PROGRESS: WHAT USE?

     Imagine a world where your smile and laughter can be as genuine as your tears. Humans should be able to smile and laugh depending upon the degree of their happiness. What would happen? In such a world our synthetic smiles will cease to exist or we shall be able to smile only for some brief periods. Laughter will be a rare occurrence. In such a world, the efforts would have been more towards understanding why humans cannot be happy for long, and whether there is a solution to this conundrum. This shift in our effort would have made a tremendous difference in our definitions of progress and goals of progress. Progress would have meant more smiles per life.

     We have cut through mountains, converted forests into cities, reclaimed seas, changed the course of rivers, and harnessed the energy of sun. Humans are the unchallenged kings of the earth. We have been able to secure, comfort and adorn human life. In spite of all this we have not been able to make much progress in our mental state. We live a dull, mediocre and miserable life resulting from the frustration, guilt, bitterness, and regrets we bear. Our happiness is momentary and fulfillment is evasive. Of what use then is all the progress in the physical world, if that progress doesn’t transmit to our psychological world?

    Our progress reflects the achievement of science in fields varying from Cosmology to Psychology. Science has been doing its part by making our lives safe, secure, and comfortable. We have not been able to take advantage of the great strides in scientific knowledge of the world to improve our psychological well-being.

    The mandate to answer philosophical questions about life has always been seized by preachers such as: god men (including some priests), full-mystics (including some spiritual gurus), semi-mystics (including some self-help gurus) and politicians (including some social activists). They have been dictating answers on the basis of their self-interests, hunch and beliefs. The preachers have messed up everything. They have failed to improve our psychological well-being because they all love their beliefs and power, more than right knowledge.

    Hitherto, we have restricted the role of science to discover and invent. Modern scientific knowledge has matured to a stage where it commands a broader role. The time is ripe for science to take up philosophical questions and answer them.

YOLO: You only live once
     
      We only live once and the time available to us within this one life is limited. We can only live forward. There is no rewind or pause button to time. We can look back on our life spent with regrets but cannot go back. Life is precious and wonderful. We miss this opportunity to live because of our thoughtless existence. We waste our lives following beliefs & values handed down to us. Life which should have been an event to celebrate is passed on mundanely. We are so accustomed to the miserability and dullness that we have taken this as normal. We are ill at ease.

PROCEDURE

     Our miserability visible in the form of frustration, guilt, bitterness and regrets is symptom of a deeper disease. We have to go to the root of the disease. We live our lives by our values. Values are reference standards of what is good or not good, and what is important and not important. Our values emanate from our beliefs, and are in turn responsible for our goals.
     We have formed and absorbed many irrational beliefs because of the flaws in our thinking system. We will have to critically challenge our beliefs. Most of them are centuries old and have lost their relevance in light of modern scientific answers. We are carrying the wrong old city maps to find our path in modern cities. Much has changed after the maps were drawn. The maps need to be withdrawn. Foregoing values based on our beliefs, we must arrive at our own new set of values based on our own conclusions about what life really is.
     This book tries to logically explain what life is, based on facts without resorting to mysticism, mythology or religion. The aim is to arrive at conclusions of life based on right knowledge. These conclusions will give birth to a new set of values. We shall be asking questions absolutely necessary for finding the truth and coming to conclusions as to what human life is. I am not at all suggesting you to go into the deep Himalayan contemplation mode to find out some mystic truth which is not open to debate. The truth I am talking about is unprejudiced scientific facts about reality. They are enough to answer all the necessary questions about human life for arriving at our own conclusions – both in the material as well as the psychological sphere.

QUESTIONS:
                  “The formulation of a problem is often more essential than its solution, which may be merely a matter of mathematical or experimental skill” - Albert Einstein:

      There are four domains of knowledge where our beliefs lay. These four domains pose seven philosophical questions relevant for our understanding of what life really is. Answers to these seven questions can give us great insights about human life. These questions have been pondered over by human thinkers since time immemorial. But the answers to these were never available as clearly as today.

 Domain I: KNOWLEDGE
      - Question 1: What is right knowledge?
 
 Domain II: EXISTENCE
     -  Question 2: Where are we?
     -  Question 3: What are we?
     -  Question 4: Who are we?
     -  Question 5: Who am I?

 Domain III: EVENTS
       -   Question 6: How events occur?

 Domain IV: PURPOSE
       -   Question 7: What is life for?

      The acute curiosity to get answers to these basic questions made our ancestors speculate different hypothesis, beliefs and myths. Every culture made its own unique stories. The most entertaining and horrific attracted followers. Humans are curious for answers. Our human biases make us gullible to specious arguments. Even bad answers which are logically fallacious satisfy us due to our biases. Because, of this human fallacy the first question – What is right knowledge? – becomes most important.
     Once the premise of right knowledge is defined, we become capable to search answers to the question in the other three domains. If our premise of knowledge is wrong, our answers for all the other questions are sure to be wrong and thus misleading.

RATIONALITY: The Missed Evolution

     We hail ourselves as rational beings, but our rationality is only 'denim deep'. We are rational on the surface but inside, we are the same irrational beings that we have been for centuries. We need to be aware of this irrationality. Though our intellect has helped us discover new facts, our thinking pattern remains primitive. Rationality is the evolution we have missed - our intelligence has evolved but our thinking has failed to keep pace.Confusion and dissonance are bound to follow.  Every generation builds on the knowledge and refines the knowledge of the earlier generations. Rather than becoming a source of enlightenment, this information deluge is drowning us in confusion because we interpret and make sense of everything in the world through the distorted lens of our human biases and skewed perspectives. Our irrationality shapes our beliefs & values causing dissonance, miserability, wastage of resources and harm to life.

FACTS ARE BORING

        “If you make people think they are thinking they will love you, but if you really make them think, they will hate you” - Don Marquis

      When we talk of right knowledge it involves mathematics, reason and science. A novel, a story, a fiction, or a motivational book, make interesting reads – but reading and understanding facts needs an application of mind and thus needs some real thirst and “will” to know the truth. Without the thirst and will to know, facts are boring. This book answers the seven philosophical questions in the four domains through science, reason, mathematics and statistics. So, get ready for some number crunching.

PURPOSE OF THE BOOK
      The ultimate purpose of the book is not to supply answers for the above questions but to help the reader “think independently” and most importantly “think clearly”. With this independence and clarity, we can arrive at our authentic ‘values’ to follow.