On The Priming Potential of Stratfor

I have been thinking about writing something here for a long time. I have been postponing my next article for various other chores that have been consuming my time. One of those chores has been reading. The truth is that I have been reading each and every article of Stratfor since the past few months. I have been read every bit of what a free rider can get and I don't think that I possess the means to get a paid subscription at this moment, neither do I think that that is important.

I really wanted to reflect on George Friedman's Borderland series of articles that he finished writing around last month while traveling in Eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Caucus. It was particularly touching to read how he was born to a Jewish family in Hungary and how his elders had to calculate the costs of Adolf Hitler's military excursions in Hungary at dining tables, and the calculations of the price the Jews would have to pay. Indeed, it is a pity. However, his trip to Europe was motivated by the recent Russian intrusion in Ukraine.

I have been reading Stratfor quite thoroughly. And the truth is that I have found it rather impressive. Their geopolitical weeklies are absolutely enlightening, albeit ruthless. But such is the nature of geopolitics. Right into the middle of the 21st century it still tends to remain ruthless.

As I have been reading Stratfor, I have been wondering of writing up a research proposal to analyze Stratfor for its objectivity. The proposal that I have in my mind's eye would require research to be carried out from a psychological point of view. I would roughly like to explain the proposal as follows.

Stratfor claims to be objective and non partisan. This is claimed in their core philosophy. The truth is that I have largely found it to be objective and non-partisan, except a few instances (where I have found it to be rather ambiguous). In reality, however, Stratfor might not really be as objective as it claims to be or as a reader like me finds it to be. This leads us to the idea that although Stratfor is objective most of the times and does not appear to be so some of the times, it is priming us in profound ways at times when it is actually not being objective whereas it is appearing to be so.

Stated in other words, when Stratfor is intentionally trying to manipulate the opinions of its readers by appearing as an innocent geopolitical analyst, whereas when it is actually not so, it is trying to psychologically prime us.

This can be a very nice idea to work on. It may as well lead to a very nice research based thesis. Having said it all, it is imperative to describe what priming really means in this context.

Priming is a psychological trick in which a subject is indirectly led into developing false beliefs and ideas by indirect manipulation, while the subject does not know that he/she is being played upon. For instance, in an easy exam in which everyone can do well (or everyone has done equally well on average), subjects can be asked to write down their about their ethnic backgrounds. Depending on their answers, some subjects would have the tendency to do poorly on the same type of exam as compared with others. The reason for this drift in performance is how they associate their ability to succeed with their ethnic roots on a subconscious level.

This is priming and I found this explanation in Malcolm Gladwell's Blink, a very nice book on snap judgements and other aspects of popular psychology.

   by  Pdro (GF) 

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Bonjour

Time passes very quickly. Most of the times we spend our present moment in trying to anticipate or plan about the future or to reconcile with the past and the time does not tend to pass. However, there is a lot of time of our lives that we have left behind when we look towards the hindsight.

A few years a go I had a privilege to work in France for one year. I was based in France telecom's R&D headquarters in Lannion as a researcher. Lannion is a nice little town in the South West of France in its province of Brittany. Like the rest of France, and most of Europe, Lannion is also extremely beautiful. And not only that the people are mostly also very friendly and extremely nice. The year lived in Lannion was very memorable. We were a few Pakistanis in the town who had befriended numerous French, Romanian and people from other nationalities. Together we had loads of fun. I wanted to write a bit more detailed article about my stay in Lannion, but I would save that for another time. I am writing this article for another purpose and a different experience.

I was lodged very close to France Telecom R&D. I could walk to work from home in around 15-20 minutes. This is not much. In order to walk conveniently and to enjoy the experience, I had found a combination of streets that were rather solitary and that were also full of typical Celtic flora and European houses. As I write this, I deeply yearn from inside to go and live there again. Walking to work and back used to be a healthy process that I really enjoyed. Sometimes it rained and I had to take a bus. But normally I preferred to walk. Walking also allowed me to develop new perspectives about my work, as it allowed me ample time to reflect and think about work. 

On a few occasions I passed by a small boy in one of the streets. And this is one of the reasons why I am writing this article. I will talk about the other reason latter below. The boy was around 6--8 years old. He'd be going school. He'd be well-dressed, well combed, neat and tidy, with a schoolbag hanging on his back. Whenever he'd pass by me, while robotically walking to the school, he'd say "Bonjour" to me loudly while his eyes were almost always lowered. The only things I clearly remember about him now are that he had blond hair, he'd be wearing large glasses with a brown frame, and that he had blue eyes.

I cannot forget this experience. And I have always wondered that definitely his mother may have taught him to behave nicely to strangers. Of course, such children can also be at a risk of being abused in some way due to their innocence. But the fact that he was being groomed and nurtured very elegantly should not be overlooked. Irrespective of his family background, and our cultural remoteness, I still think about that boy at times. And I think that he deserves enormous praise. I could never muster the courage to ask him his name and related things. All I'd say in return was Bonjour. I was wary that if I reacted in any way more or less than that, the pigeon will fly away, and I would never be able to see him again.

Let me digress a little bit to another topic for a while. This seemingly does not have any relevance with the context of this article. However, this is the second reason why I wanted to write this post. In as much as the two incidents are disconnected, the truth is that they come to my mind simultaneously. So, let us digress to Innocence of the Muslims for a short while. Recently I read somewhere that google has promised, in front of one of the relevant US courts of Law, to remove the movie from YouTube. This is a commendable effort indeed. This would not only allow Government of Pakistan to remove a ban from YouTube, it would also help in subsiding unnecessary rifts between various cultures and civilizations. 

When the movie was first released I had a chance to look at the movie a little bit. This is to say that I had a chance to look at the boy and the girl who starred in the movie. The truth is that I had a strong feeling that the people had been duped into playing those roles. This is quite embarrassing for those children as well.

I have a feeling that movies like these are not made without a purpose. One of the purpose they serve is obviously to uproot people. In this case they were Muslims. And in case of the Muslims, the other reason is to gauge the emotional temperature of the Muslim society. People react badly and they are termed as barbaric and terroristic. Indeed, this is a pity.

However, as I said earlier such movies create unnecessary rifts in the human society. As a general impression such movies are also self harming in a moral sense too. On the other hand we can learn so much good from the example of the boy that I quoted above. Irrespective of whether the boy came from a Christian family, or whether his parents had become atheists after loosing all hope on religion, due to its hyper institutionalization or terrorism, the truth is that they groomed him in a nice way to say hello to strangers. Such people should be remembered.

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Soft Power

If you have decided to read through this article a little bit then surely you must have read the title and you may have found it eye-catching. So lets do a small thought experiment before you go any further with your reading. Just close your eyes for a few seconds and think about what ideas come to your mind regarding the term "soft power". It really depends on the mental associations you may have developed with the term over the course of your life. Let me elaborate a little bit from the point of view of my conscious mind. There are actually two ideas that come to my mind by default as I try to contemplate about the term soft power. 

One way of thinking about soft power is process of dominating a group of people with the application of force, either covertly or overtly, with the help of some useful tools of force, such as military equipment. Moreover, to make use of effective incentives in a way that they are enwrapped in appropriate diplomatic wheedling of the group that is being coerced or motivated. And to do it so effectively that the party being dominated cannot refuse the offers that are being made to them. Clearly, this method of applying force resembles that of the people like mafia and  gang leaders. One thing that is obvious about this way of coercion or motivation (or whatever) is that no matter how much the group that is being dominated may be allured about the beauty of the offers, their decision to accept the deal may still be a function of the underlying threat and its consequences if they did not accept the offer.

The other idea that comes to the mind concerning soft power lacks the use any conventional tools of force. According to this theme a person, or a group of people, is motivated in doing what you want them to do in a way that they also love to do it. This is the theme of the paper titled soft power by Joseph Nye. It is basically a theory to make people want what you want them to do. This is quite obvious and self explanatory. This also makes a lot more sense too. The previous explanation given in the paragraph above is not really of soft power, but actually of hard power made to look like soft power.

This theory of Joseph Nye and his whole paper is very important in many respects. Late Samuel-P-Huntington also made passing references to the concepts of hard and soft powers respectively in his clash of civilizations. It has become quite important to comprehend this theory in order to understand the demands of the era we live in. In his paper Nye also gives rationale for why it is important to apply soft power, as opposed to hard power, when it comes to dominating people.

According to Nye the most important question while defining power is "Power to do What?" According to Nye in our times there would be overlapping yet disparate areas that would define a periphery of their own for exertion of power. For instance, while military remains one institution, economics is another independent institution with its independent power structure and interplay not only with its counterparts across borders but also with other disciplines like military and sports etc. Nye suggests that it would be the complex interplay among all such important institutions that would define and shape the geopolitics of our world. According to Nye this would also shape the geopolitical landscape from the vantage point of hegemony. Lastly, and quite importantly, according to Nye, this need for a complex interplay across important and independent institutions would also constrain the employment of hard-power based solutions. Thus, this would give rise to the need of adopting soft power based solutions. 

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  by  Dominic's pics 

Will of God

Thinking too much has its own benefits and drawbacks like any other thing. Long time ago I used to have really excessive thinking habits. I used to think about almost any thing. Think about it for the while that if you are thinking for a very prolonged time on things that are seemingly so petty. Just think about it for a while that you restrain your natural spontaneity of carrying out apparently trivial tasks by devoting an additional portion of your thought process to, no matter what you do, to think about additional, and apparently, useless things. For instance, if you are thinking about on as to who has the control of your hands as you type in the keyboard. Or think about something so fruitless as when you are going to blink your eye next time as you read this article. Clearly, if you are trying to acquire conscious control over the timing of your eye blinks and, moreover, also thinking about some could-be consequences of that blink, you have naturally, unnecessarily, restricted yourself and there are many practical disadvantages about that. To name but a few, you have sacrificed your focus, attention and a great deal of enjoyment that you could otherwise have availed if you were not thinking like this. 

But think about it like this that there is a person who is trying to optimize his/her life and wants to take all the steps very carefully. If you are living in a socially perilous, for instance, you may also start thinking like this. Well, of course, you may not think about the consequences of your  each and every eye blink, or even a few of them for that matter, but you would definitely be wary of some other things. For instance, consider that you are living in an area that is highly prone to undergoing a bomb explosion. You will be quite watchful about most of the moves you make. You will be watchful about your surroundings as you go outdoors. And possibly, given to the lack of predictability, you might also wonder about the will of God in your moment by moment experience of life.

One may think that this is quite true about the highly religious people, irrespective of whether which religion they come from. That a religious person would be wary about the will of God in, say, predicting the favorability, or lack thereof, of outcome of things. However, one may argue that an atheist would also wonder about will of God, albeit in other ways, and often also possibly quite critically.

For instance, an atheist or an agnostic, or a student of theology for that matter, may wonder about the will of God in connection with his/her ability to step his/her feet. How did I acquire an ability to step my feet in the first place? That who does it, apart from me? How does it happen? How did I learn to step my feet in the first place? How can I become better at this? And for how long, in the distant future, I would be able to keep on doing this? All of these questions may be considered naive at times and cogent at others. However, they can be posed to pass time in a good way over a cup of tea.  

It may sound like a very naive idea to scribble down one's thoughts like this. However, while we wonder about a topic so esoteric, and apparently pointless, as whether or not we have free will or not, it also make quite a lot of sense to wonder about will of God. After all what the folk out there believe about free will is that human beings have free will and have all the freedom to do whatever pleases them. So why wonder about free will? One of the answers possibly is to dig deep into human personality.

Around a year ago I came across an article by famous Urdu writer and philosopher, lat Sufi Ashfaq Ahmad. Sufi Ashfaq Ahmad was worth listening to always and he was very highly educated and well travelled across the world. He was also extremely well read. The article I found was in his book Zaawiyya. It is a collection of his short stories, inspired by his sensitive experience of life. The article was titled Ahkaam-e-Ilaahi. Its literal meaning in English would perhaps be commandments of God. However, after reading the whole article and appreciating its theme, I would rather call it Mansha-e-Ilaahi, or Will of God in English. The crux of the article is as follows in my own words:

We see weird things happening around us in every day of our life. For instance, we see that a crooked person keeps on climbing the ladder of success as his life progresses (and also keeps on becoming more and more crooked). On the other hand, we also see a very nice, and possibly extremely pious, man drenching further into problems and so on. Sufi Ashfaq Ahmad argued that this phenomenon has been been widely studied both in the West and in the Orient. At the end he argued that West finds alternative reasons for it (such as studying it from different perspectives), oriental people refer to it as the will of God. 

I liked the approach of the writer a lot. Although what he wrote was not universally true, but he did make a point. Allah Karim!

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  by  eviljohnius 

Consequences of the Lament

In response to Reflections on Free Will, by Daniel C. Danett, Sam Haris wrote The Marionette's Lament. In this Sam refutes with the criticism of Daniel about his book Free Will. In the beginning Sam is quite vociferously reactive of the style and tone of Daniel's criticism. In particular Sam finds the reflections of Daniel quite sneering. This may not have been the case with an ordinary reader whose native language is specially not English. In reality, an ordinary reader may have been unglued by a lot of intricacies of the subject as soon as he/she may have started reading the reflections. For instance, on one occasion Daniel describes the reflections as a museum of mistakes. An ordinary reader may not have noticed it as sarcasm or ridicule. Sam did! And responded quite vociferously to it. The fact is that a reader whose native language is not English might have found it quite difficult to appreciate this and other such comments specially because of lack of familiarity with the sense of sarcasm used in the English language or English cultures. A museum is just a museum at the end of the day. And there are so many museums around the world. So why make so much of a big deal about a museum of mistakes, which is just another museum. Isn't it? Oops! I have started to sound like Al-Capone!

After addressing Daniels reflections Sam goes on to explain his own conception of free will. This is done specially nicely when he tries to change the topic in his section "changing the topic". Otherwise, at least I would still have been baffled about the notion of free will he is trying to project. Free will is free will at the end of the day and we all have it. Some of us use our free will in one way or the other depending on how we wish to choose. (More Al-Capone!)

Sam's vantage point becomes specially clear when he distinguishes between first person and third person experiences or influences that shape the personality of a person. For instance, according to what a common person may understand about his notion of free will can be explained with the help of the following example. 

Consider a person who has chosen to become a cobbler. He chooses to become a cobbler because he thinks that it is a benign man's profession. A man can mend shoes and also be safe from many a distractions and dangers in his daily life. All he needs to do is to learn to sew and stitch the shoes well. He hones his motor skills to suit for speedy stitching. This way he gets better and better at making/mending shoes and becomes better and wealthier day by day. Doing so he also evades many chances of getting involved in unnecessary conflicts he would have been involved in otherwise. Had he been a truck driver, he might have been dead already in a road accident. Had he chosen a more sociable profession, such as that of a car mechanic, for instance, he may already have been badly injured due to a dispute with a client or burnt due to exposure to radiator overheating. As a cobbler all he needs to do is to find a solitary corner, sit there and hone his skill to stitch shoes and not his own hands. Pretty safe!

Common man, or folk, would obviously think that the cobbler made some really nice decisions in his life and became what he became, a successful cobbler. Does not the cobbler then have free will? To the common man, he really has that. He thought about a career choice at some stage of his life. Then he took a step to starting working on that. And as he started working he also learnt to have better self control and added to that, better motor skills due to which he can stitch more shoes in a given span of time that he would not have done otherwise.

Sam argues that this is really the illusion of free will the common man, or folk, suffer from. Daniel comes along to agree with the folk for their respite. According to Sam's framework of free will, however, the cobbler exactly does not have that freedom. Sam would argue that the circumstances, that shaped the cobbler to become a cobbler, have/had been governing his decisions throughout. The external environmental threats and influences forced him to become a cobbler. For instance, the cobbler may have feared at some stage of his life that taking up a more sociable profession was hazardous for him in some sense. His yearning for personal security urged him to take a professional choice he would not have taken otherwise. What if the cobbler had wanted to become a news editor instead but was too shy to have become that.

Sam would also argue that the cobbler's yearning for becoming something other (a mechanic, a driver, or a news editor) than what he actually became (a cobbler) also does not show in any way that the person had any free will. All his desires emerged from circumstances and influences that were out of his control. To this end, Sam indeed does have a point and he also takes us out of the misery of endlessly wondering about the real point of his argument.

How does then Sam's theory of free will cope up with the cobbler's acquiring better motor skills. His decision to learn to become a better stitcher can be ruled out using the same reasoning as above to show that free will is an illusion. The fact that he somehow acquired motor skills can also be ruled out same way. It is just a part of his decision to learn better shoe stitching and since he made that decision under the influence of external factors (factors emerging from events happening in systems other than his self), he simply does not have free will. However, how about his experience of dextrous stitching. The experience one can observe fast, near perfect mechanism of stitching shoes, with almost no flaws. How does one account for this fast stitching process as one observes it as what Sam calls a moment by moment experience of life? Sam would argue that this also suggests that the cobbler does not have free will. 

The robot-like skills that the cobbler has acquired through years of hard work and practice also suffers from third person influences. Actually, as any experience does, it may as well suffer from bunch of external influences. 

Grave Consequences: By suggesting that people do not have free will what Sam intend's to show is that people cannot be held responsible for their actions. Here, Sam's intention can sound both innocent and astute at the same time. Does not it make sense to say that since people are not the ultimate designers of their decisions and actions, it is irrelevant to hold them responsible for what they do.

Actually Sam has a deeper point when he suggests this. In a meaningful sense, he wants to liberate people from many things, such as a sense of guilt and sin and to free them out of prisons when they have been considered wrong and morally defunct by the society and the judiciary. This is done by saying that since people do not be held responsible for their actions it is absolutely irrelevant to hold them responsible for what they have done. In some sense this is what it means.

It is, however, not understandable at this point that how Sam actually thinks or would propose a newer judicial system to look like. A person who has murdered now is considered a murdered presently and accordingly he is sent to jail. If Sam's framework became applicable at some stage, how would that take into account this aspect and the associated repercussions at some latter stage.

A Deeper Point: I thought about Sam's work for quite a while. I have been reading him for quite a few years now and I know that he is an atheist. Indeed, as it appears from his writings, it is one of the life goals of Sam Harris to systematically argue against religion and hence existence of God. I seriously hope and pray that that would change at some stage of his life. But this is not the point I am trying to make, it is just a comment. So, as Sam is an atheist, one can wonder that how would Sam argue about an act of, let us say, terrorism (a bombing or whatever, we know of many such things) committed by someone. In particular how would Sam argue about the action of the person in light of his framework of free will? This is a very cogent question indeed. If a person does not have free will and he has committed a heinous crime such as creating a huge bombing event, how would Sam propose a justification of that or of his conception of free will. I propose, that Sam would propose, that that person, like all the other people, also did not have any free will. The person did that under the influence of things that have influenced him over his lifetime. More explicitly Sam would argue that it is not the person who should be held responsible for his action. Instead, it is the religious teachings he had had during his lifetime that should be attributed responsibility to. In short, Sam would argue against the religion instead of the person. This point would have far reaching consequences specially if his theory of free will is to be taken seriously. Allah Karim!

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  by  BrynJ 

A Reflection on Reflections

I managed to read the "Reflections on Free Will" by Daniel C. Dannett twice. This is a review of the book of Sam Harris named Free Will. I read the book twice due to the concern that I may have missed the point. Keeping in mind to not to miss the point is very essential in my point of view specially concerning this type of philosophical work. There are at least three cogent reasons for keeping in mind that the point not be missed. 1) This is a very delicate topic. On a superficial level it may sound artistic and, thus, easy to comprehend, but in reality it demands a lot of attention. 2) Sam Harris is a very elegant writer. There is no doubt about that. In as much as there might be a lot of his critics, I am sured he is admired by many due to his way of writing and the way he translates his thought process on paper (or a computer based book or blog for that matter). I also admire his writing its style and content. He poses very cogent questions at times. But there is one thing about Sam Harris's writing style that at times it appears that he swings his whole argument. He moves his discourse in a sort of a spiral and comes back to square one. One may really wonder at that instant on as to what is his point. That is why I believe that it is very important to re-read and to try to fully understand what he has really written and implied. Pun not intended! 3) Sometimes we can be shallow readers. Our not too good reading comprehensions, short attention spans, lack of focus, time varying interest, and dwindling energy can actually play a role in us missing the whole point altogether in an otherwise such an engaging and lengthy discourse. 

However, reflections has been written by Daniel C. Dennett and not by Sam Harris. And this one is actually not very confusing. In reality it really demystifies many of the conceptual caveats one may have about the subject of Free Will (while possibly creating others in the form of various esoteric thought experiments or whatever). So the point number 2 (among the 3) listed in the above paragraph might not really hold true in this case. However, since reflections on free will is actually a reflection of the work of Sam Harris, point 2 might begin to hold true to some extent for this book as well.

So what is reflections really all about. Reflections refutes the argument of Sam Harris that free will is an illusion. What Daniel argues about is that we human beings really have free will. This is the whole idea of this book. However, I was interested in understanding the subject in a bit more detail and on a deeper level. I was interested in understanding if there is something really deep about the subject of free will. And indeed there are a few really deep things about the subject of free will. I shall point out three things here that I came across in the book for the purpose of brevity. The real purpose in writing this (sort of a) summary is to create a stub about the subject so that I can revisit it latter at some stage for my own perusal, at least. In what follows, I am trying to write my concerns from memory. The reason for this is that I am already trying trying to struggle with other distractions as I am writing this.

The first thing I have noticed and I find worth commenting and contemplating about has something to do with the mention of immaterial souls. In the start of reflections, Daniel tries to defend the position of Sam Harris by somewhat suggesting that when he asserts that human do not have free will, his theory applies to our immaterial souls. And since we do not have immaterial souls (and since we are just lumps of biochemicals), the theory does not apply to us. This is what I have inferred at least. I admit that I could be wrong. My understanding could be flawed. Specially since I am writing this from memory and I do not have the draft of reflections opened in front of me. My concern is that irrespective of the fact that we have immaterial souls or not, what would be the repercussions of applying a similar scrutiny that whether we have free will or not if we actually had immaterial souls.

The second aspect about the book is the spectrum of various positions we can assume between free will and determinism. I have still not really understood the deep meanings of various positions such as combatilism, incombatilism etc. I do understand that combatilism implies that determinism and free will are compatible; both of them can exist (I wonder if exist is the right word) at the same time. Incombatilism is the converse. It means if free will can happen, determinism is false and vice versa. The problem is that it is really important to deeply understand these notions.

The third is the understanding of free will. The position Sam assumes is that free will is an illusion. That I have decided to read about free will. That I may have wondered at some stage on as to what it really means to have free will. That I eventually managed to find some thinkable reading material on it. Eventually I am writing about free will now. According to Sam's framework, I was not really free in choosing to come up to this point. According to Sam, there must have happened events in my life that were beyond my control that may have urged, motivated or influenced me to do all of this. For instance, I may have been impressed by philosophy at some stage. And at some stage prior to that I may have been told that philosophy was an enterprise worth getting impressed about. Daniel has argued that this does not imply that we do not have free will.

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  by  Tomas Sobek 

Understanding Superposition

Understanding ordinary Physics can be quite cumbersome at times. This can be true even for the brightest of the students. There can be a lot of concepts in various topics that may demand a lot of curious scrutiny even if you are studying the basic ideas. Moreover, a very important subject such as theoretical physics may not only sound difficult but also quite boring to the whimsical adolescent who is slowly creeping out of the teen years and would be soon going to the university. What adds to the misery of the student is that how the subject matter is made to appear so esoteric to comprehend while it is orchestrated. 

We had a very nice teacher named Professor Dr. Faiz-ul-Hassan. He used to quote one of his own Swedish teachers while he was a post graduate student that any subject in the world can be explained to any student in a way in which appears easy for him/her to understand. Indeed, Dr. Faiz used to teach very well. I still remember that in his class even the most mischievous of us used to sit and listen to the lectures very quietly and attentively. This is quite remarkable given the lack of interest students generally had in any kind of academic activity. He used to teach us difficult subjects and we used to find them interesting and easy.

A couple of days ago I came across a very nice article that discussed quantum mechanics in the context of human consciousness and its survival after death. The article was quite timely for me because I was wondering how quantum mechanics was connected to consciousness. Even though I could say, "I know what you mean" as an expression in a discourse, I really did not nearly have a clear understanding of superposition and its repercussions on the study of consciousness. Consciousness is recently being acknowledged by science and it would be appropriate to think that any serious student of consciousness should try to understand quantum physics to some extent. It is one of the various ways at looking at the survival of consciousness after bodily death.

So the explanation of superposition was given with the help of a cartoon and I found it very useful, informative and funny at the same time. Even though I had read a little bit about superposition before in the context of quantum cryptography, but I had never understood it so well before. The cartoon is as follows:

If you have seen this cartoon you may definitely have understood superposition and I can bet that you must definitely have enjoyed the cartoon. It just takes a little bit of curiosity to appreciate such work. So giving an explanation of superposition now is rather redundant. I also think that I cannot write an explanation of superposition as nicely as it has been explained by the old man in the cartoon. However, I am going to write down my own understanding of superposition only to gain a little bit of self satisfaction. You can skip this article now if you wish or you may keep on reading it if you wish to leave a nice remark at the end of article.

So what superposition tells us that matter can behave in weird ways. Depending on the circumstances it can retain its physical form or it may also convert into energy. It can exhibit a particle like behavior and it may also act like a wave. This view is endorsed with a so called double slit experiment. What the old man does is that he shows us something with the help of a slit placed between a source of white balls of some sort and a black board on the other. When the balls are fired towards the board some of them strike with the sides of the slit and are deflected away, while a few pass through the slit and form a line-like pattern on the board resembling the shape of the slit through which they passed. 

He then replaces the single slit with a plate that has two slits instead and repeats the experiment. As expected what we notice is that two bands are formed on the wall resembling the shapes of the slits. He argues that this is an intuitive result. 

In the next stage of the experiment what he does is that he replaces the source of balls with an electron gun. So in the single slit experiment a single band is formed resembling the slit. However, in the two-slit experiment, multiple bands are formed as opposed to the two that were intuitively expected. He argues that this seemingly counter-intuitive result is also intuitive. He argues that the electrons exhibit wavelike motion while traveling towards the plate. As they pass through the slits, some of them reinforce each other and while others annihilate each other through constructive and destructive interference respectively. The result is multiple bands as can be seen on the board.

In the next stage of the experiment he starts firing single electron at a time from the gun. He does so to figure out if the electrons behave differently when they are fired in isolation. What he figures out is that same sort of multiple bands are formed again. He argues that while some electrons are deflected and while some pass through one slit and while others pass through the others, the over all result is a number of bands. He owes this to the wave like nature of electrons as they travel to the board (which is possibly a fluorescent screen of some kind that illuminates as electrons strike it). 

The last step of the experiment is crucial. In this step what he does is that he fixes some sort of the detector along side the slitted plated. He does so in the hope of observing the behavior of the electrons as they pass through the slits. To much of his surprise, what he finds is that two bands are formed on the board. He finds this surprising and expects us to be surprised also because he concludes that this time the electrons exhibited a particle type behavior. He concludes that under special circumstances electrons can exhibit either a wavelike or a particle-like behavior. Moreover, he concludes that all matter is capable of exhibiting such behavior.

To us such behavior has far reaching consequences viz a viz human consciousness. It means that in a theoretical sense it might be possible that we humans, which are normally observable as physical beings with flesh and bones, might as well be able to exist other than that too. The question that what was that detector made of that made the electrons so shy that they blushed away from acting like waves demands us to brush up our quantum physics a little bit. Teaching difficult subjects with the help of cartoons like the one above is indeed a very remarkable way of teaching.

 

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

  by  superdeath 

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 

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.

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!

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.