The last ten years

Retrospect

In a sense I’ve lived my life. Life in the usual sense. From birth most of us have little choice of how it should be lived. The mental and physical formative years fly by with schools, sports and skills. At the back of our minds was always the agenda of the future and the endless train of preparation, tests and qualifications rolled on. We compete, excel and compete again. Settled onto a career or family and as if suddenly today we reach the afternoon or evening of our lives. If you managed to jump off the train of career, family or work, here becomes a salutary pause. The days are getting shorter as we age. Decades have whizzed by and now we face the prospect that perhaps we have only a decade of good years left. What next?

End the Mind Game

Humans are not just social – we unconsciously tailor our thoughts depending on who we are with and what “rules” we should follow. So for instance we were taught to be patriotic from young. Any departure from nationalistic thinking is dangerous ground. So we harp the right tune and nod the right vibes so that we become a part of the nation. This may not be true for every nationality, but for a country where most of life is influenced by a  strong government (or media) we tend to march blindly to a credo of sorts. We build our life and thinking as the familiar comfort zone. And before long you’ve lived a life like so many others of your countrymen. Now you’ve retired. Now is the chance to think for yourself. Live your own life. State your own view. End the mind game. Be yourself. But what is that?

We become who we like

Our lives were formed by the interactions with others. Growing up we form the “self” inculcating values gleaned from other humans, whether friends, teachers or family. That’s the order for me. I soon learn that human interactions can be complex and irrational and resolved to choose a career with minimum interrelationship.  Fifty years hence and I’ve found how wrong I was. The fact is that our well-being depends greatly on our relationship with fellow human beings. It is said that living in isolation handicaps one mentally. The frontal cortex tend to shrink for the socially deprived.

The call

Today is probably the most important of my life, because I think I’ve found its calling. At 5am June 26 it dawned on me I can do this task. It’s the most sensible thing to do. Sure, I dreamt of my ideal job as a top notch mechanic, with a steep engineering background, tinkling with dynamics electronics and systems and become a god of my trade. But life is not always filled with our desired surrenpidity. We do with what’s at hand and now. But no more working for a lousy boss – spare me the pejoretive insults and deprecatory dismissals from well qualified upstarts of an authoritative city-state, who put down subordinates that are not top-notch, super sensitive of their own meritocracy and the craving for recognition. No more tyrannical weight of offices. Then there’s more. You know when you live several decades in a belief, then realized that you’ve lived in what others want you to believe. Let me explain. In Christianity you have preachers and teachers who expound and persuade you the right way that the Bible says you should live. Very soon you’re tied to a creed, not a faith in a God. The creed becomes stronger and condemns and judges you into conform. But what of the One you believed in – does He have a say, and what is it? There are just too many shackles of faith and now I know it had held me back in many instances of my life which only I can detail. Then suddenly, I felt the shackles fly off – you go direct to God than through the pontificate.

Life in the cell

Science today knows a lot about how life sustains itself. But not enough to know why. Since the discovery of DNA we have a handle of how cells live as a primitive form according to a blueprint. But a fuller sufficiency of this fact is needed to answer why the cell grows and metabolizes. What is the Hidden Hand that starts the process of cell growth, its self-preservation, health and eventually death? What mechanism within itself makes the decisions to send messages out to its environment for the well being of the whole? There is a wealth of information out there to explain the effects, even to alter the effects as driven by our health needs and well-being. These recent discoveries are epochal in advancing modern medicine but remain at best, neccessary  conditions to alleviating sufferings. Finding sufficiency to each discovery is a (or several) lifetime’s work. But let’s not be distracted, or engulfed by facts. The basic question is this: Can the entire cycle of cell metabolism and it’s ramifications be viewed like a grand biochemical program code that starts the creation, maintenance and end of complex lifeforms?

A) regulation

A cell is living because it can nourish itself and grow. How is this process started? Given an environment something within the cell structure must have started a mechanism to take in oxygen and other nutrients so that it can go on living. Compare this to a computer program code. The first order of business is to march to a clock and taking in precoded instructions one at a time. Where is the clock in the cell that start and coordinate a series of instructions for taking in nutrients and making the rest of the cell function? And where is this stack of instruction? Secondly a series of actions from these instructions can be directed to perform other series of actions due to a detected need. So a sensing mechanism within the cell flags the program control such as to stop growing nutrients, or start dividing (mitosis), to shut down or reproduce (meitosis) or any other biochemical pathways. So what are the “programming codes” that instruct the creation of enzymes to maintain the cell structure and start other metabolic pathways? Or maybe there isn’t a clock to regulate the sequences of activity but just switches. For instance today (2018) we know quite a lot about how cells transport nutrients and other cargo within itself. From our human standpoint we’re used to looking for a brain, or a central control from which such molecular transport mechanisms are controlled – just like how a main program decides what part of a code needs to be executed. But a possibility is that in actuality they are autonomous – their basic mechanism are switched (chemically) from one binary mode to another. Still we need to find a supervisory mechanism to throw the switch – just like how a transfer mechanism in a modern factory are autonomously run with motors and sensors, with only occasional commands from a human operator.

So the difference between a living cell and an inanimate object are:

1. Its molecular structure enables electrochemical energy exchange with surrounding nutrient enhancing proteins in order to grow and multiply.

2. It follows a self preservation regime, driven by a masterplan within its DNA to reproduce and organise clusters of cells, which communicate within itself by molecular messages. But what is the monitoring mechanism that drives this self preservation process?

B) Fight or flight

Perhaps a third and most elusive mystery of lifeforms is a hidden hand or a “life-force” that supervises the first two qualities. Is a brain necessary?  Perhaps not. But in its most primitive form the cell must already have this self-determination to defend itself, or run away.

C) The age of digital information

Sounds like old hack but new innovations are disrupting daily life as we lived through the 2 decades of internet and ubiquitous computing devices. We will live more and more through our hand-phones. Most use it for social media but the advent of cyber currency working through new avenues of trust in our daily transactions would be a revolution in slow motion. October 2019 introduction of the Libra cyber currency by Facebook Inc, is just the beginning. Many do not appreciate it but Zuckerburg is probably the most qualified person who understands what it involves to effectively scale up the process of block-chain transactions and achieve efficient and reliable throughput. For too long the world had to pay too much for the velocity of money. Banks simply lived off our need to entrust them to enhance the time-value of our hard-earned income as well as the friction to money movement we pay for each transfer. World competition to do both of these more efficiently and reliably would put best practices at our fingertips. The trusted system of distributed ledgers will populate to all that we now do with personal signatures on promissory notes. I can’t wait.