Anil Rajput
Author Thinker Founder
Author
Cognitive Fitness
Pain Is Inevitable.
How to Alleviate It and Use It to Your Advantage.
Thinker
Upcoming Books
Old Wisdom & Fresh Ideas in a Coherent Whole
Entrepreneur
Neural Stone
Neural circuits create our desires, feelings, & behavior—stained with the possibility of self-destruction & deception—& once sculpted by socio-genetic forces, the wiring of neurons resists a reform for good, like a stone.
Environmental stimulation of the genes during the first 18 years of life sculpts our subjective reality, as well as physical and cognitive abilities, and as neural circuits can act like neural stones, many beliefs and behaviors—both individual and societal—can not be changed later in life with logic, reason, or efforts alone, causing unnecessary suffering in an already difficult life—it is easy to not start smoking than to stop it and a failed country cannot just copy what developed countries are doing and become a part of the first-world overnight, for example.
Children of today will shape tomorrow but having good genes is not enough. Excellence needs to be developed by exposing the body and mind of a child to nutrition, wisdom, challenges, and other constructive things, not coddling or indoctrination. However, formal education does virtually nothing to develop the ability to think, as parents are busy putting food on the table. Furthermore, elites and ideologues shape social systems and popular ideas, and the best of all is either not on their minds or proposed solutions are not sophisticated enough.
It is our primary duty to install awareness of the complexity and cognitive competence in children's brains, not idiocy or mediocrity so that a child can learn to thrive later in life, and we can confront complex challenges collectively too, to the best of our genetic abilities.
Neural Stone aims to suggest new pragmatic and heuristic ideas and solutions that are designed to deal with socio-genetic complexity in space-time, to minimize and manage problems faced by living things and the pain attached to them.
www.neuralstone.com
Soft Stream
Why Another Application?
Different teams use several software apps and tools for product development and hire unnecessarily, raising costs for companies, and the idea of Soft Stream is to integrate processes, tools, applications, automation, and AI into one solution, in a cost-effective and efficient manner.
Articles
About Anil
Contact
Email: contact@anilrajput.com
Copyright © 2023 Anil Rajput
All Rights Reserved
New & Notable—Sep 2019
Amazon Editor's Picks—Oct 2019
Best of the Month—Feb 2020
Fitness & Cognition
Fitness usually means physical fitness—for us, in the modern world—or reproductive success—survival of the fittest, in biology—but now that physical fitness requires conscious cognitive efforts too and many take their own lives before leaving their genetic copies behind, one may wonder when cognitive fitness and its complexity will be included in the discussion of fitness, so that not only we can be physically fit and survive but succeed too by making the best use of our intellect.
Simple problems of life can be solved by other brains which are less advanced than ours and we can think and do that which is complex. However, this ability to deal with the complexity is itself complicated and in general, many human experiences and behaviors—nihilism, suffering without any apparent reason, medical conditions because of addictions and sedentary lifestyle, drug overdose deaths, and suicides, for example—are unlikely to be found in other organisms.
Life forms that move in space-time need to have fit bodies to survive and reproduce but we use our minds more than our bodies and while primal neural features are more or less shared among all animals, our higher-order thinking separates us from the rest. Our thinking is the latest and most advanced ability in the evolution of the brain and with mind-boggling capabilities, it has weaknesses too, leading to the possibility of collective or personal harm and the stunning reversal of fundamental longing to live and procreate in many cases. Moreover, the intellect of the human brain is largely untapped and not all of us use it to its maximum. In general, it is the gene-environment interaction that can activate a genetic ability and without trying to break the subjective boundaries regularly, the potential of all the available intellectual—or physical—traits is likely to go to waste and the power of thinking, if not directed toward something good, can be our own worst enemy.
Survival and reproduction are the two primary goals of all life and humans have additional desires, both good and evil. What is desirable and what is not, is not set in stone yet and differences in our definitions of right and wrong and ambiguities in our likes and dislikes, both subjective and social, result in secondary motivations and problems which are unique to us.
Thinking can control itself and the rest of the elements of the mind—desires, emotions, and behaviors, for instance—and it can be employed to define good and bad, stop self-destruction or mediocrity, and aim high and succeed, as far as it is possible. Therefore, the fitness of our higher-order thinking—cognitive fitness—must be included in the discussion of fitness.
Our motivation for action can be good—survive and reproduce, for example—or hedonistic—engage in the pursuit of pleasure only—but what feels good can be bad—eating junk food, a sedentary lifestyle, and substance abuse for instance—and what feels bad can actually be good—eating healthy food, exercise or self-control, for example—and still, emotions or hedonism can easily overshadow our intellect and force us to engage in irrational or self-destructive behavior. In addition, why we want or like what we want or like and how much of it is enough, is not always wise, obvious, or conscious, and therefore, managing motivations, emotions, and actions with cognition—to define and defend the good—is a core feature of cognitive fitness.
Physical and psychological fitness can complement each other. Leaving aside genetic and environmental factors which are beyond our direct conscious cognitive control, taking care of physical fitness is straightforward—exercise, eat a healthy diet, maintain a healthy weight, and improve posture. Our ancestors wandered much of the day to find food and were physically fit by default but now we can eat unhealthy processed food all day sitting on our couch. The body is still the same, as it has not evolved in the last thousands of years and the huge mismatch between the body and the current environment has turned a social solution—easily available food—into a problem—miserable medical conditions and premature deaths because of eating too much and moving too little. The nervous system has also not evolved recently and the mismatch between the mind and the modern environment is extremely complex, causing even more sophisticated social and personal problems. Intellectual interventions are now needed to manage the hidden conflict between genes and the environment and cognitive fitness can facilitate that.
Healthy eating and physical activity can prevent several chronic conditions and cognitive fitness can help in the execution of the steps needed for physical fitness. However, eating a healthy diet or exercising is usually not enough to be fit physically because stress, suffering, substance abuse, and other convoluted things harm our health slowly and silently but dealing with emotions or addictions can be utterly complex. Cognitive fitness can minimize and manage stress—or other detrimental or dismal states—and associated negative side effects on health. However, cognitive fitness can address the overall complexity of life, and therefore, it can get extremely convoluted than its counterpart—physical fitness.
Individual survival depends on the safety of a society, which is usually taken for granted, and hence societal fitness—fitness of ideas floating in a social institution—is also critical, especially when the functional societies keep falling with time or some disappear altogether and social systems have also started to pollute our planet, armed with thinking and its products—science and technology.
Thinking is both conscious and subconscious. A mind can generate only a few new functional ideas in a lifetime and thinking has a huge historical influence both genetic and social. As a result, the fitness of collective thinking, novel and primitive, self-aware and subliminal, matters for the future of humanity. We need to find ways to deal with the social and cortical complexity and protect people and working societies from recurrent external or self-destruction and carefully and collectively advance living systems by using our intellect at its best and keeping track of changes and lessons across extremely large biological and social times.
God Is Not One. God Was Never Dead.
Meaning of God and Religion
Why is the idea that all gods and religions are the same and one is extremely dangerous and dumb?
Why god is not one and why all gods are not the same or good?
Why all religions cannot be considered equal or wise?
Why some religious ideas are ideological poison, and why authentic religions must exist to provide an antidote?
Is God real and what is reality?
What is the meaning of the word "god" anyway and how many meanings are there; and as time moves forward, can these meanings remain the same for one person or society?
God of One or Many
Why do some religions—developed and refined over thousands of years by endless known or unknown people—can contain essential philosophical wisdom but not the ideology of one mind in one lifetime?
Why the ability of the nervous system to perceive, encode, store, and retrieve information is bounded and why one person can never come up with all the physics or philosophy?
Why ideas of only one person should never be identified as a religion?
Can evil be religious too?
God and Stories
Why do unreal stories seem real and why some religions are encapsulated in stories?
What do gods of religious stories have in common with heroes of modern movies?
God and Archetype
Why new gods are born when old ones die and why new gods may not be as sophisticated as old archetypal gods?
Can an archetypal god take an avatar?
How the death of an archetypal god can result in real humans becoming gods and killing millions of people, and how in the future most of us can be wiped out when fake religions or the absence of authentic religions coexist with technology?
God and Unknowable
Why do we need language, and how working with other biological systems, words, and vision can reduce the complexity of nature with illusions and computational shortcuts?
Why meaning of a word is largely subjective and subject to change?
Do we have perceptions, thoughts, and languages to comprehend the unknowable or are we bounded by the limits of biological systems?
God and Humans as God
Why real humans of the past or present should never be worshipped and should never be elevated to a god?
Why those who can sing, dance, act, and play are new gods of billions, and what does it tell us about the most popular ideas?
God and Goal
Why can there be no life without an aim?
How an aim creates or changes the subjective interpretation of reality?
How can a goal become a personal god?
Why can a living thing never be an atheist?
God and Science
Science may have killed old gods for many but why does science can not answer moral questions or define philosophy?
Why tools of science are not sophisticated enough to completely unravel chaotic and other extremely complex systems?
Even with presumed superiority over all other things—including god—why science and technology cannot stop all the death and disease?
Why social wisdom cannot be found in a few decades or by science in a laboratory but only in thousands of years of practical living and learning?
Is it possible to make sense of both science and (real) religion?
Why do we have settled for physics but not for philosophy?
Why is there so much overconfidence and narcissism in the scientific community?
Why is science virtually absent in failed nations, and why is a functional society a prerequisite for scientific and technological development?
Why science cannot fix all dysfunctional societies?
How is science now used as a political tool and mass manipulation to gain and hold power?
How science created chaotic confusion and nihilism and exacerbated existentialism?
How to make sense of what is going on and where we are?
God and Systems
How did biological systems come up with the concept of god?
How do social systems carry and change definitions of god over time?
How technical systems are influencing our opinion of god?
Other Questions
Who to trust in the confusing war of old and new gods and why it matters?
What is reality and if A creates B then can A be more real than B?
Can there be a hierarchy of frameworks, philosophies, or even gods?
Why do religions (nations and organizations too) have symbols?
Can We Explain & Envision All?
What is the meaning of the word "reality" and is it as confusing as the word "god"?
Does an utterly complex word like reality (or god) mean the same to all?
Is experienced reality only objective, subjective, or a mix of both?
Are there no facts but only interpretations, as Nietzsche suggested?
Can science define reality with mathematical formulae and can technology simulate reality in its entirety?
What visual perception can reveal about reality?
Can reality be the same and different, for different people, at the same time?
Does our understanding of reality remain the same throughout life?
Can subjective interpretation of reality change with a flick of the switch?
Why do we have two distinct hemispheres in our brains, instead of just one?
Why we cannot deal with complex anomalies easily that shake our subjective understanding of reality completely?
Is science bounded by biological systems?
Why we can predict the motion of the earth and the sun with great accuracy, can comment on stars, galaxies, black holes, and the big bang but cannot stop all the biological death and disease?
Why unifying Newtonian and Quantum Mechanics cannot explain everything?
Given that information is infinite in the universe, why in some cases infinite can become finite but not in others, and can finite become infinite?
How do biological systems deal with infinite information that is known, unknown, and unknowable?
What is the difference between an interface and its implementation?
Why coming up with mathematical formulae for natural forces—gravitational, electric, and magnetic, for example—can expose the interfaces of reality but not their implementations?
With so much science and technology, why do we still have no clue about consciousness?
Do we have biological perceptions to experience all in this universe and beyond?
If we cannot perceive all, can we imagine all with our biological imagination, or it is largely bounded by our ability to take physical action?
Even if we can know all one day, can we handle it or would it even matter?
Why suffering seems real and why scientific fats and formulae cannot erase all the pain?
When Solutions Become the Problem
How do functional social systems hide the underlying complexity and slowly kill wisdom?
How social simplicity amplifies naivety and narcissism and brings back the chaos, sooner or later?
How biological illusions and heuristics—which let us function—can become our enemy?
Why sophisticated social solutions—easily available food and social security, for example—have turned into complex problems like premature death and diseases because of obesity and substance abuse?
Why social systems are a thousand times more complex that all the science and modern technical systems combined and why great scientists and engineers are usually not great philosophers?
Why pain has produced great thinkers and philosophers?
Why it is easier to disrupt a complex functional system than to design, develop, and maintain it?
How do we learn and why is it faster to learn to drive a car but not a ship or a plane and why it is so hard to learn lessons related to societal decay?
Why number of variables matter and why in some cases infinite can become finite but not in others?
After the fall of the British Empire, why the US is now on the path of self-destruction?
How do politicians and ideologues use inherent inequality and brutality of biology to gain power and destruct relatively functional and fair nations?
Why ideas that appear noble can actually be naive or deceptive and how such ideas have already killed millions of people?
Why do many elites who tell us that climate change is an existential threat actually fly in private jets and live in luxury?
What is gene-environment interaction and how is known created from the infinite unknown and unknowable?
Why does success interpret reality in an incomplete way and why suffering can expose subjective limits and develop wisdom?
What are cognitive illusions of understanding and skill, among others, and how do they inflict individual and institutional pain?
With so much political propaganda in schools and universities, why there is no focus on the complexity of social systems?
If the first principles approach is used to build and maintain complex technical systems, can we use the same strategy for the survival of society?
How to settle the war ideas—both biological and intellectual?
How to make sense of the beauty and brutality of biological life and how to distribute resources fairly that are needed to live?
What separates humans from the rest of the animals and why animal instincts are much more powerful than intellect?
How do hierarchies and territories of primates influence the borders of modern nations and the pursuit of power by elites?
How do ideas evolve and how sometimes one person can influence millions of minds and unleash horror on nonbelievers?
How to use human cognition to minimize and manage the complexity and chaos and how to come up with unified ideas that transcend domains and nations in space-time?
Can we ever be able to not destruct what we already have or the cycles of social death and birth continue, until the end of time?
Origins of Our Brilliance & Blunders
Information Processing Neurons
How do neurons of our brains process infinite information?
How does a set of neurons working together form a neural circuit and appear to specialize in a specific task—action, cognition, emotion, motivation, perception, and language, for example?
What are the strengths and weaknesses of neural circuits?
What are the similarities and differences between neural and electrical circuits?
Why is the nervous system the most complex and mysterious structure known to itself?
Neural Stones
How do neurons wire together and why is this interconnectedness breathtakingly complex?
Once sculpted, why does neural wiring resist a change or can never be changed?
Why do we have two hemispheres in our brains, not just one?
Why the brain is not designed at once but over extremely long spans of biological time?
Why do ancient animal features still exist in our brains, along with novel cortical circuits that only humans possess?
Why the hard-to-change neural wiring is the root cause of most of the avoidable problems that we face today?
Why do beliefs and behaviors become a part of the neural hardware that cannot be replaced like a malfunctioning part of a system and cannot be uninstalled like an unwanted app?
Why thinking or generating new ideas is extremely difficult but believing is easy?
How does the brain create feelings or moods from information and how do emotional circuits manipulate motivation and cause destruction?
How do neural circuits learn and why learning is limited?
Different Neural Stones Competing for Dominance
How do some neural circuits promote biological behavior whereas others are ideological and how do socio-genetic things continue to live across tens or thousands of generations, even when they should disappear for the good of all?
What is gene-environment interaction and how it affects neural sculpting?
Why do stupid ideas keep living inside our heads and why evil does not die?
Why what we desire, like, and hate is not always obvious and why it matters?
Even when some neural circuits of our brains allow for abstract thinking, why do primal animal circuits still largely control us?
Why we are both animal and human and why animal circuits are more powerful than our hider-order thinking circuits?
Why neural emotional feedback is now deeply flawed for the modern social environment?
Why some ancient circuits cannot be removed, even if we do not need them today?
How our behavior today is still influenced by what our ancestors did thousands or millions of years ago?
How environment changes the aim and action of neural circuits?
How do nutritional and social factors affect the function of the nervous system?
How do media, politics, economics, education, and other social aspects of yesterday, today, and imagined future shape our neural hardware?
How cognitive illusions of neural circuits can delude us into thinking, feeling, and doing destructive and delusional things?
Why neural plasticity is overrated for day-to-day life?
Why the definition of personal right and wrong is never entirely personal?
Problems Faced by Individuals Because of the Believing and Rigid Nature of Neural Circuits
How subjective reality is constructed (in part) and influenced by the exposure of genes to the environment?
Why personal interpretation of existence is hard to change, and how can anomalies create the possibilities of untold horrors?
Why each brain is unique and why one mind cannot read another?
Why first 18 years of life matter the most for physical and neural growth and the acquisition of skills?
Why many genetic abilities can only be developed at the right time in the biological development stages but not after?
Knowing that smoking is harmful to our health and can cause cancer, why does one start it anyway, and once started why it is not easy to stop?
Why some of the best minds in physics and psychology—Albert Einstein and Carl Jung, for example—used to smoke?
Why thinking is exceptionally difficult and why being a philosophical robot is easy?
Why knowing the harm associated with some belief or behavior is not enough to stop it?
Why do teenagers take part in dangerous behavior too often?
Why we cannot convince a suicide bomber that there are no 72 virgins waiting for him in heaven?
Why it is best to not start a bad behavior and why do bad habits resist good behavior?
Why even the best minds are influenced by political propaganda and why trait openness can become a curse?
Families and Common Goals of Different Minds
How does the uniqueness of the nervous system create friction in families?
How is politics destroying families?
Why do the ideas of others seem like ideas of our own?
How are schools used for the indoctrination of young minds and familial destruction?
Why is it now noble to be a corporate slave but not have a kid?
Societal Challenges and Opinions on Good and Evil
With as many possible opinions of right and wrong as there are minds, and still, billions blindly copying one or a few minds, how to deal with the ongoing war of ideas—which eventually leads to the horrors of actual and continual warfare, and now the possibility of annihilation by nuclear and biological technologies?
Why most of the popular ideas are unsophisticated and how are they causing unnecessary harm?
Why is mediocrity problematic, not population, and how can we mine neural diamonds?
How can the idiotic ideology of one propagandist be blindly followed by billions?
Why do millions of men and women just do what they are told and still wear clothes suggested by one man who lived hundreds of years ago?
Why the ability to think and use thinking to correct and control itself is not developed in schools?
How do neural stones facilitate individual, familial, and social destruction?
Why the third world cannot be converted into the first world in a few years and how do functional states become dysfunctional or disappear altogether?
Why once carved, a great part of neural-social-sculpting can never be changed?
Minimizing and Managing Problems and the Pain Attached to Them
Why can many problems—individual, familial, and social—only be prevented not solved and how such prevention can be done?
What matters and what to do when all the genetic and materialistic resources can never be distributed equally?
How to find the common ground in the sea of neural differences?
When Liking Overrules Cognition
Why do we need emotions and how they are related to other features of biology?
How do laws of liking rule us all, one way or another?
Are emotions always accurate?
Why emotions can easily influence behavior?
Why do we want what we want?
Why happiness as a goal can slowly kill us?
Why what feels good can be bad and why what feels bad can be good?
Why goal should be good, not just good emotions?
Why do we like drugs, alcohol, smoking, social media, sports, fiction, movies, music, dance, beauty, and other usual things?
What is habituation and why does happiness habituate?
Why do so many celebrities use drugs for happiness?
Can we like something that does not make any sense?
How do corporations use psychological conditioning to manipulate our desires and feelings for profit?
Ambiguous & Addictive Hierarchies of Power
Why do we want and like power?
Why democracy is far from perfect and why do we need a better political system?
Why democracy can resemble dictatorship, autocracy, or oligarchy?
Why democracy usually elects kings and queens, not representatives of the people?
How do political donors control the democratic government, not the people?
Why Marxism is so popular and why it is deceptive?
Why the latest variants of Marxism—critical race theory, diversity, equity, inclusion, and inequality, among others—are also misleading?
Why do we hear about Hitler too often but not that much about Mao and Stalin, who killed millions more than Hitler?
How do politicians exploit the inevitable suffering of life?
How can naive changes cause social destruction, even if intentions are noble?
How modern hierarchies of humans are related to primate hierarchies?
Are hierarchies inevitable or we can erase them or make them fair?
Are new hierarchies created by science and technology always authentic?
How do I live in a world where hierarchies are unfair?
Why Barack Hussein Obama does not live in a black neighborhood and why do many elite climate activists fly in private jets?
Why Taliban can be on Twitter but not Trump?
When the left is right and when the right is right and why do we need both, but with wisdom?
How do elites control the information?
When Emotion Becomes Motivation
Why having sex feels good?
Why do many countries in the West celebrate pride month with pride parades and why sex has become a new religion for many?
How political propaganda and social media are leading to the sexual mutilation of children in the West?
What we are teachings our kids about sex?
Is sexual hedonism a great goal?
What is romantic love and what is falling in love?
Why does love often turn into hate?
Why honeymoon does not last forever?
What is the end goal of sexual love or pleasure?
What is the difference between emotion and motivation?
Why marriage?
How political propaganda is causing the disintegration of families?
Why do many people have just one kid and why do some none?
Why working in a corporation is considered superior to having children and whose idea is it anyway?
Why employees making babies is not profitable for companies and why abortions are encouraged by many organizations?
Why population collapse is coming in many developed nations and how do politicians and ideologues convince or indirectly force people to not have kids?
Why do we like power and what it has to do with reproduction?
How modern objects of desire are related to making babies?
Why do men like the hourglass figure of women and why do women like V shape bodies of men?
Are beauty and reproductive biological fitness related?
How do companies use psychological conditioning, aimed at sex, to sell non-sexual things?
Why sex is an extremely powerful force?
For us, why natural selection is actually sexual selection exercised by females?
How do male and female hierarchies of humans work?
Why it takes 18 years for the physical and neural growth of a human to stop and many more years to mature and why maximizing the available genetic potential is virtually a full-time job of one parent?
How can we reduce the cost of education and can kids learn new cognitive skills on their own, once they learn to read and write?
How technology and the modern social environment are further complicating already ambiguous sexual matters of life?
Unsettling Beauty & Brutality of Being
Why depression and anxiety are so common now?
Why there can be multiple known and unknown factors for depression and anxiety?
What is the reproducibility crisis and why do soft sciences (like psychology) are usually not reproducible?
Why the most prescribed drug in brain science—SSRIs—is now discredited?
Why SSRIs became so popular in the West and why such quick fixes do not always work?
How do pharmaceutical companies profit from the misery of people and how do companies create artificial misery?
Why CBT is incomplete and why along with cognition and behavior, we should also address motivation, emotion, and perception, among others, and how all are supposed to work together, not in isolation?
Why we cannot rely only on psychologists for mental health or cognitive fitness?
Can we trust all psychologists or all scientific literature in psychology?
Why it is never easy to change the chemical balance in the brain by the neurotransmitters related drugs?
Why politics is now destroying psychology and other domains of social sciences and even hard sciences?
How do ideologues control grants for studies and why so many studies are complete fraud in humanities and social sciences?
What do science and politics have to do with depression and anxiety?
How does gene-environment interaction effects depression and anxiety?
Why the most popular psychologist of today, Jordan Peterson, almost died after taking an anxiety drug, and why we should almost always avoid prescribed drugs for usual depression, anxiety, and other similar issues?
If there are no actual medical conditions, why addressing the complexity of the brain and nature is a better strategy for minimizing and managing the inevitable suffering of life, than drugs?
Why medical science cannot stop all the deaths and diseases and in general, why wisdom is the best drug to deal with depression and anxiety?
Why other animals do not die by suicide but we do?
Why do we desire what we desire and why our desires are not always authentic?
Why wise always have lived the simplest life and how unnecessary desires can lead to avoidable suffering?
Why do we like what we like and why what we like can actually be bad for us?
Why alcohol, smoking, drugs, social media abuse, and so on, are not the answer to our problems but just distractions or deceptions?
How modern social environment of concrete and computers is influencing our mental states?
Education or Indoctrination
Why do schools fail to protect kids from drugs, alcohol, smoking, social media abuse, and political propaganda, among other destructive things?
In a democracy, can we trust the corrupt establishment to come up with subjects, teachers, books, and teaching methods in schools?
How do politicians and ideologues indoctrinate kids in schools for power?
Why first 18 years matter the most for an individual?
Why many genetic features can be developed only during the first 18 years of life but not after that?
We cannot change our society and schools but can we teach our kids what is missing in schools and how?
Knowing the risks involved with self-destructive behavior, why do kids do them anyway?
Why being a parent and being a friend are completely different roles and why parents should not be friends with their kids?
Why too much love and lack of cognitive challenges is not good for children?
Why kids are addicted to social media and other things and how families can deal with it?
How do corporations use psychological manipulation of young minds for profit and how to stop such abuse?
The Fallacy of Popular Ideas
We live in hierarchies of power and philosophy and a few hold most of the political power and create philosophical ideas, and because neural circuits can act like neural stones, heavily sculpted by the gene-environment interaction in the early years of brain development and resistant to change later in life, many ancient and absurd ideas do not die, whereas some sophisticated ideas are put to death by the deceptive superiority of new ideas. For example, a billion blindly believe the ideology of one man who lived a long time ago and many still die or kill for his ideology, and as the god of one man is worshipped, science killed other old sophisticated gods and has become a new god. And even when science cannot prevent all death and disease, cannot predict chaotic and complex systems, and cannot explain everything, science still continues to be a new and superior religion.
The prefrontal cortex, which is largely responsible for our higher-order thinking and its ideas, is the evolutionary extension of the motor cortex and as life evolved, new circuits were added on top of old ones. Primal circuits are still with us along with new ones, we are animals and also humans, and in evolution, the action came first and human cognition later. We think with action—a baby can act and think without developed spoken language—and we also think in abstractions and we can act in our imagination, without acting out in the real world. Given the evolutionary mix of ancient and novel neural circuits in our brains, some ideas are purely biological and some emerge from our sophisticated cognition but this mix can be extremely troubling. For example, the desire to live and the pursuit of power are purely biological, as survival and reproduction define life and more power can facilitate both. However, armed with executive cognitive functions, humans developed science, technology, and philosophy that created new ideas and new hierarchies of power for us to chase, and also the possibility of ideological suicide or genocide that is unique to us and a genetic gift of cognition also becomes a curse—animals do not die by suicides and they kill only for biological reasons.
Some ideas can be helpful and some are evil. God can be an idea and an idea can be a god and not all ideas are wise. We need to address both the biological and cognitive origins of ideas and also the fallout of the brand-new creations of our thinking—science and applied science—and if we do not separate good from evil, and complexity from simplicity, we will keep fighting the same ideological wars and now we have nuclear and biological weapons too. A tiny virus disrupted the world order recently and a highly transmissible and deadly biological weapon can wipe most of us out. We may have created new but the practical use of new is still controlled largely by the old genetic features that create desire and emotion, among other things. Science and engineering gave rise to a new hierarchy of social media likes—also views, comments, subscribers, shares, reviews, ranks, and so on—but liking is still a biological feature and what we do with the rest of destructive technology is also governed by both animal instincts and modern ideas.
Ideas need thinking of the nervous system but the ability to think can be disrupted by a tiny error in gene-environment interaction, and unfortunately, underlying biological, social, and natural complexity is largely ignored by the mainstream ideas of intellectuals and elites. Instead of addressing actual multidimensional complexity, Marxism (and its variants—equity, diversity, inclusion, identity, racism, and others) and sexual hedonism, among others, are now the novel obsessions of those who have greater control over information and ideas. However, inequality is inherent in biology and it has many faces, and all of us can never have the exact same genes, environment, and resources. Marxists try to divide people into oppressor vs oppressed groups, on the basis of money, race, sex, or any other thing and pretend to represent oppressed groups but end result is a divided population, powerful politicians, and even millions dead. It is not that living things do not suffer but proposed Marxist solutions do not even scratch the surface of genetic and social complexity. Inequality did not start with money and Karl Marx and there is much more to this than meets the eye. The wise have always lived a simple life and not all materialistic things matter. Objects of desires are endless and running on a hedonic treadmill cannot be stopped by power, money, drugs, sex, and the rest. Hedonism of any kind cannot work in long run as both positive and negative emotions will always be an integral part of the biological framework of feedback. There are wise ways to manage greed and suffering and the limitations of other popular political ideas in the West—which slowly propagate around the world—are also obvious as soon as chaos and complexity are taken into account.
Along with Marxism, democracy is also a new idea; and in the US, where representative democracy is practiced and free speech is protected by The First Amendment, Donald Trump and Jordan Peterson are banned from Twitter but not Taliban. Ideologues and organizations donate money to politicians, collectivity control information with censorship, spread political propaganda with money, media, and marketing, and get paybacks in various forms, including enacting new laws to protect tech companies from old laws that allow free speech, and this is how democracy usually works now. Electing a king or queen does not mean the death of dictatorship and ideological online censorship is just one recent example of the bizarre game of ideas and power, going on for millions of years and not all ideas can be expressed in words.
With democracy and Marxism, islamic ideas rule a large part of the world too but asking questions about them is punishable by death in most nations governed by such ideas and even in most of the presumed free countries, such criticism is not allowed and is punishable by law, as we are free to denounce other ideas. Politically speaking, in general, in the mix of Marxist and democratic ideas, most in supposedly oppressed groups are good people and hence shielded from state-sponsored crackdowns but the rights of the rest can be violated because most of them are evil. There are endless other old and new political ideas as well and such primary centers of power control the rest of the popular ideas.
As science and technology created brand new things that old religions could not, science soon became the new creator and replaced old gods. However, with time, science and technology also started to destroy things and changed the environment so fast in the evolutionary time that our genes and collective unconscious are still struggling to make sense of. To prevent further destruction, we need to make the limits of both science and ideas explicit and explain why both are different domains that can coexist and cannot replace each other and why both are needed.
We need to make it obvious that the prediction power of science is only for simpler systems, why science starts to fail to predict chaotic and complex systems, and why science can never know or explain everything. We must also separate true religions from fake ones and wisdom from political propaganda. Just as biological systems take millions of years to evolve, wisdom to keep social systems functional also develops slowly during thousands of years of practical living and such wisdom can not be found in a scientific laboratory or by one person—all the scientists and engineers cannot fix all the dysfunctional social systems after all, no matter how much narcissism is displayed. We need to address that designing, developing, and maintaining complex systems is extremely hard but destruction is easy, and why genetic and social systems are a thousand times more complex than all the science and technology combined.
Life and nature are not binary systems and cannot be explained by just science or philosophy alone. There is a need to unify different domains of science, applied science, and art in a pragmatic manner and as ideas do not exist independently but are genetically designed to work with other elements of the biological framework, the focus should also be on how desires, feelings, behaviors, thinking, and other living systems are related. Furthermore, genetic and social systems do not remain constant but evolve in space-time and the concealed biological origins, interconnectedness, and struggle of wanting and liking—to take control of our behavior—must be included in the discussion too. Trying to address eternal problems of life by focusing only on one domain—in isolation and in a limited span of space-time—and ignoring the rest of the known, unknown, unknowable, and uncontrollable is unwise.
Suffering Unnecessarily with Illusions
Among other magical things, the human brain can perceive, process, store, and retrieve information—to act for an aim or a desire—but the information in the universe is infinite and the brain is finite … and the forces of the universe are also not always controllable, predictable, and knowable. Dealing with infinite information in the uncertainty and mystery is an extremely complex computational problem and the brain in part solves it by focusing on the finite and interpreting the reality at a specific scale of space-time, using a number of computational tricks and short-cuts—to survive and reproduce, and for additional desires.
As the brain interacts with the impenetrable interfaces of reality, perfection is elusive but pragmatism is possible, with the possibilities of errors and inevitability of limits. Some errors can be obvious but when an error appears real or that which is incomplete seems complete, it becomes an illusion, and all that our brains can perceive, think, desire, and feel are subject to limits, errors, and illusions.
Illusions can help us to function in the world but they can also do the opposite and such destructive deceptions can be called delusions. One may argue that all we can perceive, think, or feel is an illusion but whatever helps in creating a living experience is the only part of reality one may ever encounter and even if it is an illusion, there is nothing more real than that for a living thing. The aim here is not to self-destruct or suffer because of delusions and illusions are inevitable.
Delusions of desires, thoughts, and emotions are hard to come to terms with but visual illusions can easily reveal the computational deceptions of the brain. For example, the horizontal bar in the image below has the same shade of gray from left to right but we do not see it that way.
Our brains are primarily organized around vision and the one 3D image that we see is created from the two 2D upside-down images, formed in each of our eyes, with a blind spot in each of them, and as there are no photoreceptor cells at blind spots—where the optic nerve leaves retina—objectively we should see two uniform patches of some color but we do not. The conversion from two 2D images to one 3D image is mindbogglingly complicated and lightning-fast but this magic can be misleading and it is always incomplete.
While converting two 2D upside images to one 3D image, our brains are free to do whatever they can, to manage and make sense of the infinite information available in the universe, in a breathtakingly complicated manner—all the atoms in a fruit become just one object which we can eat, for example. The fast and pragmatic interpretation of the information—to assign practical purpose or meaning to the objects or information in the world so that we can live—can never be perfect all the time, given the perceptual and processing limits of the nervous system and meaning is given preference over objectivity, speed over accuracy, and something which is unreal may appear real and incomplete may seem complete.
We can see food, people, predators, tools, and other objects in the landscape so that we can eat and survive but we cannot see all the cells, molecules, atoms, or subatomic particles in an apple and we cannot see the edge of the universe if any. Resolution of what we can see can be enhanced and visual perception can be extended across the entire electromagnetic spectrum with the help of technology but what is beyond biological perceptions and modern engineering is unknowable and technology is created by the biological brains. The rest of the limits of the brain are also obvious as one person cannot memorize all the books in the world, cannot learn all the possible physical and cognitive skills, cannot hear all the frequencies, cannot experience all the possible experiences, and cannot multiply two extremely big numbers without using a paper and a pen or a calculator.
In addition to distorting information when it is available, as we have seen in the image above, brains are also free to create information, when it is absent. For example, the missing information in the blind spots of our eyes is filled from the information available in the immediate surrounding of the blind spot and as a result, the blind spot looks exactly the same as its surrounding and disappears.
Information processing of the brain can also be ambiguous. For example, the image below can be perceived as a young as well as an old woman.
by William Ely Hill
Another feature of the nervous system is that, in general, it does not tell us about its boundaries, distortions, ambiguities, and tricks. Complexity is reduced with computational shortcuts and all the magic is done for us with a hint of overconfidence and we do not generally create doubt in what we perceive. Not everything that we perceive is conscious and not all experiences can be expressed with spoken language.
Overall, what we see is an extremely limited, meaningful, distorted, created, ambiguous, fast, overconfident, conscious, and subconscious interpretation of a part of the unfathomable reality and an incredibly impressive computational solution—cognition, emotion, or perception, for example—which lets us function in the real world can be problematic if its hidden errors can make our life difficult. Luckily, illusions of visual perceptions are not only harmless, they actually help us to act and function. However, the brain employs similar strategies, as used in vision, for thoughts, desires, and emotions, and just one error can be enough to make our lives miserable from the inside, without any outside difficulty or complexity.
For example, when we predict the future in a hopeless or depressed state of mind, there seems no hope or happiness on the horizon but that is likely to be a delusion as long as there are no permanent biological conditions in a free society. Each and every detail of the future cannot be predicted by the brain with absolute accuracy as prediction is an incredibly intricate computational problem for the brain to solve. Our brains forecast the future primarily by taking information from the present and infusing it into the future—as in the case of blind spots in eyes—and therefore, the future usually looks or feels similar to the present. Simple events can be predicted by the brain with great accuracy but as the complexity increases, the accuracy declines steadily—no mind or machine predicted coronavirus pandemic and no one can tell when it will end—and temporary misery at the moment can be painted over all the time that is yet to come.
Future is created from the present and presented to us in an overconfident manner and we tend to trust the neural simulation but that could be an error. As long as we are alive and have health there is almost always hope if we do not stop and keep using our thinking at its best but what we desire can be delusional.
If a desire—aim, goal, or wanting—is authentic—such as access to food, family, health, and security—it can be achieved in a free society easily but desires can be ambiguous—it is not always obvious why we like, what we like—and endless—in different domains or even in one. For example, classical conditioning is used in advertisements to assign a biological meaning—which seems worth pursuing to the life force inside us—to otherwise useless objects—which can be endless—and after enough repetitions, a worthless thing can initiate delusional pain—in the absence of that thing—or pleasure—in the presence. Our brains can be psychologically manipulated by several internal and external forces and not all that we desire and feel is our conscious constructive choice.
All modern-day emotions, feelings, or moods still have ancient genetic roots because our genes have not evolved in the last thousands of years. Liking or disliking is a genetic feature just as seeing, smelling, or speaking is. Our nervous system has both the primal limbic system and novel neocortex—among other neural circuits—and our motivations and emotions have genetic, historical, social, and cognitive causes. Why we desire or hate something is not always conscious or obvious and most of the brain's activity is unconscious. The definitions of good and bad—hence associated emotions, which are generally more compelling than cognition—can be authentic or ambiguous or destructive but the misery—individual, familial, and social—inflicted by delusional desires and emotions is real.
Whatever comes to the mind can be elusive but we tend to trust it and it is a fundamental problem. Chaos and confusion can consume the soul and a mind cannot deal with infinite complexity. Confidence in the contents of the consciousness can be comforting but a solution can be a problem.
Gene-Environment Interaction
The manifestation of available genetic abilities—desires, emotions, behaviors, thoughts, and others—is heavily influenced by the interplay between genes and environment.
Biological evolution is extremely slow and conservative and there is no feature update for us in the last thousands of years.
Our genes are primarily designed for survival in the wild, not to flourish in the wilderness of concrete, computers, and confusion.
Science and technology completely changed the environment and created an extremely complex and subtle gene-environment conflict that our outdated genes and ideas are struggling to make sense of.
Soft Stream
Software Writing & Managing Software
- Software writing UI automation test software, anyone with no coding skills can create test code by uploading test data only
- Saving the generated code in GitHub and running it on the CI/CD server on the cloud and showing the test results
- Can update and disable test cases
- Flexibility to run just one test or a batch
- Schedule test runs in a batch
- Link test cases to user story and last test run status is displayed in the story
- Test run history
- Automatically create/close defects on test failure/pass and send alerts
- Can run manually written unit tests of all kinds on CI/CD server
- Code coverage and code quality reports
- Code builds and artifact repository for the development team
- Custom production releases with a click, if it can be done by a script
- Dashboards and reports
- Agile and scrum support—projects, user story, sprint, release, defects, among others
- Custom workflows, roles, and fields
- Notifications and alerts
- For each defect, similar defects are shown for quick resolution
- Manual tests management
- And others
Product
- Auto fill UI test case fields from a link
- Create UI test case from mock up
- Record an UI interaction and create a test case from it
- Kanban boards
- Code reviews and code management
- Document management
- Team workspace
- Release management for apps that
- Ticket management for the support team
Services
- Services for custom builds and releases within the app
- Cloud services
- AI services
- Development, test, and support services
User Story
Create UI Test Case
Test Case
Run UI Test Case
Dashboard
Unit Test Execution
Workflow
