Thing, Nothing, and No-thing

In order to truly understand the core of Indian thought, it is important to understand the ontological difference between "Nothing" and "No-thing". 

The idea of a "no-thing" is unique to Indian worldview, and to the best of my knowledge, is found nowhere else in philosophies across the world. 

The "no-thing" refers to the core of our subjective experience, or pure awareness, or consciousness. To understand this better, we need to start with the notion of inquiry-- where, a subject or the inquirer is inquiring about an object, or the inquired. 

All entities that can be objects of inquiry, are "things" and the absence of a thing becomes "nothing". Conventional science today, regards everything as objects, and considers a subject or inquirer, to be just an object when viewed from the vantage point of some other subject. 

However, Indian thought argues that what we see about other inquirers are just some objective shell in which the real inquirer resides, and we can never see the real inquirer. We can only see others' body, and to some extent "see" (or infer) their thoughts, emotions, etc. None of these form the core of their subjective experience, or the inquirer. 

We can see that, we can become aware of our own bodies, thoughts, emotions, and even our sense of person or ego, in pretty much the same way that we become aware of some object outside of us. The philosopher Ashtavakra, describes succinctly thus: 

यथा प्रकाशयाम्येको देहमेनं तथा जगत् ।
अतो मम जगत्सर्वमथवा न च किञ्चन ॥ २ ॥ (Ashtavakra Gita 2.2) 

As I alone give light to (become aware of) this body, so I do to the world, As a result the whole world is mine, or alternatively, nothing is.

Whatever we consider to be the core of who we are-- like our mind, or intellect, or ego, etc.-- we can become aware of it.. meaning that there is an inquirer separate from all of these. Hence, our body, mind, intellect, emotions, ego, etc. are all objects to our subjective experience! They are all things! 

When our mind has several thoughts-- it has a lot of "things" in it, and when our mind is blank, it has "nothing" in it. But the fact that we can discern whether our mind is full of thoughts, or is it blank, means that there exists some other entity that is the core of our subjective experience, that is neither a "thing" nor is it "nothing". 

The property of the core of this subjective experience is that it can never be objectified. The core of our subjective experience is a "no-thing". It is not the absence of a thing-- it is an entity that can never be an object of inquiry. The moment we believe that we have located the core of our subjective experience, we can ask, "who" has located this, and realize that the inquirer is the one who is locating. 

Philosophers in ancient India-- more than 6000 years ago, had postulated that the core of our subjective experience, which is pure awareness, or consciousness, cannot be objectified in our or anybody else's experience. This means that consciousness exists as a separate entity in the universe, and is not something that is produced by material interactions. This kind of formulation is found in the most ancient philosophical schools of thought in India-- like Samkhya, Nyaya, Vaisheshika, and Yoga. 

Modern science still struggles to understand this, and keeps arguing about what does it take for artificial intelligence (AI) to produce consciousness. 

About 3500 years ago, there was another great leap in our understanding of consciousness, which is now called Vedanta, and recorded in this vast body of literature, called the Upanishads. The Upanishads brought about one small change to our understanding of "no-things" in that, it argues that there is only one instance of "no-thing" in the entire universe! 

This can be illustrated quite easily. All non-physical objects have just one instance. There is just one instance of the number "5" for example. There may be several instances of 5-somethings-- like 5 cows, 5 fingers, etc. But the conceptual object 5 itself, is the same. 

This is illustrated by this joke, where a boy is sitting by the roadside and crying. When asked why he is crying, he says that his father gave him five rupees in his left hand, to buy some milk, and another 5 rupees in his right hand, to buy some vegetables. But, the boy says, he forgot and bought milk with the 5 rupees in his right hand, and vegetables with the 5 rupees in his left hand. And now, the boy cries, his father will be very upset with him! 

We can see that even though there were multiple instances of the currency, their value referred to just one conceptual object. 

The same argument is brought to the core of our subjective inquiry-- by noting that consciousness, even though it exists on its own, is not a physical entity. And because of that, there can be only one instance of it. 

Hence, according to the Upanishads, all of us have the very same core, that forms our subjective experience! We are all literally the same being! We may have different bodies, minds, intellects, egos, etc. but the core of all of us is literally the same no-thing! 

The Upanishads had such a huge impact on humanity that the author Evan Thompson writes in his book "Waking, Dreaming, Being", that: 

“The Upanishads is a watershed in the evolution of consciousness. Instead of being ethnocentric and dividing all global history between B.C. and A.D., we should really divide it between before Upanishads and after Upanishads—B.U. and A.U.—because the sophisticated psychology of consciousness in the Upanishads represents a quantum leap forward in human development.”

But for millennia before the Upanishads, Indian philosophers had postulated the existence of a "no-thing" that is still not realized or acknowledged in modern society. Our no-thing is the core of our subjective experience-- and it is also the source of our sense of agency, freewill, and autonomy. 

The introduction of no-thing into our ontological models, would be somewhat akin to the introduction of zero as a number in its own right into a number system. We know that the introduction of zero into a place-holder number system by Bhaskara, was a watershed event in our understanding of numbers and quantities. 

If we look at an OWL (Web Ontology Language) ontology today, at the root of this ontology lies an entity called "OWL: Thing". Every other class is a subclass of "OWL:Thing" and is considered a "thing". A pizza is a thing, and so is a person. A table is a thing, and so is a dog. 

But we can see that a person or a dog, are more than just things-- unlike a table or a pizza. They have a subjective experience in them, which means that their core is made of the "no-thing". It is because they have a no-thing, they can act on their own, decide on their own, be driven on their own, and their responses to physical stimuli cannot always be predicted by Newtonian models. 

All forms of oppression, territorial wars, colonialism, slavery, etc. can be attributed to the fallacy of treating other peoples as things, and oneself as inquirers with agency and desire-- or no-things. Even today, TV anchors urge the world to be more concerned about the war in Ukraine, because "it is not some war in Syria or Africa, but in Europe"-- meaning that, wars in Syria or Africa happen between "things" while a war in Europe involves real people. 

It is time we introduce "no-thing" as another root entity in our ontological models.

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This blog post is a compilation of my thoughts after watching this video: 

Hermeneutic lock-in

The way we approach our inquiry into the universe is called hermeneutics. Hermeneutics refers to the way of thinking, and the underlying approach we use to make sense of what we experience. 

Our hermeneutics is so deeply ingrained within us that we are often unaware of its existence and the way it biases our thinking. As the saying by the physicist Werner Heisenberg goes: 

What we observe is not the universe itself-- but the universe that is exposed to our method of inquiry 

We get answers based on the kinds of questions we ask-- and while we are so obsessed with the answers, we often forget to inquire into our method of questioning itself. 

Let me illustrate with an example. This video called "A tale of two brains" by Mark Gungor is quite popular on the Internet: 

According to this theory, men's brain are characteristically different from women's brain. Men's brain categorises the universe into neat little boxes, and thinks only within that box. It puts back one box before taking on another. On the other hand, in women's brains everything is connected to everything else, and the entire connected web runs on an energy called emotion. 

The argument in the video is compelling, and as seen by the comments, this theory is quite popular. But if we notice carefully, according to this theory, this theory itself is a "men's brain" kind of theory-- that categorises brains into neat little boxes called men's brain and women's brain!! 

Maybe, seen from another perspective-- a perspective called "women's brain" by this theory, a brain is considered functional only when it has some form of connection from any concept to any other concept. A brain where concepts are partitioned into disconnected compartments may be considered dysfunctional.  Hence, anyone who claims to have a "men's brain" may well be claiming to have a dysfunctional brain according to this method of inquiry! 😁

I'm not commenting on which way of thinking is the "correct" one-- just observing that there may be multiple methodologies of inquiry which may all be consistent and sound in themselves. 

The  above is my favourite example of what I call a hermeneutic lock-in. We have been so conditioned to think in a specific way-- in this case, the way of "reductionism" or "divide and conquer" where we breakdown the universe into neat little categories and sub-categories, until we are able to tackle the complexity-- that we are pretty much unaware of it. 

This reductionist way of engaging with the world around us has given certain benefits, but it also has resulted in several problems like over-segregation, alienation, stereotyping, etc. And to deal with the problems created by reductionism, we once again resort to reductionism and say "our brains are like this, and your brains are like that"-- which doesn't solve the problem. 

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One of the most common hermeneutic lock-in we see today in modern science, is what I call machine hermeneutics or the "clockwork" model of the universe. This is the hermeneutics of Newtonian mechanics that pretty-much still drives much of the dominant worldview today. 

In this method of inquiry, the physical universe is thought to be made of inanimate, impersonal objects, operating under the laws of physics, and creating a causal chain of events. While this method of inquiry works well for things like engineering and machine design, it is a different story altogether when it comes to fields like medicine or social science or administration. Here too, we use machine hermeneutics extensively-- and often disregard all other approaches. 

In medicine for example, until rececntly in India, Western medicine was one of the many alternatives that existed, and was called the "Allopathic" form of medicine. But today, Allopathy has become mainstream and everything else has become "alternative" medicine, which are equated on par with witchcraft and pseudoscience. When someone says they are studying medicine, no one asks them which kind of medicine are they studying, anymore-- it just means they are studying Allopathy.

I have a personal example of how machine hermeneutic lock-in of Allopathy has affected me. 

Some years ago, I had to undergo a surgery in my temple area in response to a neural degeneration problem I had been having. The surgery took place under general anaesthesia, and right from the moment I woke up after surgery, I started feeling a lack of sensation in my pelvis area. I mentioned this to the doctor, and he said that the two are not connected-- as he never touched anything near the pelvis area. He suggested that it is probably the effect of the general anaesthesia, and it will wear off soon. 

But the lack of sensation remained for days and weeks, and continues to do so to this day! This lack of sensation directly affects my food digestion and other downstream activities. So much so that I need to be greatly wary of what I eat today, and the subdued activity in that part of my body has resulted in several other forms of chronic pains and aches. 

However, every allopathic doctor I went to, only said that the lack of sensation in my pelvis has nothing to do with the surgery in my head area, as there is no causal link between the two. I was sent to specialists who deal with the pelvis area, who could not find anything wrong there either (like a tumour or something). I had been telling them that my lack of sensation there is due to my nerves, but they didn't have any standard procedure for such a condition. 

Only recently, a practitioner of an "alternative" form of medicine (which was once the "mainstream" form of medicine in India) had a completely different explanation for what was happening within me. 

The human body is not at all designed like a machine-- although it is treated as one, by medicine practitioners. Our body is made up of trillions of building blocks called cells, which act autonomously and cooperates and competes with other cells in the body. In that sense, our bodies are more like societies, than machines. When new cells are born, they are in a nascent state and are called "stem" cells. The stem cells can go on to become any specific kind of cell-- like a muscle, cartilage, nerve, blood cell, bone cell, etc. as it "grows up". In fact, the probability that a stem cell becomes a specific kind of cell, depends on the economic demand for that kind of cell. Hence, if we exercise regularly, the economic demand for muscle cells go up, and more muscles are formed. If we read regularly and keep ourselves intellectually active, the economic demand for brain cells go up. Typically, just like what happens in a society. 

But more than just autonomous actions, all cells of our body are characterized by a pervasive sense of self. They know that they collectivevly belong to this body and not some other body. In fact, when we are grafted with an organ from some other donor, it is often the case that our own cells reject it as a foreign body. Our immune system relies critically on this pervasive sense of self. To keep ourselves immune from infection, white blood corpuscles in our blood stream routinely mark foreign cells that are potentially harmful, to be removed by the spleen. For this, they somehow know which cells belong to this body and which are foreign cells. 

The explanation to what was happening in my body was based on this pervasive sense of self across all my cells. When one part of my body was subject to surgery, it underwent trauma. This was interpreted as an attack on me, by some other part of my body, which then went into an introverted state as a trauma response. (Actually, the doctor's explanation used different terminology based on a notion of chakras, but I'm renarrating it using terms that are relatable by modern medicine). 

To give another example, some years ago, in New Zealand, there was a horrific incident, where a man went on a shooting rampage in the religious place of some community that he hated. He even live-streamed his rampage on social media, which had resulted in a shock worldwide. A few months later, in Sri Lanka, a member of the same religion that was affected in New Zealand, went on a bombing spree in several places of worship, killing hundreds of people belonging to the religion of the perpetrator in New Zealand. 

There was no physical causal link between the incidents in New Zealand and Sri Lanka. It is just that the perpetrator in Sri Lanka identified with the same religion as the victims in New Zealand, and ended up killing several people who identified with the same religion as the perpetrator in New Zealand. 

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Associations of identity have no fundamental axiomatic place in machine hermeneutics. Identity dynamics operate in a very different way from physical causality. It is very hard (with our current method of inquiry) to predict actions that are performed based on identity. Recently, there was another news report that a well respected doctor in Pune, who had made important contributions to the field of medicine, was arrested because he was also recruiting people for a terror organization! Conventional wisdom about education leading to moderate and responsible behaviour, does not hold true when one has a strong sense of identity towards some external entity or ideology. 

Wigh digital technology pervading around the world and connecting it like ever before, we will only see several more instances of identity-related dynamics, for which, we are woefully ill-equipped with our deep-rooted training in machine hermeneutics. 

Logical implication and causality

Judea Pearl, one of the prominent researchers in the logic of causality, argues that current-day mathematics and logic does not have mechanisms to represent causality. And this has caused great confusions in several instances. 

Let us consider how causality is represented in current day mathematics and logic. 

One of the most common situations where we interpret causality, is in a mathematical equation. An equation of the form 

y = f(x)

is often interpreted as the value of f(x) causes y to get a given value. This is the interpretation used in several programming languages for example. In a language like C or python, when we say: 

a = b

it means that the value of b causes the variable a to attain a given value. It is not the value of a that changes b, but the value of b that changes a. 

But mathematically, the sign "=" simply means equality. In mathematics, a = b is the same as saying b = a. 

This overloading of the "=" symbol causes complications in programming, when we have to distinguish between logical equality, and assignment. Programming languages hence, distinguish between the two kinds of operations. In languages like C or python, logical equality is represented as "==" that tells the program to check for equality, while the symbol "=" represents an imperative-- that tells the program to do something. 

Even here, there is no separate operator for checking causality. When we say "a == b" in a programming language, we are only asking the program to check whether the values of a and b are the same. We are not asking it to check whether a caused b or b caused a to take on a specific value. 

For instance, if 'a' were to represent the air pressure in a canister, and 'b' were to represent the reading of a barometer attached to the canister, then, whether we say "a == b" or "b == a", the outcome would still be the same. However, we can see that, if we manually change the air pressure to a different value, versus, if we manually change the barometer reading to a different value, the logical equality holds in the former case, but breaks in the latter case. This is because, this is not just an equality, but a causal relation between the two variables. The air pressure is causing the barometer reading, while the barometer reading is not causing the air pressure. 

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Another common operator that is commonly mistaken for causality is the logical implication operator in formal logic. A statement of the form 

P  --> Q

is read as, "if P is true, then, Q is true." 

A commonly used example is if P represents "it is raining" and Q represents "the lawn is wet". In this case, we can see that the logical implication is also interpreted as causality. The statement only says that "If it is true that it is raining, then it is true that the lawn is wet." But it is often interpreted as, "If it is raining, then it causes the lawn to be wet." 

There is this common example to illustrate correlations versus causality. It is often seen that increase in ice-cream sales is correlated with increase in drowning incidents. But of course, it is not the ice-cream sales that is causing the drowning incidents. They are both increased because of the summer season, where people eat more ice-creams, and also go swimming more. 

But, if P were to represent "increase in ice-cream sales" and Q were to represent "increase in drowning incidents" then the implication P --> Q is very much valid. The implication only says that if P is true, then Q is true-- not that P causes Q to be true. 

Another confusion that is caused because of the lack of a causality operator is the famous saying by Rene Decartes: "I think, therefore, I am". 

It is often interpreted as "I think, and therefore it causes me to exist" and leads to several jokes like the following: 

René Descartes walked into a bar. The bartender said “would you like a beer?” René replied “I think not”
He disappeared. 

Or this.. 

But the problem here is of course, that of interpreting implication as causation. "I think, therefore, I am" can be interpreted as "I think, and that causes me to exist" or as "I think, and therefore I can infer that I exist." 

What Decartes meant was the latter. The fact that "I think" leads me to infer that "I exist". In other words, it is my existence that is having a causal dependency on the fact that I think, and not the other way around! 

An implication of the form P --> Q can also legitimately mean that Q is the cause and P is the effect! 

To understand his even better, consider the equivalence between an implication and its contra-positive. An implication of the form P --> Q and another implication of them form ~Q --> ~P (where ~ is interpreted as "not") are both equivalent. 

Using this, we can see that "I think, therefore, I am" is equivalent to saying that "I am not, therefore I do not think". which is consistent. 

Even if Decartes had meant that my thinking is causing me to exist, the implication that "I don't think, therefore I don't exist" is still a fallacy-- called the inverse fallacy. "If P then Q" is not equivalent to either "If Q then P" or "If not-P then not-Q". 

The Web and Dharma

Almost everyday as I drive to work, I witness this episode. In one of the traffic signals on the way to work, there would inevitably be this one guy, dressed as Hanuman, and begging for alms from the vehicles that have stopped at the signal. 

I have witnessed this for the past several years, and it is quite clear that the aim of his activity is to get some money for himself or the racket that he is part of (unless of course, he is some kind of an undercover agent pretending to be a beggar). 

But why is he dressed like Hanuman? Why is he not begging as himself? 

Actually, such a practice (of asking for alms being dressed as a deity) has a long history. In earlier times, people used to sometimes undertake long, arduous journeys to pilgrimage centres that would have taken several months or years to complete. Such arduous journeys would be made once in a lifetime, and some of them of course, would never return. And not everyone had the means to fund such a long journey. In order to raise funds for their journey, they often went on this crowdfunding campaign, dressed as the deity that they are going to visit, and ask for support from others, on whose behalf they would visit the deity as well. 

Today of course, the guy at the traffic signal is most likely just begging for alms. If he had plans to visit some pilgrimage centre, he would have done so long ago-- given that he has been at this activity for several years now, and we have good transportation options, and affordable package tours to most pilgrimage centres. 

Crowdfunding, is not a new concept at all in our society. And it is not just crowdfunding, there were several more "open-source" initiatives that were an integral part of Indian culture. 

Another notable feature of life not too long ago, is the concept of dharmachathra. These were community-owned institutions that would give free shelter and boarding to travellers and wayfarers who often set upon long journeys by foot. These institutions relied upon donations and support from the village or town where it was situated, and it was often expected for the travellers who used the facility to help out with the upkeep of the place. Some of them who had money with them, also made donations. 

Similarly, university towns had this concept called Vaaradanna, where, students who were studying in the town would be able to visit one household once a week (vaara means week), for their meals. For the household, hosting a few more students once a week would not be too much of a burden, and for the students, they got to get to know several families in the town and dine with them. 

Yet another notion is that of community-owned farms and enterprises, which are called cooperatives these days, where groups of interested people sharing a common concern (like say, promoting increased use of their farm produce, in the population) would work as an organisation, but without strict organisational hierarchies. 

And it is not just about organisations, even concepts of democracy and republics, which were called janapada (literally "foothold of the people") have existed in India much before similar concepts took roots in ancient Greece. 

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These and several other structures and practices were designed based on an underlying concept called dharma-- referring to the state of sustainability of a system of being. The main idea here is that any system of being-- be it our individual bodies, or a town or a country, has some states of being where it is stable and resilient against perturbations. Understanding and upholding these states of being in a society for instance, helps make the society free enough to develop its creative pursuits and agency. For instance, a state of health, financial fitness and social harmony makes our individual lives stable and resilient-- which allows us the latitude to pursue our interests, experiment with new ideas, and exercise our agency. 

The above is quite an obvious statement-- and does not need any holy book or commandment for it to hold. The idea of dharma is not a decree or commandment-- it is a postulate, that can be empirically verified. There is no one authority for dharma (although, some subcultures in India had Dharmadhikaris-- who would arbitrate on issues where conflicting views were expressed by different parties, around what constituted dharma.) 

Just about any social construct in India has been historically designed around considerations for dharma-- that is, for improving systemic resilience. These include, joint families, a largely vegetarian diet, ahimsa or non-violence, and various community-driven practices that we saw above. 

Dharma is not about ideology-- it is about the science of building resilient systems. No priest or king can decree what is dharma-- it has to be argued out with empirical evidence and logical proofs. Dharma is not a political movement nor is it something specific to a culture. It is a physical property of systems-- much like gravity or magnetism. 

The idea of dharma was developed in a time when we had complex societies, but not complex machinery, and the examples used to explain this concept hence, have tended to be from the social realm, rather than from the physical realm. In fact, one of the ways I see if someone has really understood the concept of dharma, is to ask them whether the notion of dharma is relevant on Jupiter or Saturn today-- where there is no life. The concept of stable, resilient states of a system, are relevant everywhere-- not just to human societies.

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But thanks to increasing influence of the "modern" worldview on our education, media, administration and even upbringing, many of these conventional notions and worldview are dying fast, and replaced by very simplistic narratives about our past. Social organisation today, is increasingly moving away from a systematic inquiry into the science of sustainability to be replaced by several ideologies like capitalism, communism, imperialism, socialism, etc. 

The "modern" paradigm has its roots in the industrial revolution characterised by the factory, where impact and scale took greater precedence over local resilience. Factories can sustain only when they can create economies of scale-- that is in turn, achieved by mass production and standardisation. 

But the importance of local resilience started making a comeback in modern society following World War II, where our manufacturing abilities had reached such a peak, that destroying the world several times over in a nuclear holocaust, was a distinct possibility. The Cold War took this possibility to a peak, with major nuclear powers keeping several armed nuclear warheads on a hair-trigger. 

It is in this backdrop, we started exploring resilient infrastructures. The Internet, for example, was designed to be a decentralised network that could be resilient against nuclear attacks. The idea behind the TCP/IP protocol that powers the Internet today, was to build mechanisms where routes between sources and destinations can be dynamically discovered on the fly, if some part of the network were to go down. 

This increasing emphasis on resilience lead to several "open source" and community driven initiatives that resonate very well with the dharmic worldview. 

In the 1980s AT&T gave away all of its source code for the Unix operating system, for free. This helped create an ecosystem that formed the basis for modern-day computing. Similarly, key components of the Internet and the World Wide Web, like TCP/IP, HTML, HTTP, etc. were released to the public, on a royalty-free basis, forever. In addition, open source movements like GNU started by Richard Stallman, heralded what might be called the present information era. Even today, much of the Internet servers are powered by open source software like Linux operating system, Apache web server, etc. 

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Indian history can be characterised as the struggle between community-driven decentralised systems, and approaches focused on power and impact that tended to organise society into strict, stratified structures.

A very similar struggle is underway today on how the Internet and the WWW is evolving. The web has moved far beyond its initial vision of a decentralised, community-driven information infrastructure for the benefit of humanity as a whole. 

Today, there are at least two forces that tend to consolidate power on the web, and increase their impact. The include commercial entities, and political entities. Both of these entities aim to centralise control and knowledge, in order to increase their impact and further their interests. 

Increased impact and profits, often result in collateral damage that promote unsustainable configurations. Increased profits for a media house or for a political entity for instance, may come at the cost of mental-health issues, addiction, and increased social distrust in the population. 

In response to this, ideological battle lines are drawn among different segments of the society, resulting in the Hegelian dialectics of the clash between thesis and anti-thesis. 

But in the midst of all this, what we are losing out on is the science of sustainability. In today's discourse, the choice is between either this or that. We have to for example, choose between exclusive categories of nation or world-- not realising that nations are part of the world, and a healthy world comprises of healthy nations. Similarly in India today, we have to choose between civilisation or constitution-- not realising that our constitution was itself a result of a civilisational movement asserting for freedom and self-rule.  

Today, we are quick to classify people and societies into ideological buckets and organise ourselves against the "other"-- without a thought towards how can we holistically work towards sustainability. Nations, commerce, civilisation, family, gender, military, and anything else that we train our guns on, do have their place in the scheme of things. As are notions that transcend these constructs-- like trans-national structures, trans-commercial structures, trans-civilisational concerns, etc. 

The question is not whether we need the nodes or the edges of a graph-- we need both, in order to make a good network. What we need is to focus on what makes a "good" network-- something that is resilient against perturbations, and promotes capability and agency. 

Logic, Invariance and Self

When we study logic, we first study the definition of a proposition or assertion: A statement that can be assigned a true or false value. For instance, a statement like "It is raining" is an assertion-- it could be either true that it is indeed raining, or false. But a sentence like, "Come here" is an imperative statement that is calling for an action, and not an assertion-- there is no truth or false value we can assign to it. 

Assertions can be strung together using several logical operators like "and", "or", "not", "if-then" and so on. Hence for instance if we have two assertions: "It is raining" and "Our basement is flooded", then a statement of the form: "If it is raining then our basement is flooded" is also an assertion. Verifying the truth or falsity of this assertion often proceeds by an attempt at falsification. For instance, if we observe that it is indeed raining, and our basement is not flooded, then we can say that the assertion is false. However, if it is raining and the basement is indeed flooded, it is not sufficient to deduce that the assertion is true. Maybe the basement is going to be flooded from an other source regardless of whether it is raining or not. Verifying the falsity of an assertion is easier, than verifying its truth. 

As we get more advanced in our study of logic, we often see the term "true", getting replaced by the term "holds". We don't say that an assertion is "true"-- rather we say that an assertion "holds" against multiple attempts at falsifying it.

The term "holds" represents a property of invariance-- indicating something that sustains or remains. Invariance is a weaker construct than truth-- and indeed truth is often defined as something that is eternally invariant, across time and observers. 

The term "dharma" that is characteristic of Indian thought-- comes from the root dhrt-- to mean something that "holds". The name for "Hinduism" in India is called "Sanatana dharma" where the term "Sanatana" means "eternal" or "universal." Hence, the "religion" of India can be seen as a quest for assertions that have eternal sustainability-- precisely what all scientific inquiry is about. 

In our mainstream education, we often learn of mathematical truths that have eternal invariance. For instance, every number can be written as a product of prime numbers, and the number of prime numbers are infinite. These assertions hold everywhere and always-- they were true during the time of dinosaurs and they are true today; they are true on Earth, Mars, or anywhere in the (physical) universe. 

While we spend most of our time searching for invariance in the objective universe outside us, Indian thought also has a lot of inquiry on what is invariant in our own subjective experiences. 

There is a story of the king Janaka (father of Sita and the king of Mithila), who was known to be a very good philosopher himself. He once had a dream in which, his kingdom is attacked and he loses his kingdom and is exiled. He goes into increasing desperation as he roams from place to place, searching for food and striving to survive. In this desperation, he cries out and wakes up, only to realise that it was all a dream. He wakes up to find himself back in his palace, with his servants tending to him, his family members concerned for him, and people treating him with deference. 

But the dream was so intense, that the king is not sure which was real. He asks the philosopher Ashtavakra as to which of his experience was real. Ashtavakra replies by asking, "When you were experiencing your dream, did you experience what you are experiencing now-- the comfort of the palace, the respect and deference from others, etc.?" to which, the king says no. And then Ashtavakra asks, "And now, are you experiencing the desperation, the desolation and helplessness that you experienced in your dream?" to which, the king says no again. 

And Ashtavakra replies, "Well then neither the experience of the dream nor the experience that you are having now in your waking state, are real. Both are bounded and temporary." 

The king is perplexed, "Neither of them are real?" Not even what we are experiencing now? What was real then?" 

Ashtavakra replies, "In your dream, were you-- the experiencer-- there, going through the intense experience?" To which, the king replies, "Yes, I was there." Ashtavakra goes on, "And now, are you here, feeling the experience of the palace and your waking universe?" To which, the king affirms that he is indeed here, experiencing all these now. 

"Hence," replies Ashtavakra, "you-- the subject, or inquirer-- is more real than your experiences. The inquirer remains invariant while objects of inquiry that create experiences in our minds keep changing." 

Understanding Shruti and Smriti

When studying Indian philosophy and culture, we come across two terms: Shruti and Smriti. 

Of course, most people who have studied about India in Western academia would have heard of Manu Smriti (although very few Indians themselves have heard of it-- I myself heard of Manu Smriti when I was living in Europe, and till date, haven't come across its original text). Manu Smriti is supposed to be a compilation of all forms of regressive thoughts and practices that are associated with Hinduism today, and it is often argued that even today Hindus are inexorably bound by the decrees and commandments of Manu Smriti. 

But what exactly are these Smritis?

The term Shruti means something that is heard or revealed. This is often construed to mean that the Shrutis represent knowledge that were orally passed from generation to generation, while Smritis were knowledge that were codified and recorded. This is not an accurate interpretation, as there are several Shrutis that are written down and organised into verses, etc. 

Another interpretation of these terms is that Shruti represents knowledge that were "revealed by God" while Smriti (which also means "to remember") represent knowledge that represent recorded facts or commentaries about something. 

This is more accurate-- but the term "revealed by God" is somewhat problematic, as it gives a connotation of an immutable commandment issued by some heavenly creature, that is not to be questioned. 

But it is easy to see that all the Shrutis have been subject to intense argumentation and debate (not wars or battles) over the years-- not something that one would do with divine commandments.  These debates have also lead to the development of several rules of argumentation and logic. 

In contrast to the dynamics between dogmatic religious schools, debates in ancient India were more like the debates we see among different schools of thought among researchers and philosophers today. 

All of these point to the fact that the "revelation" of Shrutis were not some form of divinely ordained commandments, but more of the nature of revelations obtained by researchers and philosophers, upon intense inquiry. 

In other words, Shrutis represent writings that contain original research, while Smritis contain writings that are of the form of reports, commentaries or encyclopaedic accounts that implement the NOR (No Original Research) principle. The Smritis however, were not Wikipedia articles which were jointly written by several authors, and hence did not necessarily implement an NPOV (Neutral Point of View) principle. In fact, rather than aiming for neutrality (which may never be achievable in practice), Indian society has aimed for plurality, where multiple world views coexist and often resulted in new emergent characteristics. 

Understanding deprivation

Deprivation is considered to be one of the primary factors leading to social strife and human suffering. The United Nations (UN) defines deprivation as the inability of a social group to effectively participate in the larger society and sustain their livelihoods. One of the primary sources of deprivation is poverty, where extreme poverty is defined as living below US$1.25 a day. 

Several initiatives under goal 1 of the UN SDG (Sustainable Development Goals) are underway across the world, to identify deprived sections of the society and to bring them into the mainstream. 

In this post, I would like to argue that, deprivation is a result of two kinds of factors, and it is important to distinguish between the two. 

The first form of deprivation occurs due to lack of equity within a given paradigmatic framework. Such forms of deprivation is well addressed and well understood. For a variety of reasons, several social groups get excluded from relevant opportunities that can enable them to pursue their needs and exercise their agency. Such forms of deprivation are a result of inadequate social mechanisms that can recognise deprivation within a society and implement affirmative actions to mitigate deprivation. 

There is however, a second form in which deprivation manifests, which makes things more complex. This is what I call paradigmatic dissonance. In this form of deprivation, a social group appears greatly deprived when their lifestyle is interpreted through the lens of what is considered the "mainstream" worldview, and when the mainstream tries to mitigate this deprivation through its lens, it causes more harm than good. 

As an extreme example, consider the Sentinelese tribe in the Nicobar islands. This tribe has maintained a lifestyle that goes back to more than 60,000 years. Their primary avocation is hunting and fishing, using tools like bows and arrows that are considered to be very "primitive" in the mainstream worldview. There have been several attempts to integrate the Sentinelese into the mainstream, but all such attempts have been met with immense hostility from the tribe. The most recent incident was in 2018, when the tribe killed a missionary from the US who attempted to "save" the tribe by converting them to Christianity. Such has been their resistance to "modernity" that this tribe is now protected by Indian law, and people are prohibited from approaching them. 

The tribe is clearly very deprived when seen from our mainstream lens. They still use primitive tools for fishing when they could have easily integrated into the mainstream and have opened a fishing industry on their island. They don't have electricity, running water, Internet, or any of the necessities that are needed in the modern world. 

Yet, during the 2004 tsunami where close to 300,000 people lost their lives in different countries of the world, not a single casualty has been recorded from the Sentinelese. The tsunami devastated the coral reefs surrounding the islands where this tribe lives that even destroyed the places where the tribe usually went fishing. Yet, there is no discernible change in their population or their lifestyle. 

It is not just this "primitive" tribe that knew how to survive the tsunami. There are several accounts of animals that moved to safer locales on the day of the tsunami, well before the huge waves hit. In contrast, in the mainstream civilisation, when the sea receded suddenly in places like Phuket, many tourists at the beach resort, instead of running to higher ground for safety, ventured out into the barren seabed, without realising that this is the last thing they will be seeing in this world. 

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While the Sentinelese may be an extreme example, what we often fail to realise is that human civilisation has had multiple paradigms and world-views with which it has interpreted the universe, and built its lifestyles. But when a few of them get into a "saviour complex" and actively tries to digest all other paradigms into what it considers the mainstream, we run the risk of losing important knowledge that may be critical for our overall survival. What we consider "mainstream" is typically the result of the most dominant paradigm that has become dominant primarily because it interpreted the world in a predatory fashion and actively sought to consume other paradigms within itself. 

In some of our initiatives to bring Internet connectivity to remote villages in India for example, we were met with resistance and hostility, rather than an eagerness to get out of their "deprivation" and become integrated into "modernity." In one case, the villagers had welcomed us with a sarcastic song that they had composed specifically for our workshop. The song basically went something like, "Do not try to impress us with your www-dot-com, which is of no use to us. Will your www-dot-com draw water from the well, tend to the fields,.." 

Objectively, one might argue that the "www-dot-com" can indeed help the villagers in drawing water from the well by connecting an IoT based pump water pump, etc. etc. But the main point of their sarcasm was not that. Their main concern was that this integration into the mainstream will deracinate them from their traditional and familiar way of life, in which they had learned to not only survive but also maximise their agency and express themselves in myriad ways. 

An IoT based water pump may increase efficiency in drawing water from wells, but it also gets them into a liability loop where they will need to manage subscriptions and payments, and see their lives increasingly getting controlled from somewhere else. 

This is pretty-much what we see happening today as we try to integrate the world and bring everyone onboard in our attempts at inclusion. Even when the mainstream includes something, it does so by "scooping" the other into its structure, and not by treating it as a peer and establishing a sensible relationship with it to collectively achieve some shared vision. 

In the mainstream worldview today, traditional Indian culture is all about meaningless and "primitive" rituals of expression, and the debates centre around the symbolism of these rituals. But once upon a time, these practices were not mere rituals, with only symbolic value. These practices were deeply ingrained into what was then the mainstream practice and the way of interpreting the universe. 

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For the last few centuries, the "mainstream" culture that is based on the industrial revolution and the factory paradigm, developed in a outlandishly predatory fashion, where it pretty much scooped the entire world into its framework. 

However, by the 1990s the predatory forms of interpretations had run its course with multiple dominant  world-views clashing with one another, and faintly realising that perhaps predation and might need not equate to insight and truth, after all. In these times, we saw a glimmer of hope where technology development focused on decentralisation and open architectures, rather than on ownership and dominance. It is in these times we saw the rapid growth of the Internet and the world wide web. 

But these technologies whose design principles were based on a philosophy of plurality and decentralisation are now once again dominated by few very powerful players who not only control the technology, but also the narrative; and influence how we interpret the world. 

And even in the mainstream universe these days, there are a lot of disillusioned thought leaders who understand the dangers of predation on a very powerful network like the Internet, are now pushing for "re-decentralisation" of our connected world. 

While inclusion is a noble goal to pursue, it is also important for the mainstream to preserve hermeneutic plurality (not just plurality in superficial things like dress sense, food, etc.) and really understand how to build sustainable pluralistic societies. 

The great debate

Indian civilisation is characterised by what might be called "the great debate" that continues to this day. This debate is very relevant to cutting edge science and philosophy today-- but much of science at least, is not looking in this direction. 

This post is a small attempt to introduce this great debate-- from my perspective. 

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Among the top-most scientists and philosophers today, a burning question that is hotly debated is about consciousness. How does consciousness and its complex constructs like identity, desire, morality, etc. develop from material reactions in the brain? 

This question gains even more significance today, with rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI) taking over several aspects of our lives. If a human were to act recklessly or irresponsibly, we have several mechanisms to deal with it. We could appeal to their sense of empathy, humanity or conscience to reflect upon their actions; we could "shame" them into regretting their actions; and so on. But when an AI robot acts irresponsibly-- none of these options are available to us. Sure, a form of "shaming" is possible with negative reinforcements, but while this may bring about a behavioural change, it does not lead to self-reflection and a heightened sense of morality in the robot. 

More than 5000 years ago, Indian philosophers had hotly debated about this problem of consciousness, which had resulted in several schools of thought. The Charavakas held on to the currently held notion among scientists-- that consciousness is an emergent property of material interactions in our brains. Just like modern science, for the Charavakas, material reality is all there is. 

However, the Charavakas were just a small minority among the several other schools of thought in this regard. Most other schools of thought argued that consciousness is a "simpliciter" entity-- in that, it exists on its own, and is not derived from any form of material interactions. 

The Samkhya school of thought for instance, proposed a "dualism" model of reality. According to them, reality is made of two kinds of fundamental elements, called the Prakriti and the Purusha. Prakriti refers to material / physical reality and its causal interactions, while Purusha refers to the non-causal realm of reality of the consciousness. Purusha refers not just to consciousness, but all forms of information objects-- including numbers, concepts, etc. Information objects are not subject to time and space constraints like physical objects. While biological life may exist only on earth, and only since the last few million years, prime numbers for instance, exist everywhere, and have always existed. No physical law can affect the primality (or otherwise) of a number. 

Samkhya was one of the most widely taught subjects in ancient India, along with Vedanta. Buddha is said to have extensively studied Samkhya. 

According to the Samkhya model, there are an infinite numbers of Purusha-Prakriti pairs that make up reality. But, this infinitude of information objects creates several forms of confusion. If the concepts in my head are completely unconnected with the concepts in someone else's head, how is it we can understand one another? It also brings up other strange questions like whether the number 5 on planet Earth is the same number 5 on Mars? And so on. 

The philosophy of Vedanta, which are summarised in this vast body of text called the Upanishads, take another radical step in our understanding of consciousness. The Upanishads heralded such a radical change in human civilisation, that thousands of years later, the American philosopher William Irwing Thompson, who studied the Upanishads extensively, remarked that we ought to divide civilisational epochs as "Before Upanishads" and "After Upanishads" (BU and AU respectively), instead of the current BC and AD: 

“The Upanishads is a watershed in the evolution of consciousness. Instead of being ethnocentric and dividing all global history between B.C. and A.D., we should really divide it between before Upanishads and after Upanishads—B.U. and A.U.—because the sophisticated psychology of consciousness in the Upanishads represents a quantum leap forward in human development.” -- Excerpt from Evan Thompson, "Waking, Dreaming, Being"

The Upanishads argued that there is only one Purusha in the universe! Not only consciousness exists on its own in the universe-- there is only one instance of this universal consciousness! We are not independently conscious-- but we all reflect the same consciousness. 

To give an analogy, consider a set of bowls filled with water kept in the sun outside. Inside each bowl is a reflection of the sun, each of which may be bright enough to offer illumination. But the reflection of each of them is of the same sun up above! 

Similarly, our individualised consciousness is not our own, but our reflection of the universal consciousness. The universal consciousness is called chit, while the individual reflection is called the chidaabhasa. Sentience is defined as our ability to form an image of the universal consciousness. As an analogy, in the daylight, every object reflects light from the sun, but some surfaces like glass, water, etc. also form an image of the sun. Sentience is this ability to form an image of the universal consciousness. Of course, such images can be distorted, or incomplete-- but it is an image nevertheless.

The Vedantic model itself gave rise to several schools of thought-- including some contrarian schools, which rejected the core argument of a single universal consciousness. 

The Advaita or the non-dual school of thought, goes one step further into the Vedantic argument, to not only say that there is just one universal consciousness-- but also that the universal consciousness is all there is! Rather than considering consciousness as a creation of material reality, Advaita argues that material reality is a creation of this universal consciousness! According to Advaita, material reality is basically the universal consciousness trying to look at itself-- somewhat like in the picture below. So, all of the universe-- all our wars, kingdoms, travails, adventures, etc are essentially about the universal consciousness trying to look at itself from different angles! 

Some other schools of thought-- which are broadly called the Sramanics, of which, Buddhism and Jainism are most well known-- reject the core argument of Vedanta that there is one universal consciousness, and that as individuals, we just sport images of this one, sole consciousness. 

Vedantic thought is so old, that it has gone through multiple phases of degeneration and rejuvenation. During Buddha's time, Vedantic thought had become so degenerate that philosophers and thought leaders spent most of their time trying to realise the oneness of their self with the universal consciousness, when there was rampant suffering all around them. Siddharta Gautama, who later came to be called as the Buddha, argued that it is futile to spend out lives trying to experiences this oneness of reality, when there is so much suffering all around. Instead, it is better to understand how suffering is manifested in our lives and how to remove it. He went on to further argue that the core of our existence is not the universal consciousness, but a void or shunyata. 

The Buddhists and the Vedantic philosophers are said to have had a thousand-year long debate, during which time, Buddhism spread beyond India to Afghanistan, China and much of south and east Asia. 

The arrival of Adi Shankaracharya around 1200 years ago, heralded a revival of Vedantic thought-- especially Advaita Vedanta. It was once again to become the most dominant worldview in Indian thought for about 700 years. Some very well known Advaita philosophers like Vidyaranya have written several introductory texts about this philosophy that are still taught today. 

But as before, in a few centuries after Shankaracharya, the focus on realising oneness of existence, had started to degenerate into a form of nihilism. When the material reality is considered unreal, with the only reality being the universal consciousness, which is the core of our own being, the motivation to address existential issues like suffering, defending against attacks, etc. is not all that strong. 

By the 12th century CE, foreign invaders had finally managed to enter India. (It is worthwhile to note that several great conquerors like the Greek king Alexander, or the Mongol Genghis Kahn, or the Roman empire, had never been able to conquer Indian kingdoms. While the Kushans are called an Indo-Greek empire, they were not a result of Greek invasion, and there is ample evidence that their kings like Kanishka, were of Indian origin than Greek). 

As foreign conquests started to make its way into India from the north, some kingmakers like Vidyaranya, helped build mighty kingdoms like the Vijayanagar Empire that withstood this onslaught. But a few centuries later, they too crumbled. 

Some philosophers like Madhwacharya, felt that this is due to a fatal flaw in the core of the dominant worldview at that time-- which was Advaita. As a major critic to Advaita philosophy, Madhwa came up with the dualistic Dvaita philosophy. The core of our self, is completely contained in our worldly existence, he argued. No matter how well a bowl of water makes an image of the sun, it can never be the sun itself! Similarly, no matter how well we reflect the universal consciousness, we can never be the universal consciousness itself. We are our limited bodies with our limited existence, and we had better focus on worldly issues that affect our survival. We can at best, practice bhakti or devoted service towards the supreme, in order to reflect the universal consciousness as best as possible. 

Madhwacharya's philosophy also fit in well with the Bhakti movement that was very popular at that time, that advocated devotion, submission and surrender to the divine, as a means for spiritual enlightenment. 

Despite all these philosophical efforts in redefining ourselves, history shows that Indian society succumbed greatly to foreign invasion, followed by colonisation by European powers. 

A few centuries later, during. the freedom struggle against the British, Vedantic thought once again saw a revival through the efforts of Swami Vivekananda. Vivekananda is known for his address in the Chicago Congress of Religions, and to have brought authentic Indian thought directly to the West. Until then, the population in the West were exposed to gross misrepresentations and exotic perversions of Indian thought (something which continues to this day). 

Swami Vivekananda criticised too much emphasis on bhakti, devotion and surrender. He argued that too much of an obsequious conduct may rob us of our sense of ownership and assertion of our rights. But he was also aware of the shortcomings of pure Advaita and the criticisms it had received. 

He formulated his own philosophy called Integral Advaita (which I have explained in detail in another post), that strives to bridge between the non-dual and dualist schools. Vivekananda defined religion as the manifestation of the divine that is already within us, not through renunciation, but through active engagement with society and by addressing its problems. 

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Philosophical debates from India are radically different from their counterparts in the West. Western philosophy and science mostly focuses on the object, and tries hard to remove the subject from the picture. While this gives us very useful constructs like stoicism, Socratic methods, Analytic philosophy, etc, it also brings us to the state where we are in today-- where we effortlessly build machines that can easily destroy us several times over, and struggle to understand human societies beyond their power dynamics. 

Indian philosophy and its debates are more relevant today, than ever before, as we stare at a future, where the lines between truth and falsity are getting blurred.

Belief and Identity

Today was one of those rare occasions where I felt completely relieved of all forms of existential crisis for some time, and knew that I was exactly where I should be. As an academic, it is my good fortune to meet some very bright minds-- some of whom have come together to start a Philosophy Club. 

Today's discussion was on the issue of identity. 

I have talked extensively about our cognitive faculty of identity in earlier posts. We all possess an "elastic" sense of self, where we often identify with some elements of our external world, and act in its interest. For instance, we often identify with our family, our religion, culture, country, profession, gender, etc. 

Identity associations are fundamentally different from rational associations. In the latter, we associate with something because we expect to derive a value from that association. Identity associations are different. When we identify with something-- we act as if that something is part of us. We actively work in its interest, regardless of whether it is doing well or not. It is only because parents identify with their children, they stick with them through thick and thin, and work in their children's interest. If parents were to have a rational association with their children, there would be no incentive at all, to bring up kids! 

As we were speaking about identity, a question was posed today by one of the participants. What is the difference between identity and deeply held beliefs (called Samskara in Sanskrit)?

In both cases we are driven by something that is deeply ensconced within us. While trying to unravel the difference between the two, here is what we realised. 

A belief-- whether deeply held or not-- represents an objective construct. It constrains, directs and regulates how we interpret our experiences. For instance, if someone held a deeply held belief saying, "Indians are all unreliable"-- this would influence how they interpret whatever they hear or see an Indian do. Because this belief is deeply held, they may not be aware of this biased interpretation, but it is there. It has somehow entered their psyche and has lodged itself deeply. 

In contrast to deeply held beliefs that affect the way we interpret the external world, identity is a subjective construct affects our self image and who we think we are. Identifying as X, means that we are inherently saying "I am X". 

However, just like beliefs, our identities can be curated by us or from external factors. We can be told or conditioned to identify as X by external factors. 

This brings us to the crucial point in this post. The moment we become aware of our identity, we realise that we are not what we identify with! Since our identity can be curated by both external and internal means, the locus of our self lies beyond our identities! 

Hence, as long as we identify with X, we are implicitly saying "I am X" and acting as if we are X. But the moment we become aware of this, we convert our identity into a belief! We then effectively say, "I believe I am X", and have objectified our identity and thus have also told ourselves that we are not X, and we are only "identifying" with X. 

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This discussion today, helped me understand why I'd been sceptical about this whole hype around gender identities and people putting their preferred pronouns in front of their names. 

Our gender identities may be fluid and our sense of gender may differ from the biological sex assigned at birth. Someone who does not identify with their gender assigned at birth, experiences gender dysphoria. They feel different internally, from how they get treated by the outside world. 

But the moment they say "I identify with this gender"-- if they mean this genuinely-- it means that they have actually gone one epistemological level beyond identification with their gender! This is because, "I identify with this gender" is now an objective statement and their core being is beyond this gender identity. 

If someone just asserts "I identify as X and you need to call me with these pronouns" it means that they possess this statement as a belief and not as their identity! For someone who is identifying as X, they would be acting as X without being aware of it, and not be saying that they are X. If we genuinely mean what we say when we say that we identify as X, then somewhere, we have also identified ourselves as something beyond X. 

This is like the impostor syndrome-- one who has an impostor syndrome does not keep talking about their impostor syndrome or keep bringing it up. They just suffer with a belief that they are impostors and don't deserve what they have. If somebody keeps complaining about their impostor syndrome, then they have either already overcome their impostor syndrome, or didn't have it in the first place.

Similarly, someone who goes about saying that they are right-brained and creative individuals, are most likely left-brained. Because it is the left brain that thinks in terms of categories like left-brain and right-brain. For the right-brain, we either have a brain or no-brain. 

Gender fluidity is one thing. But for someone to proclaim themselves to belong to some gender and demand others to treat them in a particular way-- is not very convincing. Either they have realised their gender fluidity-- for which, they need to identify themselves as something beyond their gender-- in which case, it doesn't matter how others view them and they are happy to be just viewed as humans; or this gender identity is forced, being used more as a mask or a persona, than what they really feel inside. 

Engineering as intervention

Engineering today, is dominated by what may be called "creation science." Much of what we study in engineering is in the form of creating something-- be it a machine, software, structure, etc. Most of our effort goes into designing our creation and implement it in a way that makes it effective. 

But every engineering deployment is actually an intervention into an existing live system. Be it creating a building, a bridge, a car, a software, a gadget, or whatever, we are not only creating something, but this creation is intervening into an existing system and affecting the way it functions. 

Of course, by creating something, we wish to affect the way something functions. Like for example, by creating an automobile, we are affecting the way people commute. But for every creation, there is an intended affect, and many forms of unintended or collateral affects. 

In many cases, our created solutions can be so good that it can become a victim of its own success. For instance, suppose a brand new road is constructed to link two parts of a bustling city. This new road passes through relatively less populated areas, and hence, vehicles can zip through these to reach the other end of the city very fast. The very success of this brand new road, will now cause the land adjacent to the road to go up in value, and attracts many new businesses, residential properties and industries. Each business locating themselves there would use this brand new road as their locational advantage. Soon, this area becomes so crowded that any time advantages obtained earlier is lost. 

When we only focus on the design of our creation and its intended affect, and not really understand how systemic intervention works, we get into situations like these. 

If we want to bring about changes in a sustainable fashion, we need to change our perspective of engineering, from creating a solution, to designing interventions. 

The axiom of sustainability: One of the key things to understand about systemic interventions is the axiom of sustainability. Essentially, this states that any bounded system of being, when perturbed, strives to reach a state of "low energy" or stability. In Indian thought, this has been called the principle of dharma, since several thousands of years 

An atom for instance, is organised into "low energy" configurations, where electrons occupy specific orbits around the nucleus. When we excite an electron by giving it some energy, it may move up to a higher-level orbit. But very soon, it would shed its excess energy and come back to its low energy state. Similarly, if we intervene in an atom and knock out an electron, it becomes ionised and unstable. This causes phenomena like static or lightning, where the system that is the atom is trying to reach back to its low energy configuration. 

Similarly, what we call as solids, are actually intricate and tightly knit patterns of atomic interactions. When we try to deform a solid by pulling it out or pushing it in, it strives to come back to its original low energy configuration. This is what we call elasticity. 

Similarly, all biological creatures settle down into optimal states of being, where it has the maximum health, strength and pleasure that it can afford, given its circumstances. This is called homeostasis. When we perturb homeostasis (like for instance, illness or injury), an elaborate biological system kicks in, to bring the being back to homeostasis. 

This is one of the most fundamental axioms that we need to consider, when we're intervening in an existing system. Be it building a new road, adding a new train track, creating a new web service, building a new car, or bringing a new mobile device into the market, we will need to consider how will this intervention perturb the system and where the system is likely to settle down. 

The engineering solution may provide the intended outcomes soon after its deployment. But over time, the system responds to the intervention, and the state it settles down may be very far from what was intended. 

Intervention science-- dealing with understanding how complex systems respond to engineering interventions, is something that is not taught in engineering curriculum today. There is a dire need to develop this science systematically, and introduce it in our engineering curricula.