The concept of probability is a good example of the tyranny of majority inherent in scientific method. What probability actually does is generalize a set of data from past events so that some patterns start to emerge as to how the collective outcome of certain actions is going to be. An individual action, however, is always as unpredictable in terms of consequences as the behavior of a single electron in a totally predictable context of the electron beam. This type of information may be of some value for governments, organizations and authorities but nothing can be more relentlessly brutal to an individual cause.

Let me illustrate the problem with an extreme example from real life settings. Say, I have a research that reports a 99.99% probability of success for a startup in Pakistan these days. What it means apparently is that if one launches a new business, it is almost certainly going to be successful. But in reality, it is only a picture of the future finished with all recent inductees in the field of entrepreneurship. What if I, an individual, only one of the aspirants, end up being among the unlucky 0.01%? After all, it exists, and for a reason. Is there any research-backed intelligence to ensure I am not a failure? I, and only I? Any logic, any science, any theory, any principle to ascertain a strictly individual, personal achievement? You see, the answer has nothing to do with probability anymore.

The thing is that even though patterns may exist on larger scales, individual phenomena are always as miserably unpredictable with all the science as they are without it. If I start a new business, I have to face a plain 50:50 probability ratio of success and failure like every single startup among my competitors. Even though 99.99% percent of us may ultimately come out successful yet each of us has essentially done nothing but play dice with the fate. What it means for the whole may be absolutely contrary to what it does for the part!

I have certain other reservations as well but I do believe ideas like probability can serve the society as a whole. That is what democracy is all about. But shall I dare question what good it is for me, the individual? Does the whole science with all its magnificent methods and outcomes give me a single benefit as an individual? Does it make it any easier for me to take some meaningful action for myself when I desperately need it? Am I not one of the individuals who make up the society it aims to serve? But am I still not just an individual and not the society at all? Shall science ever be able to realize the not-so-objective difference?

The problem here is that a whole, like society in our case, exists only as an intellectual convenience. That is why we have always been wondering how the whole can be greater than the sum of its parts. In fact, there are two wholes: one that is generalized intellectually in order to facilitate objective treatment and the other that actually is there. The whole that is generalized is a mere arithmetic sum, practically as dead as the rationale of probability for parts. The other that exists is never a whole but absolute parts that are there in their own right. Parts that may not always like to add up!

The post Probability as a Basis for Meaningful Action appeared first on Raheel Farooq.

This is the old “building” of Government Primary School No. 2, Abdul Hakim. It was as boundlessly public as it looks in the pictures when a Mai (housemaid) first escorted me here in 1995.

I stood aghast.

Later that day, when I had successfully got myself “admitted” to the school, chosen a favorite master and requested for an even better one, struggled and secured a seat among sack-ridden third graders and surveyed my geography and milieu intelligently, I reported to my parents with deep regret that there were virtually no rooms, absolutely no restroom, positively no boundary, perfectly no distinction between gutter and washbasin and categorically no miss in the school they had selected for me.

They did not mind at all and asked me to concentrate on my studies instead.

I was aghast once again.

My teacher, Maulvi Nazeer Ahmed Mohsin, a man with a classic sense of orthography and calligraphy, an ardent taste for Lassi and the consequent slumber, and a great passion for lifting and twirling his students overhead, had himself been a class fellow of one of my real uncles. Even though I enjoyed all the physical, social and moral liberties the school had to offer, I had to study at least enough to avoid beating. I was 9 years old when I first learned some masterpieces of unparliamentary language here with profound visual illustrations and mastered them instantly. I still wonder how I managed to be so sensationally obscene in school and so radically civilized at home the same time.

Maulvi sahib, may he live long, first introduced me to what I today know as language and its arts. He had written some orthography booklets that were popular across the region and probably still are. His handwriting was marvelous. His moral standards for both himself and his disciples were exactly what I now idealize as a teacher myself. He let me bunk school a couple of times, for instance, and excused me for petty justifications; later, when he was positively sure that I was getting spoiled and I was certain that I could befool him easily, his heavy hand taught me a lifelong lesson: fear the time you become fearless!

The school underwent a promotion from primary to middle and was shifted to a new location the year I graduated from it.

The post My First Alma Mater in Punjab appeared first on Raheel Farooq.

That’s how all inanimate things operate in nature. From cross to hemlock, nothing feels ashamed when it kills a human. But that’s not the case with life. Life has a strong tendency to rebel and revolt against lifelessness wherever it occurs in nature and society.

Science is totally justified in what it does and how it does it. But we need to be rational enough to discourage humans trying to be scientific like physics and arithmetic. Humans are not inanimate. They know there is something else in nature and in themselves that defies death and dead mechanisms and they must have enough moral courage to acknowledge it.

Things are good only as long as they exist in their natural limits. Using a pen to drill into a wall will probably do something you can justify scientifically but not a hole at all. The pen doesn’t care, of course, but we do. We have other things to consider that may be more important for us than just science of the process. One may argue that we can also consider the other things scientifically and, hence, prove how prone and addicted we are to the abuse of natural limits of things.

Science, as a a rule, excludes everything from its considerations that is not shareable or communicable. This is what we know as objectification of knowledge. It has no room for experiences that are personal to you as a living being. What you know, experience and see but cannot communicate to others in shared terms is not scientific knowledge. However rich it may be, you have to be able to externalize it beyond your individuality for it to be science. Science, hence, is essentially democratization of the knowledge that could otherwise be and remain individual.

Information is the democratized version of knowledge, pixelated into bits that may never show the full and real picture but are readily digestible to the logic. It is shared and shareable but contributes nothing to you unless you internalize it again. The internalization may be purely on irrational grounds and often is but science doesn’t care as it is personal to you and beyond the scope of science once you take it in. Scientific knowledge, as opposed to information on one hand and knowledge on the other, is information internalized and compiled as a society. Therefore, its fruits are typically sweeter for society than individuals.

Turning knowledge into scientific knowledge requires it to be dehumanized. Objectification and democratization are essentially processes of removing the human element, i.e., discarding the personal, the individual, the incommunicable as subjective. This gives way to an ideal of humans without humanity which, in turn, explains why science paradoxically attempts at things like turning robots into humans and humans into robots at the same time. If that sounds ridiculous, it is not science but the scientific community who should be laughed at. It is them who are trying to equate knowledge with science and hence abusing both science and humanity.

The post Knowledge vs Scientific Knowledge appeared first on Raheel Farooq.

It is safe to maintain that Aristotle believes mimesis to be a process in which an artist imitates life. You are absolutely free to interpret both imitation and life however you want within the rational limits. Some of these limits are evident from how Aristotle himself illustrates the concept. He talks about living persons being the objects of imitation and humans learning through the process of imitation.

What strikes me as odd in the theory is that it should be impossible for the agent and the object of an imitation, i.e., the imitator and the imitated, to be the same. To borrow the metaphor from Plato, a painter can imitate a bed made by the carpenter or the one that exist only as an idea because he, the painter, is not a bed himself. A normal person can imitate a stutterer but a stutterer cannot do this.  Stutterers are stutterers; they do not pose it. They can be objects, but not agents of an imitation of stuttering. By the same token, it should be impossible for an artist, i.e., a living person, to be both the agent and object of imitation of life, or nature, if you prefer it that way.

We can avoid this discrepancy simply by maintaining that the artist imitates specific events of life that do not belong to him. He does not imitate life in general that he shares with the objects of his imitation. But the problem with this perspective is that it absolutely fails to justify the universality of art, something Aristotle himself is very sure of.

Personally, I agree with Aristotle in that we learn and express by imitation. But stretching that idea to account for the creation of art is unjustifiable. As a literary artist myself, I believe art emanates from an irresistible temptation to unite with reality as an individual when it calls for it. It is only the restraint of being a human that bars the artist from expressing his experience except by means of imitation. Otherwise, it is neither inspired by nor limited to imitation. I can tell you it is very similar to coitus but you should remember that comparison to coitus is all by means of which I can express the experience!

The post Aristotle’s Theory of Mimesis: A Critique appeared first on Raheel Farooq.

Here’s the day and here’s the way.
Walk away or will you stay?

Knowledge is what actions say,
Not what wanton words portray.

Yesterday is certainty;
Ah, tomorrow, oh, today!

Let’s remember that we love;
Let’s forget the price we pay.

I don’t know the good from bad:
That I know and still I pray.

Irony is life alone:
Not a problem, not okay.

How come masterpiece is you?
I’m the artist, I’m the clay.

Lo, the star in dark, Raheel!
Ray of hope and hope of ray.

— Raheel Farooq

The post Time’s up, Diva, time’s up, hey! appeared first on Raheel Farooq.