Real You

Recently I have been reading books on our quest for reality.  The first book is “Our Mathematical Universe: My quest for the ultimate nature of reality,” by Max Tegmark, which I had introduced in a previous post. The second is “Quantum Reality,” by Nick Herbert.

As I had mentioned in my previous post, an important point Max makes is that reality is not just some illusion created by our senses, but it exists independently of us. He calls that “External Reality” while what we perceive is “Internal Reality.”

External Reality is where the mystery lies and the best we can do is to create mathematical structures to describe what it could be. An important tool for probing into External Reality is quantum mechanics. This is where careful and extreme experimentation is required to tease out some indicators of what lies underneath.

There is a level in-between External and Internal Realities. Max calls it “Consensus Reality.”  This is the shared description of the physical world that observers agree on. These descriptions are free from illusions our senses create. So the cover of a book can be described as red, even though a colorblind person will not see the color red. This is because there is a consensus on its color being red.

I believe the same three level structure can be use to describe you, or me.

There is a mid-level description of what you are:  “You a medical doctor, who is affluent and is interested in playing golf. You are even tempered and donate to charitable causes.” Like Consensus Reality, this is the description most will agree on (and you will carefully cultivate).

However, some others may not see you that way. They may have their own interpretation of what you are, based on their biases and perceptions, much like the Internal Reality described above. They may think, “Here is a pompous ass who thinks no end of himself.”

Then there is the “Real You.” The “Real You,” like External Reality, is mysterious and visible only under extreme circumstances. The “Real You” is what makes you exhibit different behavior patterns when you are not being observed than when you are. This is so much like what quantum mechanics says.  As discussed in the second book I am reading, an object, such as an electron, behaves like a particle when observed, and like a wave when not observed. Almost like a human!

Clearly, the “Real You” is different from the version you exhibit and one that is perceived. However, that may not be all. In fact, there may be attributes of “Real You” that even you are not aware of.

Freedom Index

We all cherish freedom; it is a major factor among those that define happiness. Otherwise why would we take freedom away from a criminal as a way of punishing him? Why would citizens living under an oppressive government rebel?

However, one does not have to be a criminal or live in an oppressive country to experience the challenges of not being free, or the joy of freedom. We all have restrictions on what we are or not able to do at any stage of life.

If you take a simplistic viewpoint, there are five factors that define personal freedom: Financial ability, physical ability, available free time, dependency on others, and others dependent on you. These factors change over lifetime.  

Unless you are born in a rich family, the financial ability rises over time, reaching the peak as you retire. If you have planned your finances carefully, the financial ability continues through retirement.

The physical ability starts out being low, reaches a peak in your twenties and then goes through a slow decline the rest of your life (depressing). The availability of free time starts out high but then starts declining, reaching a bottom when you hit middle age. It rises again as you retire, staying high for the rest of your life.

Dependency on others also curtails freedom. It begins low (low=dependent) as you start your life, and are dependent on your parents. It also ends on a low note toward the later years as you become dependent on others, most likely your children. Finally, if you are taking care of others, whether it is your children or your parents, there is some curtailment of your freedom. That comes in two phases, one initially, when you are taking care of your children, the other when you hit your middle age and are taking care of parents.

We can combine all these factors and create a “Freedom Index” that indicate how free we are at different stages of life. I have done that by assigning values zero to ten for the first three factors (financial ability, physical ability, and availability of free time), and from minus ten to zero for the last two (dependency on others and others dependent on you). Then I calculated “Freedom Index” by simply adding my estimated scores for all the factors. Here are the results.

The Freedom Index thus calculated indicates that the best time of your life from the perspective of freedom to do things is the 60s to early 70s when you have the financial ability, physical ability, plenty of free time and the absence of dependency, in both directions. These are the golden years. There are other times, such as your early twenties, late forties, or the last few years of your life when there is some freedom but because of one factor or another, not as much as during the golden years.

This analysis gets really interesting if you consider that people live longer than the mid eighties as I have assumed in the above analysis. Let us see what happens if people live to mid-nighties, as is becoming more common these days.

As can be seen, the extra decade thus lived is not necessarily the one with most freedom. In fact, those years are likely to be spent in being dependent on others. In addition, your financial ability may also take a hit in that extra decade because you did not plan to live that long.

Most importantly, the arrival of extra long life creates a hit on your golden years because you end up taking care of your parents for extra ten years and that period squarely coincides with time you are supposed to be enjoying life to the fullest.  The period of maximum freedom, in that case reduces from fifteen years (as was the case when people lived to mid-eighties) to five. So, while we celebrate the fact that we all live longer, we need to be aware that the quality of life gets sacrificed for quantity. 

One needs to keep in mind that the above analysis is for freedom and not necessarily for happiness.

All of the factors in the above analysis, with the exception of physical ability, have an ambiguous relationship with happiness. Money does help, but not determine, how happy you are. So, it is with available time. For some, that is a curse rather then blessing. Although they have time to do what they want, having too much of it can bring unhappiness. Dependency on others brings lack of freedom but also love and caring. The same is true, in reverse, when you are taking care of someone. The lack of freedom is compensated by deep satisfaction that comes with nurturing and having done ones duty.

Reality

I just finished reading one of the most fascinating books I have come across this year. This book, “Our Mathematical Universe: My quest for the ultimate nature of reality,” by Max Tegmark, an MIT professor of physics, is full of great insights regarding our universe and the nature of reality. While I cannot do justice in a short Blog Post what he says in a four hundred-page book, I thought some of his nuggets of wisdom might provoke thoughts in your mind.

“If we assume that reality exists independently of humans, then for a description to be complete, it must be well defined according to nonhuman entities—aliens or supercomputers, say—that lack any understanding of human concepts. Put differently, such a description must be expressible in a form that is devoid of any human baggage like “particle,” or other English words.”

The first point he is making is that reality is not just some illusion created by our senses, but it exists independently of us. He calls the reality from our perspective as similar to what a frog sees/feels if living in a well. That is not what a bird will see. It will see what is equivalent to a reality that exists beyond what we sense. (He actually has a third level between the bird and the frog perspectives---one he calls interrelated consensus perspective, but let’s not go there.)

The second point he makes is that in the bird perspective (reality independent of humans) things like a particle should be expressible without using the word “particle”. In one of my earlier Blog Posts, I had discussed what would happen if we did not have a name attached to us (December 2013). This is a similar situation; here he calls the names for things---a human baggage.

“All physics theories have two components: mathematical equations and “baggage”---words that explain how the equations are connected to what we observe and intuitively understand. When we derive the consequences of a theory, we introduce new concepts and words for them, such as protons, atoms, molecules, cells and stars, because they are convenient.  However, it is we humans who create these concepts; in principle, everything could be calculated without this baggage.”

He then goes on to hypothesize that if you remove that human baggage, we are left with nothing but mathematics.

“Atoms are made of elementary particles, which are purely mathematical structures in the sense that their only properties are mathematical properties.”

“If you believe in an external reality independent of humans, then you must also believe that our physical reality is a mathematical structure. Nothing else has a baggage-free description.”

So, what he conjectures is that not only is our universe explainable by mathematics, it actually is nothing but a grand mathematical structure. 

Bizarre, eh? He expects us to feel that way.

“Evolution has endowed us with intuition only for those everyday aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, leading to the prediction that whenever we use technology to glimpse reality beyond human scale, our evolved intuition should break down.”

Now I know why I have such a hard time understanding Theory of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics or the concept that the universe is nothing but a gigantic mathematical structure. J

Government Spending Choices

Recently Germany decided to eliminate tuition fees entirely. That is a great move, which will cause students here in the US very envious. The debt that our students carry is staggering and restricts them from accessing education. Granting free higher education will, in an ideal situation, make the nation more educated and prosperous.

Of course, while this is free to students, it will cost government lots of money to make the program viable. Germany has made a choice. According to some one who lives in Germany, this shows that “some governments believe in spending money on education while ‘others’ choose to spend money on military”. There is no doubt that he is referring to US as the “other” country in that statement promoting the superior choice by the Germans.

Yes, we in the US have chosen to spend money on defense and less so on education. It does to some extent reflect the psyche of the American people, many of who would like to take pride in the fact that we are the strongest in the world.  Then there is the good old military industrial complex, which benefits enormously from our defense spending and that of many others it supports. The whole political structure is designed to keep it that way.

However, I would argue that there are some factors that make this enormous spending on defense not just a matter of choice. We are the prime target of every wacko organization in the world. Terrorists killed more than 3000 Americans a few years ago not Germans. From ISIS to Iran to North Korea, they all consider US as their prime enemy and want to cause us harm.

Also, we end up being world’s policeman. Some may say it is because we like to take that role as doing so furthers our cause. They argue that we intervene because we benefit, say, by taking an oil producing country away from a despot, or opening up a new market for our goods. The others may say that we do it from the goodness of our heart…to promote our idealized version of the world, even if it means we have to use force.

No matter what the reason is, we are and the world expects us to be the policeman. Any crisis in the world, whether it is in Ukraine, Syria or Iraq, the country which is expected to provide leadership is US, not Germany. Probably, there is no other choice; we are the most powerful nation on earth.  However, there is also a factor that the world trusts us with exercising power more than it trusts other powerful countries. How confortable will everyone be if China takes over that role?

Coming back the full circle, Germany does not spend too much money on defense because they are restricted from doing so. Where did that restriction come from? Well, the last time they were a military power, things did not go too well for the world. They managed to cause a conflagration that cost over 50 million lives.

So, Germany can afford to spend money on education, while we cannot. To conclude that this choice somehow reflects superior values of their society as compared to ours is a bit simplistic, to say the least.

Unfair!

If you as a parent give one of your children five cookies and the other six, what is the first one going to say---“Thank you”? I don’t think so. I suspect, a more likely response is going to be “unfair!” Rationally, what difference is one cookie going to make in the scheme of things? Little. However, that is not what the child receiving less is going to feel. That brings me to my first observation: If an action or situation is deemed to be unfair, its negative effects are amplified.

Of course, the cookies become money, when the child grows up, and the situation that would cause an angry reaction may be inheritance or the expectation there of.

An obvious corollary is my second observation: The expectation of equality is the reason why an action or situation is deemed to be unfair.

The expectation of equality is not limited to the family situation, of course. The citizens of a nation expected to be treated equally by the authorities. Any hint of inequality will generate the feeling of unfairness and amplify hurt beyond what the action may have caused. Come to think of it, people expect nature to be treating all human beings equally, whether it makes sense or not. I bet a family who gets its home devastated by a tornado becomes more anguished if the neighbor’s house does not suffer the same fate. “Unfair,” they might think, even if they don’t say that.

However, even though the perpetrator of the action could be government, society or nature, it is the interactions among family members, especially parents and their children that are the most potent sources of the feeling of unfairness, as expectations of equality are high. That is my third observation.

In my earlier Blog Post, (February 2010, Siblings) I had identified three situations among parents and children that cause stress in their relationships: getting support from parents while growing up, taking care of parents when they need it, and getting inheritance. The same situations cause the feeling of unfairness because the expectations are for equality ---children expect that they will get equal support, provide equal support and get equal inheritance.

Even if there is inequality in any of these situations, the feeing of unfairness can be avoided if there is a valid reason for that situation to arise. If the parents provide more to one child growing up (which inevitably happens), a good explanation of why it was so will prevent the bad feeling. Similarly, if one sibling is unable to take care of parents because he lives in another country, the one taking on the responsibility will understand. Finally, there are situations where the inheritance cannot be equal. Parents may decide to leave more for the child who needs more. Good explanation and understanding all around will prevent ill will.

However, if that is not the case, there is a problem. So, my fourth observation is: The level of amplification of negative effects is particularly high when there is a belief that there were (are) alternative actions that, if taken, would not have caused inequality.

This is so much like dripping water from a faucet keeping you awake at night while the sound of traffic does not. You can take an action to shut off the faucet, while you cannot do anything about the traffic.

These points are combined in the diagram below.

So, what should the person who is feeling that he/she is being unfairly treated do?

Well, I can tell a story of what he/she should not do. In this instance, the wife of one of the brothers felt that they were being unfairly treated because her husband was not made partner in the father’s firm. The reason was simple, he did not have the qualifications to become one. However, that was not properly communicated, as it was assumed that the brother was well provided for even if he was not made a partner.

So, the wife, in a rage over the perceived unfairness, decided to take over the house where the parents lived as a way of equalizing the inequality. That did not go over well with the rest of the family and she lived the rest of her life ostracized. In her mind, she achieved equality and fairness, but at what price? Was shattering her family by her corrective action worth it?

That leads me to my final observation: In most instances the corrective action leads to more unhappiness than it is worth, while being ineffective.

So, if you are the person taking action that would be construed as unfair by another party, think twice about it. If there is a chance that the action has to be taken, explain and get acceptance (even grudging). If you are the victim, do not take “corrective action” without being aware of its consequances. Be magnanimous and forgive, even if it is hard to forget.