The Story So Far

Motivation

Before we can take even the first step in understanding the world we live in, we must confront a very important question, How do we know what information to believe?

The world we live in today has a vast amount of information, more than any single human can learn in a lifetime and it is divided into multiple disciplines. In addition, new discoveries or claims of discoveries are made everyday. Some of this information ends up in our newspapers, search results, social media, etc and it may be incomplete, misleading or even incorrect.

Not only does each of us have to personally make decisions based this information (for example diet, career or health care choices) but also, in democracies, we have to support public policy decisions based on it. If we get this one skill wrong, it could mean inflicting unnecessary suffering on ourselves and our societies.

Content

One of the most important questions that humanity has had to figure out is how to acquire true knowledge about the nature of reality. For most of humanity this question did not have a satisfactory answer.

One of the historically most significant methods of acquiring knowledge is “Revelation”, where some all-knowing, all-powerful being would revel a truth about reality to a person. The benefits of this method are obvious, we get certainty that this information is true because it comes directly from the creator of the universe.  Unfortunately the drawback of this method is that anybody can claim to have had a revelation and we would just have to take their word for it. What happens when different revelations contradict each other or even our observed reality? Humans have killed each other by the millions or turned a blind eye to observed reality to keep the certainty of their revealed truths.

Another method popular among ancient philosophers was deducing the nature of reality by logical thinking. One could sit in an arm chair or in a cave and work out how the world worked just by carefully thinking about it . Unfortunately the world we live in has proved to be a little too complex for this method. For example just by your daily experience it is easy to think that the earth is flat and that the sun goes around the earth. While seemingly so obvious, we now know that these claims are not true.

An outwardly similar looking method to logical thinking is introspection or meditation. In this method one observes the nature of one’s own thoughts and feelings and draws conclusions about the nature of reality based on this experience. This method  does seem to provide insight into the nature of subjective reality (for example I feel happy when I see a sunrise) but has not been able to shed light on the nature of objective reality (for example Why does the sun rise?)

The most popular method of all time though is getting knowledge from an authority. We believe something to be true just because an important person or book or tablet said it. This method is convenient because no one person can know everything about everything but it does leave the question open of how did that authority or author of the book or tablet know the truth and this leads us back to the three methods discussed above.

The Scientific Method

One of the remarkable discoveries of the past few centuries  is the Scientific Method. Stated simply, the method is the following steps

1. Coming up with a specific question about the world
2. Observing the world and proposing an answer to the question (a hypothesis)
3. Making a testable and falsifiable prediction based on this answer
4. Running controlled experiments to gather evidence to dis-confirm our prediction
5. Being open to conditionally accept or permanently reject a hypothesis based on the evidence.
6. Publication of procedure and results and it’s verification by peers.

This seemingly innocent process has lead to a rapid acceleration in our knowledge in the past 300 odd years and created a life of material abundance like the human species has never seen before. But a few subtle peculiarities can be easy to miss so let us take note of them

1. Science is not a bunch of facts, it is a process, a step by step method.
2. In our experiments,  we always seek evidence to dis-confirm our hypothesis. This is because it is easy to only seek evidence to confirm our pet theory and then give up the search.
3. A controlled experiment means taking two or more groups and holding everything else constant but only changing the variable under study. This is difficult to do with humans because of differences in genetics, environments, habits etc. Therefore human experiments need large sample sizes in each group with the hope that when we take an average the other differences cancel each other out and we see the effect of our variable under study clearly.
4. The truth value of any claim depends on many scientists verifying the results of the experiment and reaching a consensus. It does not depend on the qualifications of the scientist or her past successes.
5. Lastly, you never accept a hypothesis permanently, you only accept it  conditionally. Which means if the evidence changes (example your peers are unable to reproduce your results or find flaws in your methodology) then you are open to refuting it. On the other hand refutation is often permanent.

The Scientific Method : Drawbacks

The scientific method is not perfect. But it is the best that we have so far. Following are some of the drawbacks of the scientific method

1. We have to give up the notion of “certainty” and accept “most probable given the evidence”.
2. We have to realize that not everything worth observing is observable directly and so we have to settle for imperfect indirect measures.
3. Any search with this method requires funding and resources (unlike revelations and thinking which can be done for free). This inserts limitations and even biases into the process.
4. Lastly, there is the “is-ought problem”. Just by knowing how things are today or were in the past is not always enough to determine how things should be in the future. The Scientific Method has something to offer here if different policies can be tried out experimentally or occurred in the past due to accidents of history but if those options are not available we are largely left to our older methods of thinking and intuition.

As a layperson whenever you come across new information, filter it through the following test to know how much trust to put on it

1. Is this an anecdote from one or multiple people with known or possible bad motives? -> No Trust
2. Is this an anecdote from a single person with unknown motives? -> No Trust
3. Is this an anecdote from a known person of good motives or multiple people of unknown motives? -> Low Trust + Caution + Curiosity
4. Is this my personal experience? -> Medium Trust + Caution  + Curiosity
5. Is this the result of a small controlled study? -> Medium Trust + Caution + Curiosity
6. Is this the result of large controlled study? -> Trust + Caution + Curiosity
7. Is this the result of multiple large controlled and replicated studies? -> Strong Trust

The color scheme used above will also be used in the rest of this book  when making or evaluating recommendations because unfortunately not everything worth studying has been studied with large controlled and replicated studies.

To conclude, it is important to note that despite its drawbacks the Scientific Method is the only reliable method of knowing the nature of reality known to man. We have known more about the world in the past 300 years than the 100000 years before that combined, thanks to this method.

References

Scientific Method : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i8wi0QnYN6s

More to be added.

Motivation

Correctly understand and internalize our place in space and history.

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Content

When we first become aware of the world around us, it is easy to assume that the world has been more or less the same for a long time. As we grow up we learn about some of the changes that have happened in the recent history. But nothing can prepare us to completely internalize the bizarre and complex history of the world we live in.  Therefore, below is a visual representation of where we are in space and time. Many of these discoveries are from the past 300 odd years. But they have been verified by multiple methods in a reliably repeatable fashion.  We recommend that you stare at the pictures below for a few minutes everyday and ponder over the scale of things to remind yourself of your place in the world.

Where are we in time?

As far as we know, the universe was created 13.8 billion years ago, the earth was formed roughly 4.54 billion years ago, earliest life on earth was formed roughly 4.1 billion years ago, modern humans were formed about 200,000 years ago and the first recorded complex societies are from roughly 5500 years ago. But there are twists and turns on every timeline below and so we highly recommend that you explore more about these on Wikipedia.

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Where are we in Space?

The world is very old and humans are relatively very recent and civilization even more so but the world is also very large and we are very tiny in comparison. The earth might seem very big to us but it is just one of the smaller planets which orbits around our Sun, which itself is one of the billions of stars in our galaxy Milky Way, which itself is one of the billions of galaxies in the observable universe.

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Timeline of human’s discoveries.

The vastness of time and space is truly humbling but when did we figure out that we live in such an old and large universe. As you can see in the timeline of scientific discoveries below, it was only in the past 300 years or so that we finally started to correctly understand even basic things that we take for granted today like the cause of day and night and the seasons, that diseases are caused by  bacteria and viruses instead of God’s fury or demons.

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_scientific_discoveries

For most of human history, change in most people’s life was slow. To a person living a 1000 years ago, the life of their parents might not have been very different from their own life. And in those circumstances it may even have been the wise thing to do to follow their advice blindly. But the past hundred years have changed things dramatically and the change is only accelerating. Its time to keep an open mind.

References

Read more In a Nutshell

Motivation

Darwin’s Theory of Evolution is a seemingly ridiculous theory that explains the origins of human beings and almost all life forms on earth and yet it has gained a massive consensus among scientists. Most importantly, it uncovers a strange phenomena and has huge implications for designing new guidelines for personal and social life.

Content

How life and humans came to be is a topic that almost every culture has explored. Creation myths around the world have come up with some imaginative stories to explain something that each of us has wondered about atleast sometimes in our lives. These stories are as contradictory as they are diverse but almost all of them have one thing in common, a creator. A creator is an active agent who brings order to chaos, light to darkness and life to a lifeless world. Even among these dozens of imaginative stories, order without a creator is literally unimaginable to our ancestors. That is until Charles Darwin.

In 1859, Charles Darwin published On The Origin of Species, a book in which he proposed a seemingly ridiculous idea that different species of life evolved by the random process of Natural Selection. At first this theory was not widely accepted but as evidence mounted in its favor from various disciplines, it was no longer possible to deny that all life, including humans, evolved from simple organisms by a random process without the active help of any creator. (See Technical Note below for more details).

It has been nearly 150 years since this discovery but we seldom stop to think about ourselves as products of a random process. Indeed,most of the time, we continue to live life like we were created for a purpose or that we have some sort of a destiny or that we have some God given rights. Even in personal life we act as if  we ourselves are perfectly rational or that we know how to take care of our bodies and in social life we follow and enforce social rules about right and wrong and good and evil. All these notions are remnants of the time when our ancestors genuinely believed that humans were created by a God, who had given each of them some kind of a test and some rules to do well in the test.

Much of the society is  still ignorant about this, while a significant portion is in active denial. But for those of us who have accepted the truth of evolution, we have a task on our hands. We have to dig into the implications of this momentous discovery and design new guidelines for personal and social life for humanity going forward or re-validate old ones. An incomplete list of implications is below, please help complete this list by adding your candidates to the comments.

1. God : Most likely, if there is a creator of the universe, it does not intervene in the daily lives of earthly species.
2. Purpose : Most likely, life has no inherent grand purpose.
3. Happiness : Evolution has “designed” us to spread copies of our genes but that does not mean that it has also “designed” us to live happy, fulfilled lives. Therefore, when necessary and possible, we need to work around our biology to live happier lives.
4. Body : Most likely, our bodies have evolved for daily routines very different than our current daily routines and hence new guidelines are needed to help us adapt to this new environment. For example in the past food was more scarce, physical activity was higher
5. Minds : Most likely, our minds have evolved for daily routines very different than our current routines and hence new guidelines are needed to help us adapt to this new environment. For example in the past the nature of dangers and distractions would have been different than today.
6. Morality : Most likely, notions of right and wrong need to be re-evaluated in light of the fact that all of us a products of this blind process and hence have the equal right to act as we please as long as we do not harm others.
7. Social Structure : The current social structure has evolved out of random process analogous to the biological process. For example a child born into a rich family does not deserve it any more than a child born into a poor family but we act like they do.

Technical Notes

Read more Evolution and its Implications

Motivation

What is the “organizing principle” of the universe? What is common among particle physics, chemistry, biology, psychology, sociology and economics? Can this answer help us know the nature of God?

Content

Emergent Phenomena seems like an obscure topic to highlight here but in fact it is so common in our world that it may be called the organizing principle of the universe. In the simplest terms it is any phenomena where a complex system arises from the interactions of simpler components where the complex system has properties that are almost impossible to predict by just observing the properties of the simpler components.

Confused? Let us illustrate by an example. The figure below shows one approximate chain of increasing complexity which has been built upon multiple levels of Emergence of complex systems which themselves become the building blocks of the next stage.  At each stage there are rules for how the components in that box interact with each other. For example Hydrogen and Oxygen are Atoms and they have their individual properties (like boiling point, viscosity, combustibility etc) and rules of interacting with each other. But when they combine to form H2O (water) it has properties completely different from either of them and it would be difficult to predict all its properties by just studying the properties of Hydrogen and Oxygen. Similar leaps of complexity are seen at other levels like individual human behavior studied by psychology to behavior of social groups studied by sociology .

How does this happen? Does this happen according to some grand plan?

Well, the success of the Theory of Evolution by Natural Selection in explaining the journey from Single Cellular Life to Humans gives us some clues on how simple rules and a lot of time for them to play out can lead to the arising of complexity in the absence of any grand designs. But when emergence happens it is very difficult to take the final result and try to trace it back to the initial conditions or take any initial conditions and predict the final result because many intermediate steps happen by chance or non-linear interactions. But it can be said that whatever survives one stage of rule based interaction is in someways “stable enough” to not disappear  and it is “unstable enough” to not become totally static and continues interacting with its environment to build the next level of rules. (See Technical Notes for a walk through the “simplest complex” system called Cellular Automaton shown below )

Technical Notes

Read more Emergent Phenomena

Motivation

Many of us want God to exist. Life would be so much better under the watchful eye of a caring yet forgiving, generous yet powerful creator who ensures fairness in the world, who rewards good deeds and punishes the evil. But does God exist? What is His nature?

Content

Many religious books claim to have a divine origin. An all-knowing, all-powerful, ever-present God shares the most important know-how for human survival and happiness through these books. Through these books God also tells us how great He is. But what do the contents of these books, indirectly, tell us about God. Is the knowledge shared in these books the most up-to-date or the most important for human survival or even the most clear and well presented? Have you ever come across a book by a human author that was more clear and well presented, had more relevant information for human survival or was more up-to-date in any field as compared to your religious book?

Unfortunately, as much as we want this all-powerful God to exist, the evidence pointing to the existence of such a God has been found severely lacking. On the other hand, scientific explanations have been able to explain many natural phenomena once attributable to God and many more miraculous and extremely useful phenomena that God did not bother to mention in His books. The creator God that is at the center of most religions seems like a figment of imagination of our less knowledgeable ancestors.

If you are still not convinced about this ask yourself the following questions and be honest with yourself.

• Saving Innocent Lives :
  • The inventions that have saved the most human lives are Public Sanitation, Antibiotics and Vaccines by preventing and curing cholera, small pox, yellow fever etc. Did the religious books of your religion give humanity the blue-prints or recipes for these inventions? Did God or any of his sons or prophets  create the above by miracles?
  • With so many children and mothers dying during childbirth,  did God reveal the technology we have to today to prevent all this avoidable suffering?
  • With so many people dying in famines and droughts, did God reveal Water Desalination technology to create drinkable water from sea water?
• Geographic Isolation:
  • Wikipedia was created in 2001 and yet in mere 10 years it could be accessed directly from anywhere in the world. Why did an all-powerful God not create a similar mechanism to access Him directly? Why did the Native Americans had to wait for more than a 1000 years before even hearing about Jesus , Muhammad or Krishna?
• Knowledge:
  • Why did none of the revelations reveal that the earth was round and went around the sun and the sun was just one star in the galaxy and our galaxy was just one in a billion galaxies?

As the great Bob Dylan would say, “The answer my friend is blowin’ in the wind, the answer is blowin’ in the wind.”

We are far from knowing all there is to know about how the world was created and how it operates. Modern science still has many puzzles to answer. We cannot confirm or deny the role of a creator in creating this universe and the rules that govern it. We can speculate if we are living in a simulation like the movie Matrix depicted, or whether aliens helped create us. But the question of the Ultimate Creator remains unanswered and we should become comfortable with this uncertainty.

References

Sanitation Revolution : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cba7di0eL8I

19th Century Epidemics : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diseases_and_epidemics_of_the_19th_century