To Be or Not To Be |
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A little kingdom I possess, Where thoughts and feelings dwell; And very hard the task I find Of governing it well. ~ Louisa May Alcott ...that more or less describes my situation!
~A Wise Man Said~ It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it. ~ Aristotle
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Thursday, June 05, 2025
“It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.” —Wendell Berry When I was a kid, I used to have many arguments with my brother
about very small things. Like for instance, there was this Bollywood song. A line
in it goes, ‘tera pyaar hai ek sohnae ka pinjara oh shehzaadi’ (roughly
translates to ‘your love is a golden cage oh princess’). That’s what I heard
when I heard the song, but my brother heard ‘tera pyaar hai ek tohtae ka
pinjara oh shehzaadi’ (which translates to ‘your love is a parrot’s cage oh
princess’). We had a heated argument over which one of us was right, but there
was no Google at the time. To figure out who between us was right was difficult.
Asking other people usually led to more fights about who was siding with whom.
It was never the end of the matter. After Google and the internet more generally, I would imagine that
these kinds of situations should be rare. And now with AI, there is no question
to which we need trouble ourselves for an answer. Not just factual questions of
the kind Google is good at but even highly contextual ones. It's mind-boggling the
way AI or LLMs come up with stuff—and I will reserve another post for all the
ways in which it has turned out to be surprisingly useful to me. But I wonder
about what we are trading in exchange for this powerful crunching of knowledge
in seconds? Efficient answers at our fingertips? Quick solutions to all knotty problems?
What happens when we do not have to 'not know' anymore in what was at one point
an arduous journey towards knowing or maybe never knowing? If Google had never
arrived, maybe my brother and I would be forever unsettled on the point of
whether it was 'sohnae' or 'tohtae'. Would that have been a good thing or a bad
thing? Isn't there something in the process of working out uncertainty for
ourselves, no matter how uncomfortable, that we grow in some way? We learn many
things even if we do not learn the specific thing we want to know, and we put
to use these learnings when we encounter a new problem or puzzle. What happens
when we get the answers from outside all too easily, quickly, confidently,
never really deeply grappling with the question inside ourselves? I wonder... |