A simple thought experiment

A few weeks ago, as I sat in my car, stuck in the impossible traffic of Bangalore and waiting for the light to turn green, I decided to indulge my mind in something to distract it. It is an accepted side-effect of driving on Bangalore roads to be perpetually mad at fellow drivers at a subconscious level. A special form of this anger gets reserved for the phenomenon known as auto-rickshaws. The sheer dedication in defying not only the feeble traffic rules of Indian roads, but in defying the rules of nature and physics in general that these guys display makes one wonder how could they and oneself be of the same species! Although this thought came to me as a jeer in my mind, I decided to follow it up with a thought experiment.

I like simple thought experiments not just because I’m a fairly lazy person and these experiments seldom involve actual work, but also because they are quite handy as quick distractions. Here’s the experiment I tried that day: Going by the assumption that everything in the world is related and that common patterns run through its various systems, try and describe a system you can observe and then see if those rules seem to apply, through observation, to a system you are part of. This is fun because being part of the target system, you do not have the privilege of the macro-vision that would allow you to observe it as a whole. Since I and the auto-rickshaw fellow are both parts of the same system, I needed a way of stepping back and assessing the situation.

I’ve tried this on many systems. Bear with me as I take you through the convoluted path that will, I promise, eventually lead back to the auto-rickshaws. This time, as I began the thought process, I stumbled upon an interesting observation. I realised that if one observes the structure of any system, it becomes apparent that the structure of that entire system describes to its individual inhabiting unit what its value is. For example, you enter a museum and you see large, wide spaces allotted to small, ancient pieces. The structure and the surroundings in that museum are screaming out loudly to the exhibits that those exhibits are valuable. A lot of real estate, thought and care is dedicated to just a handful of paintings in an art gallery. That tells us automatically, without the need of any signage, that those paintings, and not the many chairs spread around, are the valuable commodity, the centre of attraction.

Shifting our attention to a system that is, at the other extreme, telling its inhabitants how insignificant they are, let us talk about blood vessels that run through our bodies. The structure of the blood vessel - cylindrical, long and connecting various regions of the body - clearly communicates that the individual blood cells are of no importance to it. What is important here, is the fact that the blood cells together form a fluid that is able to flow without spillage and delay to its destination. The comfort, importance and the needs of the individual blood cell are of no consequence. If the blood cell had consciousness, it would pretty soon realise that the consciousness it possessed was a mistake.

Let’s continue with our experiment armed with these observations. What would this then, tell us about ourselves? What kinds of structures do we build and surround ourselves with? What kinds of structures did we build in the past? We used to have sprawling mansions and endless orchards and ranches. We now live in tiny boxes stacked up as high as the natural rules would allow without toppling the whole building over. Sometimes, I’ve seen that restriction also being treated with a relaxed interpretation. We now have built massive number of roads that run across the globe - kilometres and kilometres of tar laid out just so we could get from one place to another. We have huge bridges, tunnels and subways that are also augmenting the transportation system. We have super-fast cars that may kill a lot of us but will at least make sure that those alive are not late for their meetings.

I think we’re making it pretty clear to ourselves that we inhabit a structure and surrounding where the value of an individual life was never supposed to be too high. The more we are in number, the bigger structures we build, and the more massive the nature of the entities that inhabit our surroundings, the more obvious it becomes that our individual value is becoming really small. These entities can collapse and have the potential to destroy thousands of us in an instant. Of course, earlier, the nature of our surroundings clearly communicated a higher value for our lives but as we go on, this value is consistently reducing. All that matters is that the abstract purpose that drives our lives gets fulfilled, no matter how many lives are spent in the process.

On a related note, let us spend some time thinking about this abstract purpose that drives us all. Instead of making an unwieldy list of all our individual dreams, a more efficient method to go about this is to, again, step back and adopt the perspective of an alien. It helps because that perspective helps pragmatically spot common patterns. From that perspective, no matter what our little dreams, hopes, purposes might be, there is one activity performed frequently and is common to all: Locomotion. Everything that we do involves moving about. No life can be described by an activity that involved being in only one place for months on end. Actually, the more that a person’s life involves locomotion, the better we regard it. Many of us get a wistful look in our eyes thinking of the dreams of ‘traveling around the world, discovering newer cultures and unnamed lands, having adventures all along the way’. This is a many-worded, poetic and an enchanting way of describing but one activity: locomotion.

There is more, albeit empirical, evidence to support this claim. This needs us to again, use a principle that works for systems we observe and apply it to one we cannot. One would concede that observing a machine will inform the observer of the purpose that machine was built for. In other words, form follows function. If you look at a ladder, you know the ladder is built for allowing bipeds to climb up and down. If you observe a scissor, you see two basic parts that make up the body of the scissor 1. the blades and 2. the handles. This tells you that the scissors are a device that is meant for controlled cutting of objects. Now, let’s apply the principle, that form follows function, to something we wouldn’t normally view from an outsider’s perspective: ourselves. If you observe the human body from an alien scientist’s perspective, an entire half of the organism is made up of, simply, legs. We are, in a manner of speaking, merely a set of legs augmented with apparatus that helps the legs get stuff out of their way so that they can get to where they want to. We’re built for massive locomotion. Indeed, Christopher McDougall makes a pretty similar observation of the Tarahumara Indian tribes in his book, Born To Run.

There is one other system that is built around the idea of continuous, randomly directed locomotion apart from our own: Fluids. It isn’t surprising then, that the system we found to be similar to our own earlier was about blood flowing through vessels. It is also evident in the nature of human beings. We are built to be able to follow easily and not find our own individual path. At a cinema hall, after the movie is over, how many times have we seen a horde of people walk toward the restroom thinking it was the exit just because the first guy made the mistake of thinking that was the way out? Even when someone does have the will to find their own paths, the lack of foresight of the human mind is designed to overcome this discrepancy to ensure that the person still commits the same mistakes as the others and ends up following a similar path as those before him. How many times have we felt the frustration of watching people more inexperienced than us arrogantly stumble over the same obstacles as us? One only needs to stand atop a mountain, in a balcony or on a bridge and look down upon a busy road to realise that we are all, together, a massive, connected, organic fluid flowing randomly around the surface of the earth.

It is sad to think but the ecosystem built around the flow of a fluid is always built to facilitate the motion of that fluid, and never bothers with the preservation of the individual droplets. At this point, the behaviour of the rickshaw drivers began to make sense to me. In this sense, they were the purest and the most unadulterated form of human existence - the waterfall model of locomotion.

That is when the light turned green and I moved on.