact, most do not even acknowledge His existence. A poll of members of the National Academy of Science in the US conducted in 1998 found that only seven percent believe in a "personal creator" compared with, say, 15 per cent in 1933 and 29 per cent in 1914.

And yet, in a curious way, both theologians and scientists are listening to each other and even modifying their theories, of creation and evolution, for example. Why the sudden change of heart? The snow appears to have melted under the feet of the two once belligerent factions because of a realization that, unlike in the past, one can no longer do without the other, and that their futures are intertwined.

“Science considers deep skepticism a prime virtue. Religion often sees it as a barrier to enlightenment. So, for centuries, there has been a conflict between the two fields - the discoveries of science challenging religious dogmas, and religion attempting to ignore or suppress the disquieting findings,” Carl Sagan, famous astronomer and author, observed in Billions And Billions. “But times have changed. Many religions are now comfortable with an Earth that goes around the Sun, with an Earth that's 4.5 billion years old, with evolution, and with the other discoveries of modern science."

Even no less a personage than that torch-bearer of the Roman Catholic Church, Pope John Paul II, has reconciled to science. As he once said, "Science can purify religion from error or superstition; religion can purify science from idolatry and false absolutes. Each can draw the other into a wider world, a world in which both can flourish ... Such bridging ministries must be nurtured and encouraged."

Indeed, religion has acknowledged, and accepted, many of the advancements of science, for instance, in health and medicine where it made no progress. Science prolonged life by discovering cures for lethal illnesses and making death a fairly distant reality. Yet, it is far from finding a way to enable humankind to live beyond 100. On the other hand, miracles and black magic, which have been there since ancient times, failed to heal the sick and the dying. Today, a prayer cannot cure the plague, antibiotics can.

Science, on its part, has recognized that there is far more to the cosmos than the stars and planets it has discovered. Researchers have failed to unearth physical evidence of God or some kind of a supernatural entity who may be responsible for the creation of the cosmos we call universe. There is a radical shift in thinking among even the atheists, although they will be loathe to admit it. As Joshua Lederberg, the 1958 Nobel winner and evolutionary biologist, pointed out: "Nothing so far disproves the divine. What is incontrovertible is that a religious impulse guides our motive in sustaining scientific inquiry. Beyond that, it is all speculation." Getting to the bottom of that "religious impulse" is the challenge before science.

That philosophers and scientists have now almost stepped out of the boxing ring, where they have been sparring since Galileo turned the universe on its head some 600 years ago, is evident from the conference "Science and the Spiritual Quest" held at the Centre for Theology and Science in Berkeley, US, not long ago. At the meeting, hundreds of theologians and scientists, in a rare show of solidarity, agreed that religion and science were coming together - the common ground of convergence being God.

The world media, which has been faithfully reporting the seemingly unending debate, was quick to catch up. For instance, Newsweek, in a cover story "Science Finds God" noted: ''The achievements of modern science seem to contradict religion and undermine faith. For a growing number of scientists, the same discoveries offer support for spirituality and hints at the very nature of God. Physicists have stumbled on signs that the cosmos is custom-made for life and consciousness."

Significantly, the first move toward a rapprochement between the two sides may have come, albeit unconsciously, from the scientific field. Science never really meant to undermine religion; it merely wanted to disprove the rigid beliefs of the ancients, not just religious ones. In the beginning, religion, which feared that scientific interpretations would replace its own, counter-attacked, but then soon realized it had no choice in the matter. Religion could do little else but watch, first with shock and disbelief and then with growing fascination, as modern science unfolded with "Copernican astronomy, Newtonian physics and Darwinian biology," to borrow a phrase from Robert John Russell, a professor of theology and science, and founder and director of the Centre for Theology and Natural Sciences.

The history of conflict

Since the Biblical Age, the three main Occidental religions - Christianity, Judaism and Islam - believed in a God who was the supreme reality; a personal being who was at once the creator and sustainer of the whole universe, the omnipotent and omnipresent. These religions believed that the universe did not always exist but was created by a spiritual being, a view supported by the leading Christian and Jewish philosophers of the time, such as St Augustine, St Anselm, William of Ockham and St Aquinas.

On the other hand, Hindu philosophy did not believe in a physical being as much as it did in divine consciousness. The ancient texts, the Upanishads, speak of a (nirguna) Brahman, the ultimate reality, as pervading the entire universe (a view that is being increasingly acknowledged, but not necessarily accepted, by the modern Christian world). However, vedic literature does not force us to accept a fixed viewpoint. Many tales from the Upanishads are queries that arose in the minds of our ancestors and their attempts to answer. When Bhrigu, a sage, goes to his father Varuna and says, 'Please explain Brahman to me, the father replies, 'Brahman cannot be explained in words. Meditate on Brahman and find the answer for yourself.' Bhrigu does as he is told and concludes that food is Brahman because in the absence of food, life cannot be sustained. He tells his father: 'Father, I have truly known. Food is Brahman.' The father says, 'No, my son, food is not Brahman.' The son says, 'Then tell me about Brahman.' The father repeats, 'You have to meditate and experience Brahman.' After meditating for a number of days again, Bhrigu thinks that prana (life-breath) is Brahman. The father sends him back. This time Bhrigu concludes that the mind is Brahman. The father disagrees. Bhrigu then says the intellect is Brahman. Finally, one day, when his body, mind and intellect were at silence within him, Bhrigu experiences a divine sense of wellbeing. In the Upanishads, this is referred to as ananda. He realizes that ananda is Brahman."

Ancient Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle, also believed in not one but many gods but they did not think He was at the core of the universe, unlike the God of the Jews and Christians. While Plato spoke of a cosmic architect or engineer who brought order into a chaotic universe, Aristotle's God was the "prime mover".

The first real challenge to the philosophical interpretation of creation came toward the end of the Middle Ages (5th to 15th century AD) when Copernicus and Galileo broke scientific ground by claiming that the earth was not the centre of the universe, as the ancients believed.

Galileo Galilei, often thought to be the first truly modern scientist, incurred the wrath of theologians because of his inquisition. He gave great importance to logical interpretation over religious authority. He combined mathematics with laboratory testing in order to discover the nature of the world and matter around him. Nicknamed "wrangler" because he almost always questioned the traditionalists, Galileo is believed to have pointed his telescope skywards and discovered, among other things, that the sun was at the centre of the planets. Galileo, however, paid the price for his "sacrilegious" pronouncements - he was placed under house arrest and forbidden from writing and publishing his works, a fate less cruel than what some of his predecessors had suffered.

Shortly after Galileo passed into the annals of scientific history, there came on the Reformation scene, as it was known then, another brilliant scientist, Isaac Newton, whose theories of physics led him to claim that the universe moved with clock-work precision - which simply meant that there was no room for God "to act" in the universe.

Their discoveries, however, set the tone for whole new scientific breakthroughs of the universe, including, perhaps, the most important of them all, that the earth was not at the centre of a God created universe. As Susan Blackmore, a Senior Lecturer in Psychology at the University of the West of England, Bristol, writes in her book The Meme Machine: "Gradually, we had to accept not only that the sun does not revolve around the earth, but that we live on some minor little planet in an ordinary galaxy in a vast universe of other galaxies."

Scientific thought did not stop there. To the horror of the theologians, it progressed straight into the Age of Reason which replaced the Middle Ages. Philosophers of the Enlightenment Period - Voltaire, Rene Descartes, David Hume, Immanuel Kant and a galaxy of other thinkers gave new impetus to reason above authority. The Catholic Church came under renewed threat with the Industrial Revolution in the 19th and 20th centuries, which brought with it nationalism and modernization in Europe.

By now, researchers had split the universe wide open for scientific study. Much remained to be discovered even then. Despite four centuries of scientific inquiry into the origin of the universe, no one had yet discovered the origin of the human species - undoubtedly, the most controversial debate between science and religion. That was to happen only in the 19th century. And even here science dominated.

Ancient philosophy, for example, believed the Holy Scripture which proclaimed that God created man. Of all the creation myths, the Hebrew myths had a profound influence on western thought and culture. The first such myth is about The Book Of Genesis which narrates how God created the world in six days, with mankind being the last creation. The second Hebrew myth deals specifically with the creation of mankind - the much older traditional myth revolving around Adam and Eve and the forbidden fruit. A third creation myth, also contained in The Book Of Genesis, is the Flood myth surrounding Noah, who was commanded by God to take with him every species known to him on earth, man or animal, as the rest of humanity went under. The Flood myth, however, has parallels in other religions of the world, including India, where Noah is replaced by Manu, as told in the ancient treatise, the Satapatha Brahmana.

The first path-breaking scientific thought behind the evolution of the human species came in 1859 with the publication of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection, in his book The Origin Of Species, which stated that man evolved from ape. So far, one scientific breakthrough after another had succeeded in shocking only the theologians. Darwin did the unthinkable: He offended scientists of his time as well. As Susan Blackmore notes in The Meme Machine, “People's view of their own origin changed from the Biblical story of special creation in the image of God, to an animal descended from an apelike ancestor - a vast leap indeed, and one that led to much ridicule and fanatical opposition to Darwin.”

However, Darwin had doubts about his theory because the existing fossil record did not corroborate his claim. As he, himself, observed, “Not one change of species into another is on record ... We cannot prove that a single species has been changed.” If so, how could man possibly have evolved from an ape-like creature? Darwin was bang on target: to date there is still no geological evidence to prove he was right. Yet, his revolutionary theory of evolution is the only existing scientific inquiry into the origin of the homo sapiens.

There is also evidence that there were other people before Darwin who had speculated about evolution. His grandfather, Erasmus Darwin, and Jean-Baptiste de Lamarck of France, for instance. The latter had propounded the theory of acquired characters as opposed to Darwin's theory of natural selection. Darwin became more famous because he presented a likely mechanism through which his theory of evolution could work.

By now, many western theologians feared that science would almost definitely edge out religious thought. Many theologians even compromised - linking their ideas to certain scientific methods, and rejecting others. For example, the invasion of science in schools was stoutly opposed in the West. History and the study of nature were particularly held sacred. In fact, the fight between religion and science - on whether to teach evolution or creation in public schools - continues to rage in many parts of the world. The genesis of this classic confrontation in the 21st century may be found in the famous Scopes Monkey Trial in Dayton, Tennessee, in 1925. Unfortunately, many core issues raised in this trial were lost to a play, Inherit The Wind, which was said to be based on the Scopes trial; it portrayed the trial as a moral triumph of "science" over "religion".

The death of God?

Do the great scientific discoveries, including the 'Big Bang' theory, indicate that science is in and religion is out?

A response in the affirmative would mean science has replaced religion. It has not. Religion may have been dominated, perhaps even marginalized, in the backdrop of modern scientific breakthroughs, such as - relativity, space-walk, moon landing, bullet train, organ transplant, artificial heart, DNA, artificial insemination, Hubble, space shutde, micro-chip, cloning, quantum physics (where nature is open, inter-connected and flexible), genetic code (the key to all life on earth), the Internet, artificial intelligence (computers performing human-like intellectual tasks), and chaos (the ability of nature to self-organize). And yet, these discoveries have taken human kind nowhere closer to finding out the one great truth - the purpose of human existence and the origin of the universe without a maker.

On the other hand, man-made catastrophes - the two World Wars, the Holocaust, population explosion, human misery and environmental pollution - have vastly undermined the once powerful and unchallenged traditions of Biblical and others faiths - prayer and worship which, as Prof. Russell of the Centre for Theology and Natural Sciences notes, “seem meaningless in the everyday affairs of a world come of age.”

In fact, science is far from finding God. Having realized this, scientists and astronomers are, instead, trying to find out the GUT - the Grand Unified Theory - by which all scientific knowledge of the universe will be known to them. It is here that more and more scientists are realizing that one method of achieving their goal is through a theological understanding of the world. As John Polkinghorne, a theoretical physicist turned Anglican clergyman, observes, “Theology is the drive to find the most profound and most comprehensive understanding of our encounter with reality.”

What this tells us is that, science and religion are not at two opposite poles, although it was these past few thousand years. Now there is a growing realization in both camps that they can converge to form an alliance in which the discoveries of each can be shared with the other, while keeping their central beliefs unharmed. Both still have a lot to offer each other, most vitally, in the area of spiritualism. South African cosmologist and Quaker (one of the Religious Society of Friends) George Ellis holds out a consensus: “There is a huge amount of data supporting the existence of God. The question is how to evaluate it.” This is where modern science requires the help of the theologians.

If scientists, in spite of their discoveries, have reached a deadend in their laboratories and observatories, theologians are no better placed in their sanctum sanctorums. Religion no longer requires modern science to undermine its worth. Religious pluralism, intolerance toward each other's faith, lack of spiritual conviction, disrespect for sacred institutions like marriage and decline in family values is doing the task as well.

At the same time, multi-culturalism, chiefly through global connectivity - the World Wide Web - is removing social and religious barriers between the peoples of the world. The Internet, which may be said to have come closest to a God, has today become a one stop shop for unlimited knowledge and information in the quest for divine solace, if not outright enlightenment. This is in stark contrast to the age-old tradition of seeking a spiritual guide. So, whether through, a computer byte or a guru mantram, religion and moden science are already walking hand in hand at the altar of God.

We leave it to Prof Russell to sum up the future relationship between religion and science: “We can no longer afford the stalemate of past centuries between theology and science, for this leaves nature Godless and religion worldless.”

SOUL SEARCH: Paradise Found

2006-12-02T00:33:00.000-08:00

The genesis of faith

How God emerged as saviour, final cause and supreme judge for man

The pyramids of Giza in Egypt, the tall temples of the Mayans and the stones of Stonehenge edifices from the oldest civilizations, stand as mute testimonies to human technological excellence and to one of man's oldest quests: his search for his Creator. This human need for a Creator is rooted partly in anthropology and partly in psychology.

According to anthropologists, the idea of God rose from the human's own imagination as he tried to make sense of the world he was inhabiting. The day-night regularity, the order in the seasons, the forces of nature, all this gave him the impression that there was a higher power guiding the course of existence, but it was the human's own need for parental protection that made him endow this higher power with godliness.

According to evolutionists and anthropologists, humans and their immediate ancestors are the only animals on the evolutionary tree that require parental protection far beyond the moment of birth. Jane Goodall, studying the habits of apes in Gaza, Africa, reported of a strong bond that developed between one of the mother and son ape pairs she had been observing. The bond was so strong that when the mother died the son went into mourning and died of malnutrition. Such lasting bonds are rare among animals that appear earlier on the evolutionary tree. In fact, it is with the monkey genre that we see the emergence of a complex social order similar to ours.

Steven Mithen, examining the prehistory of the mind, says that apes and other primates who preceded humans possessed various intelligences like a general purpose intelligence, a technical intelligence, a linguistic intelligence, a social intelligence and a natural history intelligence. But the primates were not able to successfully combine these intelligences towards a single objective. For instance, an ape's technical intelligence may tell him that a heavy club could be a decent weapon to drive away a predator. But this intelligence may not combine with his natural history intelligence when he is being attacked. He doesn't make the right connections and doesn’t use the club for his defence. But if it was a human under attack he would have made the right connections between the technical and natural history intelligences and would have gone for the club the moment he sees the attacker.

The ape's descendants and humans' ancestors were able to combine the knowledge of different intelligences more successfully and prepare themselves for better defense. In fact, the complex social structure itself was effectively used as a defence mechanism. For instance, the menfolk would group up to protect women and children. Also, living in small communities makes it easier for them to survive using their combined strengths.

The evolutionary tree at this point shows a steady growth in two factors, the creation of a social structure with the family as the primary unit and the growth of emotional bonding. Humans are currently the last in this line, and hence exhibit the most complex social pattern and need for bonding. With a deeper sense of attachment, death and other forms of removal from the home front or familiar surroundings became more painful and fearsome. The leader of the group was responsible for both the physical and emotional well-being of his group members. The leader's was a coveted position possessing divine sanction.

Another visible factor was the increasing dependence on complex social structures and tools and techniques for survival. On this evolutionary branch it was brain more than brawn that provided the cutting edge. Yet, it is not till much later (40,000 BC) that we see the emergence of art objects. Steven Mithen and other archaeologists identify the period as the big bang of the human culture. From this period on we see the emergence of wall paintings, statues, ornaments etc, clearly indicating a shift in the application of human technological skills: humans began to create not only for survival but also for the pleasure of creation. And common among the themes in man's early artworks was his praise for God whom he visualized in his own image, heaven and the creation of man.

With the emergence of the artistic human there gradually emerged a more complex pattern of interpretation and a language for the purpose. Hitherto, the prime motivator for all animals is to be alive for as long as is possible. The human, armed with a language for interpretation, began to wonder over the purpose of life itself. Even today, the human suffers from this duality. Instinctively, he's concerned about his own survival, but at an intellectual level he wonders about the deeper meaning of existence. God's will and God's design emerged as the answers. But the process of defining a superior power may have been initiated much earlier as primitive man developed a more complex social pattern with its own hierarchies and codes of conduct. A convenient way to establish and maintain the hierarchies and codes was to resort to divine sanction. God was now serving multiple purposes: to provide parental protection, to provide a higher meaning to life, to provide inspiration to the artist and to stand in final judgment.

God had finally come of age.

The civiliser as God

Archaeologists and anthropologists studying the remains of ancient civilizations and the pattern behind some of the oldest myths suggest that the creation of a God figure was partly assisted by the coming of a civiliser.

According to Colin Wilson, who has authored books on the paranormal and parascience, the myths of the oldest civilizations talk of a god or gods who came in from the sea and brought civilization to the region. These civilisers were regarded with awe and respect. For instance, the Incas talk about Viracocha who is, in some legends, referred to as the great white god who came in from the sea. Qyetzalcoatl is an Aztec god who is said to have re-created the world and invented agriculture and the arts. Some historians and archaeologists feel that myths too can provide valuable information on what might have happened in the distant past. Most of the older religions have myths with remarkable similarities. For instance, the flood myths of many religions are similar. So are the creation myths.

According to Graham Hancock, when regions like Egypt and Central and South America were still inhabited by primitive people, the regions may have been visited by people from a more advanced civilization bringing along with them the sophisticated culture and technology of their homeland. But who was it that was so civilized so as to civilize the Egyptians, the Harappans and the Mayans?

The three oldest civilizations: Harappan, Egyptian and Mayan date back to about 3000 BC. Prior to this most of these regions are believed to have been inhabited by primitive tribals who had enough technology to cultivate the land. In Egypt, for instance, before 3000 BC, they didn't have the technology to build strong stone houses. Yet, within a thousand years, they were building pyramids. In the case of the Mayan civilization too, one, sees evidence of sophisticated building technology using massive stone blocks. How did they get the blocks up many stories when they hadn't even perfected metal scaffoldings or pulleys? In the case of the Harappans, we see remains of a well-planned city with even a drainage system that could be considered sophisticated even by modern standards. In fact, India never managed to build such a sophisticated city after that. How did the Harappans manage it?

One explanation doing the rounds of archaeological and historical circles is that the ancients were not as primitive as we think. Another explanation is that of visitations from survivors of a more sophisticated civilization like Atlantis, for instance. Such a civilization may have been destroyed by a major catastrophe like a flood. The survivors may have settled in other parts occupied by more primitive people, they may have passed on their knowledge to them, and cautioned them about the danger of the great flood. The primitive people would have viewed the survivors as superior beings, even if they looked the same.

According to an account about life in the satya yuga given by King Bhoja of the Pramana dynasty (c 1000 to 1055 AD) in his treatise Samaranganasutradhara, "men used to live in grooves, hills, forests and near rivers and lakes together with the gods. The kalpavraksha (Wishing Tree) existed to fulfil their needs. When they lost the Wishing Tree they had to subsist on other trees. That's when Nature produced rice. They began to cultivate and farm. They gradually became disgusted with trees and began to cut them down using a chhetriasma (a stone cutting tool). They started to build huts using the cut wood. Then they began to build houses with two, three, seven or 10 rooms."

The description seems to indicate the transition from an earlier period of cultivators to the age of civilizations. The question is; who were the gods?

A few truths from recent science

A successful religious system connotes a virtuous lifestyle. Recent studies on the human brain show that the brain has a “virtue" zone in the prefrontal lobe. Antonio Damasio, studying accident patients who had suffered injuries in the prefrontal region, noticed that the patients' concept of right and wrong were seriously affected after they recovered from their injuries. In one case, the patient was found to have lost all concept of right and wrong.

Thus the human brain has the ability to distinguish between right and wrong or good or bad.
Belief systems depend on miracles for their successful propagation and survival among their believers. A common technique is to ask the believer to listen to his own inner voice. Some belief systems depend on the voice of God to promote their ideals. For a long time this inner voice or the voice of God was considered by psychology as hallucination. But Julian Jaynes has pointed out that the cause may be what he calls “bicameralism”.

The brain's left and right hemispheres have their own functional domains, but a co-ordination takes place through exchange of information between the hemispheres through the numerous neuronal connections in the mid region. In many animals and primates this connection is not concrete. Hence, the left hemisphere where conscious thinking takes place may not be aware of what’s happening in the other hemisphere. So a thought occurring in the right hemisphere may give the impression of a voice in your head.

Most animals are unicameral; that is, only one hemisphere will be active. This reduces the animal's chance of combining information from various intelligence modules. Humans are bicameral as information from both hemispheres are exchanged. This provides them with a better chance of combining various intelligences and also with having a holistic picture of things. According to recent studies about the functional characteristics of the two hemispheres, the left hemisphere works with the details and the right hemisphere is concerned with the larger picture. But there could be occasions when the exchange between the hemispheres doesn’t take place and thoughts in the other hemisphere may seem like an alien voice in your head.

The institutionalization of religions

As civilizations progressed and social structures grew more complex, God became the mainstay of society. Deification and institutionalization of the process of paying respect to God became apparent. In some instances, there was enforcement too. In the case of the Occidental belief systems, society had developed a pattern which had rulers or masters, on the one hand, and the ruled or slaves, on the other. There was a need for deliverance from manmade bondages on a large scale. Mystics and prophets who were able to stir spiritual enthusiasm in the masses and lead them to freedom were able to form religious movements. There is the story of Moses who led the slaves out of the Egyptian kingdom and into freedom after splitting the sea and creating a path for them to escape to the other side beyond which lay the Promised Land. In a few cases the liberating prophets thems'elves were deified by succeeding generations. For instance, Christ and Mohammed.

While a religious movement under a spiritual leader may be successful, it may not continue to be successful or relevant to its followers after the leader passes away and the movement is institutionalized. For instance, the Hare Krishna movement under Prabhupada or the Osho Commune under Rajneesh benefited immensely from the mystics' charisma when they were alive.

Nevertheless, a typical institutionalized belief system, according to Oxford theologian Ninian Smart, will show seven functional dimensions. The system will have a ritual dimension, an experiential and emotional dimension, a mythic (narrative) dimension, a philosophical dimension, an ethical and legal dimension, a social and institutional dimension and a material dimension which includes places of worship, art etc. The attraction of a belief system lies in the first four dimensions. But there have been many instances when a belief system stops to serve the followers' interest and concentrates all its resources on its own survival and the survival of the guardians who represent it.

Of course, in the age of reason, science was able create dents in many religious systems that remained stubborn and failed to adjust to the changing times. The need of the present is not an institutionalized religion, but a flexible belief system that allows the individual to alter it to his needs. Better still, today's intellectuals would rather be religious without belonging to any religion. Is this possible? According to Ninian Smart and other modern theologians, the answer is a big "yes." In fact, this is the divine path for the future.

Justifying a belief

2006-07-22T22:12:00.000-07:00

The belief:

The things we identify as technology are actually the extensions of the human body, just as wheels are extensions of legs, telescope and microscope extensions of eye, global communication systems and the Internet are extension of the human nervous system.

The author of this article quotes:

"I have stared at the sun, and for the sake of my sanity, will never again look directly at the consciousness of the online ueber-geek collective"

This article is pretty old, nowadays there are plenty of such sniffers. But to peek into the collective conciousness.. the apps like Driftnet and EtherPEG seems cool... but sure not for the faint hearted.. This screenshot is a wonderful view... and the incident quite coruscating...

I view this not in the perspective of a 'Network's Systems Admin' guy or any other ueber-geek but as one of the multitude who finds internet an amazing place for communication, fun, to share thoughts and the like.

Another visible proof for me to belive that we live in a an era of techno-transcendence...

2006-07-16T13:00:00.000-07:00

Starting a new academic year, with new resolutions.