The conscious notebook
A narrative human ontolOGY
Nova Science Publishers, Inc.
New York
Contents
Rakesh Biswas
Preface i
Introduction iii
The Conscious Notebook vii
Prologue ix
Chapter 1 Introducing Darkness 1
Chapter 2 Once the Threads are Set…Must Continue to Weave 3
Chapter 3 Story of Samsara 5
Chapter 4 The Class…. Hard Clinical Analyses or a Bit of Velvet, Warm Tea 7
Chapter 5 Samsara’s Break- A New Life Format 9
Chapter 6 To All Members of this Mailing List 11
Chapter 7 Re: To All Members of this Mailing List 13
Chapter 8 Con Human Interface 15
Chapter 9 Con’s Battery Powered Notebook 17
Chapter 10 An Email to His Star Readers from Sutra 19
Chapter 11 A Collective Consciousness in your Mail Box 21
Chapter 12 Lets be Natural Numbers 23
Chapter 13 The Serpent Boss 25
Chapter 14 A Zillion Snoopings…Hidden Files 27
Chapter 15 The Night of the Bed of Flowers 29
Chapter 16 Pecking at those Thought Keys 31
Chapter 17 Why Teach an Old Con New… 33
Chapter 18 From Sutra’s Readers 35
Chapter 19 Pollinating for their Collective Bud 37
Chapter 20 An Idiot Con’s Guide to Humans 39
Chapter 21 The Failed Editor in Cheap 41
Chapter 22 A Non Pharmacological Baul Technique 43
Chapter 23 From the Class to Hardware Lab… Changing Domains 45
Chapter 24 Hardware Intensive Care 47
Chapter 25 Down to Earth Human Notebooks 49
Chapter 26 The Drowning Differentials 51
Chapter 27 Creation: Assembling from Junk 53
Chapter 28 First Rain Last Night; Poo-Wee, Yuck, Drat…End of an Illusion of Eternal Spring 55
Chapter 29 Anatomy- Hardware Junk Lab 57
Chapter 30 Spring, Finally, Overnight BLOOM!!!!!!!. 59
Chapter 31 Whatever You Wish is What you Get 61
Chapter 32 Needed Urgent: Passionate Lover for a Bored Wife 63
Chapter 33 Falling into a Different Dream 65
Chapter 34 Swiss Cheese Home Delivered 67
Chapter 35 Neonatal Antics…LCD Dreams 69
Chapter 36 Gaming...Daily Kicking the Invisible Football Amidst Us 71
Chapter 37 A Mound of Honey Tipped Neurocortices 73
Chapter 38 A Lot to Weave, Figure Out, Juggle 75
Chapter 39 Anatomy and Physiology of Relationships 77
Chapter 40 The Decision Tree 79
Chapter 41 An Ole Crone, Grizzled and Rawboned 81
Chapter 42 Letting You Into our Whirlwind 83
Chapter 43 Really, a Whoooowhoooooowhooooooo am i Time, it has Been 85
Chapter 44 Separating the Mind from its Silicon Chips 87
Chapter 45 Network Topology of the Narrative 89
Chapter 46 From a Death Ravine 91
Chapter 47 To Life Divine 93
Chapter 48 Buying and Selling Cons in a Global Market 95
Chapter 49 A Story about the Birth of One 97
Chapter 50 Words and Ideas 99
Chapter 51 Smashed to Smithereens...Picking up Memory Fragments 101
Chapter 52 Like Fruit Bats in the Moonlight Gleaming 103
Chapter 53 A Fragmented Con in Small Things 105
Chapter 54 Identifying and Plucking Leaves in the Evidence Jungle 107
Chapter 55 Principles of External-Internal Medicine 109
Chapter 56 Add-Ons to Consciousness 111
Chapter 57 A Mediaeval Specialty Clinic 113
Chapter 58 The Medical Grocery Shop 115
Chapter 59 Quest for Chemical Individuality 117
Chapter 60 Listening to Patients and Teachers Alike 119
Chapter 61 A Young Alcoholic Cirrhotic 121
Chapter 62 Bedside Troubleshooting: A Systems Approach 123
Chapter 63 Summarizing Livers and Rivers Within 125
Chapter 64 Discussing the Whole 127
Chapter 65 The Pump that Runs our Rivers 129
Chapter 66 Behind a Failing Pump: The Ailing Person 131
Chapter 67 System Trouble: A Yellowed Display Virus 133
Chapter 68 The Inoculated System 135
Chapter 69 The Letter from a Virus 1-5 137
Chapter 70 Hunger for Food and Air 143
Chapter 71 Airways Opening into System-Rivers 145
Chapter 72 Moving Muscles and Stories 147
Chapter 73 Possibilities Jumping and Quivering 149
Chapter 74 Seems as if it was just the Other Day 151
Chapter 75 Like a Whiff of Rain Swept Earth 153
Chapter 76 Eeeeek, or Should it be Mmmmmmmmmmf...I Sniff Some Pain,
A Deep Breath or Two 155
Chapter 77 House Plants Cruising through Summers Bliss 157
Chapter 78 Piercing Individual Universes 159
Chapter 79 Waiting for the Mountain 161
Chapter 80 Flying in a Magic Carpet 163
Chapter 81 Bird Billions, Beeping Tweeting Whistling with the River-Tunes 165
Chapter 82 The Birding Resident 167
Chapter 83 The Bronchial Tree 169
Chapter 84 Evaluating Mechanical Trouble Shooting Skills 171
Chapter 85 On Failing the Acid Test 173
Chapter 86 Searching...Searching Yellow Eyes 175
Chapter 87 The Train Journey 1-3 177
Chapter 88 On Being a Medical Student 1 181
Chapter 89 On Being a Medical Student 2 183
Chapter 90 Macchapucchare College of Medicine 185
Chapter 91 Settling Down to a New Dream 187
Chapter 92 The Story of Glomerular Injury 1-7 189
Chapter 93 Going Up and Down Tops and Bottoms 199
Chapter 94 Fever Bugs in System-Rivers 201
Chapter 95 The Cranky Irritable Bowel 203
Chapter 96 A Dysfunctional Dyspeptic Stomach 205
Chapter 97 Setting Gas Purely Unconditionally Free 207
Chapter 98 A Blackening Lady 209
Chapter 99 A Web Based Doctor Patient Relationship 211
Chapter 100 All Humans are Born Physicians 215
Chapter 101 A Disc Full of Love 217
Chapter 102 Yours Sneeringly, Cheerio, Cornflakes, Grits 219
Chapter 103 Yes! I Do. 221
Chapter 104 The Last Honeymoon with the Mountains 223
Chapter 105 Regardless, We Continue...New or Renewed Track 225
Chapter 106 Also Saw a Bit of the Himalayas 227
Chapter 107 Fly to Kolkata then Fry 229
Chapter 108 Conversations with a Mountain 231
Chapter 109 Becoming the Mountain 233
Chapter 110 The Poor Old Rich Man 235
Chapter 111 An Oncogene Named Desire 237
Chapter 112 A Global Malignancy 239
Chapter 113 A Bad Dream 241
Chapter 114 Trees: Like Receptors in our Body 243
Chapter 115 Apoptosis: Perishing Great Civilizations 245
Chapter 116 Cremation-Incinerating Junk 247
Epilogue 249
Acknowledgements 251
References 253
Preface
Present trend in computer ontology is toward the development of artificial intelligence and human ontology is an intervention to positively support it with natural human intelligence such that it is infused with the pluralism that characterizes human social structures.
This book plans to make a beginning toward that end utilizing a meta-narrative that examines the life of an academically failed physician and his relatively academically successful daughter. The short individual narrative beads that are threaded into this larger narrative represent a multi genre science and fantasy of medicine. On one hand it balances a postmodern stance with its incredulity toward absolute evidence based truth on the other a tolerant pluralism that simply recognizes all approaches as credible as long as the resultant is geared toward positive outcomes.
The book portrays a non-linear narrative ontology interspersed in linear discourses on its relevance to human cognition and ontology. It creates a fictional conceptual model of a human that is visualized in physical form analogous to a notebook computer that hides an infinite backend process of cognition analogous to the human mind driven by its consciousness.
This particular backend entity is labeled con (shortened from a consciousness that is universal to all humans and other sentient life also sometimes represented simply as being) and is fictionally endowed with powers that enable it to run on multiple notebook computers (analogous or metaphorically morphologically indistinguishable from humans). This helps the meta-narrative to explore human cognition and its physical manifestations in an Earthly plain.
The story line begins with Con taking the plunge with his notebook June into an Earthy material life. A plunge that makes him fall through life and is bound to end in death. Death smashes his notebook’s hard disc into tiny bits and pieces. The nonlinear narrative as a result tries to pick up these broken fragments of memory and brings out Con’s journey through the human body (in its tree like statistical self-similarity with the Earth and the universe, which may be represented in an atom). It portrays microcosmic interactions inside the human body at a macrocosmic level of day to day living on an Earthy scale.
Con becomes well versed with the anatomy and circuitry of the various intricate components of his machine but also realizes that it has developed in an evolving assembly line whose creators are long dead and nobody till date understands perfectly how the damn thing works. However there are theories, stories of atoms and molecules and their subatomic families regularly utilized to explain how semi conductor chips work inside our bodies. Throughout the ages, stories take on multicolored hues, theories on the nature of Con, Earth and self-evolving machines…the science is ever changing.
To all the dead bodies who taught us anatomy
To all our patients who taught us medicine
To all systems that need trouble shooting
Living or non living, sleek, shining, functional or worn, withered and junked
Sutra
We believe that the cognitive sciences have reached a situation in which they have been frozen into one narrow form by the machine metaphor. There is a need to thaw that form and move from a reductionist, atemporal, disembodied, static, rationalist, emotion and culture-free view, to fundamentally richer understandings that include the primacy of action, intention, emotion, culture, real-time con straints, real-world opportunities, and the peculiarities of living bodies.
Walter J. Free man and Rafael Núñez
Restoring to Cognition the Forgotten Primacy of Action, Intention and Emotion,
Imprint Academic 1999.
'You are not your body, but the witness, the consciousness of the body. Not
any of your thoughts or feelings but the witness, the
consciousness of your thoughts and feelings. '
--Line from, “The Mandukya Upanishad”.
The Upanishads (translated by Swami Prabhananda 1970). Hollywood, Calif.:
Vedanta Press. 1978.
Introduction
What on Earth is Human Ontology?
The traditional goal of ontological inquiry is to divide the world "at its joints," to discover those fundamental categories or kinds that define the objects of the world. (IDEF5 methods report 1994). What ontology has in common with both computer science and philosophy is the representation of entities, ideas, and events, along with their properties and relations and the rules that govern them, according to a system of categories. (“Ontology-computer science”, 2007) An often-quoted definition of ontology in computer science is that it is an explicit specification of a conceptualization restricted to different domains. (Gruber 1993).
For example if one has to write an ontology of driving a car it would involve representation and retrieval of data specifying certain concepts related to controlling the wheel, clutch, brake as well as concepts of objects such as road on which the car needs to be driven and characters such as trees, other cars and people that need to be avoided.
In human ontology, the ontologic domain is existence itself and for an individual sustaining that existence his/her personal ontology is his/her personal conceptualization (although rarely explicitly specified and this is where the similarity to computer ontology ends) of the roadmap he would need to drive himself through that existence and the objects s/he would meet on that road that s/he would need to know how to deal with. A computer ontology program for car driving may not actually drive a car unless connected to a robotic system but would likely be able to answer queries on car driving. In most humans substantial portion of the knowledge on car driving may however remain tacit where the body may know how much pressure to exert on the accelerator to attain a certain speed but for the individual may become difficult to tell. Instances where explicit specifications of conceptualizations are difficult to attain simulate real world human interactions where substantial outcomes are achieved in a tacit manner. (Biswas 2008)
Human ontology (a product of natural evolution) unlike computer ontology (artificially created by humans) is a remarkably heterogeneous cognitive phenomenon varying widely from human to human depending on genetic and environmental factors. It is a less explicit specification of individual concepts so much so that the term human ontology is a contradiction (unless it is just used to label neutral specifications for understanding human anatomy with an aim of building the healthcare framework around it). Admittedly the validity of claims labeling human creations as artificial is also debatable.
Yet humans do share cognitive constructs utilizing natural language that are expressed or stored as representations of entities, ideas, and events, along with their properties and relations and the rules that govern them, according to a system of categories (this is again what ontology is about although in humans it may not be explicitly stated as for computers).
Other contemporary views from authors such as Peter Wilberg deny human ontology as a cognitive process at all. Wilberg maintains that the inner human being cannot be reduced to a set of bodily processes or cognitive behaviours. The inner human being is not some bodily ‘thing’ at all but ‘some-one’: a being. According to Wilberg, human ontology creates a fundamental distinction between the human body and mind on the one hand, and the inner human being on the other. (Wilberg 2007)
Health as a personal experience is an individual phenomenon – patients understand and experience their health in the context of their social networks. People and events simultaneously make up these networks; structurally they are interconnected and functionally interrelated – and as such interdependent. (Bar-Yam 1997)
Over time individual patients therefore build their unique conceptual models of their health and illness in the context of their experiences and everyday social interactions. Equally health professionals develop their main constructs of health and disease from the collective interactions with their colleagues in medical institutions. Frequently these constructs are devoid of the ‘white noise’ generated by the personal realities of patients, caregivers and other professionals.
These personal individual views form the basis for the socio-cultural construct of health, illness and disease, and the culture of the health care system – these understandings are learnt, internalized and enacted. As Berger and Luckmann (1966) point out persons and groups interacting together in a social system, form over time, concepts or mental representations of each other's actions, and these concepts eventually become habituated into reciprocal roles played by the actors in relation to each other.
This book illustrates the dynamic interactions between individual human ontologies utilizing multiple beads of individual narratives threaded into a meta-narrative in the background of healthcare and illness.
References
Bar-Yam, Y. Dynamics of Complex Systems, Addison-Wesley, 1997.
Berger, P. L. and T. Luckmann (1966). The Social Construction of Reality: A Treatise in the Sociology of Knowledge, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.
Gruber, T. R. (1993). A Translation Approach to Portable Ontology Specifications. Knowledge Acquisition, 5(2), 199-220.
IDEF5 method report (1994) Retrieved Oct 7th 2007 from http://www.idef.com/pdf/Idef5.pdf.
Wilberg, P. Human Ontology or human genomics. Downloaded from http://heidegger.org.uk/hum_ont_hum_gen.pdf.
Ontology-computer science. (2007, Aug 12). In Wikipedia Retrieved oct 7th 2007 from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ontology_%28computer_science%29.
Biswas, R, Martin, C.M., Sturmberg, J., Mukherji, K., Lee, E.W.H., Umakanth, S., and Kasthuri, A.S. (2008). Social cognitive ontology and user driven healthcare, Hatzipanagos, S. and Warburton, S. (Eds.), Social Software and Developing Community Ontologies, IGI Global Publishing (Feb 2009).
The Conscious Notebook
All works of fiction draw on real life data and the present work is no exception. The data has been meticulously distorted substantially to remove all possible real life links. Any resemblance to a real life person would be purely coincidental.
Reading tips for the diligent but gullible reader
The trick in this book is not to be diligently linear as this is a very non-linear narrative built within the framework of a scale-free network with the sections on the medical student and her father as the major hubs. You could start with the last chapter and even end somewhere in the middle if you want to but be sure to turn it rapidly and smell the ink (that is if you are reading a paper version) or just eye the contents (not on the table of contents) scrolling down slowly till you feel like reading the italicized quotes (if you are on your electronic version).
Consider a social network in which nodes are people and links are acquaintance relationships between people. It is easy to see that people tend to form communities, i.e., small groups in which everyone knows everyone. In addition, the members of a community also have a few acquaintance relationships to people outside that community. Some people, however, are so related to other people (e.g., celebrities, politicians) that they are connected to a large number of communities. Those people may be considered the hubs responsible for the small world phenomenon.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scale-free_network
Prologue
Who Wants to Join the Dance?
I don’t know where the audience for this sort of a narrative collection or assortment lurks at the moment unless they are reading this but then why would anyone want to read it is the question that I must first try to answer. Also in my role of the prologue deity I guess I need to explain why they might consider sitting through the entire assortment of narratives.
I don’t think I have to go further back in history than the cave men to search for this. Those were the good old days when primordial genes were discovering the joys of finding new expression in variety of human bodies that were beginning to work and think differently. Like one poor cave man would often be chided by his partner for not being able to pluck that bright red flower from the topmost branch of that tall tree, her friend’s partner (called husband in the middle ages) having beat him to it.
So he would begin to think of obtaining the flower by offering to trade that neat piece of stone he has shaped into a sharp and a sort of business is born. This goes on for centuries until it’s centralized into a governable currency and the modern market is born with the same underlying theme. Information as a commodity enters the market with the advent of the printing press and is presently threatening to leave with the advent of a world wide spidery market place.
I believe the biggest return for any information monger is information itself. It may in the beginning seem a bit like flattery (when someone conveys their gratitude for the information you presented) but eventually settles down to becoming an interesting exchange where both interacting poles gain more and more information.
Now, if one settles instead for getting rewarded in the form of a certain green kind of purchasing power then one simply manages to tire/burn oneself out. After all how much can you gorge with that puny body? In such situations the only hope of salvation is to open the floodgates of charity (albeit in a controlled manner) and achieve that equilibrium one strived and managed to lose in youth.
The real market lies in our hearts where, in the light of the full moon, one can dance to the tunes of a cowherd’s flute, lilting the spirits of the jungle. The real buyer is one who can join the dance. In the end I must warn you, you are going to see more of the prologue deity barging in quite often in between the narrative.
Chapter 1
Introducing Darkness
Your article says, “Something out there holds swarms of galaxies together and keeps their stars from falling apart, but scientists still haven’t learnt what this invisible substance is.” Although I am familiar with many of the names of God, this is the first time I have heard Him called Dark Matter.
Clyde A. Bachelor
Letter to National Geographic, September 2005
What you see in front of you is not just darkness. It’s like you have no sight. Now imagine you aren’t hearing me either. There’s no sound except a soft drone, which drifts out from a deep black hole from time to time. Well… in such instances you might feel the soft rustle of air around or the saliva at the back of your tongue or become aware of the perfume your neighbor’s put on but lets think that you aren’t able to feel all this either…there’s just space, no atmosphere to speak of, no stars coming out, no taste or touch, none of the five senses at all. Our story begins right here where time stands still…no sound of my talking, no pin dropping only a drone which sounds vaguely like aum…hmmmmmmmmmm.
Welcome to the black hole of Nirvana…universal consciousness. I know it’s boring to be bereft of the senses especially when you know there’s a thriving world full of revelers right in this black hole, who are like ordinary human beings talking, listening, jostling, tickling each other, enjoying their beers, having sex, in short having a real good time. Another thirty seconds of silence in this heart of darkness and you will understand the predicament of Con, the hero of our story. He’s been holed up here since Con only knows what time…ages maybe but then again time here stands still…as if waiting.
Cons are actually ordinary people who had eaten the forbidden fruit on Earth. They wanted badly to merge into the main stream of universal consciousness, they also wanted peace and there was only one way out for them…unplug all sensory inputs from their system…with each and every bite on the apple, cut off all desires and reach the state in which all of you are now, if not for my incessant yapping. I shall stop here and leave you with nirvana for company just another 30 seconds…give you the feeling of what it’s like to be Con (alias God)…poor God.
Tamas or Darkness in physical nature finds expression as gravity and inertial mass. In human nature it is felt essentially as a downward-pulling sense of inertia and heaviness. People search to compensate for Tamasic existence either through Rajas - hyperactivity and consumerism or mindless entertainment or through bland Sattvic states of spiritual harmony, peace and calm.
Peter Wilberg
The Gunas, 2007
Chapter 2
Once the Threads are Set…Must Continue
to Weave
All authors build on their own lives to tell their stories. They use their real life as an introduction to the characters and then sit back and watch their characters emerge with a life of their own. All this is done as part of this unique thought experiment called novel.
Sutra
A note from Sutra:
I am not to be mistaken for the author himself. The author to relate his story is using me. My Bengali name is Sutra Dhar, which doesn’t necessarily mean storyteller but someone who threads and weaves a story. The things, which I relate, may happen in the real, the author’s world and the imaginary, reel…my world. I am a bridge between the two worlds. The picture in front of you shows a man crossing the street. He’s not the author or myself or even the sponsor for our story. He’s an ordinary nameless human, the focus of our story.
He is an ordinary man who’s weirdly fascinated by the ordinary people living around him in an extraordinary world. He revels in the stories churned out by their interactions with each other and the macro-microcosmic environment. He gorges on them daily as if they were a staple item in his daily diet of thought. I may not be the only storyteller on whom the author has bestowed sole right to voice his stories. There are others from the author’s world of ordinary people. You might wonder whether they are people at all. You might get to hear stories related by a virus, a red blood corpuscle or even a protein molecule masquerading as a snake or squirrel. Sometimes you might hear the lord almighty talking to you.
Paradigms are fires lit by tiny sparks of individual thoughts that brighten up our worlds as a celebration and transform incendiary individuals into overnight life long celebrities. Society needs these glowing fires from its brightest stars to function effectively in a galactic space that is otherwise bereft of color and air in a back drop of intense all encompassing darkness—
Dhar S,
The influence of dominant paradigms in social functioning
(unpublished-retrieved from the dustbin folder).
Chapter 3
Story of Samsara
To come back again to the beginning of time, even before the sperm comet hit our ovum planet, let’s take a look at the source of our comet and planet. After all, the universe is just a collection of narrative matter strung together by time. –
Sutra
Samsara, which means the universe, is only one of the characters in this story. He wasn’t always bad in academics; in fact one should say he excelled in them. On leaving school, he managed to sail into the best technological institutes in the country, all because he had a way with mathematics. Numbers talked to him. They pulled at his hair, splashed water on him and teased him often sending him into frenzy…more so when he was presented with a problem, which was difficult and impossible for the average student.
It was off course rare to find him tied down to problems, which he always liked to call challenges, as he would have solved most of them in a jiffy. Unfortunately he also bagged at the same time a seat in medical school as his aggregate in physics and chemistry gave him an edge even if his biology was just passable. His parents decided that as his elder brother was an engineer he had to be a doctor.
His medical student days were spent in rigorous studies but recurrent failures. He wasn’t actually studying the subjects’ medical school demanded but almost everything else, which included lengthy tomes on theoretical physics, combinatorial chemistry and non-linear dynamics. He took a number of years more than the average medical graduate to pass his finals and barely managed to finish his internship. Most of his batch mates had long finished their residencies and fellowships becoming busy assistant professors of Cardiology, Gastroenterology and the like in prestigious universities. His school-mates way behind his mathematical abilities who had nevertheless got into engineering now held important positions in high tech academic institutes as well as the corporate sector.
His parents had by now realized their mistake and come to terms with the fact that their son wouldn’t after all become a medical man even if he’d managed to scrape through medical school. They hoped he’d take up a government medical officer’s job. His cousin was doing well earning hefty bribes signing false post mortem reports. He had already built a bungalow, bought a car.
However Samsara Sen. was made of different fiber. He believed in following his bliss. He had toyed with the idea of appearing again for the technological Institutes entrance exams during his med school days but somehow was then too absorbed with theoretical physics to even bother about a career in engineering. He believed his bliss lay in talking to his beloved numbers…Listening all day to the melodious chatter of mathematics.
What drives us to learn? Is it our jest for reward in the form of feel good food for thought? We learn anything for these food for thought rewards and like animals in a circus seem to be constantly foraging for it.
Sutra
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