Your Best Self

Your perception of your "self" can play a great role in how well or poorly you do in various endeavors you undertake in your life. I am using the term "self" with quotation marks particularly to pay emphasis. First of all it is important to have an almost precise understanding of the term "self" itself, if not "the self". Here I have used the term "self" to refer to the topic or to the self in general, whereas the term "the self" is used to refer to a particular self. The self has been a subject of considerable philosophical scrutiny since millennia. Many thinkers have thought and written huge treatises on it. The topic also draws great attention in teachings of various religions. So what does the self mean?

It is your inner personality that distinguishes you from others. The self is something that makes you unique. The strength of your character, things you are good at, your virtues, your fears, your audacity, your goals, your memories and the way you respond to various stimuli on a moment by moment basis in your life forms your self. 

This is possibly a brief and a comprehensive explanation of the term self. If you have understood this explanation well, it should not be very difficult to understand your own self. However, the story is not that simple. Bewildered? Even if you are not confused at the moment I promise that you will be quite confused by the time you reach the end of the next paragraph. And if it does not confuse you or shake your beliefs about your "self" or "the self" as a topic, you are either a well read person with an elevated acumen for philosophical thinking or you are a bit too naive to comprehend all this academic mumbo jumbo concerning the self. Don't mind, many people are like that.

Even if you have tried hard to understand your self, you may be living in an illusion about it. Actually there was an article in The Scientific American Mind recently that was titled The Self Illsuion. According to this article everything you experience in your life is merely an illusion. In simple terms this means that you are living in an illusion no matter whatever perception you have about yourself. A more complex explanation is that the pain you have due to a severe injury is also merely an illusion. Would it be alright to infer from this that your whole existence, or the very fact that you believe that you exist as you are reading this article and your whole being is merely an illusion? You'd rather that this is the right conclusion.

Looking at the self from the vantage point of contemporary philosophers and the article posted in Scientific American Mind is definitely perplexing. However, you can simplify this discourse by making a few ordinary assumptions. You can assume that you are real and that all of your pains and pleasures are also real and consequently your self is also real. Having agreed on these simple assumptions we now try to see on as to what forms a good or a bad self. You will find that things are still quite complicated. Keep on reading to learn more.

Your self deceives you in many ways. You can do a few simple thought experiments to find out the various deceptions it plays on you. Stand in front of a mirror while you are combing your hair and while you are all dressed up in the best clothes you have. You do such a thing everyday. Now listen to that inner voice that tells you all the great and cool things about yourself. That is how your self is being dishonest with you while trying to beguile you about all the good stuff that you are actually not. Do you feel like disagreeing with this judgement? Let us see why you should not.

At once tell yourself to deliver a speech to an audience comprised of arbitrarily chosen people on a randomly and instantaneously chosen article. Think about it very strongly that you have to perform this activity very soon. As soon as you give this command to yourself you will find your self telling weird things to you about yourself and the speech you have to undertake. Indeed, if you do not have any public speaking exposure or if you are a novice speaker, a myriad of negative thoughts must definitely have stampeded through your mind at this moment. 

You are getting nervous. You try to find an excuse. You think that you are obviously great but making a speech is totally out of question. You tell people that you are good at cracking jokes with friends but you are definitely not going to make this speech because you believe that there is something really so bad about public speaking that it should not be done at all. You may even say that this whole public speaking is completely crap and that everyone should abandon it. 

These are all lame excuses. The truth is that deep inside your self is telling you that you really can not make this speech at all. It is telling you all the bad things about your voice and appearance. It may as well be telling you that how goofy you may look like when you actually stand up on the stage to make that speech. Just imagine yourself standing behind the dice while the clamor of claps from the audience strikes your ears. You think of your self as a dumb donkey, a designer's dummy standing on the stage with absolutely no clue about what you have to say. You even curse the moment when you stood in front of that mirror and thought about yourself as being something of value. It all started from there.

However, the truth is that your self is playing against you again and telling you all the bad things about you that you are actually not. This is the illusion of the self when you believe with considerable confidence in the assumption that you made earlier that you exist along with all your mental faculties intact and in good order.

The crux of the discourse we have had so far is that your self tells you good things about yourself while in reality that might not be the case. At the same time it can tell you bad things about yourself while actually you are not too bad either. Actually as a matter of fact, by continuous practice in trying to improve upon a few things you can become better and better.

Now try to relax! If you have read it so far, you have made great progress. Even if you have not understood everything in this article, it is alright. The mere fact that you have been reading this article till this point means that your curiosity has drawn your considerable attention to the subject matter this article is trying to cover. You need to be complemented about this. Congratulations!

Assuming that you have understood that your self deceives you in ways that you do not understand well, you have to find some remedies. In this paragraph and in what follows we can try to find a few remedies. First of all try to learn to relax. having a relaxed personality can enhance your performance manifold at many tasks. In order to develop a relaxed personality that you can do many things. However, I presume that meditation is one of the best cures. There are many meditation techniques that are available online and you can choose the one that suits you the best.

The second thing is to work hard. There is no shortcut to hard work. And with hard and persistent effort you can achieve anything you can conceive and that your heart can believe. The third thing is to do what you love to do. This has been emphasized by many gurus and success preachers. It is a self evident truth that there is nothing you can do well than what you love to do. 

Having said this, the fourth advice is to try to pursue decent goals and develop humane ambitions. This is quite self explanatory. The fifth thing is to try to learn to be confident. Actually if you pay due heed to the above advice, self confidence will automatically follow. Never mind if you are low on self confidence right now. Just try to console yourself with the idea that everyone suffers from this syndrome time and again. There are a few who are perpetual sufferers and there are many who have recurring episodes of low self confidence. The sixth advice is that while you should not overestimate yourself you should not do the converse as well. 

The last tip is to try to understand that your self plays tricks on you. This means that while you should not believe that you are Hercules, you should also not think about yourself to be completely irrelevant. When that happens with you, think that anyone can have these kinds of feelings. Even as I am approaching the end of this article, there is already a plan developing in mind to tell me that how the heck did I manage to write this article at all. Always remember that your best self is when you are cool, calm and confident on the day when you actually have to deliver that speech you were really scared of.




Psyops by PsyopsPrime is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://psyops.tk/.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://psyops.tk/.

  by  GaggieITMI 

Understanding Human Consciousness

I recently patched up a small research proposal titled Understanding Human Consciousness. It is a five pages long draft in pdf format. I think it is nice and can be improved by the passage of time. My interest in neuroscience grew between 2008 and 2009 while I started reading books about self help. Awaken the Giant Within was the first book that I read on this subject. It is a brilliant book but I believe that there is a lot more to neuroscience than feeling good alone. 

As I progressed further on the way I cam across ideas of Ray Kurzweil about downloading human consciousness on to computers. I also came across the books of Marvin Minsky which I think are very nice. Emotion Machine and Society of the Mind are two of his really nice books that are worth mentioning. Unfortunately I could not finish reading both of them.

The journey did not stop here. In 2011 I had a chance to read Sam Harris. I would again like to mention that he raises very cogent questions in his The End of Faith. It is indeed a very thought provoking book. Specially the questions he raises about why people believe in one religion or the other are rousing. His concern that such beliefs should be explainable by reason is rational. The other question he raises is that whether any afterlife exists or not. Although I would like to assert that he himself is quite judgmental about that question already.

As the reading journey continued I had a chance to read Irfan. Irfan introduced me to Western Spiritualism. From Irfan I came to know about the various contemporaries of Charles Darwin who were spiritualists and believed in an afterlife. Most notable among these are Alfred Russel Wallace and Sir Conan Doyle. It was quite interesting to read from The History of Spiritualism that he attributed much of the world's misery to materialism and advocated for the adoption of some kind of religion by the humanity. It was quite interesting for me to know this as I thought materialists, or so to say atheists, to be a lot more benign people before this.

Anyhow, introduction to spiritualism gave me a chance to read and skim through many academic papers regarding invocation of spirits and souls, and other aspects related to spiritualism. For instance, there are quite a few tracks in spiritualism that study the ectoplasm, a viscous material that possibly comes out of the mouths of the mediums as they communicate with the dead. Similarly, there are also papers that study the minds of mediums to figure out what sort of people are more conducive for becoming mediums. 

I do not remember the source of the papers but I am sure they can be found through the website of Society of Psychical Research. In the meantime I have also been reading papers on neuroscience from the point of view of mental and physical health as well. They are quite numerous. The conclusion they draw is that most of the mental and physical functions of human body and personality are localized in the brain and that there is no evidence for the presence of a non-physical mind i.e. a soul or a spirit. The burden of coming up with a proof is normally left with the reader.

So given this I thought that I should at least write a research proposal that could sum up all the reading I have been doing over the years. I think that it looks nice. It does not have any citations or references at the moment and I hope to be able to add a few citations by the due course of time. Here is the link to the proposal.

  by  ezhikoff 

Free Images

One of the nicest things about any blog post is the image associated it with. An image galres up the whole thing as well as can be used to enhance the context of the post. It can have many benefits indeed. It makes the whole thing look glamourous. It is a great way to catch the attention of the reader. It is icing on the cake. The list goes on.

I have been using a lot of images for my posts. Initially I was only using images from the Tom and Jerry website to make my posts appear funny, simple and nostalgic in some sense. Then I started using images of all types. Sometimes I see that I am getting them off from other blogs. I believe that images that we use for our blog posts should not defy norms of decency.

Recently I read somewhere that a person was looking for free images on the web. Does this mean that all the images we download from the Internet or find through search engines are not free. I'd rather that they are all not free. But how can one get a free image to attach to a post. Are there any specific websites or methods?

30 in 16

I have not posted anything on this blog for almost one week. The reason is that as soon as I signed up on street articles, they gave me a challenge to write 30 articles in 30 days. I had to choose a niche myself. And I had to write one article per day on average to meet my goal. There were other requirements that I had to fulfill as well. For instance, each article had to be composed of four hundred words at least.

So this has kept me quite busy. Of course, I could not do complete justice with the 30 in 30 assignment as well. There were days on which I wrote with vigor and I wrote many articles. On other days I could not write anything. Other diurnal chores came across as distractions. 

Nonetheless, yesterday I decided to finish off the assignment well in advance. This meant that I would have to write 16 articles to complete the remaining task. I had already written 14 articles in previous days. 

The topics I chose to write about were diverse. However, mainly they revolved around the idea of creating a home based business. A great motivation why I chose to write and why I wrote so much was that I wanted to get really hands on with writing. And honestly speaking, the experience of writing was incredible.

As soon as I submitted the last bunch of articles, I opened my e-mail and figured out that today is the 16th day of the challenge. Finishing 30 articles in 16 days, as opposed to the 30 days deadline, obviously gives you an otherworldly feeling. You may want to have a look at one of my articles. Please click here.

  by  blpgirl 

Street Articles

A few days ago I signed up with Street Articles. The website is owned by Kyle and Carson. These are the same guys who own The Wealthy Affiliate. But on Street Articles their main idea is to train people to become better writers. To this end, their effort is very good. When I first visited the website of Street Articles, it sounded strange to me, albeit in a pleasant way. It reminded me of street fighter, a video game we used to play when we were kids. But I suppose they have also taken inspiration for the name of the website from the same game. While in the video game people learn to become fighters, on this website people learn to become writers. And all of this is accomplished while maintaining a sense of an informality. So the idea is really cool. You sit in a street with your laptop and you scribble articles. 

The present you get as you sign up on Street Articles is the 30 in 30 challenge. This means that as soon as you become a member of street writing club, Kyle and Carson throw a challenge at you of writing thirty articles in thirty days. This is quite interesting and difficult at the same time. It is interesting because of the various aspects of the overall writing experience that is expected to be had. You have to choose a niche that you like. Then you have to think about it. And then you have to write about it. There are things that have to be kept in mind about the structure of the article. You are expected to hone your skills by the passage of time. 

I was quite busy in trying to meet those deadlines along with doing some other things too of course. This explains my absence from here for quite a few days too. In any case, it may be a good idea for you to visit Street Articles. You may as well end up liking it after a while. The niche I have chosen to write about is home based business. I believe that this is probably the most important niche specially given the overall economic conditions of the world. I have already written a few articles. And I have to constantly think about more ideas to write about.

PsyopsPrime by Psyops is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
Based on a work at http://psyops.tk.
Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at http://psyops.tk.

  by  DaveBinM 

The Muslim Blogger

After having read a lot, and after having written to some extent, I presume that I should also write a few words about The Muslim Blogger. The website is owned by (a) Muslim person(s), of course. The aim of this is to help people to develop websites using WordPress. The administrators help people in doing that for free. Moreover, they offer free plugins that render a more Islamic look and feel to the website. This sounds cool. They also claim to offer some more stuff but I am not sure if I understand everything. Apart from that they have various sections on their website which are full of useful resources. These include tips and tactics to becoming better writers, ways to enhance website traffic, search engine optimization strategies, guideline for writing e-books and becoming authors, nice alternatives to google's AdSense, and a lot of motivational advice. 

I have been browsing the website time and again and I have found it to be quite informative. They also help in one-click sort of hosting and installation of the website on a number of web hosting platforms. HostGator is one of them. One of the problem with these guys is that they are not as efficient as the guys at Wealthy Affiliate are. I mailed them a number of times with my queries and questions, but I am still waiting for a response. Although I hope that I would get a reply any time soon.

Search Engine Optimization

I have been in to too many fascinating things over the last couple of days. This has kept me unusually busy over the weekend. The temptation to keep on so great that I had to abandon so may things. And the time elapsed very quickly. Actually from the moment I signed up with wealthy affiliate, I have had to read non-stop. Added to that was the temptation coupled with compulsion to act on what they had advised. That was mainly to create a website as a part of the learning process. Anyhow, I learnt many things that I never knew before. One of them is search engine optimization.

There is an e-book that you get for free as soon as you sign-up with the wealthy affiliate. I am not sure that at which stage you get it. But you surely get a prompt to download a free e-book for search engine optimization. The name of the book is SEO Tips: 5 Things Every WordPress Owner MUST Know. I am not quite sure how to get this book just like that, but I guess it should be downloadable from somewhere here. You may have to perform a search on it though. It is written by a person named Michael Torbet, who is the author of the "All in one SEO pack" plugin for WordPress. He is also the founder of Semper Plugins. Quite naturally I presume that he makes more plugins for WordPress in this company. In the book he gives valuable advice on as to how to write content for your website in a search engine friendly way. The book has topics ranging from tips for using meta tags to arrangement of keywords in the content. Overall it is a great thing to know the strategies search engines use to index and rank pages. The main emphasis is, however, on the content itself. This means that the content you write on your website, or wherever, should be good quality content. As the punchline goes, content is the meat!

Market

A few months ago we discussed among friends that there should be a social network on which anyone could advertise anything they wanted to sell. Be it services or goods, it could be advertised using pictures and profile related details. The social network, as we envisaged, would be more like facebook, but would rather be a niche social network. We even named the project as Market. Market was created using WordPress and BuddyPress. The latter is a plugin for WordPress that can be used to create social networks within a very short time and with very minimal knowledge of web application development tools, such as PHP, in which these tools are basically written. 

It was quite fascinating to learn that a facebookk class social network can be created using these tools within a few hours of dedicated effort. That too is so much because of the time it takes for the whole system to be hosted on a third party hosting service. If this tedium were absent, it would have taken a lot less time. Market does not exist any more because we never pursued the idea any further. We just learnt that a few similar niche networks exists for things like knitting, sewing etc. But the idea in itself is cool. And there is a need for such a nice social network as well that could be used to sell a wider range of products.  More precisely, the envisioned role of the market was to enable the buyer and seller to connect with each other irrespective of their geographical locations on the planet. They would consequently be able to exchange goods with each other.

Think Twice Before You Take A Leap

I have been thinking about shifting the whole of this blog to this new Word Press powered hosting and website management and creation service called Wealthy Affiliate. But may be one should think again before doing all the dirty work of creating the website and actually exporting all of it from here to there. What are the tradeoffs? The bottom line of word press is that it also only allows you to create a blog. It is another thing that one can arrange the things to look more like a dedicated niche specific website. Blogger does not allow to have that sort of a look and feel. It has a blog-like look after all. And I imagine that even if we tried hard to convert our blog to a website through blogger, it is still going to look like a blog. But what is a blog after all? It is a website. Right? Right!

But there are other better things that are better about using blogger. One thing is that you don't have to wait for nasty approvals. Another is that you do not have to go to the HTML source code time and again to switch the text alignment from left aligned to justified. This is something that has to be done by hand in word press. But I am sure that there must be an easy cure for this. It is just tedious somehow. Media management is also not quite cool with word press. It just does not have the kind of look and feel blogger has. Dynamic views in blogger make the whole thing appear much nicer. It is just that it is a bit difficult to get rid of its blog-like appearance.  

What are the other benefits? The bottom line I guess is that if you really want to have a website then it is better to switch to Word Press. Moreover, the guys working with Wealthy Affiliate promise that they will help in guiding a great website that is going to churn out profits in a short while. Indeed, they have helped to a great deal. I wonder what is next in their jukebox. I hope it would be cool though. 

Home Based Business

I have almost finished reading all the lectures of the first level course that is offered for free on Wealthy Affiliate. I did that last night. The website is impressive. It is owned by two online marketers Carson and Kyle. They founded it in 2005. The website teaches people how to develop an online business through a set of tutorials. Reiterated, I have finished reading the first set of ten tutorials and they were quite lucid and informative. They teach you things like how to get a website up and running in minutes. 

As I woke up this morning, one of the first things I had in my mind was that how can I benefit from Wealthy Affiliate. Although I did have an idea in my mind after all due to which I had read through wealthy affiliate. But that idea was not to become wealthy at least.

So a few ideas sparked in my mind. One was Aqua-ponics. I don't know if I have spelt the phenomenon right. But this technology gives a person a utility to build a small home-based orchard along with a fish aquarium. The fertile water of the fish tank would be used to irrigate the vegetable of that small orchard. I attended a small presentation about it the other day. I do not know that from where did I get the link. I presume that the project is somewhat like having a rooftop garden, albeit with a few technical glitches involved. The idea is really cool though.

But what does that have to do with Wealthy Affiliate. The link between aqua-ponics and wealthy affiliate does not make much sense. But then the ultimate idea sparked in my mind. The idea is that as wealthy affiliate helps people in developing their personal online marketing business, one can leverage from the services, tips and tricks of wealthy affiliate to develop a similar sort of a business that would help them in building their home-based business. I presume there is dire need for such an idea for multiple reasons. I think that I had what one may call a eureka moment when I conceived this idea in my mind. I am thankful to Allah for this.

The first thing is that there is a lot of unemployment in the whole world. Worst downsizing has been observed by many companies around the globe in the last 3-4 years. These are years of economic recession. Moreover, I read an article on LinkedIn a few days back that was suggesting that the concept of jobs would vanish in the next five to ten years. The article proposed that as opportunities for working from home would grow, more people would become interested in working from home instead of  finding a place to work where they would have to commute to work everyday. Indeed, I also read another article, again on LinkedIn, the other day that projected correlations between divorce rate and the time it is required commute to work. There was a strong positive correlation. The author suggested that people should take a few days off from work. In any case that is the whole idea, that is to facilitate people who want to work from home.

I presume that the idea I am suggesting is not novel at all. Rather it would be naive to assume that nobody is working on it. But I am sure that there is a great deal of room of improvement in it. The other day I was discussing with a friend of mine that LinkedIn which is the world's largest professional network and it also has a very nice job board, is still not extremely applicant friendly even though it has evolved to a great deal recently. For instance, one of the irking things is that as soon you find a job that matches your qualifications and suits your interests, you can still be directed to a company website where you have to fill in a new profile afresh. I presume that such things distract attention badly. But LinkedIn is a professional network and professional are expected to be industrious!

However, there is no such thing on the web for sweater weavers and banana sellers. It would be a great idea to develop an internet business that helps people in building home-based businesses. I think there is a dire need for good online marketing strategies that may help in promoting work from home business. The need is dire specially given the fact that there are roughly 800,000 unemployed people in the United States, and the things are also not as good as ever in Pakistan and Afghanistan.

One last thing, if this idea that I have given above is so great then why have not I kept it a secret? I could myself start such an internet based business after all! I think that the answer is something what a friend of mine said to me a long time a go when I requested him to jealously guard our idea for a new script for a theatrical play. He said that hiding ideas inhibits the process of creativity. That was quite altruistic on his part when he used to share his ideas with others. But I do not have completely altruistic purposes in disclosing this idea, no matter how old or well-known it really is. Another reason why I am sharing this is that I am not that sort of a geek with computers after all as much as you guys may be out there and so I might not close the loop very tightly on this idea. Have a great weekend!

Wealthy Affiliate

Today I decided that I would write a full fledged research proposal about neuroscience and human consciousness. I have been reading about this field for quite a bit of a time after all. So I opened my Latex editor and started writing down all of my thoughts about human consciousness. But while I was about to finish it I just thought for a moment that it is just another research proposal after all. At the best it may only win me another postdoc at best. And after finishing that I would be on my own once again about finding another postdoc. And the vicious cycle goes on. But research can be very charming and enticing at the same time too. Anyhow, I just thought for a moment that what if I put the same amount of effort in going solo that I would have exerted for doing a postdoc or any other research job? It is good to own a business after all where you don't have to work for someone else. I do not have any business experience by the way. I have a fear that I would mess it up somehow. And that explains the endless procrastination about not attempting to start one.

I just made a casual google search with the phrase "How to become an online entrepreneur?". I remember I came across the term online entrepreneurship a short time back. And I remember that it has got to do something with creating and managing a web based business. It can be a difficult thing to do indeed, specially if you do not have any prior experience in it. Anyhow my search led me to the website of Wealthy Affiliate. Wealthy affiliate helps people in establishing their own online marketing business. I have already read through a few of their lessons on how to create an online business. Their free membership offers you to create two wordpress websites for free along with free web hosting. 

This is quite interesting. They also teach some other useful stuff such as search engine optimization (SEO). And how to have catchy menus on the website. The tutorials are really lucid. They encourage that the more effort you put, the more successful you may become in terms of making money. And then they also have a premium account. I presume that by becoming a premium member the chances of becoming wealthier increase. This is quite interesting. I wonder if the whole effort would be as much lucrative as it promises to be. But I guess that it is definitely worth giving a try.

Give Me A Shout

I started writing this blog as a response to the work of people like Sam Harris. At that time I had not envisaged that I would write so much on this. As a matter of fact, as the time has passed, I have started enjoying writing quite a lot. This is not to say that I did not like writing before. I have quite a bit of research experience in which I had to write substantially. Writing is one of the most interesting things about research. It is perhaps needless to say that reading and thinking are the other two interesting things about being a researcher. And yes I am forgetting all the hands on and thought experiments. 

But writing a blog or about anything that does not include hardcore technical writing has it own charm and, I must say, addiction. Indeed, it is fun to write on diverse topics. It is also quite fascinating to try to develop different writing styles and to use them in developing write ups probably to address a broader audience. Technical writing can be for a very few people who are domain experts.

I have been wondering for past some time that what would it be like to become a writer or to formally adopt writing as a professional choice. Of course, this is a bit of a leap from where one thinks that one could work as an all encompassing researcher to where one is merely a writer. But I never appreciated it before that becoming a good writer, if one can, is a far more exciting professional choice. This is not to say that I had never read, let's say, fiction or history books before. I had done that. But there was a time that I used to feel that writing fiction or becoming a journalist was something that anyone could do. In other words, I used to believe that becoming a researcher or a scientist was far more challenging and so I used to think that I must try to become that. But now I feel that becoming a writer is also a much better professional choice. And indeed it is also both challenging and fascinating at the same time.

I wonder if I can become, for instance, a Scientific American or Huffington's Post class writer. So if you can, or know someone who can, help me in any way in taking up writing as a profession, I would be grateful. If you can help me in honing my skills and/or winning a writing contract, please give me a shout. 

Provocative Ideas

I generally like a few things about Sam Harris. He raises some thought provoking issues at times. Specially when he provokes everyone into thinking and asking themselves introspectively that why do they believe in what they believe. I think that this kind of provocation is healthy and urges a human being to study human consciousness. That where did we come from and where are we headed? Or whether it all starts here and ends here too. This much is fine. There are other such things which one should appreciate too. This is also not in conflict with traditional Islam. A keen study of history suggests that wherever the medieval Muslims went they learnt something from other societies. And they were not too much into killing other people at all after all. So, according to Islam, one should learn good things from where ever one can. This is naturally a good idea. 

But then there are other things which are quite objectionable about Sam Harris's objections on Islam or religion in general. One of them is that Sam does not like the idea that religion is used as a tool to glue people together. This is generally true about his opinion about every religion. In my opinion as much as religion is used to unite people together for common good, it should be fine. Of course, it should not be fine to unite with each other to harm others. Unity should be also be fine for self protection. There is no harm in having a harmless brotherhood too. I used to respect atheists as I had some of them as friends and I used to think that they are educated people. Brotherhood is also good if it enhances the self-respect of a community. But I have read a few articles from other atheists about Sam Harris in which he has been addressed as a "Son of a Bitch" and a "Bastard". It might be the case that Sam does not mind that, but this sort of treatment is quite harsh. 

Moreover, just because he does not mind listening to such complements himself, he demands more liberties of free speech regarding religion. His use of the term misogyny of Islam can have many connotations and can be justifiably considered harsh. But the truth is that we Muslims believe that Islam was born at a time when Arabs used to bury their daughters alive due to the fear that they would grow up and would have to be married to someone. A perceived consequence of marriage used to be that the family of the daughter would have to live under the perpetual domination of their daughter's in-laws. Something which the Arabs despised and could not live with. I personally think that the mere idea that their daughter would get married and go on to have sex with another person was unbearable for them, even if that other person was her husband. And a solution for that was burial of the living and breathing child. We believe that Islam was born out of such circumstances. 

We believe that all the struggle of Prophet Muhammad (may Allah's peace and blessings be upon him) including his migrations and wars was against this kind of oppression, which is quite a lot I would say. We believe that all the Islamic rules viz a viz marriage and betrothal are there to enhance the self-esteem of the women. A woman should not be buried alive if she has been born in pre-Islamic Arabia by chance, nor should her naked picture be put on a billboard if she is fortunate enough to be born in 21st century Amsterdam. She should be married properly with her consent. To this end, Islam tries to strike a balance between the people of different mentalities. On one extreme, there can be people who can flare up instantly at the mere sight of a stranger falling upon their daughter, sister or mother. There could also be people who do not mind if their daughter, mother, sister or wife thinks that it is boring to have the same partner for two consecutive days but is at a higher risk of catching sexually transmitted disease, being kidnapped or raped or ending up in a bad situation of the same magnitude. Islam tries to anneal all of them. And I know from personal knowledge that plenty of such people exist in non-Muslim countries where people do not accept their women to be dating on loose. I remember the movies unfaithful (Richard Gere) and Revenge (Kevin Costner and Anthony Quinn) where these guys ended up in bloody circumstances because their wives were seeing someone else. A question is that are these movies representative of the American culture, if so Islam presents a cure in the form of respectable marriage laws.

Islam allows a woman to not get married if she chooses so to be. Similarly, one cannot wed a woman off to someone if she does not agree. And yes, should she not be educated? Islam argues that it is the duty of every Muslim man and woman to seek education. This is quoted in many hadiths of Prophet Muhammad (may Allah's peace and blessings be upon him). I am a Muslim and I like Sam Harris. I even like his commentary on religion. I think he enlightens us all on as to what and why should we believe in. I think that as a human being Sam Harris deserves respect. But Sam Harris should also try to earn that respect. His use of the term misogyny is rather provocative. 

Digital Image Processing

Learning an intricate subject such as digital image processing can be a quite of a difficult expedition to undertake. The student should have a firm background in mathematics. He/she should have taken a number of different pre-requisite courses in mathematics and signal processing before even being considered eligible to study image processing. Raafael C. Gonzalez, however, makes that task easy for the student. Digital Image Processing by Gonzales is a book written for the maths shy student. It assumes that the student would have little mathematical background. In so many ways this book can be compared favorably with the one written by Richard G. Lyons on digital Signal Processing i.e. Understanding Digital Signal Processing. In a metaphorical sense these books can be considered cousins of each other for two closely related subjects. 

After preparing the student with initial background material in the first two chapters, the authors illustrates a few spatial domain image treatments. In the first two chapter concepts such as linearity, pixel distance measures, spatial versus greyscale resolution, and shrinking and zooming are described. Chapter 3 discusses image enhancement in the spatial domain. Topics such as contrast enhancement, histogram matching, histogram processing, equalization etc. are explained.  

Chapter 4 is about frequency domain transformation and processing. The author explains the 2-D Fourier transform. In my opinion, this is the best part of the book. The explanation of Fourier transform is not only lucid, it gives key insights into how the whole transformation of image from the spatial domain to the frequency domain is realized. This is done in a step by step manner so the reader may fully grasp the inner workings of the otherwise quite enigmatic Fourier transform. Moreover, it is explained how filtering can take place with the Fourier transform. 

The subsequent chapters discuss more advanced topics such as image restoration and color image processing techniques, image compression. Lossy and lossless methods of compression are discussed. 

Overall the book is quite fun to read and it makes the reader enthusiastic about the subject of image processing. Although it is assumed that the reader has some familiarity with calculus and linear algebra, it is still a very good resource for almost any student from any background interested in studying digital image processing.

Articles Writer

A Reader Profile

Yesterday I visited The Muslim Blogger, a website that helps people in building word-press blogs from an Islamic point of view. As I was browsing through the website I came across a nice article that had tips for blog traffic enhancement. One of the ideas was to develop a reader profile. The idea is based on the observation that as writing for a wider audience is difficult to do as opposed to writing for a single particular reader in mind, one should write for a single ideal reader. This was probably the only idea that particularly caught my attention. Although there are other nice ideas listed there as well. Anyhow, the main benefit of addressing one's ideal reader is that through addressing him/her one addresses the whole of his/her audience. This is quite convenient.

The reason why I liked the idea was that as soon as I read it, I felt that I do have that ideal reader in my mind. That ideal reader in my particular case is nobody other than Sam Harris. I have been reading the work of Sam Harris for a long time now. The main reason why I started rewriting this blog was to be able to argue with him about his criticisms on religion. The idea was to be reasonable and rational. Moreover, by leveraging from the lenses of reason and rationality, the idea was to be able to argue whether he is right about his convictions about religion. Indeed, it is a difficult thing to do as the objections he raises to religious doctrines are quite too many. But I, like so many others, have tried to build the whole argument thing step by step. This blog was an attempt to that. I tried to post things concerning human consciousness and its survival after bodily death, about Islamic perspective on western spiritualism, about existence of God (Allah), and my understanding of free will.

The main objective of writing this blog, however, was not to criticize the work of Sam Harris alone, or anyone else's. One of the reasons was to develop an understanding of how atheists or other people think about Islam. I believe that if Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins can be convinced that atheism is at least wrong, that would be a great job indeed. Generally I like Sam Harris. He writes extremely well and has a very good expression. I am sure he is also a nice man. I also think that at some point in his life he may as well convert to Islam. That would be good news. 

Understanding Consciousness

One of the topics that is quite hyped these days is the study of human consciousness and its possible survival after death. The argument that human beings have souls that depart to a certain afterlife once we are dead is one of the major tenets of almost every religion. The materialist view, that we human beings, along with all the other life forms. are merely flesh and bones defies any such notion that human beings have souls or that they depart to some other world once we die. To this end, they also argue that there is no such divine entity, such as a godhead, that may have created life. The religious doctrines of creation of universe can be explained away with the help of theories of astronomy, cosmology and astronomy. Similarly, the religious doctrines about the creation of life and humanity can be explained away with the help of Charles Darwin's theory of natural selection. 

Rationalists try to understand and study the nature of survival of human consciousness with the help of various ways in which they can try to tap into the afterlife and communicate with the dead. There might be a possibility that some religious people may have the ability to do it already. I heard (or possibly read somewhere) that Jews have been prohibited to do it according to Torah. Given that it is considered the old testament for Christians and a holy book to be revered by the Muslims, it may be supposed that the followers of these two religions are also prohibited from tapping into the so-called unseen world. Particularly, Muslims are advised to follow a set path and believe in the unseen and are advised not to long for miracles. 

Whether or not there is an afterlife, or whether or not people survive bodily death cannot be proven by believing merely in someone's word of mouth. A religious scripture no matter how convincing it may be is not a proof of any of the extraordinary claims it makes. The claims must be proven from sources other than where they have been claimed. Thus, objectivity demands an honest scrutiny.

People who are interested in knowing about human consciousness and its survival of bodily death leverage mostly from the research of near death experiences (NDEs). As the name suggests, in an NDE a person is subjected to a clinical death of sorts in which electrical activity in the brain of the subject stops. Once rehabilitated back to normal life, the subject is asked to describe his/her experience. A keen survey reveals that there are hundreds of thousands of NDE stories. A review of the NDE research also indicates that NDE research has become a mature field of study with considerable adoption of scientific method.

Another discipline that tries to tap into afterlife is spiritualism. Spiritualism is rather old and established itself in the late nineteenth century. In simply world spiritualism entails methods to communicate with demised soul and to tap into the spirit world. A wide variety of literature is available by various contemporary and prolific scholars of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Older people include Arthur Conan Doyle, Alfred Russell Wallace and William Crookes, to name but a few. History of spiritualism by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is probably the best resource on the subject.

If the findings of NDEs and spiritualists are correct that human beings survive bodily death, and that human beings do indeed have souls that depart to another world as we die, it means that materialism and its related theories of evolution etc. have already been explained away. For skeptics it means that they would have one less dimension to think about as regards existence.

    

Applications of Free Will

A keen study of free will would suggest to you that it does not really matter whether you have it or not. What would matter most is that as long as you have some degree of freedom in choosing and doing things in one way or the other, you would prefer to pursue your goals. If you are an athletic type, you may want to enroll in a gymnasium and develop a great body. You may also train to become a kick-boxer. And as soon as you have learnt something about the art, you may find your heartiest adversary and you may apply a perfect flying kick right on one of his jaws. This, however, depends on how you define virility. Even if you do not care much about the masculinity of your approach, or rather if you are a person of a nonviolent type, even then you may want to do something with your newly learnt martial arts skills and your toned body. You might at least go to a beach, take your shirt off and stand in the knee-deep water. All of a sudden you stretch and raise your right leg above your head,  so quickly so as to create a great splash in the water. You get yourself photographed. Congratulations! You are in the news now!! You are Jean Claude Van Damme!!!

The above narrative was one of the many examples of how a person can hone and use one's mental and physical faculties. It was supposed to be funny! The debate that whether humans have free will or not is a totally different one. In as much as the subject may sound trivial or insignificant from a practical point of view, its study has rather serious applications in various scientific and academic disciplines that concern human development and well-being in one way or the other. These are social science, psychology, human behavior, neuroscience, law, politics, philosophy, war and religion, to name but a few.

For the purpose of brevity it may be worthwhile to look at the importance of this subject from the vantage point of its relevance in studying neuroscience. I believe that neuroscience is one such area which has started to dominate many other spheres of life in today's interdisciplinary world. It attempts to study things as simple as emotional well being of humans to issues as complex as motivations behind peoples actions and their repercussions on social order and legislation.

Consider psychology and mental health, for instance. Why do people choose to be angry when they can smile? Why do people choose to steal things from others while they could simply have helped an old person cross the street?

A very interesting reason for studying free will is to understand human consciousness. Analysis of human consciousness is a very hot topic these days. On a coarse level it tries to understand the human consciousness and along with that whether or not it survives bodily death or not. In either case, that is, whether or not human consciousness survives bodily death, it becomes quite interesting and important to understand as to how to live this earthly life happily and peacefully? What forms a healthy coexistence? What is the role of religion in our lives? This and many other interrelated questions urge us to study the nature of free will. May Allah help us all to live and coexist peacefully.

Understanding Free Will

The subject of free will has fascinated me for a long time. I have wanted to learn about the subject for a number of reasons. The first time the subject drew my serious attention has a rather boring description. But the event was that a few acquaintances had broached up the topic and were trying to explain to each other what it means for a person to have free will. I had to remain quiet because I had no concrete explanation of the subject in my mind. However, that was the first time the subject drew my serious attention. Ever since then I have been interested in studying about various other reasons too. Why do people behave in one way or the other? Why do siblings fight with each other whereas they could be affectionate with each other at the very same time. Similarly, why should we be jealous of a friend or cousin when he/she tells us about his/her recent achievement, whereas we could have felt happier and could have had a congratulatory appearance at the same time?

Why should we prefer to choose one thing over the other? Are we free to make our choices and act on them? And what are the consequences of acting upon our choices, no matter how good or bad they are? Why does a good person end up in a jail and a person who is perceived to be mean by people become a member of the parliament? These and many other questions inspired me to read and understand about the subject of free will. This article is a summary of my understanding that I developed after reading articles from various writers. I must mention that the explanations I have found most lucid about this subject are those of Sam Harris.

On a very coarse level free will can be defined as the ability to make choices under certain constraints. This means that a person is both free to choose and also act upon his/her choices while not violating the constraints which define boundaries for his/her actions. A more refined definition of free will is the ability to choose. The ability to act is called as volition. Another term that is associated with free will is determinism. The theory of determinism suggests that everything we do or choose to do is already predetermined and that we are not free either in making choices or in acting upon them. Between free will and determinism there is a spectrum of positions that vary between soft and hard determinism. However, to keep the discourse simple, for me at least, I will stick only to the presence or absence of free will. The position that free will does not exist can be explained with the help of the following example.

Assuming that you have read this article up to this point this can be done fairly easily. Assume that now I ask you to judge this article on a scale between 1-- 5 for its quality of content. Depending upon whether you are a casual or a seasoned internet user you may find this task absolutely boring or quite interesting. You may also have a mixture of feelings. On one hand you may feel like totally abandoning this article as crap and doing something else instead. At the same time you may think that it may be an interesting thing to rate an article for its content. You might think that it may hone your skills as a reader and a reviewer. At the same time you think that it is absolutely trivial and useless both to write and read about something as monotonous as free will. But then you think to give it a try. You may get motivated by thinking that you may grasp a few nice ideas for writing something more interesting. At the same time you are aware that you have to attend to the eggs that you have put on the stove to boil. You feel like leaving this computer of your's and going to the kitchen. But then you decide to hang on for a few moments till the time you reach the end of this paragraph.

If I have portrayed your thought process to some degree of accuracy while you were reading the above paragraph then indeed you have had a stampede of thoughts. A midst all of those thoughts, ideas and feelings you have managed to read this blog post to this point. You don't know exactly why you are reading it. But your eyes are slipping through line after line and you think that it is worth reading it. Indeed, if you have read it through to this point, you are pretty much engaged with this article by now. You do not know exactly why you are reading this or whether you like it or not. You even do not know exactly why you opened this article in the first place and started reading it and kept on doing so, whereas you had other tasks to complete too. Bingo! You have finished reading another paragraph.

If you are a neuroscientist, or you know someone closely who is a neuroscientist, you may get an explanation from the point of view of electrical activity in your brain. You may be told, or you may have learnt, that your choices are governed by complex electrical activity in your brain that take place on the level of synapses and neurons. You may argue that it is actually the chemical reactions in your brain that govern your behavior in the present moment. Let's call it the electrochemistry of your brain for the sake of simplicity. You may even believe that you are not consciously choosing to read these words as they slip before your eyes. Instead you may believe that the decision to keep on reading through moment by moment has already been made by the temporal lobe of your brain a few microseconds (or milliseconds) in advance of what you are currently reading. This kind of reasoning is brought forward by the opponents of the existence of free will camp to argue that it does not exist. Irrespective of whether you are a proponent of this line of reasoning or not interested in it at all, it might be altogether mysterious to you as to why you have read this article through to another paragraph.

In the same way as I have tried to explain my understanding of the non-existence of free will, anyone can try to explain its existence. Consider now to look at things from my vantage point. In the same way as you may be baffled about why at all have you read this article, I might be confused on as to why I have written it in the first place. Is it all about electrical impulses, auroral charges, and whims of the mind through which I have grown out to write this. Among a myriad of things on my to-do-list for today why did I write this article at all? Indeed I thought about writing about free will a few months ago. This has al most been a year that I thought that I should write my thoughts about the subject of free will. The reason is that I find the subject both fascinating and challenging. Indeed, one of the most challenging things in the world is to satiate the intellectual curiosity of a philosopher. And free will is a subject that very much falls under the umbrella of philosophy.

In as much as I wanted to write about free will, I kept on postponing it. I have listed the reasons why I wanted to write about it above. But what are the reasons due to which I have been postponing it to this point. Well, there are quite a few reasons indeed. One of them is procrastination. Another is the fear that I may end up writing something stupid. The underlying guilt that I want to gain attention is another reason for holding back for so long. Another reason is that it sounds all the more pretentious to be publishing one's thoughts in the public domain. It is a blog post that I am writing after all!

But no matter what the reasons may be, I have at last chosen to write about this subject. This, out of the choices I had (i.e. to write or not to write about free will), and irrespective of all the reasons for writing or not writing about this topic, I have at last chosen to consciously write about it. And as you have reached the end of this article I would conclude it by saying that this ability of humans to make deliberate choices suggests that we do indeed have free will. May Allah help us in using it well.

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The Alchemy of Happiness

The Alchemy of Happiness is a wonderful book by the renowned medieval Muslim scholar, philosopher and mystic, Abu Hamid Mohammad ibn Mohamad Al-Ghazali (RA). Although Imam Ghazzalli (RA) is remembered mostly for his works in philosophy, his book, the alchemy of happiness, aims to elucidate its readers on as to how to live a happier and a more fuller life according to the tenets of Islam. Original title of the book is Kimiya-yi saadat. The book has many chapters that are divided into four main parts.

Mainly the book discusses various forms of worship including prayers and dhikr. A significant portion of the book deals with the various aspects concerning human relations. The most interesting thing about the book is that discusses various spiritual and psychological problems and their cure. Emotional problems an individual can have such as hate, anger, spite, envy and jealousy etc. are discussed and their cures are suggested.  For instance, the author suggests simple cures such as to praise the person for whom one has jealousy in his/her heart. To this end, the book is also a very good resource for learning about emotional intelligence.

The Conquest of Happiness

Conquest of Happiness is a very interesting and a wonderful book by Bertrand Russell. Bertrand Russell was one of the most prominent intellectuals of the early twentieth century. His major domains were philosophy and mathematics. However, this book is about life. Particularly, the book lists many tips and tactics for acquiring happiness in life and for developing a happier and a more content personality. Apart from its contents, the book is also very well written and is a good resource for anyone willing to improve their reading comprehension of the English language. There are many good examples in the book through which Russell has tried to persuade his readers to live with a simpler lifestyle. The book also gives a reflection of the simplistic mindset that Bertrand Russell had.

The most interesting thing about the book is where the author gives and example regarding struggle for survival. I do not remember the story verbatim, but it somewhat goes like this. Russell gives the example of a businessman living in a big city such as London. He spends most of his time with his work. He is so much workaholic that he hardly has time for his spouse and children. He leaves home early in the morning and comes back much late at night. On work he spends most of his time devising strategies in order to beat his business rivals. This is how his life goes on. Russell suggests that if you ask such a man on as to why he works so hard? The usual answer would be that he has to struggle for survival. Russell argues that this is not struggle for survival. Russell then gives an example of two friends stuck on a wrecked ship. Everyone except them has died on the ship. In order to feed themselves to stay alive they have eaten up all the corpses. Their plight is now such that in order to remain alive one of them would have to eat the other. This, Bertrand Russell argues, is struggle for survival.

There are many other interesting things in the book and avuncular advice to his readers for achieving happiness. For instance, Russell suggests that achieving happiness is not a one day endeavor. Rather it should be acquired over time and should be considered as a lifetime goal. Among other things Russell also argues that one should never feel guilty or remorseful from the point of view of having committed a sin. Although Russell asserted that he would explain his rationale somewhere latter in the book, as far as I remember he did not do it.

Overall the book is very nicely written and despite the fact that it is very old, it is still very much relevant for everyone to read.