Dwaita is not the same as Theism!

One of the most wonderful things that the Internet gave me is access to the lectures of Swami Sarvapriyananda, who made the core concepts of Vedanta accessible and understandable to today's generation. 

Growing up, I had always been interested in our core philosophies and was curious to learn more. I have lived most of my life with a vague sense of void-- some strange intuition that something important is missing from my life. However, our mainstream education not only never taught us any core knowledge from Indian thought, but often dismissed and mocked all Indian thought as primitive superstition. Indeed, the only people who seemed to possess this knowledge all seemed to be tightly affiliated to organised religion, and whenever I've tried to approach anyone to learn about Indian thought, all they seemed to be interested to teach me was about "submission" and "surrender". I do not know why we have attributed divinity (in the name of bhakti) to what is essentially slave training. For me, bhakti is about devotion and commitment-- and not submission and surrender. Both are very different. The latter requires blind faith and acceptance without questioning, while the former is about commitment and focus. One can verily be a bhakth of the path of inquiry and questioning. I remember sitting in a class about Upanishads several years ago while I was in college, and all that the speaker was talking about was-- what is the correct way in which we should worship. I had walked out of the class in frustration. 

Anyway, I am ranting. Let me come back to the main point of this post. 

One of the biggest value addition that Swami Sarvapriyananda's lectures did, was to make Vedantic thought accessible to the inquiring mind, without passing judgments on our humility or any such thing. And indeed, after I started listening to his talks, the void that I had been feeling all these years, had suddenly begun to clear! 

Indian thought indeed is profound and wholly different from what we learn in our mainstream education. So much so that, I now see mainstream science as overtly mechanistic, focusing only on processes and unable to distinguish between why and how questions. In contrast, for more than 6000 years, Indian thought has been arguing and debating whether consciousness has any material cause. Most schools of thought have rejected any material cause to consciousness, giving us some enormously cool insights-- like the ontology of thing, nothing, and no-thing. 

Swami Sarvapriyananda subscribes to the Advaita philosophy, which argues that consciousness is all there is. The ultimate reality Brahman is the only entity that exists, which is featureless (nirguna) and formless (niraakara). The myriad of features and forms that we see in our existential reality (the Prakriti of Samkhya) is called Maya, which is essentially an "appearance" in Brahman. This is somewhat like how on a television that is showing a movie, all that exists is the screen. All the characters in the movie and its events are just appearances on the screen. The semantics of the movie has no bearing on the screen-- for instance, an explosion in the movie that blows up every entity nearby, does not affect the screen at all. By this definition, Maya is at a lower ontological reality with respect to Brahman, or our consciousness, which is the only reality. 

Advaita is indeed radical in its philosophy (not radical in the organised religion sense!) and offers a perspective on reality that is arguably unique only to Indian thought. It has greatly shaped our civilisation and culture. 

But Advaita still leaves out some questions. If Maya is an appearance, what causes this appearance in Brahman? What is the purpose of this appearance? Advaita also can lead to a sense of nihilism if we (in my opinion, wrongly) interpret the impermanence of Maya to mean that Maya is "unimportant" and its elements like morals, justice, ethics, etc. are not worth pursuing or upholding. Such questions had prompted me to argue in defence of Maya saying that we cannot dismiss existential reality that easily. 

Advaita is not without its detractors, and one of the biggest challenges for Advaita came from Madhwacharya, who was born more than 500 years after Adi Shankaracharya (who was the first to popularise Advaita into a movement). 

Swami Sarvapriyananda defines the Dwaita philosophy of Madhwacharya as dualistic (which is fine), and equates it with theism like Abrahamic religions. Theistic religions argue of a God as an entity separate from the material reality that we live in, and one who is the creator of the material reality. Theism requires its adherents to act within the commandments of God, and propound submission and surrender to God to achieve redemption. 

I had not found this argument convincing. Madhwacharya was an astute philosopher and makes very sharp arguments. It is very unlikely that after learning Advaita in depth and realising reality in a whole new perspective, a thinking mind would come back and argue for theism which is way too primitive in the way it approaches the ultimate question of reality! 

Today, my perspective again changed deeply after I came across this talk by Prof. Prathosh from IISc, who, apart from being a an expert in AI, is also deeply well versed in Dwaita philosophy. 

The core question that Dwaita addresses is whether the ultimate reality is featureless (nirguna) or has features (saguna). If the ultimate reality is featureless, then all features of existential reality, including questions of good and evil, or justice and injustice, are all meaningless. 

Dwaita basically argues that the ultimate reality is not "featureless", but "infinitely featured". It contains all features like knowledge, happiness, existence, etc. to an infinite extent. The limited existence that we live in, is brought about by the "filter" of existence that limits this infinitely featured reality into a finitely featured being. 

As an example, consider white light. This is not a light that has no colour-- indeed, white light has all colours. If we subject white light to one or more filters, we get coloured light, which is but a limitation of the white light. 

The sense in which we are "separate" from the divine in Dwaita philosophy is not that we are the "servant of God" as in theistic religions, but that our material existence entails that we possess these filters that limit the infinite reality into our finite existence. 

This approach to modelling existence removes the nihilism problem of Advaita! It is not that good and evil are both parts of Maya and hence unreal with respect to the ultimate reality of Brahman. It is that what is "good" is that which helps us transcend our existential filters and realise the infinite reality, while what is "bad" is that which adds more filters and limits our existence even more. 

The bhakti of Dwaita is not made of blind submission and surrender and irrational faith towards a divine entity. The bhakti of Dwaita is a path of devotion, focus and commitment, where we become aware of the filters that are limiting us and work towards transcending them. 

This is such great clarity! 

Induced versus Intentional Attention

Yesterday, I was listening to a talk about the importance of sustained attention in today's world. Indeed, the crisis of attention in today's connected world, forms one of the core concerns that can affect our individual and collective well-being. 

It is well known that cursory attention is characteristically different from sustained attention. Cursory attention makes us process the input at very shallow levels and come to a hasty conclusion (which is often wrong), while a nuanced and deep inquiry into the object of our attention needs us to sustain our attention for extended periods of time. Interruptions during periods of sustained attention have known to be extremely expensive, requiring the person to expend significant effort and time to get back to the original state of mind. 

Recently, I was in a talk where the speaker was saying that in the current day, attention spans have reduced drastically due to constant interruptions from social media, mobile phones, and other sources. As a result it is important for teachers to cut down their classes into byte-sized chunks that are in line with the average attention span. 

I remember thinking that, the argument loses the whole point. The question is not about what should be the length of an instructional material in today's distracted world, but about how to create islands of sustained attention in today's distracted world. 

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But, I have come to realise now that there is more to the fundamental dilemma. It is not about cursory versus sustained attention, but about induced versus intentional attention. 

In order to promote sustained attention, and a distraction-free learning experience, some educational institutions impose a ban on mobile phones and laptops in classrooms. Some institutions go even further to ban these gadgets from their entire campuses. 

In addition, several other mechanisms are also implemented-- like for example, compulsory attendance, social media ban in the campus, etc.

However, such measures are of course not exactly effective. Because, even if the students are physically present-- when they are forced to do so-- most of them are mentally absent. Although they are physically in the class, their minds are elsewhere. 

The fundamental issue here is not whether attention is sustained or cursory, but whether the attention is induced by the external system, or is an intentional and autonomous choice of the individual who is paying attention. 

Even with no ban on mobiles or laptops in the class, as teachers, we can see that in any class, a small proportion of the class is genuinely interested in the subject matter being taught, and intentionally engage with the teacher in learning the subject. While a few others who are physically mandated to be present are also paying attention-- but their attention is induced and forced. They have to expend an effort to sustain it. 

When attention is intentional, sustained attention becomes effortless, but when attention is induced, then sustaining attention becomes a big burden. 

Teachers and administrators wishing to improve educational outcomes, should not be asking how we can induce sustained attention over extended periods. Instead, they should be asking, how should we create an environment, where the students' attention are intentional rather than induced. 

Or rather-- how do we induce intentionality? 

One of the most powerful mechanisms of inducing intentionality is relevance. Our attention is not arbitrary or random. What we choose to pay attention to, is fundamentally derived from what we think is relevant for us.

This can be explained using what is called the "cocktail-party effect." Assume that you are in a party or a large marriage reception. There are people talking all around you, but you are in a small group yourself and chatting with others. Our attention is so effective that it completely attenuates what people in other groups nearby are talking, and focus solely on what our group members are talking. However, suppose somebody in another group happens to mention your name (or anything that you closely identify with). Then, you can see that your attention immediately shifts to the other group! 

Hence, even if our attention is attenuating all other signals, there is still some process that is scanning for anything that might be relevant to us! 

The same is true with classrooms as well. If we as teachers, are able to show that what we are teaching the students is actually relevant to their lives (beyond just in getting a job in the placement season), intentional attention and engagement develops naturally. 

But yes, how do we make our teaching relevant to a large group of diverse students coming from disparate background experiences, is a different matter altogether! We're actively researching this question and are working on an idea called "assimilation patterns"-- but that is a topic for a different time.

The pradhans of argumentation and leadership

In our daily lives, conflicts and misunderstandings are often resolved by dialogue. But sometimes, dialogue only ends up making things worse, with people going off in tangents with their argumentation. 

Even when two arguing parties are sincere, objective and diligent, they can fail to reach an agreement because of differences in underlying deep-rooted personal priorities. 

In this article, we look at different forms of personal priorities endowed by nature, that I have observed across disparate conversations. Before we start off, I would like to put one form of conversation out of reckoning. This is the conversation driven by delusion. Sometimes, people have deep-rooted beliefs that they are either not aware of how it is colouring their arguments, or are unwilling to question them. Those kinds of conversations are out of the question here-- because, they don't represent argumentation or debate-- just a delusional power game. 

Among the sincere argumentations, there can still be dissonance formed due to variegated forms of personal priorities. I call them the "Pradhans" or the "principal drivers" of our argumentation. Here are some of the pradhans I have noticed: 

Karma Pradhan: For these kind of people, the primary objective of argumentation is to decide on a course of action. They are the executives who wish to get things done. Karma pradhans are the achievers who like to reach goals. They see argumentation as some form of a necessary evil, that wastes time, but sometimes helps in building consensus so that the entire team can work more efficiently. 

Bhoga Pradhan: For these kind of people, the primary objective is to experience something. They seek to deeply experience different emotions and embody these experience. They would argue that unless we experience something (like say a tragedy), we have not really understood it, and would just pay lip service in our argumentation. Bhoga pradhan people tend to become talented artists, performers, sportspersons, travellers, service personnel, builders, etc. Their goal is not the action and the objective consequences it creates, but the subjective experience it brings. They don't do things to chase metrics and achieve goals like the karma pradhans, but for the experience it brings. 

Rakshana Pradhan: For these kind of people, the primary objective is to protect or preserve something that they hold dear. It may be their life, their culture, their source of wealth, their nation, whatever. For them, argumentation is an exercise in vigilance. Their radars are forever looking for potential threats that may subvert what they hold dear. Rakshana pradhan people tend to gravitate towards roles like policemen, detectives, military strategists, bureaucrats, etc. A number of people in business, academia, administration and industry are rakshana pradhan. They form the bureaucracy that keep the institutions and nation running. Often bureaucrats are rewarded for what they achieve or what new things they do, but a much more complex activity that they do day in and day out, is to preserve what is already there. This is so routine, that it appears positively boring to others, and is often ignored. 

Jnana Pradhan: For these kind of people, the objective of argumentation is to obtain knowledge by developing more clarity and understanding. Their personal priority is to understand the universe, and they are driven by an insatiable sense of curiosity. They seek not to experience or to achieve, but to learn and understand. They do not make good executives or performers, because, after a while, the experience and action stop giving any new knowledge (which is seen as unproductive, in the jnana pradhan universe). The jnana pradhans are often greatly misunderstood and misjudged by the other pradhans. They appear to be "weak" because they give up on the action or experience midway. They appear unreliable to the rakshana pradhans because the jnana pradhans may start questioning the fundamentals and thus, endangering that which is sought to be preserved. 

But it is the jnana pradhan who would probably notice the different pradhans in the first place! For all the other pradhans, they are too busy focusing on action, experience, or vigilance, that they may not even realise that there are different priorities driving our discourse! 

Jnana pradhans make good teachers, advisors, and visionaries. They often get snubbed because their vision is not followed up by action. Recently I heard a quote that said: "The universe rewards action-- not thought" which is such a karma pradhan conclusion! The kind of rewards action brings is very different from the kind of rewards that the jnana pradhans seek. Jnana pradhans often seek to be detached from the world, so as to keep their spirit of inquiry unhindered by worldly issues. While the karma pradhan seeks to engage with the world and get things done and achieve something. 

In a leadership position, each of these pradhans would focus on very different things to lead their team. Karma pradhan leaders set clear, measurable goals and expectations, and push the team to achieve great heights (great heights according to the karma pradhan universe!). Bhoga pradhan leaders would focus on endurance, personal transformation and growth, in their people. They don't mind if their people don't achieve great things, but they want their people to care deeply and bring about external impact via internal transformation. The rakshana pradhan leader focuses on discipline, vigilance, loyalty and fitness. They want their people to be fighting fit in order to boldly face any challenge or crisis, and not buckle under pressure. The jnana pradhan leaders are the most difficult and confusing for the rest of the pradhans. They agree for the need for action, achievement, transformation, vigilance, discipline, etc. but treat none of them with primary emphasis. Instead, they treat all of them as tools and supporting mechanisms for us to collectively learn something and realise something we didn't know earlier. 

I once heard a motivational speaker say this about discipline: "Discipline is like a boat that you can use to cross a river (an obstacle), but after crossing the river, carrying the boat on your shoulder makes your further journey harder." Usually, motivational speakers say the opposite-- that discipline and structure can take us anywhere. While, a jnana pradhan leader like say, Richard Feynmann says this: 

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible. You have no responsibility to live up to what other people think you ought to accomplish. I have no responsibility to be like they expect me to be. It's their mistake, not my failing.  --Richard Feynmann 

Jnana pradhans can be good leaders for other jnana pradhans who are also seeking to learn and understand. If they try to lead the other pradhans who are seeking to achieve, experience, or protect, it would just be a disaster, with the jnana pradhans getting subject to a lot of scorn, contempt, mocking, and other forms of adverse judgment by their people. 

Enabling Sustainable Economic Growth

Creating economic growth centers is an important step in promoting overall well-being of the country or a state. Economic grown spurred by any given sector in a region, creates a virtuous cycle of growth by attracting other forms of businesses and also improving economic indicators of the neighboring regions. 

For instance, Bangalore's meteoric growth over the last 25 years spurred by the IT industry, also enabled other forms of businesses like construction, hospitality, transport, etc. to also flourish. Similarly, it also created an impetus for growth in real estate and other businesses in the neighboring districts as well. 

However, complex systems do not just respond to specific initiatives, but they also tend to generate their own dynamics often acting in ways that can negate the earlier gains obtained. This is called the law of unintended consequences, often due to the emergence of perverse incentives. 

For instance, when I was a student in the 1990s, it took us 3 hours to commute between Bangalore and Mysore on the narrow 2-lane road connecting the two cities. In early 2000s, this narrow road was widened to create a well paved 4-lane road with a median between the two. Initially, this brought great benefits-- cutting the travel time to 90 minutes. But soon, by early 2010s, it took us 4 hours to commute between Bangalore and Mysore! This is because, this one good road attracted a lot of traffic and in turn, a lot of businesses, and in turn, a lot of housing projects along the highway-- soon saturating the capacity of the highway. 

When we have one growth center, it leads to a virtuous cycle and promotes more growth. But it also soon saturates, and the cost of maintaining the growth center slowly overtakes the benefits it brings. The chart below shows a typical trajectory of an intervention that brings about economic growth in a region. The initial impetus creates a favorable environment, leading to a rapid growth. But over time, the system saturates and costs starts mounting. Eventually, the system autocorrects to some extent to settle down in an equilibrium, which would be higher than where we started out (which makes the whole initiative a success), but lower than the initial promise. 

Coming back to the story of Bangalore, even after more than 25 years of IT-led growth, Bangalore has not created natural incentives for other growth centers to form in the state. The figure below shows district-wise percentage contribution to state GDP in the state. Bangalore Urban alone contributes 37.8% of the state GDP, while its immediate neighbor-- Bangalore Rural-- contributes just 1.6%! Today, Bangalore Urban that contributes most to the GDP of the state has one of the most congested traffic, acute water crisis, and a high cost of living. The benefits of economic growth are getting fast outpaced by its saturation crises. 

Image source: https://www.reddit.com/r/Bengaluru/comments/1fgfp0h/district_wise_gdp_contribution_of_ka/?rdt=55134

Most unitary initiatives to promote economic growth suffer from the problem of saturation-- where the very success of the initiatives leads to its eventual downfall. 

So, how do we strategize for economic growth that does not become a victim of its own success? In this regard, about 11 years ago, I had proposed a model called Development in pairs. I would recommend the reader to read through the earlier post separately. 

The primary idea behind this is to promote not one, but at least two (more than one), growth centers simultaneously. Each growth center needs to be far apart enough so that they don't merge into one big center, and near enough so that each offers a veritable alternative to the other. These centers should be connected with high-speed transit like RRTS and should enable free movement of people and businesses between the two. However, each center needs to be administered independent of the other in a "coopetitive" fashion. That is, while each center competes for businesses, each of them are promoted cooperatively as part of a larger plan. 

Not only does each growth center counter-balance the other, and bring about stability, we can even mathematically show that a paired setup gives better expected returns to its citizens. The approach to this proof is an adaptation of a famous experiment in Game Theory conducted at the University of Sussex, where a group of researchers threw breadcrumbs into a pond from two different ends to see how the population of ducks in the pond divide themselves. (This work is described in the book "A Beautiful Math" by Tom Sigfried).

Representative image generated by AI

Suppose there are N breadcrumbs and m ducks in the pond. And suppose that these breadcrumbs are thrown from only one end of the pond. If there is only one location with m population, the following will be the utility function:

Utility = (1/m)(Payoff from location) + (1 - 1/m)(0)

Let us say that there are two growth centres A and B with equal potential and let the population in each centre be m/2. In the broadest sense, for any agent in say, location A, the following recursive utility equation would apply:

Utility_at_location_A = (2/m)(Payoff from location A) + (1 - 2/m)[Utility_at_location_B - cost_of_moving_to_B]

The second part of the equation will in turn have its own second part where the agent shifts back to location A. The above should be solved using power iterations. If the second part is greater than 0, then this will be more than having a single location. If the term (1 - 2/m)(cost_of_moving) is less than 1, then this term vanishes over iterations.

We can also see that the former case of only one growth center can be modeled as a pair of growth centers, with the other growth center having a resource pool of zero. As we divide the resource pool between the two centers in different proportions, we see that the disparity in expected outcomes keeps lowering, with this reaching its lowest point where expected payoffs become equal between the centers. 

This is what I would call a sustainable growth center, with each center counter-balancing the other.  

So, will this pair of growth centers too saturate at some point? Surely, it will. And to address this, we can address the same strategy at a different granularity level by connecting two pairs of growth centers and organically grow a megaregion. 

The limitations of machine hermeneutics

What we observe is not nature itself, but nature exposed to our method of inquiry --Werner Heisenberg 

Consider this scenario: A client approaches a lawyer and says, "My friend has cheated me!". In response to which, the lawyer asks two questions: "Why did your friend cheat you?" and "How did your friend cheat you?" 

Clearly, they are two different questions and requires two different answers. The first one asks about motives and intentions behind the cheating, and the second one asks about the mechanism of the act. 

Now consider this scenario: A school student approaches a scientist and asks two questions: "Why does a lunar eclipse occur?" and "How does a lunar eclipse occur?" The answer to both of these questions is the same! 

In our scientific models of physical reality, there is no difference between "why" and "how"! This is because, in our models of physical reality, there is no such thing called "motive", "intention", and such elements of "free will" as a fundamental element of reality. 

This is what I call "machine hermeneutics". 

For the last few centuries, we have been adopting a specific hermeneutic or "way of inquiry" to understand and interpret reality. In this approach, we consider the entire universe to be an impersonal automaton powered by "energy" and whose dynamics are characterized by causality that began with the big bang. Everything else-- including life and its associated constructs like free-will, intentions, motives, etc. are all considered to be complex emergent properties of these impersonal causal dynamics. 

Machine hermeneutics began in medieval Europe in the 18-19th century, and was greatly influenced by the industrial revolution. In this mode of inquiry, the study of reality and the design of machines go hand in hand. Machine hermeneutics replaced earlier models of reality that were overtly anthropomorphic. For instance, a physical theory that says that a lunar eclipse happens when the "moon covers itself with shame" or something like that, is (justifiably) considered unscientific, and discarded. 

Focusing only on the mechanics of physical phenomena has clearly brought us great benefits. We can how build machines inspired by such phenomena and extend our capabilities and reach. Which is precisely what we have been doing for the last few centuries. 

We have built more and more complex machines, so much so that the machines are now starting to replicate the ultimate frontier of human faculty-- our brains and intelligence. 

Our machines today can replicate the mechanics of a number of activities that we thought were driven by the "human spirit"-- like creating artwork, writing poems, translating text, carrying on a conversation with another human, etc. Machines today can also autonomously take decisions and act on them. 

The mechanics of human intelligence seems to have been unraveled! Or have they? Can we finally close the gap between why humans are intelligent and how humans are intelligent? 

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Consider this case from 2016. where the police in Dallas used a robot to kill a suspect who was engaged with a shootout with them. Or the use of autonomous killing drones in the Ukraine war. There are videos that show (like this one) drones pursuing soldiers and taking them down, with the soldiers pretty much helpless to do anything against them. The more interesting (and disturbing) fact is in some of the pictures, the body language of the soldiers show that they have clearly given up-- and yet, the drone takes them down. 

There is this axiom that drives human soldiers to kill on the battlefield-- "I do not want to kill someone with whom I have no personal enmity over, but if I do not kill the enemy soldier, he might kill me!" 

In other words, humans (and all other living beings) hold their lives to be precious and resort to killing other living beings mostly as a means to preserve their own life (except when driven by ideology). An autonomous drone on the other hand, has no fear for its own life, and has no empathy for the other person. It is just programmed to kill, and cannot tell when the adversary is no longer a threat, and need not be taken down. 

The AI in the drone only knows how to make the kill, and not why it is killing! 

Before our lives were taken over by machines, the why question was all pervasive and played a central role in our daily activities. It was also clearly distinct from the how question. We often had solutions that solely involved addressing the why question rather than the how question. 

Suppose that we are back in the medieval times before the advent of automobiles, and we owned a horse carriage pulled by two horses. For the last few weeks after we bought a new horse, we notice that our journeys in the horse carriage have been very bumpy and uncomfortable because the two horses that are pulling the carriage are not synchronizing with one another. Before getting to ask how to make them coordinate with one another, we first ask, why are they acting in an uncoordinated manner. It may turn out that one of the horses that was newly acquired, is feeling insecure, or is in need of our attention and care. In such a case, all we may need to do is to spend more quality time with the horse in question and get it better acquainted with us. 

Now imagine the same situation above in the present day, when we buy a new car, and find that it is not running well. We can be certainly sure that the reason for this would be something more mechanical-- like a faulty engine tune up or a loose connection somewhere. 

But imagine AI driven cars in the not-so-distant future that learns about your preferences and customizes itself over time. Now, spending "quality time" with the car, suddenly becomes a thing! As cars get more intelligent, we may need them to understand not just how to drive us somewhere, but also why we're going somewhere and what it means! For instance, an autonomous car taking us to the airport to receive our family members may have different considerations to address from the same car taking us to a hospital near the airport in response to a medical emergency. 

For too long, we have been thinking of reality as the ultimate machine. Even theories like Quantum Mechanics, only doubt the deterministic nature of mechanical causality (at least in the Copenhagen interpretation that interprets the wave function as the uncertainty in the knowledge of the observer), but do not give primacy to free-will itself. We will need a very different way of interpreting the universe as machines become an integral part of our lives and well-being.