What after the war?

A life of constant insecurity is led by people living under the claws of war. Everything appears imminent but nothing is indeed. A life to be lived at the precipice. A baseless internal hope that things might be fixed the coming morning. A substantiated fear that things might get worse the coming day. Abrupt internal shifts of hope and despair causes internal agitation. Weariness becomes the constant. An ongoing plight, a seemingly endless distortion, a progressively deteriorating life, render one’s senses unable to sense. The inability manifests due to the difficulty of comprehending the situation. Our brains aim to find patterns that seem sensible, then lead our bodies according to those patterns, but when the brain fails to do so for some time, it might lose its pattern recognition capacity as everything around seems “chaotic”.

The beautiful morning cup of tea becomes a tasteless colored liquid that is sipped in a ritualistic way. The stroll to the market is a forced activity replete of internal humiliation, as the hopes of being capable of sustaining minimal rations to stay alive, dwindle day by day. Terrified faces all around. Hopelessness mirrored at every corner. The muscles that allow one to smile seem to have atrophied as they are present but unused. Children no longer ask where will they enjoy their weekend, but if they will live till the weekend. A teenager no longer thinks of revenging on his classmate who tackled him on the football game yesterday, but what will his father do to pay the rent of the house, as it seems they will be removed before he can have another physical education class. A junior student no longer wonders on the smile of the gentle guy who shared his pen, but she finds herself wondering when the miserable grimaces of her younger siblings shall fade. The sunset is no longer a divine beauty, but rather a path to a darkening sky sending a heartbreaking sign of another closed door, which might have led to the chest of hope.

The sweet outlines of normal daily routines are invaded. The background that gives life to actions is suspended. The very slight nuances that happen are no longer experienced. Internal apathy accumulates and suffocates. As an arrogant neuroscientist would say, “it seems that the receptors on the neurons that make one experience some form of pleasure have been ‘down-regulated’, and it seems that the neurons are insensitive, rendering the person ‘apathetic’”.

The impact is extensive. Just like a depressed person wonders how people might be experiencing pleasure, a person living between the canines of war may wonder what life without war is. The inability to see anything beyond it can takeover. The constant fear, and the intensifying despair “rewires” the brain. The intensity of the situation hijacked the mental apparatus fully, even though it has experienced some form of life before being hijacked. The capacity of looking back at pleasant memories could be lost. Darkness triumphs. A depressed person can ask himself if he was ever happy, so can a person who lives in an ongoing war ask himself if he ever slept peacefully.

One Notion on "Black Mirror Season 3 Episode 2)

Directly jumping into the notion that kept on firing in my brain, as I was getting closer to the end of the episode, which is will we reach a state in which there would be an intelligent software that would be able to “learn and adapt on the fly”, by monitoring our brain activity and work out how best “to frighten us” (or in other scenarios if applicable, how best to treat us or guide us).

This is the very pinnacle of AI overpowering humans; the ability of understanding what is going on in the human brain by monitoring the brain activity. The capacity of decrypting neuronal firings to their exact meanings shall make humans existentially naked.

But for now we should know first of all that neurons and neuroglia are the constituents of our brains, not images or audios. We can open a brain of a person and see the car he was dreaming of, or his first sexual encounter. The difficulty of the idea mentioned above is well known for whoever is into neuroscience. First of all our external behaviors arise from impulses that take place in our brains. Our memories arise when certain factors stimulate a certain neural pathway, and by that the perception of a path treaded upon earlier is experienced. By that we should understand the limitations of our current tools and realize that what we can weigh or assess are neural firings (creating a brain activity that could be tracked), opening and closing of ion channels that facilitate stimulatory or inhibitory mechanisms of neurons, and brain activity being studied under certain behaviors (certain regions being active or non-active). We can assess certain neurotransmitters fired that will further stimulate or inhibit. In between our neurons, there are no images or audios saved in a tangible way. It is firings that create so.

For a software to have the capacity of learning and adapting by monitoring our brain activity is something outrageously dumbfounding. How can certain neural impulses be understood by a machine that they meant a certain thing. Firings are within a range of similarity, but the subtle nuances lie on the subjectively created neural network in a certain individual. The probability of the machine “guessing” what was meant by a certain brain activity just seems confusing, and rather "impossible". 

The ability of looking at a certain brain region being active in correspondence to a certain behavior is present, but looking at the brain activity, then saying what has been thought or what is roaming in the brain is not yet there, and that as well seems to be so far-fetched. So far, AI is greatly advanced in quantitative knowledge. It has the capacity of analyzing a huge database, and bringing out wonderful predictive results and also giving amazing guides. As someone noted “after all, being advanced in quantitative analysis gives high qualitative results”. I have been telling friends that it would be better to put your blood results into a system and it works on it, then gives you the diagnosis and differential diagnosis instead of a well experienced GP. With all this advance, the capacity of interpreting firings as certain memories, and being able to create simulations based on what has been acquired from the firings “still” seems a rather astonishing, or even scary, thing. 

The Two Poles (Conservative minds and proponents of Freedom)

When one seeks some degree of mental freedom, and reaches a state of experiencing some mental freedom compared to the prior state, the realization that is reached is that among the most stagnating issues was being limited to certain notions and being indoctrinated some “absolutes” in the realm of beliefs.

Normally, one then treads from one pole heading to the other, and each step might be teaching something. Heading towards the camp of “freedom” especially in personal beliefs, one finds at times matters that do go against the essential concept of being free. When being shocked by certain limitations in thought in the new camp, one might deduce that both are trying to establish a certain perspective of life and reinforce it. That might be true, but is it? Surely, if one constantly disagrees with the established “maxims” put forward by the proponents of freedom, one might be belittled, condemned, face some verbal attacks, but rarely do they try to end your existence. After all they are human, with biological apparatuses to evaluate matters. They as well, at many times, evaluate matters from a subjective perspective and assign a criterion for evaluation, creating a path of categorizing people and notions as well, and claiming that their path is objective, yet they fail to realize that the criterion is perforated as it is formed by human subjective inclinations.

It seems to be an unattainable journey for humans to understand real tolerance or absolute tolerance because everything is open to interpretation since everything happens to be an interplay between what is out there and how we perceive it, whether be it a religious person or not. This makes it hard to understand how a person shall act just by merely knowing what beliefs they have, for a human act arises not in a direct causal way from belief to action. It is no wonder that we see religious people who can’t tolerate people of a similar religion but a differing sect, yet we also have religious people who are ready to connect at the deepest levels with non-believers or people of different religions. At the same time, we find non-believers who hypothetically call for “freedom” yet they form a narrow criterion of categorizing people who deserve tolerance, based upon their subjective evaluation, and by that creating animosities and polarizing the society. Some have established personal beliefs that religious people with certain beliefs are dangerous, not realizing that they are struck in a belief by believing that. For example, some find women who wear Hijab to be backwards and devoid of logic regardless of her social position or what she has to say. Such people have created a mental map that has associated backwardness to a piece of cloth, and they fail to realize that they don’t differ much from those who assigned piety and chastity to a piece of cloth covering the hair. Different associations leading to not so different superficial judgments.

The presence of differences around us has been emphasized by the boom of communication and technology, yet the idea hardly sinks in our psyches. Our biological wirings are hard to rewire. This state shall continue with us for long since it is our limbic brains that exert their powers upon our not so well developed prefrontal cortices.