Category: Wanderings

The acceptance of our existence

Akshat Rathi6 Comments

I finished reading Thomas Nagel’s What does it all mean? It is a very short introduction to philosophy which explores nine fundamental questions: How do we know anything?, Other minds, Mind-body problem, the meaning of words, Free Will, Right and Wrong, Justice, Death and the meaning of life.

In the very last chapter, on the very last page of the book, Nagel writes on the meaning of life:

If you every ask yourself the question, “But what’s the point of being alive at all” – leading the particular life of a student or bartender or whatever you happen to be you’ll answer, “There’s no point it wouldn’t matter if I didn’t exist at all, or if I didn’t care about anything. But I do. That’s all there is to it.”

Some people find this attitude perfectly satisfying. Others find it depressing, though unavoidable. Part of the problem is that some of us have an incurable tendency to take ourselves seriously. We want to matter to ourselves “from the outside”. If our lives as a whole seem pointless, then a part of us is dissatisfied – the part that is always looking over our shoulders at what we are doing. Many human efforts, particularly those in the service of serious ambitions rather than just comfort and survival, get some of their energy from the sense of importance – a sense that what you are doing is not just important to you, but important in some larger sense: important, period. If we have to give this up, it may threaten to take the wind out of our sails. If life is not real, life is not earnest, and the grave is its goal, perhaps it’s ridiculous to take ourselves so seriously, perhaps we just have to put up with being ridiculous. Life may be not only meaningless but absurd.

But a friend, Michelle, disagreed and introduced me to a new way of thinking about our own existence. Her philosophy is that

We think or act or feel only to be able to accept our own existence at this very moment.

That is certainly a big claim and definitely worth investigating further. “So what do you exactly mean?” I asked.

M: Ok. So what are you trying to do now?

A: I am trying to understand the meaning of life.

M: Ok. So you are doing this because if you are able to understand the meaning of life then you will feel satisfied or contented of your existence.

A: If very simply put, yes.

M: Then, right now, it is the means of accepting your existence at this very moment.

A: Hmmm…may be. Can you can give one more example?

M: Ok. Think this way, you are working on making this molecule which when developed can prove to be an anti-cancer agent and may help some people over come the disease.  When that happens it will make you happy. But at this very moment,  you reason that you are doing what you are doing so that you are able to seek that happiness then and it gives you a reason to accept your own existence at this very moment.

A: But that is a cyclical argument. Anything we do can be reasoned that way.

M: Yes, it’s true. I’ve asked this very question very many times and this is the best I could come up with. Isn’t it a neat way of looking at things?

A: Yes. It puts you in a state of mind such that you value the present more than the past or the future.

Ok. Sounds great. It is a cyclical argument and does not give an absolute answer to that question of what is the meaning of life but it gives us a good way of thinking of our own existence. That’s all fine and dandy. It’s a great philosophical thought. Sweet. But does this way of thinking have any practical use? Because, isn’t it very easy to keep saying that I am thinking about the fact  that we think about things so that we are able to accept our existence so that I am able to accept my existence.

M: We can use this to help us put things in perspective or to be able to prioritise things that we do at any given moment.

A: Hmm….ok. So how do we do that.

M: Well, think of any moment as a vertical line on a horizontal timeline. Then think of all the things that you can choose to do at the very next moment. (For simplicity we are going to restrict ourselves to doing only one thing at any given moment). Now, you can say that you can do X which is something you have spent a certain amount of time in the past doing (Mx) and doing it now will impact a certain amount of time in the future (Nx). Now you can mark Mx and Nx on the timeline and then draw a slanting line from that point towards the point where your current moment meets the timeline. This gives you a cone.

A: Hmm…ok. What next?

M: So now you  can do this for other activities like Y and Z and for that you will have respective points My and Ny and Mz and Nz and they will in turn give you two more cones. Now you priorities X, Y, Z such that the activity which will give you the highest area under the cone is the most important one to do now because it will have to be the most efficient use of your time now.

A: Ah, I see. That’s neat! So like now it’s 1 am and we are standing outside in this cold and talking about these things. At the very next moment I can decide to leave because I need to get some sleep so that I can be in the lab early and do n number of things. But that area under this cone may be less, because even tomorrow I will think about these problems and probably not be as effective in the things I do. Where as I if I stay for sometime longer then we can use this superb conversation to yield us some more effective tools of thinking about the world and the area under this cone certainly seems more to me.

Right. So obviously when we have built on a good base to philosophise and find things to add to our self-manipulation toolbox then we should think about more practical ways of developing these tools.

M: Have you heard of the 21-day rule of habits?

A: What is that?

M: Well, if you do something for 21 days without breaking the cycle and doing it religiously and with the same rigour then you will form any habit you want.

A: Hmm…interesting. You know it took me about three weeks to fully adapt to my polyphasic schedule last year. I wonder where this comes from, may be there is some scientific way of explaining it. It sounds like the 11-gulps of water rule.

M: What?

A: If you want to get rid of hiccups then have 11 continuous gulps of water, they will go away. Every time. Have you heard of the 10000 hour rule to become an expert?

M: No, what is that?

A: Malcolm Gladwell wrote this in his book called Outliers which was based on some study by a psychologist that if you do anything for enough time (he found the golden number is 10,000 hours) then you will become an expert in that field in definitely succeed.

M: Sweet. So that translates to what 4 years of doing it all the time.

A: Yeah sure! Only if you give up everything and do it but, in general, it is more long-term.

Actually, think of it this way, doing a PhD is 3-4 years of full-time working on solving a handful of problems by using similar sort of tools and thinking about your subject all that time. Seems like a good reason why one should be awarded a PhD if they do it religiously! 🙂

Disclaimer: Such digressions, although intellectually appealing, may have detrimental effects on your work.

Deconstructing Homeopathy: An Indian perspective

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

In January this year, sceptics from many cities in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the USstaged a stunt where 300 people took large overdoses of homeopathic remedies. Their aim was to demonstrate that homeopathic remedies are nothing but sugar pills and as expected, no volunteer was killed or injured. As 62% of all Indians believe in homeopathy and with that number growing, it is high time that the country begins to understand the science behind homeopathy and the dangers of blindly believing in its claims.

Let’s consider how a homeopathic remedy to treat common cold is made. Homeopaths follow the ‘like cures like’ principle, according to which one must find something that causes the symptoms of common cold like running nose and watery eyes. It is known that onion juice can. So a drop of onion juice is taken and diluted 100 times by adding 100 drops of water. It is then shaken. But that dilution is not enough because homeopaths believe in another principle: ‘the higher the dilution, the higher the potency’, thus one drop of that solution is taken and another 100 drops of water are added to it, followed by more shaking. This is repeated at least 30 times to give the final remedy. At this level of dilution, the chance of finding Barack Obama sitting in your living room is higher than the chance of finding a single molecule of onion juice in that homeopathic remedy. (See BBC documentary to know more)

There have been serious concerns about the validity of homeopathic principles in the mainstream medical community. They lack any scientific evidence and are in complete contrast to the body of knowledge that is traditional medicine. Such highly diluted solutions, which don’t contain even a single molecule of the active ingredient, also make it possible for homeopaths to claim that their remedies have no side effects. Also according to the ‘like cures like’ principle, as stated before, the same homeopathic remedy used to treat stress can simply be used to treat a brain tumour. After all, both conditions cause a headache and the homeopathic remedy for both would simply consist of a highly diluted solution of something that causes a headache.

Many patients who receive homeopathic treatment say that it works for them and it would be wrong to claim that they are lying. Positive effects of homeopathy are merely caused by something called the ‘placebo effect’. A placebo is a medication with no active ingredients in it. The best examples of the placebo effect are observed when two dummy treatments are compared with each other. If one sham treatment works better than the other then it must be simply because people are expecting it to work. For example, a study showed that four sugar pills a day are better at reducing pain than two but more invasive treatment, like a salt-water injection, is even better. In another study patients reported that a red pill was better at treating pain than a white one, even though both were inert.

Homeopathy ‘works’ because of the placebo effect. It doesn’t matter if you are a sceptic, a baby or an animal – if people around you expect the treatment to work, it is more likely to. Sometimes ignorance of important symptoms which need timely attention can give homeopathy credence. This ignorance often makes people wait to see the doctor until their illness is at its worst. At this point a homeopathic remedy is prescribed to the patient. Once the worst is over, the immune system becomes capable of combating the disease and healing begins. But unfortunately, the natural process of healing is often then attributed to homeopathy.

When a homeopathic treatment does not lead to a cure, people tend to blame either their condition or their fate, but still continue to rely blindly on homeopathy. The belief in homeopathy is also perpetuated by India’s unregulated pharmaceutical market which makes it easy to buy medicines across the counter without a physician’s prescription. As a result, people often take the wrong medication and blame the ineffectiveness on mainstream medicine. This tendency generates an undesirable bias towards homeopathy.

One might question that if homoeopathic remedies work (by placebo effect or by self-healing) then surely there is nothing “wrong” in prescribing them? Ethically speaking, it is not wrong to use homeopathic remedies to treat minor illnesses such as common cold or a headache. But it can be exceedingly dangerous, as WHO warned recently, when homeopathy claims to be able to treat serious medical conditions such ascancer, swine flu, AIDS, TB, or malaria.

Furthermore, there can be serious consequences when homeopathy becomes enshrined in mainstream medical policy. In Punjab, for instance a state-wide program is being implemented that uses homeopathic treatment to ‘cure’ pregnant mothers of the need for a C-section during child birth. Incidences like these makes one wonder how many mothers will die and if they do, whether the homeopaths will ever be held to account.

The scientific community has, for decades, systematically refuted every claim that homeopathy makes and yet millions of people in India still believe in it. Government funds it, ministers support it, more colleges are built and more homeopaths walk amongst us year on year. Some say this broad public support for homeopathy remains because the scientific community is unable to communicate this to the people or it comes from a general disdain for “western” medicine.

Further Information:
  1. BBC Horizon documentary
  2. Sense about Homeopathy: A Sense about Science publication
  3. Homeopathic treatment for Ovarian Cysts
  4. Prasad, R. The Lancet, 2007, 370, 1679
  5. Samarasekera, U. The Lancet, 2007, 370, 1677

How important is it to have heroes?

Akshat RathiLeave a comment

In a recent post Seth Godin compared the efforts needed to learn a new thing with the joy one gets from doing it.

Graph 1: Over time, as we discover new things and get better at it, our satisfaction increases. At some point, there’s a bump when we get quite good at it, and then, in most activities, it fades because we get bored. (Ignore the last peak, that’s the joy of being an expert)

Graph 2: Over time, the trouble to do something decreases

Graph 3: The two graphs overlaid. That zone on the left, the red zone, is the gap between the initial hassle and the initial joy. My contention is that the only reason we ever get through that gap is that someone on the other side (the little green dot) is rooting us on, or telling us stories of how great it is on the other side.

It’s a good thought and probably very true. And assuming that is the truth what strikes to me as the most important lesson from the post is this: The bigger your red zone, the louder your green dot needs to be.

Let me repeat that.

The bigger your red zone, the louder your green dot needs to be.

That right there is why we need to have heroes. Those green dots are our heroes, they help us get through the red zone. If our heroes are people we know then we hopefully they will realise that they have to ‘get louder’. If not, then we can use our own voice to make the green dot louder by using the self-manipulation toolbox.

But what happens when we don’t have heroes for a particular situation? As we go ahead in life, we specialise. We use the inspiration that we have gained from our heroes to achieve new things. In the process, we go through unique experiences and we become unique individuals. Individuals with our own very unique problems. It can get very hard to share those problems, let alone find a hero who has been through the same problems and emerged successful. What then? What if we don’t have a ‘green dot’?