Monday, July 21, 2014

Why not sonar?

It is an oft-stated maxim that great power incurs great responsibility. Parents should not get in the habit of beating their children but rather should strive patiently to educate them. We don't chop off a limb each time it gets scratched, and we don't lop off our heads just because we have a headache.

So I'm of the opinion that the Israeli Defense Force should be just that in relation to the Palestinians. It should focus on defense and shun offense. There simply is no justification for the number and percentage of civilian casualties that is being reported today. In war, it may be argued that the best defense is a good offense. But, nowadays, what war lasts for 50 years? And if a war does last that long, then someone should have long ago implemented a more effective solution than the military one.

Israel was and still is concerned about rockets fired from Palestinian territory. But now we see that the Iron Dome defense system has proved quite effective at minimizing that risk. Yes, definitely, the disruption to daily life from such rocket attacks is more than a small headache; but does it call for the deaths of more than 400 Palestinians of whom 70% are non-combatants, many of them women and children? I say No.

Israel is also concerned about tunnels being used for attacking communities on the border of Gaza. Given the circumstances, it is a legitimate concern. But what about sonar? Can it not function under land as well as water? Can sonar not detect underground caverns, construction, and movement? And are there no radar satellites that can detect underground construction? If the technology is not yet up to the standard required for countering the tunnels built by Hamas, then Israel and the world's well-wishers should rapidly bring it up to that standard.

Of course, neither sonar or radar is a long-term solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Nor is the so-called two-state solution. As Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar was wont to say, "The present age is not the age of large animals and small states." (Sarkar, Prabhat Ranjan (1984). "Socioeconomic Movements" published in A Few Problems Solved Part 9. Ananda Marga Publications.) The only long-term solution in the region is for Israelis and Palestinians to live side by side as fellow citizens of one and the same nation.

Sunday, July 13, 2014

Flipping the switch on human consciousness?

These are my observations after reading a Washington Post article on this subject.

It is remarkable to me how many definitions or interpretations of the word, consciousness, exist. Personally, to avoid confusion, I prefer not to use that word in the context that we find in the referenced article.

An on-off switch in the brain for awareness? I don't think it is as simple as that. Imagine a desktop computer. It is largely useless without its peripheral devices. For the sake of this analogy, let us just consider the computer in association with a single input-output device, a touch-screen monitor. 

Try to turn on either the computer or the monitor without first plugging it into an electrical outlet, and nothing at all will happen in respect to the unpowered device. 

Power up the monitor without powering up the computer; and you won't see any information processed by the computer, and you won't be able to send any commands to the computer. 

Power up the computer without powering up the monitor; and again you won't see any information processed by the computer, and you won't be able to send any commands to the computer via the monitor (although in this case the computer is able to process data). 

Finally, even when you power up both the computer and the monitor, still the monitor won't report any data processed by the computer and you won't be able to send commands to the computer if the monitor is not connected to the computer. 

As to the anecdotal event reported in the article – a primitive experiment at best – it is interesting, but we should not be hasty in drawing general conclusions from it. We don't know whether the same procedure would have a similar impact on other persons. But, even if it were to have the same impact on others, there could be several explanations for that impact. To extend the earlier analogy, here are three possibilities:

(1) The electrical impulses at that point in the brain could be putting either the 'computer' or the 'monitor' or both into sleep mode.

(2) The electrical impulses at that point in the brain could be disconnecting the monitor from the computer (without putting either of them into sleep mode). 

(3) The electrical impulses at that point in the brain could be disconnecting the monitor from the computer and also putting one or both of them into sleep mode (directly or indirectly).