My Favorite Post (DJ)

Luckily I did not have scan too much for getting my favorite post. When the voting was in progress for selecting the next topic, I had already decided what would be my take on the topic if this one is selected.

Just before writing this post, I had completed reading "The Alchemist" by Paulo Coelho; though it was not the first time I was reading this book. But somehow I went into some thinking mode and suddenly I started making my own sense of the author's words. This is what I had gathered around from my knowledge and tried to interpret philosophy with science.

This might be quite boring for most of you who are not interested in science or are not into technical fields, but please try to bear it somehow. :)

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World in terms of Probability
"When a person really desires something, all the universe conspires to help that person to realize his dream" - from The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho

Recently I read, once more, one of the finest books ever written - The Alchemist. The above sentence appears more than a couple of times throughout the book. And this gave me a thought in the context of philosophy as well as science.

Some two years back, I was studying Artificial Intelligence at school and I came across this concept of Probability Distribution Graphs, what we call PDGs. Modelling any situation with the help of PDGs is fun. It is very interesting to see how the conditional probabilities of certain events get raised or lowered under the influence of some evidences which are disclosed or masked at some point of time or their individual probabilities are altered. And in fact, with the vision of evidences on the graphs, the complete probability distribution on the graph changes quite a lot. We used a tool named Genie to model the probability of getting a good grade in any class. I collected a set of events that I could think might have influence on getting a grade. With the help of the tool, I could set the initial probabilities of all the conditions and then after selectively unmasking several evidences, I could see the variation in probability of getting a grade.

Later on, I read a book titled - 'God's Debris' written by Scott Adams. I found several explanations to be really interesting in this context. The reasons that Scott gave for the existence of universe and interpretation of every other thing in the universe in terms of probabilities was engrossing. I could recollect PDGs at that point of time.

After reading "The Alchemist" once more, I again tried to relate the above sentence with PDGs. One can model the world as a really big PDG. But the world is very complex now and things continue to add to the complexities of it. With every step forward in every field of progress, we are adding several conditions to the PDG that makes the interpretation of the graph even more worse. But if it is possible to collect enough knowledge base and resources so as to create this titanic PDG, most of the events can be surely projected as wished. Although, the same thing is happening right now and at every moment of time, we are not in a position to decode enough information so as to reveal accurate predictions.

That's why "When a person really desires something, all the universe conspires to help that person to realize his dream". And it surely does. Though most of the parts of the world go unnoticed, one can relate everything once the desire gets transformed to achievement. It is only then that the connected dots are visible which can be traced through the path of time to the initial spot where it all began.