A fiery ball of orange sitting atop the city skyline, peeking through the morning fog that still clung sleepily to the buildings. And I wanted to scream it out to whoever would bother to listen. But who would?
"It is just the sunrise: it rises everyday."
Aldo Leopold advocated that one cannot walk the streets and neglect to look around at nature. Aldo Leopold would be sorely disappointed with the people today. How could anyone not notice a sunrise? Around the same appointed time each day, the sun rolls in from beyond the horizon and splashes a huge array of colours across the sky. Each day, it is different. And yet, no one cares enough to bother.
"Sunrises are sentimental. Sentiments are for fools."
And thus were uttered the words that would one day form the foundation of existentialism. For what makes our reality any more real than the notion that we were all just living out a dream, our real selves being asleep? There is no way of sufficiently arguing away the latter possibility, and philosophers have tried in vain to determine whether we are real or merely like lights being triggered in specialised environments.
Before I set forth to lay out my discussion, it is imperative that you understand the angle from which this discussion develops. Imagine a circuitry that, with the aid of environment-reliant resistors, light up a single light bulb. We are able to say with certainty that, supposing we chose an arbitrary combination of bright and warm, we are able to pre-set the bulb to light up only under specific conditions. It does not require anything much beyond a Secondary School education to predict that in drastically different conditions, there is a high chance that the bulb would switch off. And often, it does.
If we are able then to magnify the scale of such implications, we could well be described to be mere circuitry -- programmed to respond predictably in specific environments. We feel comfortable in familiar environments and distressed in unknown ones. The degree of our distress and our drive to make the unknown known pretty much determine how we would react. And we are able, through repeated observations, to predict a person's actions with relative accuracy. If this were not true, the great sciences that study behaviour would not have been able to gain as much credibility as it has today. Clearly then, our minds are potentially predictable. All that is needed is understanding of what stimuli flips which switch. And yet, in spite of all this, scientists have still found it tremendously tedious to accurately represent the human mind. Why?
I do not profess to have an answer, but I will seek to merely attempt to provide a few viable points to consider. Firstly is the mind's ability to programme itself. It is this learning ability that has proved most elusive in arriving at the ultimate model of the mind. A simple algorithm often used in robotics should prove helpful in explaining this. Imagine a robotic mouse and a human running through a maze. A very simple command would be to turn left at every obstacle. But let us go one step further and think of further scenarios -- turns that vary in angle, dead ends, curves -- and we are able to consider additional rules to accommodate all these. However, suppose the makers of the maze are very cunning craftsman, and the mouse ends up in a highly unexpected situation with no algorithm determining its next course of action. The mouse would continue to rely on its programmed rules, unable then clearly to overcome the obstacle. A human, however, would well be capable of sizing up the situation and adapt. That is the biggest difference between the mind and a mere machine, a chasm many scientists have tried in vain to bridge.
Next is the idea of random choice, a concept I have often outlined in my recent posts as being the distinctive feature of humans. The mind has a tendency to forget some things and remember others. To make things more complicated, the mind has also exhibited situations of seeming forgottance. We have experienced this countless times. When we meet up with long-uncontacted friends, we at times cannot remember names until both parties recount the days that they spent together. How do memories associate and organise themselves? Self-help books on memory-boosting seem to offer an answer, but careful scrutiny would reveal that they merely seek to manipulate the effects of memories and not explain the causes. They can say to a large extent that excitement of the senses make an event more memorable. And so, what makes the senses tick? Surely it is the mind. The books are unhelpful in our foray. Ignoring the mind for a moment, even mere chance and randomness have not been able to be replicated unnaturally. The simplest task of generating a random chain of numbers have also not been possible thus far. Considering that the task of spotting a distinct, repetitive pattern of behaviour by the mind is conflicted by its ability to conjure seemingly infinite choices, the aim of reconstructing the mind is made almost impossible.
And finally, the greatest irony in wanting to replicate the mind is that it requires the greatest of minds, and still that is not enough. Perhaps it is like attempting to lift yourself off the ground with your bare hands. No matter how strong, how intelligent, there are physical limitations to what you can do.
Or to put it simply, can a mind comprehend the mind?
Again, I had woken up on time only to instinctively switch off my alarm again. It was the same excuse that I lived so close to work that I could afford another half-hour of sleep. Guess what? I could, but with a generous serving of urgency.
And so, I was racing to work that day. It was all the same routine:
Tap my card Walk through the turnstile Enter the building Momentarily hold the door open for anyone behind Amble down various flights of stairs, blocked by less-agile personnel Rush across a carpark to the office
Except this time, something caught my eye at the foot of the staircases. It was like a black guitar pick with a splash of colour down the middle transitioning from turquoise to green. I paused momentarily to muse at it before rushing on again.
After work, I followed the same routine, except backwards. Again, I saw the black pick, and bent to pick it up. Only then did I realise that it was not a pick, but the wing of a butterfly. I searched around a bit and found a matching piece shoved in some corner, tattered away. The butterfly itself was nowhere to be found. Still, the wing I found was complete, and it was still there after so many hours. Till today, it is on display in my wallet: a memory of the butterfly that ceased to be.
Friends are like that. If I could use imagery to describe this, imagine a curious canary that alights upon your windowsill; a fallen flower that drifts to the earth in a final dance; a broken wing of a brilliant butterfly -- images which invariably tend to bring a smile to the common person.
In this same way, friends are the little sparkles in your life.
And in the same way, you can never drag all of them through life. We cannot tie the canary to the window or throw up the flower to let it fall again. In the same way, some friends drop in merely to leave a sweet memory. Some drop in and stay there as a companion. It is not our obligation to stay in contact with all of them. It is, however, our duty to grant those who are worthy an eternal memory.
For remembering someone is pure. In a commercial world, people want to be remembered. People want fame and fortune. To be remembered and acknowledged is their idea of success. To remember someone, however, takes an additional step of humility and respect. And so, to grant someone a memory that withstands the test of time is truly remarkable indeed. To commit something as precious as a memory is all that a friend could really ask for. Any attempts at maintaining contact is bonus.
