This famous dialogue from Agent Smith in The Matrix, in essence, captures what we really are. Like Joe Rogan points out in his Bacteria Theory, it's not the single individual that's to blame, we as a collective unit are a nuisance. As I discussed in my previous post, all our actions are directed towards a single goal: Multiplication.
"Why's that such a bad thing?", you may ask. "Nothing wrong with that", I'd say. That's pretty much what every organism does instinctively guided by the DNA's urge to replicate itself. The problem is, we are such a burden on our resources that soon we exhaust them and then we have to spread further, unlike other organisms that develop a balance with the nature.
As you would have guessed by now, I'm not a fan of the human race. A friend (one among the few I have) once asked me why I avoid human contact so much. My answer was simple. I prefer to spend my time with computers, or gadgets in general, over people because gadgets or machines don't get angry, they don't have ego, behave consistently and can be trusted till their very end of life. Her reply to this was that despite all these qualities a machine cannot love you, care for you, make you laugh, make you cry. To be frank things like love, being cared for, having a social network figure right at the bottom of my priority list.
I often used to wonder why we need to be so complex. Why can't pure logic rule the world instead of bloated egos and innumerable emotions? Once, during those late work hours at office, I happened to have this discussion with my manager. His opinion was that if only logic was the guiding force of the world, everyone would think the same under similar circumstances, much like a robot or a computer program which would give the same output for same input. That would make the world a really boring place.
While writing this, I just remembered what I had read a few years back in The Shiv Maha Puran. If I remember correctly it was mentioned that the first creation was of a spiritual nature, flawless, much like the first version of The Martrix as The Architect describes. The problem with this creation was that it became static as the spiritual beings that resided in it were not really interested in reproducing. Hence a new creation featuring sexual reproduction was created, complete with all the emotions and ego states enclosed in an envelope of virtual reality called Maya.
The way I understand this is that emotions and feelings are just a layer of abstraction added to avoid our getting bogged down by the intricate biochemical reactions taking place in the body. Much like love is biochemically same as eating large quantities of chocolate and dreams are a manifestation of DMT secretion in the brain by the Pineal gland. So we go about with our lives with all our achievements, accomplishments, innovations, failures, successes. We rage wars, we produce a whole lot of people, terrorists, conservationists, politicians, philosophers, thinkers, polluters, enterpreneurs. We come up with ideoligies, religions, social structures, nations. Little do we realise that under the hood it the DNA at work.
So far so good. But here's what confuses me every time. The Bhagwad Geeta and various other scriptures tell us that our aim is to rise above the Maya, realise the true world and attain Moksha. If we fail to do so we remain stuck in the birth-death-rebirth cycle. All this makes me feel like I'm a character in a game with the birth-death cycles being the different levels of the game. This also reduces God, the Almighty to a mere spectator enjoying the show who sometimes logs into the system as different Avtars (human manifestations of God). My issue is that if God is Almighty he could have come up with something better for his entertainment than playing around with people's minds. This has started sounding so much like The Matrix and The 13th Floor.
At this point of time I'd like to clarify that I'm not an Atheist. I'm a firm believer in God. It's just that my definition of God differs slightly from most of the people. To me, God is a convenient name we give to any phenomena we cannot explain with our current understanding of the Universe. The moment we come up with an explanation with empirical proof, it becomes a new scientific theory and ceases to be an act of God. At one point of time I used to suspect that if we are able to come up with a gigantic equation that models the entire Universe with all the variables representing the state of the Universe and can predict the next state from the current state, we would no longer need a concept called God. But here's the catch. To run this model, we would need a computer which is more complex than the Universe itself. Now I don't remember the exact theory but the moment we create such a computer, it becomes a part of the Universe thereby increasing the complexity and immediately making our great model obsolete! Even if we are able to get around this difficulty, there's another problem. If our computer, equipped with the model claims to be able to predict the next state of the universe, it should essentially be able to predict its own next state since it is a part of the Universe itself. Now again, a system can only predict the state of another system simpler than itself. Thus, getting an equation to model the Universe and simulating this model cannot be physically done from withing the Universe. This reinforces my faith in an external entity called God. But I'm still clueless behind the motive of creation. May be someone reading this can answer this.
I should go to sleep now. Bye, till next time.
Aalok
-Fear knocked at the door. Faith answered and no one was there.
0 comments:
Post a Comment