Why do we like to cook?

I could have named this post ‘Why do we like to dance?’, but decided to name it what it is because of my new found hobby, cooking. A more apt name would have been ‘Why do we “zone out” so often?’, but it would have been incomprehensible to those whose lingo is not yet up to the mark.

To begin with, one must differentiate two kinds of cooking — one that is done purely with the motive of fulfilling a goal — ‘eat to live’, ‘pack children’s lunch boxes’, ‘Guests are arriving in an hour!’ and so on; and another whose main motive is not just the above but also something beyond it. What that ‘beyond’ is will be my focus here.

First of all, we must observe one thing about cooking that seems quite strange to people who don’t cook — cooking actually seems relaxing to people who come back tired from work! It involves more than a little mental and physical labour and yet people seem to love doing it. In fact, it is probably the one thing that is as pleasurable (if not more) than eating itself!

To answer this, we must first have a look at what it is that exhausts people nowadays. Leave out those who perform physical labour to earn their bread, who are exhausted by the sheer expenditure of energy: Most of those who will be reading this really don’t fall into that category. What seems to exhaust us is explained by people in two vague-sounding terms — ‘stress’ or ‘strain’.

So, what is it that is being stressed or strained? Surely not our muscles; most of us do not use them outside gyms or jogging tracks. Obviously, it is our senses; more precisely just one or two of them. This is pretty much a modern, white collar phenomenon.

It is remarkable that we can feel exhausted by simply staring at a spreadsheet or computer code for an extended amount of time. It is equally remarkable that the world can run because of people simply staring at spreadsheets or computer code for an extended amount of time. Welcome to the Information Age: all that is need to crank the wheels of civilisation nowadays is a computer.

With the assumption that all that matters is information fed into the thinking part of the brain, the computer and similar technologies like the television and Walkman try to feed in as much information as possible, in as focussed a manner as possible, preferably using only a single sensory system. It seems like there is some problem with this assumption — everyone nowadays complains of stress and strain without moving a muscle!

The problem seems to lie in the fact that humans have evolved to experience the world with all their senses — hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, thinking and feeling (yes, not just the physical senses!), whereas the modern living and work place seems to assume the exact opposite: humans function best when they work free of ‘distractions’, so deprive them of all extraneous sensory inputs and feed all information through one or two sensory systems.

This is the guiding principle behind the construction of most classrooms, laboratories, appliances like the TV, computer, tablet, workplaces (think cubicle!),  supermarkets and pretty much any modern place of production and consumption. People need to be ‘focused’: ensure they are not ‘distracted’ at any cost. Think about it: monochromatic or dichromatic color schemes, ACs to ensure the exact same temperature and humidity, noise absorbing ceilings and carpeting, coffee makers and canteens (no kitchens!) — The modern living and work places resemble the interior of pyramids, fit for the mummified dead, than places where actual living, feeling human beings exist.

Contrast this with a kitchen, and you get the picture why cooking is so much fun. Cooking is probably one of the earliest activities of the non hunter-gatherer human, and has not changed in its basic form for at least 6000 years. What we cook may have changed, but nothing else. It is a feast for the senses unlike any other: A well cooked meal is not just about the taste, it is about how it looks, smells, feels to the touch and feelings of happiness and contentment that it evokes. Here, the human being as a whole, and not just her brain is being stimulated. It is probably the most multi-dimensional of all activities that humans perform (with the performing arts coming in at second).

While cooking, we have to stand, walk, chop, grind, grate, stir, smell, taste, hear, mix, blend, heat, cool, wash and what not. There is simply no other activity that is even remotely close in terms of the sensory palette that offered to us, and we do all this almost unconsciously, so deeply ingrained is the activity of cooking in human civilisation. Living as we do in an artificial environment that has been consicously designed to deprive stimulation to our senses, cooking is our refuge, our hiding place, the one activity that cannot be done any other way if it has to be done right.

Cooking is therefore one of the few activities that makes complete use of all human dimensions, not just the cold, calculating, logical one. It is but a small wonder then that avid cooks find cooking relaxing, meditative and even therapeutic. It is no coincidence that good cooks seem to be ‘bursting with energy’, whereas those who cook because it provides them food are normally weary of cooking and look to eating out whenever possible.

What is more worrying is children growing up in such a sensorially poor world. Children, more than adults even, learn best through the use of all their senses rather than purely by information alone. There is a difference between reading about a sea breeze and experiencing one. There is a difference between learning about electricity and making a bulb glow or experiencing an electric shock. Learning purely by information flowing into the brain is necessarily boring, unidimensional and ‘stressful’. This does not mean we should put up a projector and show ‘educational’ movies. This is more of the same. What it means is that we have to rethink education, learning and living, adapting to the necessities of our age without losing what it means to be human.

What to remember, what to forget?

Humans are creatures with a gigantic memory. The evolution of the written word made it possible to store things outside our brains, and hence more safely for very long periods of time. This gradual accumulation has resulted in a memory too large for any single human to remember or grasp. Only collectively do we know a lot.

Sooner or later, the question of what is important and worth passing on, and what can be neglected or lost in the sands of time would have cropped up. This is because even external storage of memory is not costless. Different civilizations came up with different answers to this question. Indians seemed to have thought that lessons from history are more important than history itself, and thus have left us with very little solid historical data, which is why the huge controversies surrounding the ‘construction’ of ancient India. Europeans were more meticulous, and have always had a good tradition of storing away bits of information from life thousands of years ago.

But why is it important to remember? Goethe took a shot at this question, and said

He who cannot draw on 3000 years is living hand to mouth.

which is simply another way of stating what Newton said:

If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.

The biggest advantage humans have over other living creatures is our capacity to build cultures, and it is on the basis of this culture that we can ‘move ahead’ without (literally!) reinventing the wheel every generation. This is why we have schools, so that we can remember something, and social institutions, so that something else can do the remembering for us.

But this memory can as easily be a disadvantage in many ways: First, not everyone who draws on 3000 years can rise above it to think for themselves. Knowing too much may kill creativity and the capacity to face a changing world. Second, remembering everything may preclude the possibility of forgiveness and healing. This is what is happening in India and America after 2002 and 2001 respectively. The intention is to ‘never forget what happened’ and the very memory breeds anger and hatred.

Thus, some people try and make a case that forgetfulness is as important to humanity as is remembrance. Thus, even when one is saddened by the news that Muslims in Gujarat are voting for Modi in the name of restoring normalcy,  one understands why it is happening. Shiv Vishwanathan believes that people are forgetting what happened due to Modi simply because all of today’s stories are written in the language of economics, which fails to capture the evil Modi represents. In fact, he is made to look like someone who has made Gujarat great if one only looks at the economy side of things. Same with the Bhopal gas tragedy. ‘Victims’ were converted to ‘patients’ and then to ‘vagrants’, simply by changing the language in which memory was constructed.

While this interpretation is undoubtedly true, one must also understand that even if the language changes, the want for people to restore normalcy to their lives will never go away, and that bearing a burden as heavy as the Gujarat riots maybe too much for most.

This brings us to today’s time. Semiconductor and magnetic memories have become so accessible and cheap that I believe that the 21st century will be a watershed for humanity: It is the time from which we forget practically nothing. Forever. The principle of important vs. unimportant memories simply no longer has any relevance. People are clicking photos using their phones and their cameras; recording voices and songs; recording every small detail of their lives on Facebook and blogs. It is no longer sufficient to experience something beautiful (or trivial for that matter), but to capture/record it from every angle and tweet about it, paste it on your wall and upload to Flickr or Picasa. The 21st century is the veritable historian’s nightmare: with nothing forgotten, he has to sift through immense data to try and make any sense of the world he will inherit from us. Undoubtedly, the day is not far when writing history will need the assistance of machines.

The demons of memory will haunt us now more than ever before in history. The issue is that it is not experience that makes us wise, but what we learn from experience. This requires a certain distance from what we experience, a kind of ‘greying out’ or ‘blurring out’ which is no longer possible as our entire lives are recorded in HD quality video. We have become ‘knowledge brokers’, but to rise above mere knowledge and pass onto posterity real lessons of history might no longer be possible.

Does everything really matter? If yes, does it matter to everyone around us, to the rest of the world? Just like Calvin says:

I’ll bet future civilizations find out more about us than we’d like them to know.

On Evolution

History and Evolution (from biology) are somewhat similar in that both are quite descriptive, and involve in their description some events that cannot really be predicted from any known first principles. Indeed, it will not be too much of a sin to say history is evolution of some kind by itself.

This being the case, there are atleast two ways in which one can approach evolutionary topics, which can complement or (probably more common) confront each other. All evolutionary topics that we are interested in always suffer from a lack of complete data about them. As mentioned a couple of posts back, this has motivated people to assume an underlying ‘model’, and use it to string a story through the facts which seems plausible. Another, equally interesting method to deal with the same would use the notion of a ‘constitutive absence’.

‘Constitutive absence’ is simply a way of saying that what is absent from the data collected or story woven is as important as what is present. This motivates us to ask the question ‘Why not this?’, as opposed to the question ‘Why this?’. It is my suspicion that looking at history and biological evolution in this manner will be able to structure our thinking about these subjects in a more constructive manner. For example, instead of asking ‘Why do birds have two wings?’, it may be more constructive to ask the question ‘Why are there no birds with six wings?’. It may just so happen that we have missed finding these flying critters, or there is some other reason. This to me is more in line with the theory of natural selection — Natural selection can only select against, not select for. To select for something implies evolution should ‘know’ what to select for, which is obviously nonsense. In the game of natural selection, there are no winners, only survivors. However, most biology literature seems to try and explain why a particular trait is present in an organism. Schrodinger came to the conclusion that the molecules that carry life (The structure of DNA was unknown then) must be large by asking why cannot there be small molecules of life (Answer being related to the fact that at smaller scales, Brownian motion dominates and smaller the molecule, the more suspceptible it is to change (mutation) by bombardment of other molecules).

The picture that this provides us with is not of an all-encompassing Story of Everything, but about the constraints that are put on organisms which prevent any other possible scenario from being viable. It is somewhat like trying to understand how water flows — If you look at water in a large river, trying to follow one blob of water may be hopeless, but in a stream you may have better chances. The constraints of a narrower channel makes this easy for us. Even so, you may not be able to predict precisely how the blob of water flows, but you know that it will remain within a confined boundary.

However, you will need to admit that beyond a certain stage you can’t really be sure about things when you take up this approach, whereas the Big Story approach will try and explain everything.

History is no different. Instead of asking ‘Why did the Europeans have an Industrial Revolution?’ one can ask ‘Why did the Indians and the Chinese not have an industrial Revolution?’. Instead of asking ‘Why is India mainly vegetarian?’ one can ask ‘Why did not Indians develop a meat dominated cuisine?’. You can probably see how just framing the question differently leads one to think very differently about the same problem. If you appeal to the physics of complex systems, then you are acknowledging that the trajectory of any complex system is inherently hard to predict, but constraints on the system make certain trajectories highly unlikely, and everything that happens does so within the phase space that is still viable. Historically we hoped to find laws of Nature and Society that would enable us to see forward and back in time. Unfortunately, we know now that these laws, if they exist, are probably too complicated for us to comprehend, and so a ‘constitutive absence’ is a more sensible way to move forward.

Why do people honk so much?

This question seems quite important considering that the sanity of people having to tolerate incessant honking might be somewhat rescued from the edge of the cliff on which it now stands if they understand why. Honking probably served an important public purpose, that of preventing two vehicles from occupying the same space at the same time often, but its usage has gone beyond such mundane considerations to being a reflection into the personality of the owner of the horn itself.

First, one must distinguish between different types of honking:

• The standard honk, which is used for the important public purpose mentioned above.
• The stylish honk, which rises above the previous one to include (normally irritating to everyone else) tunes or rhythmic patterns. Normally used to show a possible flair for music and an upbeat mood.
• The angry honk, longer in duration but bursty in nature, when the owner seems to think (or hope) that the honk will become louder and more irritating to others if used for a longer duration. It is normally used to show disapproval.
• The frustation honk, normally used in beastly traffic jams, and whose duration is proportional to the feeling of powerlessness that the owner feels. Normally used when the owner wants to make something/someone cry for what he is feeling and the effect is conveniently reproduced by pressing the horn.
• The celebration honk, used when India wins the World Cup or something like that. It consists of innumerable vehicles on the road honking in unison for an unbearably long period of time. One must thank the Indian team for not doing such a disservice to the road travellers of India often.

There might be a richer variety, but these are what I can think of. If one thinks about it, there is no logical reason why some of these should exist. I have heard a person relentlessly honking at a railway crossing when the gates were closed, and others honking back, probably to make him stop. Don’t think it worked very well. The scene felt like watching wolves howling at the moon. There is no rational reason to honk at a closed railway gate, but then the mistake lies in believing that people are driven by reasoning and solid logic in their day to day conduct.

Driving or sitting in a vehicle under busy conditions is one of those few instances in one’s life when you are shown for what you really are. People who seem nice and sweet suddenly start acting bossy and judgemental, and mousy and mild people, well, continue being so. People who tell you that they don’t feel the need to control everyone or everything show their true colors when they are passengers in a vehicle  zipping at 100 kilometers an hour past other vehicles.

All these and other observations point to what seems to be a fundamental feature of the human psyche – the need to assert the Self, to show the world that you exist. As the neuroscientist V. S. Ramachandran points out, the Self cannot really be defined without reaching out to the Other – who or what you are is shaped by your interactions with others. People who are completely shut off from others, like in the case of autistic children, don’t seem to possess (at least observably) what we would call a normal human personality. The honking at a jaywalker becomes more and more urgent unless she acknowledges your presence by looking directly in your direction. While one can explain this away by saying that you were only hoping to draw her attention to the fact that a possibility exists of her being stuck under your tyres, but sometimes even when there is no reasonable chance of this happening, the honks still persist.

The traffic jam is the ultimate put off, one of the few (well, maybe not few) moments in when you simply don’t matter, and really cannot do anything about it. The effect is similar to what you would evoke if you tried to end a fight by trying to walk away and ignore the other person. On the other hand, a person who is angry at you will try to incite anger in you, knowing fully well that that is the only way any decent fight can result. One needs to know that one’s anger is fully reciprocated and probably some mechanism like the mirror neurons will help maintain the feedback loop, keeping the anger flowing from one to the other. In this light, it would be interesting to see how frustration honks start and spread in a traffic jam.

Almost every facet of our personality – beauty, intelligence, aggression – make sense only in a social context. ‘Setting goals for yourself’ or ‘Not following the herd’ seem to simply be replacing the social with a reflexive analysis, but the mechanism is still the same. Which is why we have Special Interest Groups, debating clubs and Facebook which serve the purpose of ‘mutual admiration’, in the words of J.K. Galbraith. Knowing that you matter matters.

Evolution – Variation and Similarity

Evolutionary thinking (due to Darwin) is no doubt one of those paradigm shifting moments in scientific history, changing how we conceive of the world around us and ourselves. The idea of ‘Descent through Modification’ is now well established and accepted.

While evolution is not a disputable fact, a major source of debate a few decades ago (and even nowadays, to some extent) has been the causes for evolution. Enter a evolutionary biology class and you will see that everyone tries to explain observable traits (non-jargon way of saying phenotypes) using fitness arguments – how this or that trait was required for survival and reproductive success, and hence it is here today. These arguments stem from a view that is called the ‘Modern Synthesis’ – evolution happens primarily through natural selection, and natural selection requires a set of variants to select from, and this variation within a population is given by random genetic mutation. It is called the ‘Synthesis’ since it combined ideas from evolution and genetics to give a plausible answer to the mechanism of evolution. The whole idea of evolutionary game theory rests on this hypothesis, and so does evolutionary psychology.

However, a physicist or a mathematician or anyone else who tries to look for patterns in phenomena will tend to be exasperated by natural selection arguments for everything: in some cases, it is obvious that natural selection caused evolution, while it is not so in others. However, a knee-jerk answer to any evolutionary question by a biologist will invoke natural selection. Now, most of these answers are plausible, but that does not mean anything. For example, a crash in a predator population can easily be put down to a lack in fitness, but everyone who has studied the predator prey model will tell you that this crash comes about due to interactions between predator and prey populations, and has nothing to do with genes or natural selection.

Creating evolutionary fairy tales frees the biologist from looking at a phenomena at a deeper level, and sometimes one feels that depth is what is lacking when one reads up evolutionary biology. The oft quoted example is of the Fibonacci spirals in plants – this shows up everywhere, from shapes of galaxies to arrangement of seeds in flowers. A hardliner selectionist would tell you that this is because there were many variants of the universe and ours was the only one that managed to survive (reproduce?), and thus all such successful survivors will have Fibonacci spirals because of their ‘fitness improvement’. Now, one cannot disprove this, no doubt, but the question is whether one should accept it.

For me atleast, the answer is no – while selection of variants has its place in biology and (I sceptically say this) in other fields, it cannot explain the unity underlying phenomena: Certain things ‘just happen’ to look/behave/think similarly, and this evolution via selection cannot explain. Are there physical, chemical, informational constraints on a living being that simply does not allow certain variants? Are ‘gaps in the fossil record’ actually ‘gaps’ –  is there a step jump from one form to another? Answering these questions is way harder than coming up with ‘plausible’ selectionist arguments, and has very rarely been attempted in the history of biology. However, if evolutionary theory has to have the depth seen in physics or mathematics, such work has to inevitably happen.

Situating the Mind

One of interesting themes that emerged from a workshop that I attended recently is the problem of placing the Mind in a certain place. Up front, one must assume that it is sensible to separate the Mind from the Brain, at least for purposes of analysis if nothing else. Neuroscientists may have problems with this, but that is their problem.

The first approach to this problem was to deny that anything ever happened within the Mind – the brain was a simple input/output machine, put in stimulus and get out behavior. There is nothing called mental states and anything ‘unobservable’ had no real existence. This was the approach of the Behaviorists, and this is what gave rise to traditional psychology, with its ideas of conditioning and behavioral modification. This view is quite defunct especially after Chomsky and others at MIT and Harvard came into the picture.

The second dig at the problem was taken by the cognitive scientists from the Chomsky tribe. This still dominant view considers the brain to be a computer (note that they do not think of a computer as a good model, but rather that the brain is a computer). While the particulars of implementation may be debated (Turing Machine vs. Neural Networks), the idea is that the Mind has certain internal states, which when combined with sensory inputs gives you all the rich everyday experience that any person is familiar with. To a first approximation, and as a working hypothesis, this is extremely useful and has led to great insights about the functioning of the Mind, especially with regard to perception and language. Computer vision is the brainchild of this era, and its results are there for anyone to see.

However, biologists were probably dissatisfied by this ‘disembodied’ mind that the computer scientists had come up with. This would imply that the relation between the mind’s functioning and the environment in which it evolved is very small. No self respecting biologist can ever accept such a claim, and this led to an ’embodied’ concept of the mind, where perception (for example) was not the output of an algorithm but a combination of body states (walking, running, eating, etc.,) and mental states, and one cannot separate the two out since the mind did not evolve on its own, but rather developed as part of a whole.

Thus, we see a trajectory of thinking about the Mind, which moves from a complete denial of it, to a disembodied version to one (now popular) version which places it firmly within an organism. In some sense, the complexity which one attributed to the mind has increased over time.

The next step came from (obviously) the philosophers, some of whom claimed that the Mind does not exist within the person, but is a combination of the organism and its environment. What they say is that the environment does not simply affect cognitive processes, but is a part of them. Thus, no environment means some processess simply will not work.

Thus, the Mind is no longer a localized entity but which is distributed over space and (maybe!) time. One hopes this gradual extrapolation does not lead to Deepak Chopra like new-age mysticism and leads to claims that can actually be tested for their truth value. But again, one sees that this is a step up the complexity ladder. Slowly, the study of the Mind has gone from simple to very complicated ideas about its location, forget about function.

This is in contrast to historical developments in say physics, where complicated phenomena were ultimately explained using a small set of concepts which were considered fundamental. As with the study of the Mind, the study of the Earth system has run into difficulties. What one hoped would end at studying large scale motions of the atmosphere and ocean is nowadays studying phytoplankton and its effects on global climate!

Intuitively, there seems to be something very different about the phenomena that we are trying to study in the mind sciences or earth system science than the atoms or celestial objects that physics studied. You cannot study vision and learn things that extrapolate to the mind in general, just as you cannot study a liver and tell what the organism is likely to be. The fact that even the question of what to study is not well defined leads to very dubious research which gives the whole field a bad name. Do we, as our predecessors did, study the liver, pancreas and heart and say well, put all this together and you get a living being? Or do we try to answer the question ‘what is life’?

It does not seem very clear as to how the present range of scientific methods can help answer a question like the latter. The study of the Mind, the Earth or even Biology is at a stage similar to maybe where Mechanics was at the time of Kepler. People are looking at various ways to chip away at the same problem, some traditional, some extremely offbeat, in the hope that what one considers valid questions will be answered. Whether they will be answered or shown to be invalid, time will tell.

Life at 8 kmph – A Walker’s Manifesto

Whether on four limbs or two, we and our ancestors have been walking for millenia. It is in our DNA, and we still rely on it from time to time when our cars break down, just like our ancestors relied on it when their donkeys suddenly died. In fact, we have been walking for longer than we have been thinking, which explains why the average human walks far better the she can think – If everybody walked as well as they thought, the world would be a very dizzy place for most of us.

Here, no attempt is made to outline the physical importance of walking – This every IT professional or MBA knows and no farmer or street vendor needs to know – this is an attempt to delineate the cosmology of the walker. Also, it is an attempt to understand how man’s relationship with his walk changed after cataclysms like the invention of the wheel and the iPod. However, technical questions like how much to walk, at what intensity, with whom, how can one associate a real number with a certain kind of walk and other publishable questions are left to future theoreticians from some Institutes of Science.

A walker is a peaceful animal. She knows that she cannot walk faster than some 10 kmph regardless of what happens, therefore is content with her lot. Running is possible, but not for long distances – walking is the only way to ensure that one can transport oneself daily from point A to B without dying at a very early age. A walker is also a very careful animal. He is at his most vulnerable when not protected by his home and family. Thorns, predators, snakes, stones, pretty much everything in his path is potentially fatal. For example, if people only knew how to walk, then people would not have such a problem with night traffic being banned in Bandipur. Instead, they would request that such a ban be enforced in the interest of the walking public. For the walker, time is not composed of discrete intervals determined by some cesium atom. One does not have to reach some place at some time, one reaches a place when one reaches the place (preferably before sunset, when we are even more vulnerable).

A walker is learning and playing all the time, unlike those who need specialized locations for both. Learning about what to eat, where to stop, how much to talk are all part of the curriculum. At the same time, listening to the wind rustling through the leaves, the robin announcing the arrival of spring with interesting lectures from the tree tops, watching the trees burst into bloom and the grass drying out are all part of the small pleasures that come by the walker’s way. A walker can stand and stare for as long as she wants, an ability that is slowly dying out. Staring is a very important part of both the intellectual and aesthetic development of the walker, though nowadays she would be accused of sexual harassment or mental illness for doing the same.

A walker does not go visit point B alone, but an infinite number of places along the way. People coming to Mysore complain that they only have around 10 places to visit, boring place. Maybe a walk around will change their mind. Thus, for a walker space is not composed of finite points connected by finite curves, but a continuum of points from here to everywhere. It is therefore not surprising that walkers know more about a place than anyone else. Nothing is boring because nothing is static, space in a walker’s view is always fluid, just like time, and both are in consonance – more the space in front of you, the more the time you will have.

And then comes the wheel. Nowadays, everybody wants their own wheels, depending on what they can afford. Thus, an American rides a Harley, an Indian rides a Hero Honda and an IIScian rides a cycle. For some strange reasons not well understood, from where they come (point A) and where they go (point B) suddenly are given undue importance. Another strange concept called ‘saving time’ also gets introduced, which justifies riding wheels that rotate faster than ever. Time cannot be stored for a rainy day, nor does it need saving from anything, thus this saving business seems to be mere wordplay rather than a concrete concept. Space and time are now quantities that are opposed to each other – farther means you ‘save less time’. The harmony between space and time is destroyed in this process.

Now everybody has ‘saved’ time, and therefore has plenty of time to ‘spare’. Since it cannot be lent to others, it must be used by its owner in the best manner possible – parties, philosophy, defence policy, business expansion and the like. Unfortunately, as was noted before, man does not think as well as he walks. Thus, it is not surprising that most of the problems in the world today are caused by the ‘savers’ – animals with too much time and too little brains. If they only had less time to plot jihads or search for cheap labor markets, we might have been better off. Simply put, walking naturally leads to world peace!

Earplugs which deliver music right to your eardrum is another invention that is killing the pleasure of walking. Like all good earplugs, they cutoff the walker from his surroundings, surrounding him with badly composed notes which are not even infinite like the ones he is cutoff from. Thus, his concept of space and time are completely dictated by another person (sometimes rightly called the ‘conductor’). Since the walker no longer pays attention to his surroundings, all the dangers that he faces are thus to be paved over by roads, killed or put into National Parks. Thus, not only does he affect himself, but everything around him as well.

These and other pernicious inventions have relegated the walker from being the centre of her universe to a small, sometimes irritating, part of someone else’s universe. It is high time we discover the walker in ourselves, before we evolve to a stage where we do not know what to do when our donkey dies.

Bridging Nature and Humanity

I personally find it quite strange to think of humans as apart from nature and vice versa, but after many interactions with people who think otherwise, it seems that I’m in a minority. If evolution is to be believed, we as a species (Dawkins would say individuals!) have evolved mechanisms to improve our survival rate, to the extent that we are now the most dominant species in terms of geographical reach and resource use.

However, our genes seem to have forgotten to encode limiting behavior, atleast with respect to resource utilization, which would enable us to live sustainably. Therefore, we have to resort to non-biological notions like stewardship and animal rights to keep ourselves in check. From where such notions arise, one really does not know. Nevertheless, questions in ethics, epistemology and ontology have interested us as much as questions in physics, math or chemistry.

Ancient scholarship, both Western and Eastern, never viewed either category as seperate from the other and, to quote a friend, did both physics and metaphysics. It is only recently that our world view has taken a schizophrenic turn, looking at billiard balls using differential equations (bottom-up) and guiding human behavior using teleology (top-down). It has been notoriously hard to reconcile these world views and thus each developed practically independent of the other.

No doubt, there have been attempts by one to encroach upon the other’s turf. Dawkins and like minded compatriots went one way, while the Christian Right in USA and Astrology try going the other. All in all, it seems unlikely that one or the other will have total dominance anytime in the near future.

Thus we are stuck with quarks on the one hand and The Goal Of Human Life on the other. For example, mainstream economics ignores nature by invoking the Axiom of Infinite Substitutability (One kind of good can always be substituted for another, thanks to human ingenuity), so if rainforests go, then we can always conjure up something to take its place. Marxist thinking takes the view that all human development is the result of economic processes, so trees and animals don’t even merit a mention – they are simply unimportant as far as human society’s development goes. On the other hand, we have climate models which put in a large amount of CO2 into the model atmosphere and see how things change, as though humans are just passive CO2 emitters who cannot recognize calamities and adapt their behavior (This seems ominously probable nowadays!). Each approach has value, no doubt, but it is obvious that neither economics nor climate modelling can actually solve the problems we face today.

One solution is for people with different outlooks to sit down and reach a consensus. My last experience with such an experiment was not very encouraging, and the recent spat between Rajendra Pachauri and Jairam Ramesh did nothing to to encourage anyone about interactions between politicians and scientists, I’m sure. The other solution, of which one is more optimistic, is for researchers to break  the new barriers and go back to a world view where one can engage with physics and metaphysics without being called a witch-doctor. Natural and social sciences are ripe for such a synthesis — we have finally reached a state where our metaphysics (explicit or otherwise) is affecting the earth’s chemistry and biology, maybe even the physics: while I don’t think we can change the Gravitational Constant anytime soon, but a few thermonuclear warheads here and there could change g=9.8 m/s2 to something substantially smaller!

Little known but impotant steps towards such a synthesis are being seen — ecological economics is bound to be mainstream before we kill ourselves, social ecology is bound to be important in the future too. Scientists seem to be getting more comfortable doing politics outside their institutions and politicians are learning some thermodynamics, thank heavens. The principle of  learning two subjects well, one closer to quarks and the other closer to the God side of the spectrum of human thought will serve researchers well in the future. Oh, and present day economics does not count on either side of the spectrum.

Society and Ecology – courtship and conflict

The variety of disciplines and specializations that have proliferated sometimes hinders larger understanding of any phenomenon, especially one that involves anything more than (an arbitrarily selected number!) 3 variables of different types. Then someone comes along and sees things happening that cannot be explained through any existing theory, and hence we have ‘inter-disciplinary’ studies. So, we can have, for example, economics, mathematical economics, ecological mathematical economics and so on, as long as we are comfortable with unwieldy (but cool sounding!) names.

So is the study of relationships between collections of humans and collections of everything else, living and non-living. Sometimes called human geography or social ecology, the main aim is the same: to study how man and nature are intertwined in a circle of courtship and conflict. The separation of man from nature itself is quite arbitrary, and has roots in religion rather than in any sensible thinking. Study of people interacting with each other, which is commonly studied under the banners of economics, sociology and anthropology (and all combinations of the three) has very rarely touched upon our interactions with plants, animals, trees, mountains and rivers, assuming a mutual independence between the material and social worlds (which is again quite arbitrary).

This separation of man from nature is extremely well reflected in products of present culture like TV series and novels. Take for example, the latest hit shows (which I religiously follow) in the US, House M.D. and Heroes. The absence of nature from the studio sets unless it is absolutely required (i.e, it is an outdoor shot) is quite remarkable. This is even more so in our very own Saas-Bahu soaps, which don’t seem to be shot outside a single set. New generation ‘Multiplex movies’ by film makers like Rahul Bose also show how little nature has a role to play in the lives of residents in metropolises. Traditional movies aimed for the less cultured masses still have a role for nature in them, since their audiences may still interact with it on a daily basis.

Take another example of the latest NDTV campaign to spread environmental awareness. As usual, NDTV got a lot of celebrities to support their campaign. A sampling of their comments leads to interesting conclusions : They articulate their concerns in abstract terms like climate change, aesthetics (beautiful/green city = good), energy. The only true down-to-earth concern is that of dwindling water supply, since that is what each and every city dweller is really constrained of. Citizens of the city have really very little understanding of what it means to be part of an ecosystem that does not contain only asphalt and concrete, and typical gathering grounds for them like malls, movie theatres, pubs, nightclubs are indicative of this epistemic void.

But we seem to have evolved to also like being among living beings which do not wear spaghetti tops or rippling abs, and hence the urbanite’s courtship with nature. Nature is an abstract entity that manifests itself in regular trips to National sanctuaries and mountain treks. Not something one needs for daily life (Spencer’s Daily is there for such things), but something that has some nebulous link to our aesthetic and moral sense.

This understanding is quite inaccurate and unfortunate, since it hides from us our means of sustenance. This is where the conflict between different people and people and animals arises. The environmental movements in India started mainly because of these conflicts between man-man and man-beast for natural resources (Chipko Andolan, Narmada Bachao), whereas those in the West derive from the urbanite view of Nature. In fact, the first few to articulate environmental concerns in Europe were artists and poets.

The bitter irony of the matter is that the same people who seem to court nature with their concern towards it are locked in a huge conflict with other people over the same nature, albeit unwittingly. The conflict has been ‘outsourced’ to their creations, the State and the Corporation, and so they can feel purged of moral obligation by buying village handicrafts and tie-dye clothes. Does our obligation stop here ? Are there ways by which one can indulge in ‘high’ culture and still live in harmony with other people and animals?

As always, the questions are easy to ask, the answers may not follow as easily.