A love letter to my sons, induced by the pandemic

If I think about it objectively, I am relatively untouched by the Coronavirus pandemic. There is no existential panic in our household. We have felt and expressed gratefulness for that. Other than everyone suddenly being at home during the weekday, it does not feel very different. I anyway work from the home a lot and now my wife is doing it too. Kids are at home and thankfully we quickly fell into the routine of each evening the kids creating a checklist of activities and accomplishments for the next day, and then the next day they go and do that and also have much fun on the side. It is only been Week 1 of that, so who knows what the future holds. The gym and yoga studio are closed but kids and I are exercising more, even as the wife is insanely busy dealing with the implications of the current situation at her company and their ecosystem. Traffic in the neighborhood is down to about 10%. When I take the dog on a walk, I sing. Badly. But I sing. I don’t know why. I am able to cross a major road without pressing the pedestrian crossing sign button. I am mortified to say that it almost feels……pleasant. But I am just not able to enjoy it. Because I know that I have no real idea about the pain, panic and anxiety that hundreds of millions of people around the world are legitimately feeling and viscerally living right now. The loved ones of health workers, those that are directly affected by the virus, those that have no safety cushion and rely on week-to-week paychecks that may be disappearing, I can’t imagine their terror. My heart goes out to them.

It is scary to imagine that this giant flywheel that is the interconnected economy of the world is massively slowing down. What happens when shoes start to drop all over the place? How will we cope with consequences of that? I shudder to think. Are toilet paper factories still running? Thankfully, my first encounter with toilet paper was at age 21. I think I will be fine in that scenario. But that is not likely to be the only bad outcome, if it comes to bad outcomes.

Even beneath a lived experience that is at the moment normal-ish, I feel tremendously attuned to mortality. My own physical mortality of course, but also that of our society, our civilization, our way of being, our species. As an intellectual idea I have known for a while that all species will go extinct some day, and so too must ours. But the notion of our species going extinct just went from being an academic notion to a suddenly freakishly real and present danger. Maybe, all will be fine, and in a few months this will have receded from memory and life would have gone back to normal, or maybe this is the onset of the end. This is how the cookie starts to crumble. I don’t know and can’t control. It is hard, at least for me, to logically arrive at what to do and how to be in a time like this.

So my instinct is to slow down and listen to my intuition. I am anyway going to be guided by some incomplete thinking and knowing system with its attendant benefits and blind spots, so might as well do what is easy, which for me is to tune in to my intuition. And my intuition says to write a letter to my boys. Not for their sake, but for my own. And share with them what I have to say about life.

I know full well that this may be the most pointless missive of all. It is never going to be useful in any scenario, I know, but humor me. Either things will go back to normal and we will look at all the panic-stricken things we did such as writing love letters as funny little oddities, or the world would have changed so much that anything we say about life before Coronavirus is irrelevant to life after. Let us say that we are lucky and this was a near death experience for our civilization but we lived (and better still, learned from it) and that life looks much the same in 2021 as it did at the start of 2020. Even then, what I say is irrelevant. Because in the metaphysical plane, you can’t really learn from anyone else. Even before I write a single word of this letter, I know I will end up in the metaphysical plane. With me, pretty much everything ends up there, no matter where it starts. In that plane, you have to learn on your own. The tiny sliver of hope is that just as how I have pieced together my worldview from a million influences, big and small, this can be one of those influences for my boys, one among many, nothing less, nothing more. Here goes nothing.

Boys,

In my 20s, I didn’t want to have kids. I am so glad your Mom convinced me. But for you, I would not have had much reason to try and figure out this thing called life. I would have sleep-walked through it. I wouldn’t have tried to make this world a better place. I wouldn’t have had the energy if it were just for me. So thank you, for giving me a reason to live, I mean really live. I know I will be dead some day. I always knew that, but shit just got real. Maybe I’ll be dead soon, maybe not for a while. But now is a good time to get this load off my chest.

This note is a collection of some conclusions I have drawn about life. You will draw your own, as you must. You can just see my journey as one random path that someone took, and so hopefully you will embrace your own random path a little bit more fully. Conclusion is too definitive a word, and I don’t hold these as inviolable conclusions. So let me soften the language and say that these are observations. I believe them to be valid (as opposed to being true, or heaven forbid, True!) and I am open to modifying them based on future experience and learning. Or because Science tells us the final answer (It’s 42. We already know that). Or because God reveals Themself to us. Or just because I feel like it someday.

We have already started getting into Observation 1: Truth in life about anything seems incredibly hard to fathom. The term post-truth world seems to be gaining in popularity these days. But it seems to me that the world has always been post-truth. In fact, that is the nature of the beast. You can question almost anything. Some of the most fundamental questions like how the universe came into being, is there God, who am I and why am I here, are of course easy examples (of hard questions) but even less esoteric questions like what drives the price of a stock (why do some people buy when some sell), did Bernie supporters vote for Trump and is that why Hillary lost in 2016, what is the best way to control Coronavirus, etc. are more practical examples of the difficulty of asking and answering even pragmatic questions. Of course, there are some things you can say with certainty, like the Dow Jones index fell by 867 points today, etc., but you know that’s not what I mean. Some of the causal and relational and more fundamental things in life are truly hard to get to the bottom of. The more we know, the more we realize how little we know. And so being comfortable with not knowing (even as we go on an insatiable quest for knowledge) is a necessary hallmark of a wise human. I think.

Observation 2: Things sit upon other things, or assumptions. If someone believes that the lack of support by Bernie supporters cost Hillary Clinton the 2016 election, then they believe several things. First, they have a belief that there is a singular causal fact behind the outcome and that that fact is in fact knowable. Then, they may believe that the exit polling methodology is a fully reliable way of determining that fact. And without even realizing it, they are putting their faith in statistical methods that they may not even understand, and which furthermore rely on underlying concepts such as number theory, normality of distribution, linearity of data, etc., things which they’re not even thinking about. So what we often think of as “fact” is often either an “opinion” or a potentially biased outcome of reliance on some methodology or mental model or epistemology (method of knowing) which will always have some limitations. Or “fact” might be something we heard on TV or a podcast or read on the Internet. In some cases it may simply be an “axiom” or “convention” or just a balancing term in an esoteric equation (a la dark matter). As you can see, when you objectively analyze pretty much any piece of knowledge, it is turtles all the way down. Which is why we are finding hard to know how exactly to deal with the Coronavirus threat.

I know (well, I believe may be the more appropriate thing to say here) there are likely to be some Absolute Truths. At least One. I hope! But I have no means of knowing them. At least as of yet. Science is built on logic, and logic is built upon its axioms. Axioms are supposed to be self-evident truths but aren’t there unintended consequences of treating them as self-evident truths? Doesn’t the die get cast right there? By choosing our starting assumptions, don’t we eliminate certain outcomes from the realm of possibility?

Anything we treat as true sits atop some other framework or assumption. Think about the statement 27 X 3 = 81. Is that true? Anyone would likely say Yes, that is true. I would say that is the wrong question. That statement is not true. But it is an agreement. It is something we agree to treat as valid so that we can conduct the business of life. That statement is only valid in Base 10 number system and that too only when we agree 2, 7, 3, 8, X, =, and 1 mean what we say today that they mean. We could very easily have chosen different symbols for these values and operations and then 27 X 3 = 81 would have been as much gibberish as J# & 9 ] “@ is to us currently. So, I would claim that 27 X 3 = 81 is not truth, but something we agree to treat as true in a particular context. It is not truth as much as it is a corollary of agreements we have made.

Yuval Noah Harari brilliantly makes this argument more broadly about all manners of “truths” in his book Sapiens. Democracy, capitalism, religion, politeness, etc., these are all agreements (I am massively paraphrasing here). And they work as long as we follow through on these agreements. If we change our mind, there is no inherent strength in these concepts. That is why, cannibalism, animal sacrifice, the inquisition, communism, dowry system and untouchability (I’m signaling here where I grew up), slavery, and other abominations have fallen out of / are falling out of vogue, even as certain other abominations are still holding strong and maybe growing in power.

Observation 3: “Facts” or “truth” actually depend on the “observer”. Observer independent facts are hard for us to wrap our head around. If our senses were different, our reality would have been different. It’s perhaps not that hard to imagine that a fish’s sense of reality is not the same as ours. The concept of “water” probably does not exist in the worldview of a fish, just like for most of our existence as a species, we were blissfully unaware of “gravity”. So the reality accessible to the alien beings in the movie Arrival was different than ours. Which one is “true”? Theirs or ours? Well, which one is true: ours or the fish’s? Again, wrong question. To look at our current answers as pretty solid is to assume that we are the final word on intelligence, which given the vastness of the universe (or the infinite grace of God, whatever floats your boat), is a rather silly belief. Intelligence the way we define it may not even be all that it is cracked up to be, but we will not know that until we encounter an alien species that demonstrates some other attribute that seems even more useful.

Observation 4: “Reality” is also massively dependent on Language. Reality is probably too big a word. Let us just say the human experience instead. The human experience is massively dependent on Language. You can see the power of language right here. We are having this conversation in language. By signaling that Reality is too big a word, and replacing it with the human experience, I created a certain impression in your mind. If we did not have language, what would happen to most of our lived experience? Let us do a thought experiment: Let us think about the notion of thought experiment. It is an abstract thing. It does not exist in nature. A “rock” or “flower” has an equivalent in the natural world, but a “thought experiment” does not. We can only conceive it in language. So it is almost as if the language for it has to exist in order for the experience to be available to us, or to be shared across our culture. In the beginning was the Word……..

Observation 5: Things seem to be relative and dependent. Knowing anything to be true independent of anything else is therefore a very limiting exercise. Let’s say I became the ultimate empiricist, and held a standard that I will only utter that which I myself can know to be true from first principles. That I will make no leaps of faith or believe anyone else, neither the Pope, Imam or Shankaracharya, nor the highest priest of Science. In that situation, I don’t see that I can say anything beyond “I am”. I couldn’t even get as far as Descartes’ “cogito ergo sum”. I think therefore I am. That causality between thinking and being is an assumed one according to me. To me, “I am” seems undeniable. There is an entity called I, and that entity is having an experience. It is experiencing something that is not nothing. Which is what we call beingness and to which we attribute the verb “am”. So, to each one of us that exists, “I am” can be the only statement of undeniable truth. Everything else is conjecture in some way, shape or form. Turtles all the way down again! This is not an original idea. Actually nothing I say here is an original idea. Each of these notions I must have read somewhere, or heard somewhere or somehow through osmosis have absorbed from the world, or misinterpreted out of something. My only contribution is to spit out these words in a sequence that only I could have had.

“I am” is one of the central concepts in Advaita Vedanta. At the core of Advaita Vedanta is the word “Soham”. Which translates to I am. Some say it means “I am that”. But I don’t know what is the “that” it refers to (some big idea that “that” is all there is) so I am just sticking with the simpler interpretation.

Now even that observation and conclusion — “I am” — may rest on some other background turtle, but I can’t see it yet and so I can’t speak to it yet. (Buddhism speaks of the notion of No Self.) But by sheer extrapolation, I can anticipate that the existence of such a turtle in the background may indeed be likely, and so if some day I do trip on that turtle, well, I should not be surprised. Again, this idea of “I am” may only be relevant from the human, linguistic vantage point. To a gazelle (or to a turtle, an actual biological one, not that metaphysical one we’ve spoken about a couple of times), that idea may have no meaning and dare I say, no truth. Again, doesn’t simple extrapolation require us to not give in to the notion of human exceptionalism?

Observation 6: Everything very quickly becomes paradoxical. In the logic arc we have followed so far, it seems that everything is relative. But “Everything is relative” is an absolute statement! We have stumbled into a paradox. There is likely no statement that every human being will agree to as an Absolute. (Sun rises in the East does not count. Remember, to call that direction East is an agreement.) People believe in different Absolutes, such as the existence of God, or that murder is evil, or that Science is the only way we can know the truth of anything. But can something be an Absolute without being self-evident to all? If something is self-evident only to some, isn’t it by definition a relative truth, not an absolute one? I don’t know.

Without thinking deeply about it, it may be easy to say that, of course, murder is pure evil. That has to be absolutely true. But then think about war, killing Hitler and Osama bin Laden, capital punishment, abortion, livestock farming and now try to tell me that “Thou shalt not kill” is an Absolute. Jain ascetics in India always wear a face mask so as to not breathe in microbes and kill them unintentionally (but they probably don’t know that the human body is a veritable biome of trillions of microbes which are necessary for our existence and which have no existence outside of us). And I don’t know for sure but I think those Jain ascetics do eat yogurt. The ascetics carry a broom and sweep where they walk in an effort to move away ants that they might otherwise inadvertently step on and kill. Who else has that kind of commitment to “Thou shalt not kill”? But they too have drawn a line that is below ants but above microbes. And, it is not hard to argue that crushing an ant with a hard-soled shoe and instantly killing it might be more humane than trapping its body under strands of dry grass and then dragging the broom across a hard floor, abrading the ant’s body and leaving it maimed and half-dead, unable to move and awaiting a torturous death that takes a long time to come.

And so we live in a tangled web of unintended consequences and contradictions. Those that believe life begins at conception are the very same people who are for capital punishment. And those in the my-body-my-choice brigade who fight for the right to terminate fetuses that obviously have committed no crime, are typically also the ones who don’t want even hardened criminals to be put to death. As a species, the choices we seem to make are riddled with contradictions, and we go about pretending that our intellect is the apex of creation. It seems clear to me that even that thing that some people think are Absolute and self-evident, upon deeper reflection seem to develop chinks. Anything that one can say, it’s opposite can also be argued for, just from a different starting point, from a different set of “self-evident” assumptions. If the opposite of this last statement can also be argued for, the statement reveals itself to be contradictory, or paradoxical. Paradoxes everywhere!

If we really care to observe the truth of something in a truly rational way, we will sooner or later, encounter a paradox. Let’s do another thought experiment. Imagine you are in a dark room. You are pretty much having the experience of blindness, whether or not you have the biological capacity to see. What do you need to be able to see? Well, light, of course. So God said, “Let there be light”. Great, you can see now. Congratulations! What happens now if the amount of light keeps on increasing? You can see better and better. Finally, there is so much light from all directions that all that you see is light. There is not a shadow left. All that reaches your eyes is bright, white light. What do you see now? Again, nothing. Once again, you are practically blind. So the complete absence and the complete presence of the exact same thing result in the very same outcome. What the hell!

Someone has said: “Truth is paradoxical. If it is not paradoxical, it is not true.” Truer words were never spoken (Believe me, the irony of calling that of all things “true” is not lost on me. Irony is the shadow of paradox). Any reasonable line of critical thinking will end not in a conclusion, but in a paradox.

Isn’t your mind boggled by the mystery of being? At the interstellar level and at the sub-atomic level the universe looks the same. Pure white is the same as pure black. May be zero equals infinity. The Big Bang is supposed to have happened out of nothing. This whole unending, infinite universe came out the wazoo of …… Nothing? According to Science, well, Yes. And these materialists expect me to believe that kooky idea while they pooh-pooh creationism and can’t even see the irony? And also the inconvenient fact that religions have always said something pretty similar.

Science has the strength of being peer-reviewed and which is why it has a big stick with which it can beat Spirituality. I deliberately say Spirituality and not Religion. To me, the two are very different. I don’t care about Religion. Organized Religion is a tool of exploitation and instrument of oppression and deserves to be bludgeoned to death with that stick. But the trouble is, Religion is the evil twin of Spirituality. They were birthed together. I have found great comfort and relief and meaning in certain claims in Spirituality at the core of Vedanta, Buddhism, and mystical / gnostic branches of religions, Sufism for example. Spirituality I believe has an equal role to Science in our salvation (as do other epistemologies, viz., Evolutionary Psychology, Philosophy, Anthropology, Art, etc.)

Science has tremendous rigor as an epistemology, and nothing else comes anywhere close. The scientific method asserts that a hypothesis should be falsifiable, an experiment should therefore be repeatable, observations from different sources there have to be consistent for something to be recognized as a “fact”, etc. Science is therefore an open-loop epistemology. By that I mean, loosely, that observations and knowledge from different brains have to concur. That is a rigorous framework that weeds out bad Science. But shouldn’t we at least consider the notion that “Reality” may be a closed-loop phenomenon that is a subjective experience in Consciousness and an open-loop objective epistemology may be ill-equipped to study it? There may be a sort of epistemological corollary of Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle at play, that no system of study can be both rigorous AND comprehensive. Science has chosen to be rigorous. Great. But it is like the apocryphal drunk who may have dropped his keys in the ditch where he fell face down, but he is looking methodically for them in the parking lot because well, that is where the light is.

A system cannot know itself. So then, what Science can describe may only be a small sliver of Reality, and anything that it’s axioms do not allow it to study should be considered “out of the curriculum” rather than “fanciful”. Science conveniently ignores the fact that it has rejected solipsism axiomatically, simply refused to consider it, even though, on first principles basis, it is a perfectly plausible explanation for the sensory phenomenon I am experiencing as an individual. What if we are indeed in a simulation? What if “life” is just a high-res virtual reality? What if Christopher Nolan and his scriptwriters had it right in Inception? When we are dreaming, mostly we don’t know that we are dreaming. How do we know what we are living is not a dream? Our observational apparatus sits on consciousness, but in the epistemology of Science, we choose to ignore that fact conveniently. We focus on what we see, ignoring how is it that we see, who is it that sees, and how does she see. We equate measurement with Truth, forgetting that all measurement is dependent first on definition and instrumentation.

Is God simply a catch-all term for what we do not understand, a balancing term in our foolish quest to define the universe as an equation? Isn’t Science just statistical fitting of data into a pattern and we simply keep imagining patterns until new data makes the pattern not fit and then we go and imagine a new pattern. And we repeat that ad nauseam as if some day this process will end. And like I said, there are lot of balancing terms. Dark matter is 85% of all matter. 85% is the assumed balancing term? And we are okay with that?

Science is a very useful slave. Extremely, extremely, useful. Most things that provide our comfort (heated toilet seats!), safety (self-braking cruise control), convenience (online shopping), enjoyment (streaming TV, audio books) etc. are enabled by Science. Ergo, I love Science. Science is what is going to protect us in the age of Coronavirus. Vaccines. Virology. Science is our savior. But Science is also a culprit. Science is also what helped us increase food production to a level where we can sustain 8 billion people on this planet. Agriculture, enabled by Science, is what has enabled the virus like growth of humanity on this planet, which the planet may now be fighting back against. The Coronavirus might be nature’s antidote against the virus of humanity. Remember unintended consequences? Science is also what gave us nuclear weapons. But deterrence created by nuclear weapons also may be keeping war in check. So you see, it is impossible for us to be certain about root causes, interrelationships, unintended consequences, what is right, and hence proper responses to anything. Reality is a fractal. Once again, turtles all the way down.

Maybe God and Satan are the same entity. Maybe they are just ideas that some of us have agreed are opposite (like light and dark) and others of us have chosen to treat as fairy tales. And still others of us don’t give a rat’s ass. We just want sports to restart on TV! Given what we are saying here about the slippery notion of reality — that it is hard to know what if anything exists outside our own mind — it doesn’t even matter. Everything is a fairy tale. The problem is that we are ready to kill each other in the name of these fairy tales — the idea of God, nation, system of government. Science too, although no one has started killing others in the name of science. (Yet. One of my dearest friends is real close to it though. You know who you are, S! 😊)

Ugh. This observation just exploded. That is the problem. Language is not designed to have these sorts of conversations. Where are the Vulcans with their mind meld when you need them? The observations here have even started to collide into each other. This one has also started to sound like Observation 3. I need to start wrapping this shit down. I have been writing for two days. I have also started to cuss which I never do with you in real life. Um, in what we think of as real life. Let me try and land this god- and science-forsaken airplane.

These 6 observations are all the same. I could have simply said: We have no access to Truth. We swim in a sea of meaning of our own making.

And yet, act we must. Neither Science nor Religion will ever be the ultimate arbiter of Truth. There will be no ultimate arbiter of Truth. Each of us ultimately has to figure this shit out on our own. Science, and philosophy, and logic, and spirituality, and books, and meditation, and podcasts and blogposts, and peer-reviewed studies and Men of God can provide some guideposts on our journey, but ultimately we are naked and we have to take the leap of faith on our own. From incomplete information we have to act. There is 7.7 billion of us, give or take, each with a faulty apparatus, believing only our reading to be the Truth. That is our lot. But it is what is. It is from this place that we need to act and move forward.

We have no choice but to live life without having access to the whole truth. Our addiction to one pole of the duality (like truth, being right, etc.) is killing us. We are killing us with our stupidity. And we think of ourselves as supremely rational species. Enough with the intellectual arrogance. Our apparatus is faulty. We don’t know shit. We will never know shit. But loving each others seems like a no regret decision. It’s what religion says. It’s what science says. Can we just agree to that and start to build a better world? We can’t know the truth. But we can make agreements, until we are willing to change them. Can we just choose love? What does that even mean? How do we choose love? How do we put it into practice? What are the unintended consequences of choosing love? There we go again with our intellectual fucking arrogance and our moral bloody certitude. Can we just choose love? And figure out the details as we go!

I am willing to give it a shot. I will start now. To me, the first act of love is to stop Othering. I will stop othering everyone that I have ever othered, including in this piece, on the basis of their beliefs, their political or religious views, their blind devotion to science while ignoring the problem of epistemology, their condescension towards me because I do not believe in “their” God, who they voted for, what they eat, their materialism or any other -ism. I renounce all that right here and right now. I don’t need an alien invasion to band together with my brothers. I choose to end the othering inside of me. I choose every human being. I choose love. Even if you want to kill me because of what I believe (I can’t help what I believe because I am born into a species with faulty apparatus), read my lips, I choose you.

On the other side of this, what happens does not just depend on our technology, or on our institutions. Those will have a huge role to play, of course. But whether our civilization will survive and thrive or gun itself down, will depend only on one thing: our character.

On the other side of this, boys, let’s build a better world. We don’t need to gut this one down. But let’s do a nice remodel.

I love you 3000*.

Dad

* The boys and I have chosen to agree with the Marvel Cinematic Universe that 3000 is the largest number possible. It is greater than Infinity. Number theory can suck it.