A new perspective to Astrology!

Astrology, by definition, is about predicting the future of a person based on the positions of some celestial objects. Pure astrologists theorize that there is a 'soul' or 'energy' that gets added to the world when you are born and the state of this energy can be deduced or predicted as a function of time. This is the limit of my knowledge about astrology and probably cognitive readers can put some light on this later. But my point does not really deal with going beyond this definition anyways.

"Do I believe in Astrology"? This is a question that I used to think about when I was a kid. What could be a possible relation between celestial bodies and human nature when looking from a scientific perspective? How do you really quantify human mood ? It was some 20 years ago, when I read upon a topic in some science magazine that my Mom brought me. It was on the activities of Pineal glands and occurance of flight accidents. Pineal glands are some glands in our body which are called 'biological clocks', since they control our temporal functions like aging, fertilization etc. These glands are set when we are born and they go through some 'activities' with some frequency. The claim in the magazine was that there is some relation between the birthday of the flight captian and the accident dates. Well, that was an interesting thought and seemed to give a possible scientific explanation (atleast for a kid), stating that you are trying to model the state of your Pineal gland (which basically controls your mood) as a function of the position of celestial bodies. I am not very sure how much is this true though!

Well, now I have grown up and have come a long way travelling through time for the past 20 years, and I had more or less rejected any other possible explanations of my astrological relations. Actually, I had stopped believing in astrology, since finding a relation between some biological activities and position of celestial objects was a bit too overwroughted and fancy from an engineering or mathematical perspective. It was a few years back, when this anecdotal event happened. I was in Hyderabad and a friend visited me. It was early in the morning and he was reading the newspaper, when I fancily asked him what was intersting about my horoscope that day! He perused through the paper and started laughing saying that I was going to have a big trouble because of a friend that day! We laughed it across and went ahead with our day! Everything was normal, when towards evening my friend started getting blisters on his face!! He was actually taking care of another friend who had chicken pox a few days earlier! Well, such prognostications happen many a times in our lives and we just passes it aside believing mere coincidence. But is there any deeper meaning to it ? Can we build a theory between astrology and the rest of the scientific knowledge ?

/* advice-- this para is hardcore technical :) you can probably skip to the next section if you don't understand them*/

Now, let me get to my point.  My idea is not to see why astrology works, but trying to figure out what could be a possible mathematical framework for it to work. Suppose we have a huge database of the birthday of people and their mood for everyday or say possibly every unit of time. Suppose we have a huge astronomical database of the positions of various celestial objects. Suppose we do a cross-correlation between these two datasets, do a dimensionality reduction and project the data onto the principal axis? More mathematically, we can confine our mood of people to whether they are happy or not; where, say happy is greater than being sad. Later doing some kind of an isotonic regression to map it as a function. Here, the principal axis of projection will provide us with the most important celestial object whose path influences our horoscopes the most. The approach is just what we use in Machine learning for prediction or regression, except that now we are trying to draw a parallel between a scientific technique and some fringe-science. Just like the case that the predictions by machine learning techniques will not give us an absolute answer, we know that horoscopes also will not (Possibly because we are not considering all the directions of variations). People have been collecting astronomical data and associating it with human nature since ages and when the dataset approaches infinity, the relationships become more and more apparant (assuming there is a relationship), and we are seeing this, anyways  (looking back at my story) :) .

Ok! So what next? Well, in this world of mass communication and internet, it might not be a big problem to collect the moods of people (let say we just use the status of Gtalk or Facebook :) especially the similies :P ) and getting the birthdays of people is even more trivial. We have an 'infinite' number of people using these programs and a company like Google can very well get this information in no time. Astronomical data is always there since ages. Now, from the above process if some useful pattern comes out then probably we can make better predictions about the mood of people! Hmm... that might be a bit scary! but atleast its nice to think it will work :) Well, it should work, since the horoscopes I belive to some extend does work and "seemingly there is some relation"!

In conclusion, the target of this blog is not to prove anything, but to hint that using Machine learning techniques could possibly put some light on saying that there is something to be believed in horoscopes, and trying to find the exact connection between human nature and celestial bodies is worth a try!! 

Translogical Sentimentalism!

Huh! What in heaven's sake does that mean ? Oh well, I just went about neologistic in an eccentric mood in naming a new form of literature I just thought about! Well, I am not strictly "positive definite" on whether it is a new form of literature, but probably, in the sense that I am trying to combine both my left and right brain activities in a cohesive framework, it could be! An illustration of this idea is depicted in the story here.

Another example which I just thought about is the following! Well, forgive my thoughts in random directions!

Patterns of distances: Like my friend once pointed out, humans can't really digest random events. They always try to find patterns in them and tries to "predict" what could be next! The following are the distances of myself from my home in ascending order of time which I had thought about in a rather pensive mood of homesickenss. (O(x) means "in the order of")

0 ~ O(0) - 1980 - unborn
8kms ~ O(10) - 1985 - home to school
165kms ~ O(100) - 1998 - home to college
1330kms ~ O(1000) - 2005 - home to Hyderabad (for work)
13832kms ~ O(10000)- 2007 - home to Minneapolis

Now where could I be next to satisfy the geometric progression ? Doesn't it look like a Translogical or Pseudo mathematical sentimentalism ? :P where you bring about logic and sentiments into one framework ?

Time Travel !

A year back, during one of those coffee table chats, in the cafetaria of Microsoft, this imaginative idea of 'the third eye' popped up! Won't it be a great add-on for a human to have a mechanical camera eye, which will record everything in the world he sees! Well, there can be immensible possibilities with such an eye, but jokingly we were basically looking for an appropriate position to place that eye on the face and finally decided to put it in the un-utilized space at the center of the forehead! This later formed the basis for my cartoon "The third eye, everything is useful atleast twice" :)

Obviously, one of the main reasons I would love to have something like this would be, to see again those cherishing great moments of my life once again! Thinking about this further, what if we recorded not only the visual feedback from our eyes, but also the complete brain activity ? A kind of brain photo or whatever you call it! Its like an active snapshot of the brain activity for the duration of recording!

Elaborating it further, anologus to a video camera recording visual scenes, lets assume that we have a brain camera that records brain activies. Since recording brain activities include recording of the nerve signals from all the sensory points (that includes eyes, skin, ear, nose, tongue...). This, I will call the brain activity photo (BAP :) ). Now, if we have a mechaism of feeding the BAP back to the brain, may be in the subconscious level or as a dream (so that the actual functioning of the brain is unaffected), then wont this bring a feeling of time travel ?

How does it be equivalent to a time travel? Well, if you would formulate a Turing test for time travel, then one possibility would be to ask the testee what time he thinks he is in! And feeding the right set of BAP signals to his brain would obviously make him belive that he is actually in that particular timeframe! So I believe this is a kind of timetravel itself ! Well, there are psychological problems of belief that might come into picture here, like do you believe in the dream you see when you are seeing it or does your subconscious tell you that you are actually seeing just a dream and its not real? In that case, the model Turing test for timetravel might fail! But anyways, thats a different story!

Concluding, this is like getting a four dimensional photo of oneself, having all the three dimensional space cordinates and the fourth dimensional time cordinate. Anyways, this is just a feeling of time travel (which is actually real relative to the person) and is perfectly coherent unlike the quantum mechanical time travel paradoxes :)

What good is consciousness to machines?

The blog below is a peek at my own continuing thoughts to understand some terms and is written to evoke a discussion (in case!) or criticism!

Its been a while since I have been trying to define this term and recently my focus went over a paradigm shift. What use does it serve in defining 'consciousness'? The major reason for this thought make over was the "feeling" that the genesis of ideas are not "normally" in the realm of consciousness, but somewhere outside it. I don't know where ideas evolve, but from my own experiences, its certainly not inside consciousness. A conscious mind is just a verifier of ideas.

These thoughts lead me to another point. Mind/consciousness is just something that arises out of itself! Its hard to explain this weird self-referencing definition, but my efforts are underway! You can't define self-consciousness, since anything you use to define it is a matter of itself. Going by Godel-ian kind of explanations, you can't define it since you are inside your own consciousness when you try defining it and to define anything you need to use the materials outside itself!

Now, what are ideas? And how do they evolve? An idea, if you ask me, is a solution to a problem! In that sense, if you can find a problem, then that problem forms an antagonistic definition of an idea. When you think of solving a problem, unless you have already seen the solution and the solution is already a part of your consciousness, the computation happens elsewhere! I don't know where this happens, and thus I would call it a peripheral computation. Mind or consciousness has no control over this computation, except that it can feed in motivation, perseverance, concentration and guidance. When a solution arises out of some "random" firing of neurons, the mind acts as a verifier and checks the feasibility of the solution!

By the above argument, I am not discarding the possibility of the influence of existing knowledge in the finding of a solution. It certainly is guided, but my point is that consciousness has nothing to do with the finding of a solution or the thought process!

Now, what do I think, could be the after effect of such a conclusion? It means that self-consciousness is just an influencing parameter for a machine to solve problems, but is not a required parameter, but peripheral computation is... whatever that means ! Sometimes people call it "intuition" !!

Corollary to these thoughts:
1) If everything happens through peripheral computation and it is based on randomness, then why is the world so deterministic ? Why do people think alike in most of the situations, if everything is equally probable?

2) Randomness is just a shield over our inability to understand what lies beneath. Thus it is not random, but is something guided. In that sense, doesn't it mean that the origin of ideas is not random, which means that what I am thinking right now is not some random thought but is an after effect of a configuration which at any cost is unavoidable due to the last series of incidents! In such an extreme sense of completely mechanical self-awareness, is it required to do something special than the conventional things, in programming a machine to act like humans? Does the turing test make any sense in such a framework?

3) Though this question does not make any sense in this context, but am just curious to know the answer: "What could be the smallest computer program that is self aware"?