A Very Short Introduction
Uploaded by
alok bajpaiA Very Short Introduction
Uploaded by
alok bajpaiA very short Introduction
Whether our Universe arose out of nothing from a big bang or it pinched off from another,it
has been around for 13.8 billion years with life hovering on planet earth for around 4 billion
years. Life in plants and animals evolved not only incrementally but diversely too under
genetic and epigenetic control as Science has brought us to understand. Nature and nurture
together create the palimpsest called life.
The interface between the two is the Nervous system that grew from simplest to complex (in
Homo Sapiens). The brain is the sentinel between environment and genes continuously
gating information.
The same brain in humans has surpassed the animal brain and strives to create a meaning
of life in a largely self- referential frame of reality. The search for reality has created a
complex network of knowledge over the last 5000 years, the sheer burden of it forced us
further to create disciplines of specialised knowledge- art, science,philosophy all are still in
search of reality. Technology on the other hand has always created comfort and ease for
physical existence but the deepest question about self,meaning and reality remain the same.
Languages often fall short in expressing the personal experiences and explorations while
Mathematics appears to be the nearest precise language in describing reality that too
partially but unfortunately it is not Universally understood.
But what is the reality from our perspective?
We inhabit planet earth and have peeped to some extent in space and to a large extent in
the biology and chemistry of life but the fundamentals are still missing.
The nature of reality with our current knowledge can be summarised as-
- The Universal has basic laws and few fundamentals governing the Physics
- The physics at a subatomic level is random and probable and deterministic at a
meso- and macro level.
- Uncertainty and randomness is allowed but within a larger finiteness.
- Chemistry gives rise to the diversity of nature.
- Biology as an offshoot of both Physics and Chemistry has a different scale and
process of life.
- Regulated by genes that provide a deterministic frame of life has randomness and
emergent phenomenon to continue evolution of species.
Human life exists in a mesoscopic scale and exhibits both determinism and
randomness.This comes from the Human brain. Caught in biology and physics like any other
species, it developed a quirk called THOUGHT. Rest of the Human history is a result of
thinking and its product- imagination.
The writing in this book is an attempt to connect the thought and imagination to the basic
physics and biology of brain and in the process explore the various dimensions of
Reality,both in ontology and epistemology.