Significantly Tiny

Ian's ambition was to build the Total Perspective Vortex. The machine was once an artifact of science fiction, but Ian had toiled to make it a reality. Whoever entered into the vortex could see their true place in the Universe. In science fiction, this piece of truth was so debilitating to humans who realized that their existence was so insignificant in the grand scheme of things, that it crushed their very soul. But Ian being an intelligent scientist, had tweaked the machine such that everyone would see the same thing, reasoning that all of us human mortals are insignificant to the approximate degree. He was also convincing himself that contrary to the science fiction, he would be strong enough to face the truth and not let it crush his soul. Yet, as he stood in front of it to test it out, his trepidations started gnawing him again. Would he be able to face such a shattering truth, even he, who was intelligent enough to build such a powerful and perceptive machine? (Original Source: The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, by Douglas Adams)

Those familiar with "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" must be able to identify this machine, and the courageous character who survived this machine, claiming that he was shown to be a "terrific and great guy". We can always interpret his response in two ways - he was either quite strong to face the truth, or his ego was so bloated and his perception of truth scaled in proportion to the Universe, that he was happy that he could place himself, however infinitesimally, in the huge Universe, whereas a little ant could have probably not even found his tiny dot.

The most interesting question here is - How significant should something be, for it to be significant. When I write down significance so many times, the first thing that I am reminded of is statistical significance. A man-made cut off of 0.05 is really more arbitrary than statisticians would want us to believe. Although, I now have a genial Advanced Statistics Prof, who laughs off saying he no longer believes in empiricism and experiments, for even if your experiments yield nice p values, there is something called as Type 1 Error, according to which 5 % of all published experiments could be false. An extreme view, one might think. But there is a lot of truth to it. We are all aware of how easy it is to toss away the results of a Control as being insignificant when it inches to 0.06, and how we celebrate the results of the Treatment that just about stops at 0.051. Papers are still written and accepted with such marginal significance and insignificance, and hypotheses and speculations fly high. Ah, there is replication validity, some might say. But how many complex experiments are replicated? And how many "simple" experiments are replicated more than a 100 times to catch those stray 5 false positives. Truth is arbitrary, and it is manipulated by significance.

The next interesting question is - Why would a man be so crushed to see the truth of his insignificance? Our lives propel due to us attributing meaning, purpose and significance to everything that happens to us. If someone were to tell a toiling student that his efforts, his aim for success and his life are tinier than a piece of grain in the grand scheme of things, he would lose his mind and his sense of identity. It's crippling to face the truth that our lives are meaningless and our pains and angst are worth a naught. If motivation, purpose and meaning are removed from our lives, it becomes nothing. Existentialists argue that we need to therefore create meaning and purpose for ourselves to combat this feeling of lack of purpose. Associating causality is part of human nature, else he wouldn't have survived.

So the next pivotal question is - How significant should our lives be, for us to find purpose and meaning? If significance is arbitrary and subjective, it follows that it has its own scale of measurement. A doctor who witnesses a woman in labor finds hardly any significance to the whole episode. But to the woman, it is one of the most significant moments of her life. The scale of such qualitative impressions are markedly different from person to person. If one were to step into the machine and see that his life is as big as the tiniest meteor in the galaxy, it still doesn't say anything! Size can be no valid scale! We have teeny tiny deadly viruses who can significantly wipe out human existence! If we believe that every little speck of dust on the Universe plays its role in the shaping of the Universe, then each of us have our own tiny significance. And that's exactly what Beeblebrox from the science fiction, perceives. Our minuscule significance is notable, considering our limitations and the expanse of the Universe.

At this point, there are serious questions on whether such a machine can even be built. What can it be its measurements to come up with the value of significance. Significance is a proportion, something that can exist only in comparison to something else. A virus's significance to Earth may be very high, but its significance to other planets may be very low.

But the aim of the Total Perspective Vortex is to instill a sense of humility in all of us. It helps us reevaluate our values, our priorities and the way we conduct ourselves in relation to others in the Universe. Even though what matters is each of our perceptions of significance and meaning, it is a worthy exercise to be made aware that everything and everyone around us are equally significant in their own little ways. Every time we feel the burden of our life weighing on our shoulders, it helps to reflect on our real place in the grand scheme of things.

The Language of Thoughts

Professor Lapin and his assistant were quite excited about their current research that involved developing a lexicon for a previously unheard and unknown language. The first identified word in the newly found tribal language was "gavagai". They heard this word being used whenever a rabbit was present, so Lapin was ready to associate the meaning of the word "gavagai" to rabbit. But his assistant intervened by pointing out a possible confound. For all they knew, "gavagai" could mean "hey look! Rabbit!", or "a single rabbit" etc. It could also be embedded with some other cultural or physical adjectives that they were unaware of. In order to thoroughly establish the validity of the word and meaning, Lapin and his assistant need to not just make more observations, but essentially live long enough with the tribe to get a grounding of their culture, so that they understood the ties it has with the formation of words and the language. Is it true that one needs to understand culture to comprehend its language? Is there any way by which the "truth" of the words can be objectively ascertained? Does truth become subjective to language? (Original Source: Word and Object, by W.V.O. Quine (MIT Press, 1960))

I can very well see through the challenges that emerge from a research standpoint. I have no idea how linguists work, but I'm certain that the standards for establishing validity are same across all disciplines. There are two parts to this excerpt - one deals with the effect of culture on the evolution of language, and the second deals with how language by itself can afford how we form concepts and thoughts and can thus influence the way people think and behave, therefore affecting how the culture evolves. It's sort of like a symbiotic feedback loop - culture->language ->thoughts->concepts->culture. Since culture is on either sides, envisage a circle instead of my linear diagram.

Those of us who know at least a couple of languages (or better yet polyglots), will be well aware that each language has its own set of unique words and grammar rules than cannot be translated to other languages. Many friends of mine have raved about books in a certain language that can never be translated into other languages without losing some of their truest literary beauty and form. I've even struggled to explain the meaning of certain very common words in my mother-tongue to another person from the very same country and culture, but from a neighboring state. This is because each language is heavily based on metaphors that are relevant to the nuances of a culture. Such is the confluence of culture, traditions and the physical nature of our environment, found in our languages. A popular example is how the Eskimos have a large array of words differentiating the various types of snow. Due to their climatic conditions, these people were in need of forming different words in their language to specifically relate to the subtle gradations and kinds of snow. In South-India, there is no word for snow, except of course if we are to adopt the English word into our vocabulary. Or our leaders would be kind enough to expend their time in inventing authentic and convoluted words from the root of the language.

Consequently, it is also true that our concepts and thoughts concerning the word "snow" will be constrained because of the language. If we don't have words to define and conceptualize different kinds of snow, our knowledge/truth about snow is also limited. Similarly, our abilities to express ourselves and communicate meaning among others are also dictated by the rules and structures afforded by the language. The more poorly designed the language, the harder it is for us to think in terms of the language, the lesser concepts we can frame, the more time it takes to express, the greater the complexity of the expression, and less information or misinformation gets communicated, thus jeopardizing meaning and truth. Another favorite example of mine is that of computer programming languages (despite them being arguably different from natural languages). But a programmer will largely agree that the rules of a programming language can either constrain or expand their abilities to not just program efficiently, but also afford unique thought processes for problem solving and expression. With dynamically typed programs and object-oriented programs, the consensus is that these languages provide more scope and freedom for solving problems and expressing the solutions more effectively. In effect, they allow us to conceptualize and think differently.

This notion, that language structure affects the way we think and form cognitive concepts, is called the Whorfian-Hypothesis. Science is a little divided on this hypothesis. While many (including me) agree that there is some truth to it, it doesn't extend completely to all cognitive concepts or processes. There have been many scientific studies disproving this hypothesis. A popular experiment proved that a culture in which people have no linguistic representation of any color except black and white, still formed cognitive concepts of the primary colors "blue", "red" etc, such that they could arrange the secondary colors around them. Some argue that this is merely perception, rather than conception, but there are many more studies that have attempted to disprove it.

Therefore to a large extent we think in terms of our language, and our cognitive boundaries are sort of determined by the scope of our language structure. But as evidenced in the current generation, the use of SMS-English has led to additions and abbreviations of "words" to our daily vocabulary, such as "lol", that even the structure of the language seems to slowly change. This is due to the technological instant-messaging culture. Hence language is sure to correspondingly evolve. It leads to an interesting question of how this change in language will affect the thought processes of the future generations.

Finally, does all of this relativity with language and culture imply that the expression of meaning will be affected? Two people speaking the exact same language are prone to multiple misunderstandings. Given that, is it plausible that the "truth" remains relative to every language, for we cannot completely express and translate the meaning and embedded context, however expressive we try to be? To a certain extent, yes; which is probably why we resort to Logic, Mathematics and equations to be more objective about what we want to convey. But the field of Logic has its own can of worms, so I'm not going there :).

The Evil Demon

The basic question posed in this chapter is taken from Descartes's, "Meditations". When I saw the source, I was as happy as a child that I was aware of this discussion and what Descartes had to say about it :).


Descartes tried to explain the working of the human mind, and to understand what goes inside our mind. The first question he poses is - how self-evident is everything around us? Is it true that the grass is green as seen by you and me? Or am I just led to believe that we both see the grass to be green, yet what I call green is actually seen as red by you? Can we believe everything that we perceive in the world to be the truth, or is there some "evil demon", or God who has programmed us to view, act and behave the way we do. Are we living in a dream? To a hypnotized person who has been "programmed" or "instructed" a certain way, two plus two is five and that is the truth to him. If hypnosis is possible, are we all then "hypnotized" by such an evil demon? Can we really trust what we see and believe as facts, to be the truth?


"Matrix" series is what springs to my mind. When I started reading a few paragraphs by Descartes describing and reasoning about this, my head started to ache. According to me, one of the reasons why Philosophy is probably taken to be such a dense and hard to reach science is the way the philosopher communicates. The paragraphs are riddled with dense and complicated sentences, and almost all views are expressed in such a seemingly convoluted and lofty style. I will try my best to not sound so.


So here is what I have thought - As I mentioned in an earlier post, I have sometimes felt like I am a third person looking at a movie of this character (me) and experiencing what she goes through, just like how one would get engrossed in a movie or a novel and start associating themselves with the character. I really cannot fathom what will happen when my consciousness ceases to exist, or when my character exits the stage. I may be living in a movie, dream or be hypnotized. But in whatever state I am in, people around me seem to share the same belief on many aspects of this world, making me be harmonious with my assumed-reality. I may be led to believe so, and I may never know. Using Fodor's principle; my mental model of the world is nothing but rules and representations of my beliefs of how the world is, as perceived by me. In which case, there is probably no absolute truth, which is why I see everyone of us trying to solve the mystery and have our own interpretations based on our beliefs and perceptions of the world.


So is there anything that can be trusted as being true without a doubt? To this Descartes says, our ability to doubt and reason, is probably the only thing that is self-evident without doubt. And I agree. I don't know if the grass is indeed green or if the sun does rise in the east, but I do know I am questioning their truth and validity... and hence I'm certain of my ability to constantly doubt and reason. I am also certain that IF I am programmed by certain rules to view the world in a certain way by the demon, THEN my belief, representations, and actions hold good and are true. If I am led to believe that I cannot walk on water, then me trying to not walk on water is a true logical consequence and is hence Truth to me. If I have been programmed that 2+2 =5, and I believe that the answer to 2*2 must then be 5 as well, then given the belief system, my ability to reason is the only thing true here, although both answers may be False. How good my ability to reason is, and whether it helps me reach the right conclusions every time, given the premise... I don't know.