Book Review: Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari.

Hegel's 'Philosophic history' envisions a Universal, rational and intelligent spirit that guides and shapes the course of history. By nature it is unknowable but it is good.He explains his methodology and its merits of this universal and dominant spirit over the other approaches, especially against the cultures that does not believe in the linearity of time and progress, with special reference to other German thinkers who were influenced by the ancient Hindu canons of his times [ Von Schlegel]. Spirit of the state and arriving at a universal truth, becomes important pre-requisites for a Hegelian Approach. 

Yuval Noah Harari's methodology of linking up all the world events and facts based on evolutionary principles and a linear time line in a lucid narrative style generates a free falling anxiety. Selective abstraction of voluminous facts, building a crescendo of tension and ending on a high note prophesy then becomes a performative art using science. Especially when he starts prophesying in the last chapters of Birth of a useless class and beginning of a new religion - Dataism. 'Big brothers and corporates are watching us and measuring all the human activity data we record in our smart phones and internet devices' - 'Surrender yourself completely to the new 'Bio Algorithms' - 'New evolutionary forces are in action'. Proposition without a valid methodology turns out in to a sensationalised mind numbing media slogan. Using the so called scientific principle to buttress a popular sentiment raises second thoughts. 

Oddly , the ancient Sumerian Super Hero, Gilgamesh [2000 BCE] was already two thirds Human and one third Divine. A true, 'Homo Deus' in construct.. He fails to upgrade himself successfully to a full Homo Deus status during his times. If he was born today, may be a song in YouTube or a lecture in podcast would have fixed his misery and elevated him to a full Homo Deus status.. 

----------------------------------------------------

The king who proclaimed that ‘History is rife with Hegel’s illegitimate children’, did not name his own child to be a prince. When history moved on there was not a need for a prince. - Translated from , Meenakshipuram Deivakumar Muthukumaraswamy , மைத்ரேயி மற்றும் பல கதைகள், 2014.

‘Dataism’ is one such new Hegelian child borne out of the labour and vigour from the honey pot of Evolutionary Champs. The technophobe old school psychiatrists tried to abort this foetus a decade ago, by calling it internet addiction disorder. The failed attempts has yielded a new child for the evolutionary champs to play with. Whether the champs would name it a prince and seek power or marry it to Spirituality champs to elevate it to its life mission of turning in to ‘Homo Deus’, time would tell.

Time for old slogans; ‘God is in Sky’, ‘God is in Humans’, ‘God is collective unconscious’, God is Dead’, ‘God is Alienation’, ‘God is power’, ‘God Is neuropeptide’, ‘God is Global warming’ , etc.. to rest for a while. One more new child has joined the list, ‘God is a Data’. So on and so forth, for story tellers.

---------------------------------------------------
For Humour in Syllogism : 

An e-book cover of a ‘non-fiction book ’ (Titled: ‘ Man God’) from an author (c. 2 years ago). The body is of human language, but the Logic is none. This is one of the first indisputable examples of art, and probably of religion, and of the ability of the human mind to imagine things that do not really exist. 

An ivory figurine of a ‘lion-man’ (or ‘lioness-woman’) from the Stadel Cave in Germany (c. 32,000 years ago). The body is human, but the head is leonine. This is one of the first indisputable examples of art, and probably of religion, and of the ability of the human mind to imagine things that do not really exist.

Cell Body and Dendrite

When the tree falls in the mirror neuron of a young medic it does not make much sound. One such moment was in the Kilpauk Medical College library dense silence jungles. Santiago Ramón y Cajal was one such towering Spanish father tree competing for attention with all the silences and the abstract thoughts of the Banyans of the Kilpauk medical college Campus. Every medical college and their tree counterparts share the similar storylines speaking volumes about the formative years of the young medics. 

How Ramón y Cajal’s legacy shaped the world’s to come is a feat in itself. Along with the the crops and plants that had value in the enriching the diversity champions life style, the tree model illustrations of ‘Santiago Ramón y Cajal ‘ was the most sought after all. The arborescent dendritic branches of ‘ Ramón y Cajal’ can be aptly referred to the ‘mirror trees’ as the arrangement mirrors the most efficient tree arrangements in a forest to intertwine and communicate with each other. The 'Mirror Neuron' which receives it name for mirroring the motor functions fails to capture the essence of the dendrites, that mirror the deep evolutionary designs of the nervous system. The art of branching that takes place in the lungs, vascular systems, kidneys and other organs do mirror the same essence but the branching models of the nervous tissue takes a special interest in keeping up the spirits of the trees. ‘Dendrite’ is the branching of a tree sounds as strong and clear as ‘ Vaginum’ is the floral sheath.

My personal bias is in remaining attracted to this dream of how the pre-morbid rowdy of a fellow can convert his angst to raise to the position of a father of modern neuro-anatomy is not limited by time. How far can the disaffected go with this pointlessness of the situation without the champions of social institutions?  How far the temples, hotels, churches and families are conducive to promote the healing spaces is what should reverberate perpetually...

 The single neuron minded theoreticians of the West who wield the authority by blinding themselves to the sounds, musics, emotions of the disaffected, present themselves with  a humongous gap that dictates the needs for its own remedies from the STEM [ Science, Engineering , Technology and Mathematics] industries and training industries of modern Post colonial Psychiatrists. 

Kafkaesque

Tyranny without a tyrant - 

Prisoner of own ego and being unable to delegate paperwork to others - 

success that comes with completion becomes pointless - 

Frustrating and disorientating amount of pointless paperwork

Bureaucracy of 20th Century Prague and Similar times and places.

Dreaming of nether castles

Ramayana dreams of Janamejaya castles
Krishna of Ayodhyas
Smokers of Pranayamas
Drinkers of Dhauti
Eaters of fasting
Oligophrenics of Multiple personalities
Schizophrenics of Advaitha
Honeybees of Ascetics
Blue Buddhas of Saraswathis
So On of So Vice Versas

அழகு செய்வார்

முற்ற முழு மணி பூணுக்கு பூண் வேண்டா 
யாரோ அழகுக்கு அழகு செய்வார்

Mathsa Vilasa Prahasana

The farce of a drunken science

-------------------------------

Relationships are forever trickier. Relationships with tricksters doesn't get any easy. Henry the eight gave a whole hearted attempt to explore the farce of marital relationships. He killed one out of six. The feat matching that of John Cadewell, he killed one out of twelve before propositioning Lithium as a gold standard for Bipolar mood swings. Henry only propositioned a lot of church money to his own government, an apple of his eye daughter Elizabeth and five hundred ships to appease his sea folly spirits. Relationship with real people cannot be the same as relationship with objects of science. Real people purr when you are nicer to them. Objects of science blur the conditions to be nicer to people.

In oligopoly the man who has relationship intimate with zero to one person, tends to thrust his view points on to others and constitutionalise the puranic ancient canons. In Polypoly the man who has far too many relationship trees hides his sexual affinities behind the scientific canons like evolution, linguistics, racial histories and would thrust the oligopoly constitutions on the willing subjects. 

If the hero wants a clinical claim to expedite matters to his advantage, he often turns to ICD and DSM to appease his mores. Autism is compatible with oligogamy ( monogamy or zero gamy) . ADHD is compatible with Openness to new novelty experiences. Personality disorder is compatible with finding a dominatrix mistress. Depressive disorder is compatible with learned helplessness with rich and powerful partners. Anarchic personality is compatible with Dissocial personality disorder. Antisocial personality is compatible with having the harem of partners. Manic personality has the art of assortative mating with honey bee like profilers. The learning disabled is too clever for these trouble and never moves away from his mom and the Carer. The Schizo and the deluded keep adding how many more virtues and vices could be added in this dimension. 

Medicaments can come to rescue the souls severed by excesses of unregulated passion. Except when it does not Bung up the bowels, retrograde ejaculate in to the bladder, make you a space cadet or a rocking star. Especially when the relationships trivialise abortions, extramarital relationships and in the process trivialises sex itself, there is little scope for phytoestrogens and psychotropics to rescue the glory. Psychotherapy is the key, I pray to thee... Lord Shiva, let you get a very old girl as your therapist, to avoid the lure of relationships and to hang on tight and to get in there to the zone of creativity, to recreate the holy order your house, away from the influence of masquerading politicians and movie stars. 

Let the spirits of Emma Darwin and Jenny Marx guide your being to a more restful place called Home, away from all the back breaking works of the world on.

Love Poem for A Wife - by A.K. Ramanujan

Love Poem for A Wife
----------------------

A poem by A.K. Ramanujan

Really what keeps us apart
at the end of years is unshared
childhood. You cannot, for instance,

meet my father. He is some years
dead. Neither can I meet yours:
he has lately lost his temper
and mellowed.

In the transverse midnight gossip
of cousins’ reunions among
brandy fumes, cashews and the Absences
of grandparents, you suddenly grow
nostalgic for my past and I
envy you your village dog-ride
and the mythology

of the sever crazy aunts.
You begin to recognize me
as I pass from ghost to real
and back again in the albums
of family rumours, in brothers’
anecdotes of how noisily
father bathed,

slapping soap on his back;
find sources for a familiar
sheep-mouth look in a sepia wedding
picture of father in a turban,
mother standing on her bare
splayed feet, silver rings
on her second toes;

and reduce the entire career
of my recent unique self
to the compulsion of some high
sentence in His Smilesian diary.
And your father, gone irrevocably
in age, after changing every day
your youth’s evenings,

he will acknowledge the wickedness
of no reminiscence: no, not
the burning end of the cigarette
in the balcony, pacing
to and fro as you came to the gate
late, after what you thought
was an innocent

date with a nice Muslim friend
who only hinted at touches.
Only two weeks ago, in Chicago,
you and your brother James started
one of you old drag-out fights
about where the bathroom was
in the backyard,

north or south of the well
next to the jackfruit tree
in your father’s father’s house
in Alleppey. Sister-in-law
and I were blank cut-outs
fitted to our respective
slots in a room

really nowhere as the two of you
got down to the floor t draw
blueprints of a house from memory
of everything, from newspapers
to the backs of envelopes
and road-maps of the United States
that happened

to flap in the other room
in a midnight wind: you wagered heirlooms
and husband’s earnings on what the Uncle in Kuwait
would say about the Bathroom
and the Well, and the dying,
by now dead,

tree next to it. Probably
only the Egyptians had it right:
their kings had sisters for queens
to continue the incests
of childhood into marriage.
or we should do as well-meaning
Hindus did.

betroth us before birth
forestalling separate horoscopes
and mother’s first periods,
and wed us in the oral cradle
and carry marriage back into
the namelessness of childhoods.