The inspiration for this post is a blog post on Heart and Mind. I was just spell bound by the clarity of thought with which the post was written. As I started reading the blog....there was an unchecked flow of thoughts and an immediate need to put it down....and so here I go.
As some of you who may know me will understand that my love for Wavelet transforms dates back to 3-4 years and it still continues in its full glory. There were times when I had seen wavelet transforms in Arisi appalams (Rice crispies)and to a lot of other things. It has completely become a part of my life now.
But I just realized that it is not a part of my life alone it reveals a greater truth.It is a mechanism that showcases how life can be seen in different resolutions.
**In this blog post I am writing my perception of how science, math, biology and life may possibly be related. The principles mentioned in its basic sense is true but the relationship may not necessarily make sense if you look at it from a different perspective. There are lot of shortcomings to this and people as different as they are might have different views on this. Kindly put down your thoughts in the comments section (i.e if anyone is reading this :))
Have you ever wondered how difficult it would have been for God to create this whole thing called earth and create multiple species and create human species and design their body giving them their sixth sense to actually think. Doesnt it seem so complex? The reality is that we all want to see realistic models with complex levels of details that requires paying a lot of attention and we want this done quick ...... The solution is Multi-resolution analysis.....:D (Thats where my wavelets help....but I am not gonna explain that here....it will be too much of math for a blog post). In MRA you take a bottom-up approach.....Keep on creating the global picture and at every level get into a deeper level of detail. That is exactly what I am going to do today to appreciate the beautiful balance nature has set within itself...Keep on Reading.....
First level of Resolution: God Creates the human species that consists of man and woman. They are opposites. One sees beauty in the ordinary while the other aims at creating something out of the ordinary...one believes in being objective and the other questions the impact of objectivity in life....one jumps into action by instinct/gut feeling and the other waits to takes action based on carefully thought out judgements....It would be impossible for one kind of species to exist without the other...More on the next level.
Second level of Resolution: God creates a super sophisticated instrument called brain within these human beings in order to compensate for them being opposites. Those are heart(not the physical heart but the emotional part of the brain is called heart here due to its prolonged identification with emotions) and mind.Mind looks for a reason behind every happening and Heart accepts those happenings and expresses it out as an expression of happiness or sadness. This is why Heart always happens to be the emotional one and mind always happens to be the logical one.....If the accepting part is not taken care of by the heart then mind cannot think peacefully and if heart has to be logical when it actually accepts the truth it is almost next to impossible. It is very essential for both to co-exist as one cannot do without the other.....Read on for more...
Thrid level of Resolution: Now this is slightly complicated but yes now we go into the details of the brain and see how this is actually done. There was an article recently that made a study on how brain controls emotions. There are two parts within the brain one is the emotional part of the brain called amygdala that gets activated every time you feel something. There is another part of the brain that is called the executive control for neural processing. Now the interesting thing is that these are connected and everytime there is a need for taking some important decision the executive control area inhibits the emotional area and hence takes charge of the situation. When these do not co-exist or the relationship between these two areas of the brain are not normal it results in post traumatic stress disorders and emotional conflict which causes a whole lot of psychological problems at a mental level.
Similarly at every level if the co-existence is not proper or if the balance is not maintained...something goes awry and the results are there for us to see. The beauty of inspecting this at multiple resolutions is to appreciate the balance at every level in life and how beautifully it is maintained to avoid conflict in every sense.
***I apologize if I had been too technical in this post...these were the raw thoughts that came to my mind as I was writing and I found it too hard to resist.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Multiresolution analysis of life
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priti
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9:19 PM
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12 comments:
Trying to match time & Frequency with Heart & Mind...Good thinking but thats true.
As our human body - works on signals - All kind of communications theories and finding may be true with our system..Only few like you Imagine to such depth...and match with our day to day life activities.
Its an interesting article.
Are you a scientist?
@ Priti: Interesting blog. Let me ask you a quick question here. My knowledge of wavelet transforms is pretty limited, so please pardon my ignorance. You have essentially defined three levels of resolution. To be consistent with the theory, each level represents a vector space. Let us call the three stages, S1, S2 and S3. S1 is of lower resolution and hence S2 is a vector space that contains S1. A key requirement being that S1 is completely subsumed by S2 (nested subspaces). Hence they need to be similar under transformation. This implies that while the resolution can change dynamically, the picture by itself cannot change. Is that true with life? My argument would be that in life the resolution changes are combined with fundamental changes in the picture. Hence would it not be better to think of life as some form of complex adaptive system?
JK....welcome aboard...Yes everything that we see around us is within us....Though it has been there all your life, It is so beautiful when you realize it....and I am not a scientist...if I were I wudn be paying attention to things outside of science...I am happy to just know science enough to appreciate it in every sense and not just in the sense of its use in technology :)
Anup: Interesting point that you brought up....OK this is how it works your assumption of s1, s2 and s3 as vector spaces (or rather feature spaces) is perfectly right but it is not in the order you specified....it is in the reverse order....The one that has the lowest resolution is the first in the line...and the next level it is the same picture with details added in and next is the same picture with more details added in....If you observe a picture being loaded in the internet then you will know how it works...first you see a blurry image from which you can make out that it is a person...and then after a while you can slowly see that it is a girl and sometime later you can see that she is wearing a hat....so the highest level of detail is the innermost subspace nested within the more global levels...Now that clarifies MRA and wavelets...When you say life is accompanied with fundamental changes + changes in resolution you mean to say that the picture becomes clearer and at the same time more details are added.....From my perspective fundamental details correspond to addition of new and more detailed features which is done as the level of transformation gets higher and higher...So there is picture change as well as resolution change. Let's take the example that I gave above.....The fact that the picture at the first level changed into a woman (depicts change in resolution with which you can clearly see the picture) and one fundamental change you can see that is added is that she wears a hat (which is hardly fundamental but for an example lets say that is a change). So I would still say that Multi-resolution analysis is applicable in this case. Although this technique would not work if a fundamental change means introduction of another person in the picture when the resolution that we are currenlty in confirms that there was just one person intially :)....The thing that I have tried to portray here is the beautiful balance that nature has created between man and woman and in the second level(within any man or woman) between the heart and mind and in the third level(within the mind itself) between the amygdala and the executive control center.....When you add an adaptive control which is essentially F/B (I am not very good at this) you can go back and forth between the levels....Hmmmmm Sounds good ...will read more on that and get back :)...And thanks....That was a good thought provoking comment.
//I am happy to just know science enough to appreciate it in every sense and not just in the sense of its use in technology :)
//
Pretty good thought...Keep going..
@ Priti: Thanks for the clarification. Ok. It is fair to say that once we have a basic picture, increasing the resolution solves some of the information problems. For instance as your example states, we have some form at stage 1 and in stage 2 that form becomes a woman. Therefore, stage 1 is a complete subset and contained in stage 2. My point on fundamental change is changing the landscape (spatial/temporal or both). As you rightly point out, this will lead to failure of the method (which is probably because of the static nature of the technique).
The alternative I could think of was a complex adaptive system framework, which allows you to keep the science and also accomodate landscape changes. This is a classic problem in linking pure sciences with social sciences.
Another issue that we can raise is ad hoc definitions. For instance in stage 1 you have man and woman. In stage 2 it is between the heart and the mind. Now changes in landscape can have a significantly different impact on the heart and mind, which cannot be captured by MRA, since changes in landscape is not allowed. But in reality the landscape around us is always changing. Futher, what happens when we have a continous set of attributes (not just a binary choice between heart and mind?). These questions become pertinent in understanding the complete picture.
The concept of equilibrium when we think about life is very difficult to conceptually operationalize but at the same time the thought is interesting. The question that comes to mind does the existence of mankind require off equilibrium solutions? Essentially the notion of equilibrium is flasifiable.
The presence of an equilibrium will not explain the continous change that we keep seeing as there are no private benefits to anybody. The world survives because there is asymmetry between benefits and losses (defined very very broadly) and we forever try to correct the imbalance and reach equilibrium. Once we reach equilibrium,nirvana is achieved and hence life is no longer interesting. Therefore the day we reach equilibrium will probably be the day when mankind ends. Hence, the existence of an equilibrium can be fundamentally questioned! This line of thinking may be worth exploring.
Conceptually interesting blog though. Maybe you can think about how to accomodate changing landscapes within the MRA framework :-)
You have been tagged...you can check it out on my blog :)
but the atoms on brains vibrate too much that the mind cant keep up with the flow and hence more often we end up dissonated
Very well written. Nice blog!
priti .. what makes us cry? why do tears flow?
exectutive control n the emotional area need to be balanced- well, like ya said teh blance needs to be there, failure of which, there is post-traumatic stress..
decoding that, i guess, if we keep the emotions to a basal level, n do things the executive style, maybe we cud jus make life a lot more simpler.. :)
however, we cud be sensitised to life to appreciate its ups n downs and less sensitive to things, in order to avoid trauma!
good one,
ya had my mind going in wavelets :)
Hi, if u have some time visit this site www.ted.com u will find some answers...and if u r brilliant enough u will find more questions than answers...
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