The value of an individual

An interesting thought experiment that is always helpful to turn a few boring minutes like waiting in a queue, at a traffic signal etc, into a little more interesting is this: Going by the assumption that everything in the world is related and patterns run through it all, 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 and hence, do not have the privilege of the macro-vision that would allow you to observe it as a whole.

Recently, this led me to an interesting thought. If you observe any system around you, it becomes apparent that the structure of the entire system describes to it's individual unit what their 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 is dedicated to just a handful of paintings in an art gallery. That tells us 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 realize that the consciousness was a mistake.

What would this then, tell us about ourselves? What kinds of structures do we build? 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, that restriction also is 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 where the value of an individual life was never supposed to be too high. The bigger structures we build, the more massive the nature of the entities that inhabit our surroundings, which by collapsing have the potential to destroy thousands of us in an instant, the more obvious it becomes that our individual value is really small. 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.

Let us spend some time thinking about this abstract purpose that drives us all. If you try and list each individual purpose out, the list will surely become too unwieldy. However, this problem can become a little simpler if one adopts the perspective of an alien. From that perspective, no matter what our little dreams, hopes, purposes might be, there is one activity 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 (with the exception of the ancient sages who anyway were said to have gained the perspective of someone who does not belong to this world, in other words, an alien). 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 observational, evidence to support this claim. It is already known that in most cases, observing a machine will tell 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 higher. 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 easily tells us that the scissors are a device that is meant for controlled cutting of objects. Now let us do our little thought experiment and apply our theory, that form follows function, to something that we are not usually allowed to observe: 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 way, a set of legs augmented with apparatus that helps them 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 point in his observations 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. After the movie is over, in the dark theatre, 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 we do find someone with the will to find their own paths, the human mind is weighed down enough with the embarrassing lack of foresight to ensure that the person 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 realize that we are all, together, a massive, connected, organic fluid flowing randomly around the surface of the earth (actually, thinking of it this way, perhaps it is the centripetal fluid motion that generates the force of gravity that pulls us toward the earth. That would explain why the sages who would attain moksha, and hence would stop moving for long periods of time, tended to levitate!)

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.

"Autorickshaw waterfall model" - a model I created to help me understand

how they plot their navigation.