by M I A Harba
This desert was showing its mysteries already, and he wondered if that was the end of it, or there was more of this over the coming months?
He remembered the displeasure of his wife, whom he loved immensely, with his intentions and this project. He guessed she might not want to come with his, which, of course, he could understand. She asked where he would live, and what the urge was for. It was one thing to advocate living in the desert, yet another to be realistic about it. He himself could not explain the urge nudging him to go there. In his mind, however, he envisaged solitude in a simple house in the middle of nowhere, and that was it.
‘What about electricity, water, food, the Internet? Surely, no one can live without these. Have you thought about this?’ asked Sally, his wife.
‘No I haven't, but there must be a way. Besides, I don’t need these when seclusion is what I’m seeking,’ Sam answered.
‘I can’t imagine or understand this sudden willingness to live where there are no communications, no TV, no Internet, or any kind of normal living,’ Sally said.
The conversation with Sally did not help but added more anxiety and created indecision in his disquiet mind. He knew people might not understand his idea and would doubt his mental state. The chat with Sally was an early warning of what was coming. He was going to encounter resistance, not only from his wife but all friends and relatives. It was an uphill battle, he thought. But nothing could deter him from his already determined mind.
If he could convince only Sally but none of the others, who didn't count in his mind anyway, that would be sufficient. It was imperative, a must, therefore, to convince Sally.
That night, as he lied in bed next to his wife, before he discussed this outrageous idea with her, he stayed awake tossing and turning, unable to sleep, staring at the ceiling. How could anybody explain abandoning his family, this beautiful house, and a successful business to move into the desert, well away from civilization, and where the nearest neighbour might be hundreds of kilometres away? It was easy discussing this with Sammy earlier but appeared impossible with his wife.
He could envisage this discussion might impact his marriage. He never thought about this before. What if his wife said no, and that she had enough? He couldn't continue with life without her. His torment would be beyond endurance.
As the drastic moment of truth with his wife approached, doubts started sprouting in his tired and overworked brain. He loved his wife. She was his salvation from the misery he lived after his parents died. She saved his soul, and this new adventure was particularly unfair to her. He knew he couldn’t do anything that upset her, even in his wildest dreams. However, he hoped she would understand him, or perhaps support him.
But why did he need to go to the barren desert to clear his mind? Couldn't he do it here, living with her and relying on her support whenever he needed it? He was sure she would ask this and needed to be prepared with a convincing answer.
No, he couldn't do it here. He needed to be far away, far from his usual surroundings, to be able to think clearly. Wasn't that how philosophers and prophets purified their ideas and messages? Didn’t they need seclusion and solitude in similar barren places? Their need was, no doubt, shocking to their counterparts at that time.
He knew his stay out in the desert would not be short, and it might be years, if not for the rest of his life.
He'd been reading extensively about science, technology, and scientific advances in physics and astronomy, and his brain had become clouded. He didn't know which was which, and where life started and where it succumbed.
He had made enough money to support himself and his wife and daughter for a few years. Financially, he was, therefore, not in a bad state. He could afford a few years away from work and could still support his family.
Thanks to Sammy, he understood the consequences of this outlandish idea. Where would he stay in the desert? One can't just jump into the desert and say, here I am. He wouldn't last a week with all the predators out there: wolves, snakes, scorpions, spiders, thieves, cut-throats, never mind lack of food and water.
He needed to build a shelter or a simple building to protect himself and his wife, of course, if she agreed to come with him. What about food and water?
Eventually, his wife reluctantly agreed but asked,
‘How long was this likely to be?’
He wasn’t sure but said, ‘Probably a few years. I will be able to visit regularly, though.’
‘Where are you going to live?’
‘I haven’t located a place yet, but somewhere around the desert area of Rawa.’
‘I meant what kind of shelter?’ she repeated her question.
‘Oh, I will arrange to build a simple house.’
‘But wouldn’t that cost a bit of money? You will need to haul materials, labour, etc. over there,’ she said.
‘Well, yeh it will cost a bit of money. I will not use any of our savings. As you know, I have inherited some money from my aunt. I shall use that,’ he responded.
‘Sorry to sound a bit silly, but why build a house? Why couldn’t you live in a Bedouin tent? This is what has been used for thousands of years and proved their worth.’
‘I need to have some comfort, if you see what I mean. I’m completely unfamiliar with living in a tent and not sure how safe they are,’ he responded.
‘Ask a Bedouin then?’ she sarcastically answered.
‘I don’t believe a tent is suitable for a person living by himself. Remember snakes, scorpions, wolves, etc. Living within a tribe offers some protection,’ he said.
The discussions went on and on, neither could convince the other of their point of view. Sally thought about it from a different point of view. If he wanted to spend his inheritance, it was his money. Using their savings, which essentially belonged to the family, especially their daughter, was a definite no.
She could see he was head fixated with this idea, and nothing could deter him without making him unhappy. Let him go along with his silly idea for a few weeks. She was sure he would get fed up soon and return to her, hopefully, satisfied and a happy man. The money wasted was worth it if that could be achieved. However, she said, she would not come to visit him but asked him to get a satellite phone so she could call him in an emergency. He could call her in his emergencies, too. Also, he must have a pickup on standby with him, all the time.
He was more than happy to accept these conditions. He then became free in his mind and could start planning for this seemingly outrageous project. He knew it wasn’t easy and missing his daughter would be hard. The guilt of being away from her would play on his conscience and trouble his soul.
Many people believe in the afterlife. They will tell you it's the natural thing to happen. There is a purpose in human life, not just to live like other animals. All messages by the various religions say this earthly life is transient to the other eternal life. This is fine if people believe it, and they are entitled to their beliefs. For him, believing had been a struggle all his life.
Even when he was a child, when his mum was telling him about the divine Creator, and how everything had been created by Him, he wanted to know more. The Creator wants us to be good to each other and the people around us, she said. He wants us to go to the mosque, to the church, or to the synagogue, to pray for Him and ask for His forgiveness of our sins. When we go to the afterlife, we are rewarded, or punished, for what we’d been doing here. But he always asked this awkward question, if the Creator created us, who created the Creator in the first place?
‘Shut up. don't ever say these blasphemous words. You've got to believe in Him. Your brain is not smart enough to understand who created the Creator. You should never say anything like this, ever again. I will be truly angry if you mentioned it again,’ his mother used to say.
‘I'm sorry mum, but what's wrong with asking questions? I need to know.’
‘Son, you're not old enough to understand things like these. Listen to your mom and take her word as good advice. Full
stop.’
So that was the story when he was a child. Nobody wanted to even discuss matters like these.
As he grew up and started his education, his mental span widened, and its capacity enlarged. His mind opened up to new philosophies and ideas that were taboo before. He started reading about religion and listened to arguments for and against religions and religious beliefs. Clergyman would come to spread the word, to counter atheists who believe there is nothing but this life. That’s what we come into it, and that is how we will depart from it. There is no such thing as a soul or afterlife, or whatever when the body decomposes and dissolves into the soil. Nothing remains.
Science, while not opposing religion as such, started finding reasons for various natural phenomena, like the eclipse of the sun, the earth is round, not flat, etc., that region had the wrong explanation for. Advances in science made this dilemma even worse. Religion had to change its argument when science proved too convincing to be ignored. Religion suddenly appeared old, illogical, and resisting change, or so say the atheists.
Questions why we are here, why everything is out there, began to be asked by many ordinary people. Scientific advances in science, especially in the last 100 years, created amongst ordinary people an explosion of philosophies that used to be reserved for philosophers only, who spent their lives contemplating such questions. It became the talk amongst family and friends, at parties or while drinking in a pub. It was a mental awakening that no one knew where it was leading to.
Why the Existence
As he sat with his back against the rock, with the blue bead in his fingers, he thought about the theories and advances in physics he heard in his meeting with Dr Talib. They made him think about his existence and the reasons behind it. According to physics, all things that we see, including humans, plants, animals, are nothing but empty space. Yet, our eyes see them as shapes. We see them because the light is reflected off the outer surfaces or outer atoms, and our eyes and brain interpret them as what we see. But we are told everything is empty space, so how?
If we had senses that ignore the light reflected off the outer surfaces of the objects, then we might see them as a huge collection of atoms glued together. This is not unreasonable because we know atoms form elements that form molecules, and so on. What we see might be a collection of empty atoms our normal senses cannot see. So everything around us should appear as a collection of atoms glued to each other, and absolute nothingness.
That took Sam to the issue of existence. Why do objects and beings exist? What's the idea behind their existence? Why?
Each human and animal is obviously a living being, albeit essentially empty space. Each has the need to eat food, process it chemically to extract energy, and defecates the remains. Each is essentially a power generator. It takes food as input and extracts energy, in the form of chemical energy, to feed the body. The energy extracted is distributed to all other parts of the body, via the circulation of blood.
Every part of the body is controlled by the brain, and it seems that all parts and organs are built for food intake and food processing. The legs move the body to wherever the food is. The arms, particularly in humans, pick the food from the environment and shove it in the mouth. The mouth and the digestive system take care of the extraction of the energy, the chemical energy, out of the food. In other words, all the internal organs are there for the extraction of this energy and its distribution to the various parts of the body.
It is the brain that controls these activities, which also benefits from this energy extraction. But for what purpose? Surely, it is not just for the purpose of energy extraction itself.
The body looks after itself, reports its injuries to the brain, and maintains its power generator in perfect shape. The energy extracted keeps the body energised and functional. The brain needs some of the energy to keep it going, but, at the same time, it needs energy for something else. The brain needs the energy to look after something else: consciousness.
Consciousness enables the human to make use of previous experiences and scan the area around him for danger. Further, it stimulates innovation that we see every day in science and technology. It is exactly what makes him, Sam, for example, look at the universe and contemplate what it is about.
The human body, including all its parts and organs, are there for the ultimate goal of serving the brain. The brain controls their operations and maintains the energy distribution as one of its functions. But the ultimate function of the brain, which it needs energy for, is consciousness. In other words, the body is created for consciousness.
This is why do we need a body, to generate power for the brain and consciousness.
Sam could now understand the purpose of life. Life is essentially to serve the brain that is somehow connected with consciousness. In other words, life exists for the purpose of consciousness. Religion might tell us life, at least for humans, is intended for the worship of the divine Creator. Sam could now see another potential purpose for life.
However, if the brain needs energy, why couldn't the creation of humans have allowed for tapping the energy in a different method? Building the human’s body as a power generator requires maintenance and energy to keep functioning. Today's computers operate using electricity, which is generated centrally at a power station usually far from the computer. There is no need for power generation in each individual computer.
Sam thought this was quite extraordinary. Nature has opted for intelligence and consciousness based on an individual power generation in each machine, i.e. each body serving the brain. In other words, the brain operates and generates its own power, individually. Human intelligence and consciousness and computer machine-intelligence, and possibly consciousness, seem to have taken different directions in this respect.
All life extracts the energy indirectly from the sun. They eat plants, if they are plant eaters, and digest the plants to extract the stored solar energy. The plants, during their fluorescent activities, store the solar energy inside them for their purposes. Predators, on the other hand, eat animals that feed on these plants and, therefore, extract the energy from the bodies and organs of the plant-eating animals. So basically, all animals extract their chemical energy, one way or another, from the sun.
The sun is, therefore, the source of life, and every life around us relies on the energy of the sun. This is very strange. It means the universe out there is not needed for life and existence, only our local sun is.
Look at humans again from a different viewpoint. When a baby is born, much of brain control is already built-in for the body. The baby’s brain controls the digestive system, the vision, the hearing and, obviously, all the organs associated with these activities. All of these characteristics are already built-in, and they get enhanced gradually as the baby grows into a child and then into an adult.
The brain also expands gradually in its capacity for control and knowledge. However, all the knowledge associated with speech, reading and writing, understanding, words recognition, and the like, come later in life. The brain learns these activities as the human body grows.
Knowledge acquisition and the brain capacity reach its maximum at probably the age of 30. Everything starts going down from then onwards. When a human gets very old, their knowledge is either wasted when they die or made use of if they write a book or leave a remnant of their knowledge, e.g. a painting or a poem. When a new baby is born, all of this needs to be learned again, and this is perhaps a limitation of how nature has developed its living beings.
In computers, as the hardware and software improve, the databases and all knowledge associated with or stored by the obsolete computers become readily available to the newly invented hardware and software and can be utilised immediately. Computers don't need to learn or relearn everything from scratch, as humans need to do. This is definitely a different approach to intelligence and knowledge inheritance.
Take for example neural networks, a software that exhibits artificial intelligence and is based on a
n architecture similar to how the neurons are networked in a typical brain. The neural network learns by training it on a very large set of examples of the objects, or patterns, they are intended to recognise. Once the neural network is trained, for speech recognition, for example, it may be ported to other computers, without re-training. Knowledge is saved indefinitely and becomes available to utilise in newer machines. When a new computer is made or born, it does not have to re-learn speech recognition from scratch.
Further, nature appears to be relying on the individual capabilities of the individual being. Knowledge sharing between humans is limited. Let's consider some examples. Humans understand speech, which runs, when spoken, at a speed of say 10 words per second, which represents a fast way of speaking. If one considers language as the means of knowledge transfer between humans, then this is the maximum rate of information transfer between humans.
Of course, there are other means of transferring information between humans, but they all seem to be limited in rates of knowledge transfer. For example, when one types text using a typewriter or a computer to someone else, the maximum words per seconds typed is limited by human’s ability to move their hands and fingers. If one types at 100 words per minute, then this is the transfer rate of information amongst humans using paper or computer. The same argument applies if one handwrites his words on paper.
The human receiving the text can perhaps read a little faster but again, it is limited. He might be able to read two or three lines per second, which is considered fast reading. This represents how the information is transferred from paper to the human.
One may conclude humans communicate and transfer information and knowledge between themselves at these kinds of speed.
Computers, on the other hand, are much faster in their knowledge transfer. They can currently transfer information at gigabytes per second, which is probably more than a hundred million times faster than between humans. They might become even faster in future.