Human Nature and Idea of Restrictions

I read a very nice quote somewhere:
We are not human beings searching for spiritual experience but we are spiritual beings enjoying human experience.

Nice perspective towards life. But what exactly is meant by "spiritual" and "human" experience? Certainly spiritual experience here is considered superior than human experience. If spiritual experience is better than human experience then what makes human experience inferior (?) than the spiritual one? In my opinion, human existence is  nothing but a restricted spiritual existence. An existence which is confined to space-time continuum.



Consider a game of (foot)ball where you are allowed to do anything for scoring a goal. You can hold the ball in your hand, you can run at the speed of light, the opposition team is so weak that they crawl at a speed of 1 meter/hour, you have already bribed the referee to give all results in your favor. In conclusion, you are always bound to win by a big margin. What do you think? What type of game would it  be? Would it be fun, entertaining? Does not seem so.


Now consider a game where all the rules i.e. restrictions of the game of football are in place. You have a strong opposition, your team has its own strong and weak points, you have work really hard to win the game, you have a strategy for the game considering your and opponent's strong and weak points. Don't you think all of us would certainly prefer this game rather than a game where we always win without any opposition.


Now consider your life with you having all the powers possible in this world. You can do whatever you want. There are no challenges to be faced. No targets to be met. There are no expectations from anybody. All your problems are solved automatically by your might. You are only living to enjoy. You have no work to do. How many months/years can you live this kind of life and remain happy and content? I bet you would get bored very soon. Now I can imagine how boring a Superhuman life can be.


Now consider your life where you have your own limitations i.e. restrictions. You have few strong points and few weak points. You always strive to improve upon your weak points. You struggle hard to win and in that process you lose also. You enjoy small things in life. You love your kid for his/her mistakes also. All this sounds very human and interesting, isn't it?


Imagine watching a movie where hero is all powerful. He crushes the villain just by thinking of it. He just enjoys his life and he has no oppositions, no problems. He is a happy-go-lucky chap. Would you like this kind of movie? First of all, is it possible to make such movie at all where there are no problems in hero's life?


I think I have made my point very clear. It is those restrictions imposed on "all powerful" which has created this world. The Superhuman has imposed certain rules and restrictions on himself to create us (Why? Because we have seen how boring life can be without challenges). If there are no rules, there is no world. We are programmed to follow certain rules. It is those spacio-temporal rules, imposition of which could create this world. There are restricting forces acting everywhere. Gravitational force does not allow us to fly, we are always vulnerable to electromagnetic forces etc etc. But they have their own advantages also. We and the whole scientific community is trying to find out these rules and trying to find ways to break them. Life is all about finding our way out of these restrictions. And honestly, in the core of our hearts, we love to live this life (as concluded above, we do not want to live a superman's life either).

Second Law of Thermodynamics: My view

Introduction:
The second law of thermodynamics says that total entropy of any system always increases. In very simple terms, entropy can be defined as the degree of randomness in a system. It indirectly means that how much ever we try to keep a system in order, it always moves towards randomness. But does this rule apply to human behavior, society, evolution, genes etc? This is what I would try to analyze in this post.

First Impression:
In my opinion second law of thermodynamics (SLoT) applies to everything living or non-living including our thoughts and emotions. Actually our existence is a struggle to keep this entropy in control. But till now probably none of us have succeeded because nobody around us has claimed that he/she is immortal :) In short, forces of nature are at work to destroy whatever we build (including our body) and our job is to keep it intact. In technical terms, we are trying to reduce the entropy of our things but somehow the entropy is bound to rise whatever we do. In philosophical terms, whatever has been created is bound to get destroyed.

There is one more perspective to it. Without SLoT in action, even creation itself is not possible. In effect, this whole universe is governed by very generic principles and what we see are only infinite variants of it. We start with a basic single substance and keep dividing it to create multiple things. One example of this could be building 1000 stone houses made from the stone blocks taken from a single hill. So, one mountain gets converted into thousand stone houses. So, in principal there was a system with higher degree of order (hill) and the degree of order in it was reduced (randomness increased) to construct many houses. Overall, degree of order in the system (hill + houses) was reduced and randomness increased. According to the big bang theory, this universe started with the primordial matter. If we take the primordial matter as our hill, all the galaxies, stars etc are houses. Thus, without increasing the entropy of universe, it is not possible to create anything. So, we can conclude that without SLoT, it is not possible to define the process of creation itself.

In other words, SLoT sets this universe in motion.

It would be interesting to think about a world where the overall entropy of a system always decreases. For us living in an ever increasing entropy scenario, it is like always going back in time. So, for us it is possible to reduce the entropy of the universe only if we turn the arrow of time by 180 degrees :)


SLoT In Action:
Around us, there are many practical examples of this theory in action. A house (system) is built and it always needs to be repaired. It can not keep itself static or it can not improve itself over time. No matter how much hard we try, a kid always tends towards lying (degradation). Till now we have not been able to keep ourselves always young. Our clothes always get dirty and we have to clean them (if I am allowed to take this as an example). All in all, we are surrounded by numerous examples of SLoT everywhere.

Analogies:
Now it is clear to all of us that reducing the entropy of a system is possible only at the cost of increasing it for the environment. Let's apply this principle to few things like human body, chromosomes etc.

Human Body:
Are the human beings also under the control of SLoT? Certainly, yes. As discussed earlier, I think the fundamental requirement for us to stay alive is to keep our body in good health (in correct order) which means we have to keep reducing our body's entropy. Somehow we know that as soon as we stop following this principle, our body starts degrading and slowly it gets destroyed (we die). But how do we keep reducing our body's entropy? The only way is by increasing our environment's entropy by extracting food, air, water from it. But how does entropy of the environment increase if we extract something from it? This question can also be answered with the same hill-house example stated above. Would it be possible for us to survive by keeping our body's entropy constant. Theoretically, yes. In physics, the systems for which entropy is constant are called adiabatic systems. These imaginary systems do not interact with their environment. Going by this example, if we turn our body into an adiabatic system, we would not be able to interact with this world. We would not be able to see, hear or feel this world. We would be totally isolated from this world. So, if we become immortal by becoming an adiabatic system, we would be out of this universe anyways (which is equivalent to dying). So becoming immortal in terms of our body is of no use according to SLoT.

Human Evolution and Genes:
Can we apply SLoT to Human evolution in terms of genes? I think, Yes. It is already known that life on the Earth started with a single cell. If this was the case then we can safely consider this first cell as the most ordered system with all DNA information contained in it. It is also known that the zygote contains only half of the genes from both mother and father. So, in effect the system gets degraded by a factor of two in every generation. And so on. This whole theory of life formation on the Earth is actually the story of genes getting divided into halves and combining together with other genes to create a life form. In this whole process, it is very easy to figure out that the degree of randomness from genes point of view is increasing. The ordered system of the first cell is getting divided again and again to add randomness and orderlessness in us. We are actually a degraded form of the first cell! So, in this case also we are following the pattern suggested by SLoT. If a couple decides not to reproduce, they stop the process of entropy increase from the point of view of genes system. This means that as soon as we stop disordering the gene system, we would not be able to produce the next generation and the human race would cease to exist. In order to survive, we have to keep increasing the entropy of genes system (reproduction process). This could be one of the reasons why our population is growing so rapidly. We as a race want to doubly make sure that our 'genes system' entropy is increasing :).

So, as long as we are disturbing the environment or in other words as long as we are interacting with the environment to keep our entropy decreasing, we exist. Otherwise we would cease to exist. In some other words, as long as we are acting/reacting with this world, we exist. As soon as we stop all our actions (even at the minutest level, be aware that a person in coma also is acting in a way) and become an adiabatic system, we cease to exist. That means we can not perceive this world which is as good as we are out of this world. So, we can take this as a motivation to keep working :)

Society:
This theory can be applied even to human society. All our lives, we have seen how important it is to keep the law and "order" maintained in the society. As soon as it is left alone, disorder starts cropping in. At the social level also the total entropy of the system has to be reduced in order to survive. So, as long as some of us are working towards bringing order into the system or in other words reducing the entropy of our social system, we are sure that we are safe and the social order is maintained. To further explain the entropy increase at social level, consider an individual as the basic unit of society. When we know that entropy of the individual keeps increasing, it has to increase at the social level also.

But at the social level it is not guaranteed that entropy of every individual in it is decreasing. Every individual keeps fighing for resources and he/she makes sure to keep the effort at minimal level so that the spending in terms of effort is not more than reward (resources). This is necessary to keep decreasing the entropy. In social terms, it comes at the cost of entropy increase of some other individual. But as a system, we have to make sure that the sum total of the reduction/increment in entropy at individual level leads to overall decrease in social entropy. Actually this fight for entropy reduction at individual level is the reason of lawlessness in the society. So, we can conclude that lawlessness is a hard fact of life and it will be there as long as we are here.

Conclusion:
Life is all about reducing the the overall entropy of the human system. But at the same time, it is also known that it is impossible to prevent the overall entropy of a system from increasing as long as it is not an adiabatic system. May be this is the explanation of "struggle of life" in terms of Physics. But we should note that black holes add a new dimension to this conclusion.

Note - This is not a scientific paper and I have only tried to correlate Second Law of Thermodynamics with my observations.

The Idea is to Reuse!

I still remember my childhood days when we had to carry a shopping bag whenever we went for shopping. Plastic bags were not available or not given for free. Generally our shopping bags were made out of some old trousers which was not worn by anybody. At that time, reason of doing all this was very different. But because of those constraints, we were forced to do a marvelous thing -> "reuse".

I would take one more example. Being the younger son of my parents, I used to happily wear old clothes of my elder brother which were in good condition. It was like a part of life and I did not see anything wrong in it. At the end, those old clothes were getting "reused" in a beautiful way! By the way, it does not end there. I have studied from the same school which my brother attended and I had to reuse by elder brother's text books :).

In those days, reusing things again and again was to save some money or it was a compulsion because of the lack of one time usable packaged products in the market. I remember my grandmother used the water for gardening which was already used for washing rice. Most of the water used for gardening was already used for something else. One of the primary reasons of doing this was because we used to get water for one hour in the morning and for one hour in the evening through municipal water connection :).

Use of electricity was a luxury for my grandmother. She always used to switch off all unused lights and fans. I must confess that we used to hate it but later it became a habit for us too. At that time, it was done because she wanted to save on electricity bills and now we should do it because we have to save electricity; no strings attached.

Now comes the question, why am I talking so much about reuse? Here are some observations. We keep reading in newspapers that the natural resources are becoming scarce and many of them would not be available after few decades; The carbon foot print of every individual on this Earth is increasing everyday; We are using natural resources mindlessly; We need more fuel, electricity, food etc etc. At this rate, where are we going? We need to do something about it and we have to act NOW!

But before that the question is, who is responsible for this situation? It is partly done in the name of boosting the economy by introducing consumerism. I think we have taken the concept of consumarism too far. The single use concept was introduced in disguise of convenience. Use and throw is the new mantra. Nobody talks about reuse unless they are somehow forced to do it. This single use habit has been injected into us because as long as consumerism is promoted and adopted as a way of life everywhere in the world, new markets would be created for products and overall economy would keep growing. But at what cost? A city like Bangalore in India generates millions on tonnes of garbage every year. Most of it is not recycled at all. It might be acceptable for biodegradable waste but what about non-biodegradable wastes like plastic, electronic, chemical, nuclear, radioactive etc? The rate at which we are generating non-biodegradable waste every year, very soon we would not have any fertile land and clean water available anywhere in the world. We are treating our mother Earth like a big junk yard. This might be an exaggeration but the intent and the message which I want to convey is loud and clear.

I assume that we have to solve this problem and we as a race does not want to run away from it. We want to keep this planet livable and we should not plan to run away to another livable plant. Its too futuristic but that day would come if we do not act now. I like one of the dialogues from the movie "The Matrix" in which Agent Smith tells Morpheus: "I'd like to share a revelation that I've had during my time here. It came to me when I tried to classify your species and I realized that you're not actually mammals. Every mammal on this planet instinctively develops a natural equilibrium with the surrounding environment but you humans do not. You move to an area and you multiply and multiply until every natural resource is consumed and the only way you can survive is to spread to another area. There is another organism on this planet that follows the same pattern. Do you know what it is? A virus. Human beings are a disease, a cancer of this planet. You're a plague and we are the cure. ". Partly, what was said is true. What the human race is doing at present is very nicely put in these words. Our population is growing leaps and bounds and the amount of food required to feed all of us would not be sufficient in future. I was reading an article recently in a leading newspaper which stated the outcome of a scientific conference somewhere in the world. One of the scientists quoted that the amount of food required in next forty years would be equal to what was required in past few million years. It is obvious that a businessman would see this situation in a different light but the truth is: "life is not only about business and economic growth. It is far-far more than that." And this is the reality we collectively are running away from.

Please note that I am not against economic growth. Consumerism IS required for overall growth. Products are required for guaranteeing a good standard of living. But we have to keep questioning our system and find out that at what cost are we getting all this? Is this kind of growth sustainable in long term (by long term I mean really long term :) )? At the end we as species (including all the species) would be the sufferers if a line is not drawn between growth and walking towards complete catastrophe.

But enough of discussion. We are probably clear that only mad cancerous growth is not going to work. NOW, what is the way out? The simple answer to this question is "reuse". We should try to reuse everything everywhere. When I talk about reuse, I am not only targeting reuse of commercial products but of a reuse which saves natural resources, plants etc too. Reuse is already a very big concept in software industry. The evolution of programming languages and all kind of software tells the emphasis given to reuse. Imagine, you have to start from writing an OS first for writing a "Hello, World!" program :). Even industrialization itself is to stop all of us from reinventing the wheel (which in a way is reuse). Coming back to our topic, I would give you an example of how easily reuse concept could be adopted in our day-today routine. In office, I generally have two cups of coffee daily. I have a habit of having a glass of water before tea/coffee. Previously, I used to use a paper/plastic glass for having water and I used to take a coffee mug for my coffee. Now I have water in my coffee mug first and then 'reuse' the same mug for having coffee. Simple! :) This way I save two paper/plastic glasses a day and approximately 450 glasses a year. Even in a scenario where reusable glasses are kept for drinking water, this rule applies because every time we use them, they have to be cleaned using water and soap and mind you; water is precious. Imagine what would happen if all the employees of my organization start following my reusable idea! I can get an award from higher management of my organization if I propose this idea to them :). So, now we know how effective these small measures could be in long run.

I have listed down few very small and simple ideas from my side which are based on reuse concept. In the next section, I have covered few ideas which can be applied at a larger scale.

1. If you are used to drinking water before tea/coffee, use the coffee mug first for having water and then REUSE it for having coffee. This way you can save plastic/paper or water.

2. Try not to touch utensils such as glasses with your mouth so that it can be reused by others. Here, keeping the reusable utensil clean is very important. This way you can save plastic/paper or water.

3. Save and reuse water as much as possible (my grandmother's example). I never use bath tubs. It is a criminal waste of water. Remember that 3rd world war would be fought for water :). Everyday I see water tankers on the road and think what is more precious: Water or diesel?

4. Make the kids at home learn the reuse concept as part of their lives. There is no need to teach them separately. Teaching is required for spoilt and misguided people like us :).

5. Reduce your carbon footprint as much as possible. If possible, use solar power.

6. Always switch off unused lights/fans/decorative lights. Check your house for any switched on power points before going out.

7. Avoid anticipatory buying. Buy only those things which are REALLY required. Many of the times we buy something which becomes a "pseudo garbage"* for us. By "pseudo garbage", I am referring to new things which we do not use and are kept in the house waiting to be thrown away someday.

8. Encourage recycling of newspaper, plastic packets of milk etc.

9. Always carry a shopping bag with you when you are going to buy vegetables etc. Avoid accepting plastic bags as much as possible (Imagine a vendor giving you a packet of biscuit packed using plastic, in a plastic cover!!!).

10. If you are not in a hurry, do not use the "spin" option of washing machine for drying clothes. You can use natural sunlight for doing it.

11. Do NOT waste food and make sure that food cooked at home is always consumed fully.

12. Try not to cook your meals and store it in fridge. Also, instead of wasting additional LPG, take veggies out of the fridge few hours before cooking them.

13. If it is fine with you, younger children at home can reuse stuffs from elder ones.

14. Use torn/unused clothes for dusting/mopping.

15. I think a shirt can be worn minimum 2-3 times before it needs a wash :)

16. Use plastic carry bags accumulated while shopping in your dust bin.

17. Encourage grown up kids to use slate and chalk for doing their rough work. This would save a lot of paper.

18. Do not take unnecessary printouts. The concept of "pseudo garbage" applies here also. If you have taken a printout by mistake, you or your kids at home can use the blank space for rough work, preparing shopping lists etc.

19. Do not accept pamphlets which you know you are going to throw away.

This list is non-exhaustive and we can keep adding new points to it. After these small steps, we should also think of reuse at a larger scale. Below are few inputs from my side:

1. Introduction of glass bottles for packaging of milk, soft drinks etc instead of plastic bottles.

2. Companies can encourage the reuse of their products' packaging material. As an example, they can introduce an offer where they give certain discount on a new packet of biscuit if 10 old packets of the same biscuit is produced.

3. Extensive research should be done on packaging technologies from the point of view of reuse.

4. BAN plastic bags.

5. Introduce chapters on reuse in primary schools and educate children about the importance of reuse.

6. Research on large scale on the use of renewable energy sources.

7. I could think of a system where refilling is possible for all products without using any intermediate means of packaging. Imagine, there is a pipeline provided for every shampoo in a supermarket and you have to carry your own bottle for buying shampoo. In these supermarkets, all liquid products can be maintained in big containers. This way, we can save a lot on packaging cost and also a lotttt of plastic.

I hope I was able to convince you about the dangers of "use and throw" culture and how "reuse theory" can save us. I also hope that the tips for reuse/saving energy are helpful.

By the way, I have not introduced anything new in this article (except point 7 above) and am only trying to create awareness.

Both positive/negative Comments are welcome. I would be expecting few inputs also from your side as well.

* Pseudo Garbage - I have used this term in a very different context here. I am not sure if this term has been used like this anywhere else.