At some point in the future I will consolidate the two blogs. But for now, I am starting another blog with its theme (more of a code name rather) being "Inspiration". The theme (code name?) of the current blog is "Reflections".

So there it is, two parts of me - "Reflection" and "Inspiration". More than parts, it feels more like a paradigm shift. Something bigger has changed, something more like my engine underneath. I am not perfect, but I am ready to take on the world :)

Inspiration feels more like the current me. Reflection (funny its name matches the occasion) feels like an older me.

I will edit this post with the address where "Inspiration" will be located.

I have composed a small poem that describes how I feel:

Every thing feels new, everything feels fresh
I feel fear, yet I feel hope
I want to shine, I am afraid of the past
I hope not to repeat my mistakes,
I want to be strong, yet I feel wobbly

But, I realize, I feel,
It doesn't matter,
I will make mistakes, I will fall,
It is part of what will make who I am
I will get up, and I will shine
New experiences, a new me
I want to be strong,
I realize I am not perfect,
But I'll take a deep breadth, and take the world on
God, please take care, please protect

Labels: new, philosophy

I have not posted something in the "meaning of life" category for some time now. I have a bunch of things to say. I will say each individually and in the end connect them all. :)

Weighted Sum of Energies

I am a strong believer in thoughts have power - when you think of something you exert an energy for that to happen. If your energy is strong enough you would cause it to happen. But wait! you are not the only one thinking! Yes, everyone's thought have power, when I think of something I execute energy in one direction, when you think different of the samething you exert energy in a different direction. The net movement is in the sum of the two energies. Say person A's energy moves it 1 unit to the left and person B's energy moves it to 1000 units to the right. The object happens in the right direction (no pun intended :)). Where your energy comes from - is a whole different question - I think it comes from a range of things, your confidence, actions etc..

The movement of events in the world are a weighted sum of all our "energies" (as referred above).

Non-Greedy Optimization

Here is a thought I had. Have you ever heard people say "its for the best" - when something happens, and things seem to have gone wrong for you. When someone says "its for the best" what they mean is for some reason beyond your comprehension this was the best thing that could have happened to you. May be if what ever this event was, did not happen, something worse could have happened.

Say you are working in a graph problem:
You have 4 nodes A, B, C and D.
A is connected to B, with a cost of going from A to B = 1 unit
A is connected to C, with a cost of going from A to C = 10 units
B is connected to D, with a cost of going from B to D = 100 units
C is connected to D, with a cost of going from C to D = 1 unit

You start at A and your final destination is D. You want to minimize cost. You don't know all the costs in advance. You go to a node, and you learn about the costs of visiting other nodes from there.

So, you start at A, and you look at the costs for going to B and C. They are 1 and 10 units respectively, so you would decide that B is the better option, only to later let it cost you much heavier. The journey from A to B to D would have costed you 110 units.

The best way would be, to start at A, choose to go to C, even though it is a higher cost, you would experience a much lower cost from C to D. The whole journey would have costed you 11 units.

Thats 110 Vs 11 units!

I believe this is how our life is. We are at a node, there are a whole range of things that can happen. Something bad seems to happen, and we feel depressed, but I believe its part of a greater optimization algorithm which due to our ignorance we don't realize (and may never)...like the case above, if from A you are forced to take path C, you might feel angered...it cost you more!! but only so that in the end you have a cheaper (better) journey.

Let's try to combine them

The flip side to the second thought is of course, does this mean everything is pre-determined? Well, I think that would make everything somewhat pointless....if everything were predetermined...why!? why do we exist? what can be found...everything is already known. There is no point to anything!

I know there can be arguments against that, since my arguments assume some rationality and things like this is not some crazy experiment conducted for fun by some higher being etc...but thats just a bit too crazy for me to believe in...and I'd rather stick to my thoughts :)

So, here is what I think might be happening. Let me do some defintions to explain my idea:
Entity: An entity can be a person, animal, thing...who knows what else.
Nodes: Nodes are events and things like that. Entities traverse nodes.

An entity traverses through the nodes. The twist is, the nodes don't have static costs. The costs of the nodes vary based on the thoughts of the entities. There is a direct connection between all nodes. The cost of some of them may be really high (think infinity), making them impossible for the optimization algorithm thats running to choose those nodes. But, since the costs between the nodes are based on the thoughts of entities - the energy that they exert - an entity can potentially make a path from a node A to B where it did not exist (i.e reduce the cost from infinity to zero or what ever that works out to be the best).

There you have it! Thats one of my tries/theories to undestand on how our world works under the category of "meaning of life"

There are many more things I want to say, that are starting to come up in my mind...but I have to end this somewhere and its getting late, so I'll end this post here. I hope that was not too intense and that I did not scare any one away...haha... :)

Labels: philosophy, random

I have always believed that the potential of the human mind is vast and remains very much under-utilized. I find it interesting (and enjoyable? :) ) when I can draw analogies of such thoughts to science.

Analaogy 1

When we learnt about drift velocity in "Electricity, Magnetism and Optics", this is the analogy I drew:

First, let me explain the concept. In a wire, the electrons move at very high speeds in all directions - they move at a high speed randomly. This type of random movement is useless to us. We want them to flow in 1 direction in a controlled manner to make use of it, as current. When we apply a potential difference across 2 ends in a circuit, we induce a magnetic field in 1 direction, this causes the electrons to slowly move in 1 direction. The random movement is still present, but overall the electrons are starting to move in 1 direction - the velocity with which they move is called the drift velocity. This velocity is much much slower.

The analogy I drew was, the human mind is like electrons in the wire. There is a lot of chaos present. But when we think of something and "will" to do it. We cause the mind to move in that direction with some drift velocity. If we had very good control of our mind - to be able to control all the electrons, if the speed of random motion was used towards achieving an objective. The power would be truly amazing.

I guess the reason I started thinking of this, relates to something I read in Sanskrit a long time ago, which meant something like "The human mind is like a monkey, it keeps jumping all over the place. It is hard to keep it steady on something. To control the mind, is like controlling the wind".

I kid you not, try this and you'll realize - try to NOT think anything for sometime. Its really hard. Even if you try to think of just 1 thing for sometime, its hard. You will notice that there is always some other thoughts that come up, or something running in the background...

Analogy 2

Well, this is not really an analogy, but something supportive, I guess, lol. In the thermodynamics class today, the professor was talking about entropy (which is basically a measure of the disorderness of a system).

One thing he said was to maximize the performance of a system, we want to minimize entropy. Haha...I feel the same way about the human mind, to maximize performance, we need to minimize entropy.

Let me end this post with that. :)

Thinking about it, I could have organized the flow of the post (in terms of content) better... but oh well, this is not English class and these are just thoughts as I had them (somewhat...)

lol.

Labels: philosophy, science

Yesterday, when traveling in the subway I had this thought (haha...this falls under my interest of meaning of life :D):

To show weakness is true strength, but a show of strength is true weakness

Of course this depends on the context, but I find it rather interesting :)

And I took a stab at writing my first poem (I think this is my first...not sure) motivated by the cloudy and rainy climate:

Happiness in Perfect Sunshine
Pleasantness in a clear and starry night
But the prolonged battle of light and cover
giving a struggling light and
a downpour of tears is truly fearful

Haha...I know it does not rhyme, but I don't think poems have to :P

I like strong rain where it showers heavily for a short time and then there is bright sunshine following it. Yesterday's rain was slow and prolonged.

Labels: philosophy