The Palaeontologist’s muse

There are two types of forces in the world. There are the explosive, fast forces like volcanoes, earthquakes and thermonuclear fusion weapons. And then there are the slow ones – the rivers that cleave mountains and the seas which batter entire land-masses into submission. In our brief, fleeting, lives we tend to recognise the fast shapers as superior in some way. But take a look at the Grand Canyon or the Himalayas – they were shaped over thousands of years (by water erosion and tectonic plates moving against each other respectively) by the slow powers that be.

The process of science parallels this aspect of nature. There are the moments of extreme insight – the ‘eureka’ moments where we make giant strides in fleeting instants. And then there is the slow process of chipping away at the barriers nature places between us and knowledge. Where we batter down the obstacles we face and achieve our ends inches at a time. This post is dedicated to that inexorable movement. For though the sprint may get us over a hill, it is the march that moves armies over continents.

I mentioned in ‘Our little friends to be’ that I’d spent the winter (of 08-09) in the US. I stayed in Washington DC for the entirety of that trip (except for two awesome days in New York). And as any geek worthy of that title would have done, I spent more than a few days running around the Smithsonian(s) grinning in delight. They weren’t as great as I thought they would be. Don’t get me wrong, they were brilliant. But they seemed to fall a way short of expectation – the dinosaurs didn’t seem as big and the sabre-toothed cats not as menacing as I thought they would in my imagination. But a few parts stood out. One of them, in the palaeontology section is what’s inspiring this post:

They had this glass room in which the palaeontologists who prepared the fossils worked. You could watch them work like any other exhibit at the museum. The room was brightly lit and the hallway outside quite dark. So, I guess, to someone inside it would seem like the quiet labs they were used to. People knocking on the glass, however, might’ve be a problem. But the hilarious sign I’ve photographed above seemed to stop most of that!

A palaeontologist digs up fossils. Fossils can be pretty large – the fully preserved hip of a brachiosaur for example. But I’m given to believe that most are small – teeth, bone fragments and the like. In any case, Palaeontologists dig them up and clean them with instruments like toothbrushes (only for heavy duty work!), paint brushes and other stuff like that. Imagine the patience it takes to sit in the mid-day heat of a desert and dig out a five tonne piece of mineralised bone embedded 20 meters up a cliff-face with a fine sable! What madness drives them!?! But scientists and engineers do that all the time. We seldom rely on leaps of intuition.

There are hundreds of famous examples of this in the history of science. Men and Women have so often made thousands of models and millions of calculations before they got things right. I myself have spent weeks varying values in a circuit trying to find an optimal configuration.

But the effort is almost always worth it. Look around you. Look at that plane overhead or the cell phone you hold in your hand. They almost surely took a massive effort to design and build. But ask an engineer who creates them or a scientist who discovers the principles they rely on and they’ll tell you that the sheer joy of seeing their work come alive is worth every drop of sweat and ever hour lost in thought.

I know this joy. And I suspect almost every creator of things does too. It is our reason. It is the thing that binds us to our lab-benches and drives us. It is our muse. The muse that inspires the palaeontologist within us all to chip away at his problem one layer of dirt at a time.

The nature of will. On the forces that drive.

I once wrote a post titled: ‘To live or not to live. That isn’t really a question’ for my old blog: http://oftheforge.blogspot.com. I dealt with the idea of the human desire to exist, live and fight for his or her life when all evidence points to the magnificent insignificantness of our existence. I came to the conclusion that we live simply because we want to live. And that those bloodlines who didn’t would quickly be weeded out by natural selection. Here I’m going to try and talk about the (related) idea of ‘will’.

The next few paragraphs will be dreary and serious. Bear with me. They are important.

As an added note: these are my ideas alone. I haven't taken the trouble to read through more than Wikipedia or talk to someone who’s devoted any amount of time and study to this. Well, here we go:

A person who chooses not to steal because the Ten Commandments said so would be exercising free will because it was their choice to follow the Ten Commandments Someone who independently forms their own moral system or who composes a musical composition pleasing to themselves. however, would be exercising an act of will. –Wikipedia, on Nietzsche’s perspective

Nietzsche clearly felt that will was something that made us act in a certain way. That something was his higher ‘an act of will’ when it was somehow internally motivated. I disagree. I believe that his perspective is an abstraction of my more general principle:

Will is the ability/practice to put/of putting a larger long term gain* ahead of a smaller short term gain*.

-*Gain is some tangible, visible or perceived benefit whether internal or external. It should be applied in the broadest sense possible, applying to both the trivial and the grand. Also, it is important that the idea of ‘larger’ and ‘longer term’ be applied very liberally. A situation where someone does B instead of A or C, where A is the most immediate and easiest option, B is the middle choice and C the ultimate ‘best choice’ is still exercising ‘will’ as defined above. In this case C is simply disregarded and B is taken as the more ‘difficult’ yet ‘better’ ‘longer term’ ‘gain’ according to that person’s inner reasoning when compared to A. – Me.

Starting with that first principle, we can derive Nietzsche as follows: In the 10 commandments case the smaller, short term gain was the wealth the theft would bring him. The longer term gains (of not doing so) are several – the internal tangible benefit of not having to deal with his conscience, the visible benefit of not being caught and punished and the perceived benefit of being admitted to heaven having lived a virtuous life. The second case is more interesting. For this we must analyse the concept of ‘pleasing to themselves’. I believe that the idea of satisfying oneself can be looked upon as a combination of a  sense of achievement, as simple pleasure and as a stepping stone to something bigger (such as acquiring a mate or future success). All these are, I believe, things our minds trick ourselves into doing as they increase the probability that our Genes will survive. In this sense, my definition holds as the composer is giving up the small gain of lazing around and having fun for the perceived greater, longer term goal of becoming a more eligible mate and more successful person in all. Do note that it is not required for this process to be carried out entirely consciously. Our minds trick us with abstractions. Thus, we simply note that an extra helping of Kesari (a sweet from south India, which you’ll love!) is ‘bad’ rather than trace its effects on our health and thus our eligibility as mates and our efficiency at doing other, advantageous things before denying ourselves it.

One important thing to note is exactly what I have intended to do with my definition of will. I wanted a definition that would apply to all scenarios, especially, situations where a person could be called ‘strong willed’ for doing something instead of some other thing. In the second case I have not actually reconciled Nietzsche's idea of free will with mine. I have simply explained how my definition satisfies an act of free will (i.e. the motivation to do something like that) but not the specifications of that free will itself. I am separating the concept of free-will, the idea of choice and non-determinism, from ‘will’, the somewhat abstract idea of force and power we associate with the word ‘will’.

Volition or will is the cognitive process by which an individual decides on and commits to a particular course of action. It is defined as purposive striving. – Wikipedia on ‘Volition’

Again, this straddles the line between my ‘will’ and the idea of free will. I have tried to define the kind of will it takes to drive a human against all perceived odds. The kind of will you find possessed by heroes ancient (Hector et all etc) and in modern graphic literature (Batman, say) as almost a power that is as important as super-strength or speed. ‘purposive striving’ is closer to what I’m getting at; obviously, it derives from my definition too – why would you sacrifice your immediate comfort to ‘strive’ unless some greater reward lay at the end?

At this point, having discussed several approaches to ‘the will that motivates’, I have hopefully convinced you that my definition of ‘will’ is a good basis for understanding that aspect of the human psyche. Before I get to the point of this post I’d like to address another point: My definition can act repetitively (recursively if you will… no pun intended). For example: in the example given as an addendum to my definition a person chose B out of A, B, C where they lie in increasing order of ‘gain’ and ‘long term-ness’. Here my definition is ideally applied twice. In the first B was chosen disregarding C. Here the person is ‘weak-willed’ as, in the act of deciding on the ultimate objective the ‘best’ one was given up for something easier. He, however, is still ‘strong-willed’ in pursuing B instead of the immediate comfort that A would provide. I am not specifying any limits to these ideas. A person who gets out of the way of a speeding car is still accounted for because he/she took the effort of moving (effort toward the longer term gain of staying alive) as opposed to the ‘easy’ option of simply staying put. This application might seem weird at first, but I feel that a certain amount of ‘will’ is built into our instincts. Doing something to avoid almost immediate pain and suffering instead of just sitting there and enjoying the even more immediate lack of exertion still counts!

And now to the point of it all- isn’t the idea of ‘will’ beautiful? It is so abstract, so belonging to the realm of grander things. But it is something we experience, within ourselves, every day of our lives. I am exercising my will when I write this. I could have simply slept or played another game of Quake. But I didn’t. Why? Well, I don’t really know. All I get from my head is that I’m doing something ‘good’. What my head thinks It’ll result in is beyond the ‘conscious me’. Doesn’t that intrigue you?

I simply want to peer into that great, dark mystery that is the human mind. And I don’t think that it is very complex in its basis at all. I believe that it is just a few rules (like this one) applied over and over again, in inconceivably complex ways. Each of those rules are simple products of natural selection (Indeed, the idea of ‘will’, especially as I have defined it, is an obvious aid to our survival) yet they have resulted in something so much more impressive than anything else around us. We build ships to the planets and cities that tower above all. Our nearest ancestors, who are supposedly, 98% like us would be lucky to build a misshapen club. How on earth is that possible? I refuse to subscribe to any of the silly ideas (read: supernatural explanations) that many rely to- they answer nothing. I yearn to answer that question; to understand ‘us’, ‘we’, ‘you’ and ‘I’. Because hopefully, one day, I’ll be able to improve upon it.