India enters the Age of Transparency

Not many would have thought that when an year back this was happening to Kejriwal....this would be the eventuality of this situation an year later.

Dec 2012 outside Delhi Sheila Dixit's (ex-Delhi CM) house.

An year later sworn in as the CM of Delhi

Wonder what's going on in her mind

or his

or hers

Bi-Polarization and Capitalism

One of the biggest examples of Bi-Polarization is the existence of Financial Markets and Bubbles. Bubbles happen because of the consistent need for the human mind to be part of the larger wave and not be left behind. Financial Markets facilitate these bubbles and help them exist. Actually its a little more complicated that that. Markets are designed to remove the inefficiencies of the financial system and matching Supply and Demand (.. or another Source and Sink) by providing a platform for pricing exchanging information

Now lets come to a very fundamental question. Are markets efficient or not? Of course people would say that markets are efficient because markets always price in all information. The problem is that this understanding is flawed. The markets are not efficient because some people always make money while others always lose. Why does the phenomenon exist. Occam's razor- because some market participants always have more information that others- its as simple as that- thereby making our perfect and efficient market a void theory.

Till the time the world was going through the Cold War, many countries were not in a situation to remain neutral and had to become party to the entire situation thereby taking sides. Even though some countries were neutral, many eventually became polarized either due to proximity or core ideology or whatever the reason is. The fall of the Soviet Union led to the beginning of a new era and in a bid to become a larger pole in the entire polarization scenario the more efficient system ( at the time) survived and ushered an age of consumerism and privatization.

But there happens to be an underlying weakness in capitalism as well. It might well be possible that the in the past the current form of capitalism showed more endurance than the failed version of Communism. The basic flaw is that Capitalism favors wealth or whoever has more wealth. This gives an undue advantage to the person who has more of it and puts others to a serious disadvantage. Capitalism works by adding a premium to money (in more laymen terms puts an interest rate to cash). To start any project we need cash. Capitalism designates a risk premium to this cash. So in more simple terms interest rates are like a carrot that has been placed in front of us- The ones who ride the horse are the wealthy. But who is following the carrot. Who is the mule? The mule is the working class- those who are starved of cash. Look at the vast economic disparity already existing in the world. Let's face it. The ultimate objective of capitalism is the increase share holder's value. This never ending cycle of increasing economic disparity could eventually be the reason for social unrest and possible future revolutions/alternate forms of governance.

Capitalism in its current form exists because people in power see little merit in the socialist form of governance and having already witnessed its failure in multiple times in history have out rightly rejected ideas of a inclusive growth strategies which could improve the world multiple times. But there is a catch. Capitalism has also failed- and more number times. That's what happens when we have financial bubbles- LTCM, subprime you name it, we have already seen it before. But the problem is that till the time the US continues to maintain its dominance in the world, we would continue to see this system function unless there is complete loss of confidence in the Dollar and their economy. I believe this reality is more closer than we think it is.

Eventually the central bankers and leading economic advisers in the world would figure out that extreme capitalism can lead to massive imbalances in any society. It would only be time before some madmen decide to take control by force if there is a critical mass and then we could land up in another totalitarian regime. Just that the imbalance created are usually trying to equilibrate and already existing imbalance. The underlying problem is that the human mind is not willing to change easily. Change comes at a cost and that work against the short term interests of the shareholders. However, if our governance systems had been more flexible and willing to evolve, we would not have situations like over population, inequality, gun culture, casteism, corruption, lack of medical services etc.

Why would it happen that in spite of having more than sufficient food in the world, there are people still dying of hunger. The reason is the underlying skewed nature of our minds. We are just not willing to accept that may be we are wrong and it is time to embrace a relatively tolerant and humane approach to things.

Lets look at a small piece of information I wanted to share which might change the way you look at everyone else around you. It is interesting to note that entire modern human civilization outside of Africa that we see today are descendants of a small tribe of around 100 people who managed to cross from Africa into Arabia many thousands of years ago. Yes, everyone around you, even your boss, your enemies, your wife and all before you have come from that small group.

Bi-polarization and sensory perceptions

In our previous discussion, I explained how bi-polarization can lead to the existence of two opposite polar entities in systems to ensure continued existence/sustenance. The existence of the two sexes can be derived from the same explanation.

Some of the effects of the bi-polarization of sexes in humans has led to some of the following specializations:
1. Women able to multitask better than men.
2. Men having better spacial/ hand coordination than women
3. Women are much more networked/connected to peers than men
4. Women able to perceive sensory perceptions in more details than men can
5. Women having more longevity and immunity than men
6. Men physically larger than women.

This leads us to an important possibility. Men and Women perceive the world and their lives in very different ways. This drastic realization would mean that how a woman would sense or feel about a particular event/time/color would be very different from the way a man would experience. Not only does that mean all people in the world feel differently but they might actually perceive and understand them differently.

We know that there are super tasters who can taste much better than normal people. We know some people have more sensitive skin. Some can hear really well and some can sing well. All these small differences on people is what helps us becoming more diverse. Its nature's way of not putting all eggs in the same basket.

Now I would like to discuss about the primary senses that we humans have.

1. Vision
2. Auditory sense
3. Smell
4. Taste
5. Touch

Most humans would agree that the above are primary senses any human would most likely have. Some would say there are more but we would like to keep this discussion within the realm of acceptable science.

Now say you have got only 100 units of memory space allocated to you to store a particular piece of information, say think of a day when its raining and you are standing in front of bakery waiting for your bus. How would you allocate those 100 units to the different senses to recreate the entire scene to the greatest detail. Which senses would be your first and second choices. Once you have finalized your allocation I would like you to think about why you made the choices you made.

Now let me guess what choices you would most likely make.

1. Vision
2. Audio

In fact most people would allocate more than 70 of the 100 memory units to the two above senses. What could be the reason for such a lop sided result. Are we stuck with our sight and sound fixation. Or are we subconsciously choosing these two senses for a reason. The reason is blaring right at our faces.

We choose information that which is efficient. We choose Vision and Audio because it helps capture the most information. By seeing and hearing people use associative logic to store a lot of their information. But there is catch here. I have asked you to recreate the entire scene.

Now lets add a control to this experiment. The 100 memory units remain the same. However, this time the only difference is that every visual memory has to have another memory associated with it to ensure that memory has an association. Standalone memory is of no use to the brain and hence our grey just loses it after some time or just discards it. We can still use other senses but at least one association has to be maintained.

Say, you see a tea stall right next to the bus stop I was talking about. With this visual memory of a man taking out hot tea for you on a rainy damp evening, we could possibly take the sound of the stove or the tea getting poured into the cup or maybe just use the smell or taste of tea.

Gripped with that hurdle, our allocation of the memory units comes close to what we call the polarization or Bi-Polarization of the senses.

If my guess is right most people would now allocate more than 40% of the memory units to Vision; Audio would take much lesser space now.

This phenomenon is called Polarization of the senses. Because humans end up taking so much more of input from one particular sense organ for quicker processing and action that other senses take a hit. It is clear that in human beings and many animals, a lot of the brain power is used for storing visual information.

The problem with this kind of polarization is that our mind tends to fill in information for us even if its not there. Visual confirmation is taken and for faster processing the brain fills in the rest for us. Its like guessing the story by just reading the first chapter. Only your mind makes up the rest of the story.

Polarization of senses occurs in animals in different ways. Some animals are known to be able to smells out things and not just the present but through time. Some bears have the capability to figure out if the source of the smell passed through a spot today or yesterday and sometimes even a month. It is possible that the way we perceive our visual sense, other life organisms may have senses which are polarized in another specialization. Is it possible that their brains are able to get a larger amount of their external stimuli from other perception organs. Is it possible that they are therefore able to perceive/see/experience these external factors in very unique ways. Well we can't be sure about this at the moment. But may be if someday we invent machines which can possibly help us communicate with them..... 

Bi-Polarization and Life

Bi-Polarization Effects opens possibilities for explaining some of the basic questions of Life:

1. What is the possible explanation of Life?

2. Why are there two sexes?

3. How did Life get so diverse?

4. What we still cannot explain?

When Big- Bang struck the Time Clock running, there began a race for every thing. Since its been only 13.8 billion years since time existed, it might seem very difficult to explain Life but it isn't. After when the Solar System came to Life around 4.5 bn years ago, Life found the right conditions to form a billion years later. We came quite late on Earth for sure. But lets get to answering those questions.

1. What is Life. 

Life is a controlled transfer mechanism created by the Universe to exchange energy or forms of energy. The transfer is controlled by some rules defined by mother nature.

That might seem quite like a trivialized explanation for such a beautiful experience but we are transferring or exchanging all the time.Universe is a  packet of energy that went haywire for a particular period of time following which energy became mass and mass became complex entities like Life. Life exists because some elements (more specifically carbon, hydrogen and oxygen) in the periodic table come together  more oftern to form regulated entities and can form sustaining units. When these self sustaining systems got more larger, things went into overdrive. Collective units needed to be more stronger to survive. Once a system stays stable for long periods of time, the more stronger units form mechanisms to exchange stimuli and matter in a controlled manner. Over time these systems become capable of storing information and recording past experiences- more like control experiments which after millions of years of repeated sustenance become capable to accepting/rejecting external stimuli.

Ultimately all life is functioning on the information stored in our DNA. These memory coils just help us transfer matter/energy/information/ideas in more controlled manner.

2. Why are there two sexes?

At some point in time, life figured it out that division of labor is the best chance for survival. The existence of the two sexes is a testament to the fact that natural systems tend to get polarized over time. This not just helped in increasing efficiency and diversity but has in turn help in exchanging information which could otherwise have possibly got missed had Life stuck to asexual reproduction. Over billions of years, the polarization of sexes can get extremely skewed and show remarkable differences in the two due to natural selection.

3. How did Life get so diverse?

Changes in external circumstances/stimuli led to similar life forms changing their behavior. The changing environment could have acted on these life forms at different times in evolution and hence the differences. 3.5 bn years is quite some time to show have this diversity becoming real.

4. What we still cannot explain?

Our understanding of existence itself seems still quite limited. Why does anything exist in the first place. Are we the imagination of a super natural entity or are just an extension of a cosmic singularity. The problem is that in spite of all the technological breakthrough, we are still to go much ahead in understanding the Universe. Some with an academic approach to things might find these questions frankly very inconsequential and more delving into the spiritual, nonetheless these happen to be some of the most basic questions before we can understand anything in this world properly.