Inquisited.com

Just for kicks, I decided to search for “the meaning of life” on Google. The first result, as with many other queries these days, was the Wikipedia entry which was very… comprehensive (go see for yourself). It wasn’t quite the short, succinct answer I was looking for but close enough.

I can’t say what it was that made me turn to a search engine for metaphysical comfort, but it only goes to show how integral internet search has become to my life - Googling something, whether a cocktail recipe or synthesis of phosphatidylcholine, is second nature. Its almost like we’ve outsourced an entire portion of our brain to the internet. The Library of Alexandria was humanity’s first attempt at compiling the sum of all human knowledge. The Internet is our latest and greatest attempt.

Like a digital librarian, internet search facilitates the connection between a user’s query and his desired answer. But relationship between humanity and information retrieval has also fundamentally changed. A question that might have taken weeks of perusing at the local library to find scantly 10 years ago can now be answered in a matter of minutes, if not faster. In terms of knowledge organization, this represents nothing short of a quantum leap forward. 

That also got me thinking how the web itself might evolve in the future. Today, just about everyone is connected via home PCs, 3G Phones, PDAs and other devices. But the interface is still relatively clumsy - that is to say, you can only navigate and operate Google, Facebook, email, MSN messenger etc as fast as your 10 fingers can type. I think it would not be a stretch of imagination to say that in the near future, we will be plugged in directly to the net via an integrated neural interface (Its not science fiction anymore, people).

Its interesting to speculate how humanity might evolve when you’re able to instant message anyone in the world, anywhere at the speed of thought. Would that be any different, for all intents and purposes, from true telepathy? And why stop there? If you’re able to thought-communicate with someone, not why with a whole group of people? Could an entire nation connect their minds and form a singular consensus of thoughts? The concept of a “democratic government” would change radically, as would the fabric of society itself.

And would it be possible to download the sum of a person’s memories into a digital repository? Perhaps a repository that contains multiple memories. Maybe then even physical death can be cheated.

In graduate school, you don’t receive a salary for teaching classes and doing research, you receive a “stipend”.

This is amusing because the only other time I’ve heard the word being used in any context was in my senior Japanese history course, where the Samurai warriors, we were told, received annual “stipends” from their Daimyo overlords for services rendered on the battlefield and elsewhere.

To put things in perspective, the Samurai, who were respected for their chivalry and placed at the top of the feudal Japanese social hierarchy (with the peasants, artisans, and merchants below them in that order), nonetheless lived very spartan and impecunious lives.

Incidentally, this is rather reminecent of grad school as a whole, where masters and PhD students technically exist in a higher academic strata than the undergrad masses, but get worked several times harder and paid miserably for research work that arguably goes further in establishing their daimyo’s advisor’s career than their own.

And as I weigh the pros and cons of getting a PhD myself, I can’t help but feel that going to grad school again is going to put me on the short end of a very long stick. It’d be at least 4 years of my life committed to solving somebody else’s problem before I can ever begin to broach my own.

Unlike the Samurai of old, you can’t just wander off to become a ronin (a masterless warrior). For better or worse, no such thing exists in the academic world.

These are fundamental existential questions that have intrigued me for as long as I can remember, and ones that I want answers to (or at least some of them) before I kick the proverbial bucket. To quote a dream theater song, “where did we come from, why are we here, where do we go when we die?”

The catechisms offered by classical religions on the origins and purpose of life and the universe have never convinced me; the idea of an anthropomorphic designer is appealing and, altogether, a very human explanation of what we observe in the natural world. But science has showed us that there are other possibilities - equally human but far more compelling.

Take for instance the origins of our planet. Most of us don’t give it a second thought - the Earth is here just because it is. And while it is true that our planet has been around for the better part of 4 billion years, the details of its formation contains some rather interesting twists. Virtually none the solid matter found on the planet is native to the solar system. Heavy elements like Carbon (which is the building block of all organic matter), oxygen and Iron etc can only be synthesized via fusion reactions in stars much larger than our own sun.

Some billions of years ago and light years away from our solar system, there was a massive star that had exhaused its supply of nuclear fuel. As it finally collapsed and exploded in spectacular fashion, it returned most of its matter to back to the cosmos. In the depths of space, gravity condensed and stirred the stellar dust that gradually accreted to form the sun and planets of the solar system.

On earth, organic molecules which had been cooked and manufactured in the furnaces of stars slowly began the arduous process of natural selection. Initially, these molecules were clumsy and were only capable of making crude copies of themselves. These were not, by any standards, anything we could term “life”. After millions of years, these molecular machines became more sophisticated and better at copying themselves. Collectives of organic molecules evolved to single-celled organisms, which in turn gave rise to multi-celluar organisms that make up all the flora and fauna on the planet, including human beings.

From the dust of dying stars, to life. The take home lesson here is that we are all intimately tied to universe. Its easy to think you’re only been around for a “few decades”. But all of the physical matter that makes up “you” have been around since almost the beginning of time. In a very real way, we all are all literally made of star stuff. We are all stardust.

Increasingly, scientists believe that life is not unique on earth and that it may be very common across the galaxy indeed. It has long been known that the organic building blocks of life, complex amino acids, are virtually ubiquitous across the cosmos. So it appears that life itself is natural, thermodynamically and chemically driven process that happens naturally, given enough time for evolution to occur and according to estimates using the Drake equation, there should be many more intelligent, sentient civilizations in our galaxy.

That consciousness should arise is no accident, either. After all, there are plenty of creatures that go about their business like biological automatons without any real sense of self. So the real question that ought to be raised is: why has sentience evolved? What purpose does it serve, and how does it fit into the grand scheme of things?