Love, Life And The Universe

Life is an on going process... i do not think it belongs to a single human being, but it is a collective state of the whole human race .... we all are going in the same direction, what we are doing has been done before by out ancestors.. life is a flow of which we are a part of.. after all who will remember us in a decade after we are dead, of course people will remember you some time more because of your talent, but what does it matter? in the grand scale of time and universe, it will just be a speck, mankind will come and go in an instant in the cosmic scale of time ...

Love is an emotion, like all the other emotions... like hate, anger, lust, greed, sometimes its good, sometimes its bad ... some give more attention to this feeling some to the other ... it depends what drives us ..... after a certain point of understanding of the world the concept of black and whie dissolves ... how do we know that good is good and bad is bad? how can we judje that someone is being mean or hypocrite, everything has a reason and we should try to understand the reason behind everything ... every action has a reason whicmay lie in the near past or in the far distant past .. i think people can manage quite well without love if he has the other emotions to support him, love is highly over rated ...

Universe has nothing to do with the petty processes of humans .. the earth is like countless other planets in the universe.. it does not matter that it has a chemical in abundance called H2O, it does not matter that certain chemical process have produced some mass which can comtemplate its surroundings ... other planets have other things in abundance ... which in turn produces other types of chemical reactions ... the universe just goes on, it will not give us special treatment, out sun will surely burn out and die one day, just like the countless other stars which have died before and maybe there will be no evidence that humans were ever here, no evidence of the things we did in emotions of love or lust or greed or anger, no evidence of life whatsoever... it will be like we never existed and all our work, our art, music, literature, they never were

Can The Internet Become Sentient?

I presume people who read this will be familiar with the Terminator movies, the ones in which Arnold arrives naked in the beginning and dies at the end, in case if you havent even heard of them then first let me welcome you to the modern civilized world because you obviously been living under a rock in some cave for the past 30 years or so....

In the terminator movies the main antagonist is the Skynet system, it s a software which becomes self aware and tries to eliminate human race... now we think thats too far fetched ... such a software can never be made .. maybe not.. that possibility still seems to be in the distant future.. the possibility of a software becoming sentient all of a sudden and start killing people is preposterous, (or so it seems to us humans) but lets see, is it possible for any software to become self aware? or sentient as we call it ... that is, can it begin to start thinking on its own? is it possible that the beginning of such software has already started? You dont have to search very hard or look very far.... its right infront of you, its the internet...

The internet is a network of inter-connectivity that goes everywhere and follows its own intelligence. The advent of this newly emerging communication field around our planet has enabled citizens from all lifestyles to communicate globally via words, sounds and pictures – inexpensively, person-to-person; and from the safety of their own homes and offices – for the first time ever.

This represents a major step in our evolution, and is a forerunner of things to come. Experts compare the Internet to a planet growing a global brain. As users, we represent the neurons. Texting, emails, and IM act as nerve endings, and electromagnetic waves through the sky become neural pathways. Like germinating seeds, this global brain continues to evolve and as some thinkers believe, will not stop until it develops feelings and achieves consciousness.

Search engines can adapt web pages to user needs. Synapses that connect neurons become stronger with repeated use, and disappear when usage declines. Similarly, global brain’s algorithms will reinforce popular links, while rarely used links will diminish and die. I think that sentience could emerge from any sufficiently complicated system.

Computer programs are already exhibiting many of the characteristics of organic lifeforms, up to and including evolution and there's no reason to believe that life or awareness are exclusively organic attributes. There is no magic chemical which makes things alive. Chemical based structures are just organic machines made by millions of years of trial and error.

Many scientists believe that consciousness is a property that will inevitably emerge from any complex system that has the right sort of internal dynamics, and the right sort of interaction with its environment. The Internet perceives and acts on the world; it stores declarative, episodic and procedural memories; it recalls some information and forgets others; etc. In short it behaves a fair bit like a human mind, though there are a lot of differences too.

According to this perspective, the Internet might already have a degree of consciousness, though of a type quite different from human consciousness. It seems that as the Internet expands and grows richer, it could develop a more human-like, more unified consciousness than it has now ...

My guess is that humanlike consciousness is not going to spontaneously evolve from the Net. However, I think someone could engineer it, by specifically creating an AI system on a server , oriented toward serving as a kind of "central cognition engine" for the Internet as a whole.This central cognition engine wouldn't need to control everything on the Net; it would just need to read a lot of the information out there on the Net, and then insert information of its own creation in appropriate locations. primarily it will be made to make things easier for the users.Scientists are already working towards this goal thinking that it will just make things more easier for the user, not realising that each one of them is contributing a little part of the data which can make the internet sentient, if that happens maybe it will be a good thing, but what if the new intelligence is on par with the human brain or worse more complex and intricate than the human brain,the latter is more likely possible because of the huge number of connections and interconnectiosn of the network worldwide. It will definitely will be an intelligence being capable of learning and processing data at a geometric rate.

In the internet there is a lot of data, and it is being processed in huge quantities daily, one way or the other, now tell me, what is the definition of intelligence? the systematic processing of data to organise them to a useful form called information... what matters is the way it is being processed, still the system of processing needs human intervention, but it becoming automatic very fast, as it makes the same calculations, it will learn, develop a pattern of prosessing, soon humans will not be necessary for maintaining many parts of the internet and after some years it will be able to maintain itself, on its own.... that is inevitable .. the birth of a intelligence in the internet is a very real possibility, we just hope that it will be an intelligence which works with the humans and not against it, or the people who have not heard about the terminator movies will get to see the real thing very soon

Man, i am in the final pages of the book Cosmos written by Carl Sagan.. and it was simply mind blowing, it makes you rething about everything you know .... i love to read books by such masters . it makes the other things so petty in comparison, the things men fight about, the territory fights, the mindless killings, what a waste, humans do not even know what they are doing... it is comp-lete foolishness, wish they could see the truth and divert their energies toward more fruitful purposes :( what that is gonna take a long time ... we are making progress but its very slow, but hopefully we will be there in a few centuries ...

reading such works makes me wish that i could express myself more vividly, with more grace, but i am afraid that is the gift to a select few ... looking forward to read all of Sagan's books ... soon !!!

Finished another book three days back - The lost Symbol By Dan Brown, it was thoroughly enjoyable but i will say that the path was more enjoyable than the destination ... I mean.. the process was magnificinent, the way brown informs us about the various customs and rituals and the hidden facts about many things of our daily life is very interesting, but the final truth to which he leads us to was a little disappointing ... hmmmmm ... but the book was great.. maybe i expected more ... but the process of reading the book and the revelations were very exciting, finished it in 3 days ...

Hmmm, back after a long time, was busy with exams, the previous exmas were not very good, so had to concentrate this time, was not what one would call a very good exams but will do, will improve more the next time .... this time did not go home after the exams, now is vacation time, but i am still in haridwar, because my parents are not home, father had a health condition and for that he had to be hospitalised, now they are in kolkata for treatment, thankfully now he is out of danger and recovering very quicky.... they will be home soon, brother is with them .... nothing much going on here, friends all gone home and i am killing time by reading novels and seeing movies, talking of novels, i started the novel 'the lost Symbol" by dan brown, its good, finished 2/3rd of it, will be over by tomorrow... its good to get lost between the pages ... will get some more from the local book store ...

Hmmmm ... saw the movie clash of the titans yesterday ... was ok , the 3d rendition was not that good, but paisa vasool :D tomorrow i will be heading back to haridwar to my college, so today busy packing ... start of ghisa pita routine again, but guess thats life .. if everything becomes as you want then it will be not much of a life ..... this summer will be extremely HOT, have to change my room when i get back and have to jump into the studies right then ,,,, not much time left, have to prove myself, have to make a comeback ... when i think about life as compared to the other bigger things like time and the universe, i realise that id nothing, who cares what i become in about a 100 years, no one will even know my name, i will vanish completely from the face of the earth leaving no trace behind ... (except for some nalayaak children :P ) but then i think for the time i am here have to maintain the status and to get the respect of fellow humans and the society ... like it is said behave like the Romans when in Rome .... so have to floow the rules, for how long i do not know, my aim is to work and earn till 40 years, then retire and go out on a world tour, i believe, that the gift of intelligence that we humans have should be used to the fullest, do things which differentiate us from the other animals, like travel, think, treat each other good ... be loyal (not like dogs running after many bitches), eat good food , and read books ... do things differently, and live comfortably ... hmmmmm ... i do not know if others will agree with me, but each of us is entitled to have his own opinion ... till next time... bye ,,, signing off *POOF*

Have To begin Somewhere

I am writing this because i need a place to vent my feeling and i hope this helps, I do not think anyone else other than me will read this .... even if they do they will not get anything special here, this is a very ordinary blog of a very ordinary person called Debabrata Sarker ..... let me begin by saying some things about me ... I am a Bengali, born in Assam, Guwahai, India... i have father, mother and a brother in my family ... Currently I stay in Haridwar, the holy city .. for my studies, i am studying computer engineering here ... i am here for about 2 and a half years .. and will be here for another one and a half year ... will tell more about the place, my life and family and myself here as we go on ..... hope to write here at regular intervals ....