Metaphysics - Notes

 A ‘scientific experiment’ is the test of the truth of a ‘narrative’ that is being tried to push into the world to be taken precedence over. Every other narrative (non-scientific) doesn’t have this experiment, with its concrete process of ‘scientific method.’ But wait, the narrative of ‘evolution’ did take some precedence over the narratives of 𝑟𝑒𝑙𝑖𝑔𝑖𝑜𝑛 at the scale of the world. It’s simple. Experiment is not a lie. The results of the experiment are the truths. If the ‘truth’ is clashing at large scale with something else, maybe that other thing is not constructed or interpreted well enough. If, on the other hand, the ‘other narrative’ is interpreted to its truest sense, and it still clashes directly with the ‘scientific truth’, that narrative is categorically wrong.

There’s the material or physical, mathematical, and the ‘ultimate’ reality. Natural Sciences have a claim of all the truths inside the physical reality. Pure Mathematics claims all the truths in the mathematical reality. I do not intend to portray that the physical and mathematical reality are distinct, for they could be distinct, intersected, or one in the same. As far as the ultimate reality goes, there are a lot of players that lay claim to its understanding. When it comes to the ultimate reality, the narratives fight with each other and try to get higher from each other regarding which narrative holds more truths. These narratives range from ‘ultimate reality doesn’t exist’ to having many complex notions about its nature. The subject matter of science is the physical reality. Hence, when science (or scientist) starts talking about the ultimate reality, it participates as a mere candidate, a mere player among hundreds or thousands of others; and it is, when viewed rightly, nothing more than just another narrative as opposed to the objective truths it holds in the physical reality.

When dealing with its own personal and main subject matter, science uses logic to traverse through all of its created knowledge. Logic is a system of thought popularized by the Greek (I am not, and do not intend to be, an expert on History). I assert that (I am not talking about ultimate reality, so I can ‘assert’ logically onto this physical reality) — I assert that Science, after its immense success in dealing with the physical reality, has deeply mistaken by using ‘logic’ on ‘ultimate’ reality as well.

Human Psychology laughs at this assertion, because, interestingly, most scientists invent and discover so much about the physical world by having deep and inner beliefs that they are finding truths about the ultimate reality. They do not want their motivation destroyed by a mere Computer Science student.

I am using the term ‘narrative’ in a very large and general sense. Hence, the apparent literary restrictions (I know very little about Literature) shall not be applied on this term here. The narratives are created by people. In a precise professional tone, they are the philosophers, scholars, writers, politicians, businessmen, mathematicians, scientists, and prophets.

I am unfinished, and do not have the energy right now to explicate further.

December 17, 2023

Journey of a Computer Program

The program is given a new life. After some bug fixes in the C file, he was saved on the local disk drive. His master, whom－out of respect－he calls ‘root’, saved him there. He, the program, sits inside a folder named ‘My Codes’ inside the root’s home directory. The address of the home directory is ‘~’. The home directory occupies a block of space in the local storage drive, and that block sits somewhere deep inside the whole of the drive. His height is 500 lines. His upper parts end just after the 10th line, and they contain all of his thinking side－brain. After that, he has his face, heart, lungs, all the way to his feet that rest on the 500th line. In the hard drive, there’s some empty space after his leg, but other programs lie next. Some are long unused, almost dead. Some are freshly used and came back to their place in the drive.

A construction work is happening in the main memory. It is randomly accessible, and hence the camera flies towards this precise location somewhere in the middle of the memory. A guy in a truck is clearing up dirt and cleaning the space. Upon asking, he says a new program is coming here, and the old one left this trace that I have to clean. He was a very old guy, and his name was Garbage Collector. Now, the place is clean. He goes back and writes in his notebook that his place is free now. A team of cranes and trucks come and make up more than a dozen segments here. Every segment is constructed in a delicate way. They put labels on each of the segments: stack, heap, and code, etc.

Something came to the hard disk drive, put him in a car, and after a while he was thrown in one of those segments in the main memory. It all happened so fast that he hardly had time to breathe and look around himself. Here, he is alone. He waits. He asks himself about the structure of these buildings around him, the structure of the roads with which he came here, the methods of travel along the way. What external forces make him move, how these cranes and collectors and trucks work. He tells himself that it doesn’t matter if he doesn’t know anything about it. He only knows his own work, which is enough. After all, he is a Computer Scientist, not a Computer Engineer.

Sitting bored in his code segment, he tries asking his whereabouts from a pedestrian in the busy street alongside. People are too busy with their lives. Nobody answers him. Meanwhile, he sees that new kinds of trucks are putting some things in his other segments. He is perplexed. He starts getting depressed, and wishes to call his psychotherapist. But instantly, a dwarf comes and tells him, looking at his notes sheet, that it is his time to run. They called him to the headquarters. Now, his facial expressions change. A flash of memory comes to his bright eyes, and he smiles. He knows the Central Processing Unit. He had been there before.

The CPU was working hard on something when he realized that a small clock inside it just sent a signal to halt the work. CPU stopped what it was doing. Another signal lighted up, which changed his mood. He calls it the kernel mood. [I SHALL WRITE MORE HERE. TIRED NOW]

He remembers his youth when he was heart broken and devastated upon the rejection of someone he had shared his intense feelings with. First, he had lost hope. Then, he stopped his prayers. At some point, he hit one of the weakest times of his life. He was suffering from fever and headaches. Only his mother was by his side. He did not share any of his feelings with her, but she knew deep inside her that there is much wrong with him than what appears on the outside. A time also came when he would constantly think of suicide and weep every night like a child. He does not remember how he got back into normal in the previous months or a year. Now, as he starts to get mature and become familiar with everything around him, his fascination and passion of things around him decreases. Boredom haunts him every day. He knows that those trucks and cranes were memory managers, loaders, and linkers; the note sheets were nothing but lists containing free space address in the main memory. The high manager ordering all the jobs for moving and placing him in different areas, was the Operating System. Every night, in solitude, he thinks that I have lived my whole life in these areas, and I still understand very little. The young programs live in big mansions called data centers, and they have put me in their local drives since many years. This, too, is a big society. He thinks, I see so many problems in this society, and I know many ways to make things better here. Maybe I might do this some time in my later life. He tells himself, there’s too much to do here. Then, he sleeps.

This is an unfinished draft. I’ll complete it later.

December 16, 2023

Of Creating Sense in Mathematics

Slow stream of thoughts caught in hostel’s quiet hours

Inasmuch as Mathematics is concerned, It is a very private experience for me because there is no external human eye that looks after me. I feel myself a culprit of not doing and learning even a quasi-fraction of mathematics as what I had imagined and was (and am) passionate about, and of doing very little of what I had thought. An active assertion of this kind is taken to be a lie by those close to me, for they take it in a manner where we try to explicate some person’s understanding of maths merely by comparing it to his immediate surrounding that considers maths just as an obstacle to life and examination results. Hence, it is true iff considered at a largely personal sense, as a feeling, and not an active assertion. And it is needless to extrapolate the reasoning behind such sort of negative feeling; for the answer generalizes to too many things of life, material and mental, that are already semantically bleached.

In the movie, ‘The Man who knew Infinity’, G.H. Hardy takes the Indian prodigy Ramanujan in his assistance, goes hard on him first but becomes his friend by the end. Sad to say that Ramanujan, a brilliant mathematician of the first kind, dies at a young age. I heard the name ‘Ramanujan’ from my mathematics teacher, Gul Rehmat, in class twelve at Islamia College. Keeping sir’s persona in mind, I say that he barely taught us anything, and he would just sit in the class and talk to us; yet he stirred a desire in me and opened me to mathematics in an original and creative sense — as opposed to my earlier notion of trying to be faster than everyone around me in calculations, being confident merely because of good marks, and not having a coherent idea of the juxtaposition of abstractness and concreteness. To be precise, this openness to creativity started the moment when he stood up from the wooden chair and started writing on the Whiteboard. My sensory apparatus caught a moment of profound insight when I saw such a rare explicative appartus unveiling such an abstract idea. The ‘precise propositional definition of limit’ entered my mind and imagination, and the image of the teacher entered the frame of my heart. I am proud of myself that I chose to concentrate for those thirty minutes and kept my heart, mind, and imagination open and undistracted.

Later, GIKI revived those older childish notions again in a much superficial sense — as the maths taught to undergrads here is just a play of calculators (you missed a decimal point), 20 minute quizzes coming from presentation slides and prepared by students by cramming formulas; either by sitting alone with a fast beating heart, WhatsApp-ing someone who can help them, or by sitting with friends in the little study rooms of the beautiful library — anxiously staring at laptop screens, listening to a friend who finally understood a way out of ‘x’ from an Integration, ordering food near library, and consistently made silent every by the librarian, and laughing at each other when they hear librarian saying to a group that their plagiarism in humanities course report is 85%. We take sighs of relief after leaving the examination hall and heading to the tuc or the hostel, and then home after months.

In his book, ‘A Mathematician’s Apology’ — which I read twice, first in the summer of ’21, and later in December ’23 — Hardy writes (and I summarize):

“The real maths of the ‘real’ mathematicians, of Fermat and Euler and Gauss and Abel and Riemann, is almost wholly ‘useless.’ The metric of judgement of a mathematician is not the practical utility, but something different: that something worth creating was created. High thinking of one kind is always likely to affect high thinking of another — but it has extremely little effect on anything else.

Exposition, criticism, appreciation, is work for second-rate scientists and mathematicians. It is a confession of weakness to talk about ‘writing’ mathematics, instead of doing the actual maths and adding something to maths. What we do may be small, but it has a certain sense of permanence; and to have produced anything of the slightest permanent interest, whether it be a copy of verses or a geometrical theorem, is to have done something utterly beyond the powers of the vast majority of men.

Languages die, but mathematical ideas do not. Greek mathematics is ‘permanent’, more so even than Greek literature. ‘Immortality’ may be a silly word, but probably a mathematician has the best chance of whatever it may mean. An equation is the same whether it’s written in red or green ink. It makes no difference to a chess problem if the pieces are white and black, or red and green, or whether there are physical ‘pieces’ at all. The chess board and the pieces are mere devices to stimulate our sluggish imaginations, and are no more essential to the problem than the blackboard and the chalk are to the theorems in a mathematical lecture.

One of the finest weapons of a mathematician is the proof by ‘reductio ad absurdum’ (proof by contradiction) — a far finer gambit than any chess gambit: a chess player may sacrifice a piece, but a mathematician offers the whole game.

A man who could give a convincing account of mathematical reality would have solved very many difficult problems of metaphysics. If he could include physical reality in his account, he would have solved them all.”

December 7, 2023