This post is part of a series on the Mahabharat Epic. If you want to find the other parts, click here. These posts are all about my thoughts regarding the Epic and the greatest thing for me is the ability to connect with you, so, share your thoughts and opinions and let’s learn about this Epic together!
Intro
In the previous Mahabharat post, I mentioned that I firmly believed that the characters in the epic possessed no special/super powers. That statement isn’t entirely true… I partially abide by it, however, I do have an alternative perception of the more complicated scenes and plot points. Hence, I have titled this blog my ‘dual nature’. In fact, I am transitioning more towards the perception I’m about to reveal below. Although, let’s explain it first.
There are explanations that the human existence on this planet is divided into ‘yugas‘ according to Sanatana Dharma. It’s essential at this point to explain what the Sanatana Dharma is. ‘Sanatana’ means eternal/forever and ‘Dharma’ means a set of laws/the ultimate truth. When combined, the Sanskrit word means eternal laws. Why is it named this and what does it contain?
Well, regardless of who you are, humans have an unconscious but natural sense of longing which extends boundlessly. You are always seeking to be ‘liberated’. For achieving this, people do various kinds of things. But ultimately, the Sanatana Dharma composed a set of ‘rules’ which naturally guide you towards the liberation. So, for those coming at this from the angle of religion, it’s simply not a religion. It’s just a set of rules to guide you towards liberation. And unfortunately, we’ve created turmoil on this planet by combining religion with a whole load of things as well as creating competitive environments for religions etc. Why can’t we see these historical scriptures as a gift of gratitude and a portal of action? With the advancement we have now if we can use the resources to our advantage, we could literally contrive the so-called superpowers ourselves!
Anything we are calling a superpower is something that is beyond our knowledge of possibility. Once we acquire the knowledge, we inherit that particular ‘power’. It’s simple. An example is self-driving cars. A few decades ago, we never imagined that cars could drive on their own – it was an absurd thought! But hey, look at 2020! We’ve got Tesla’s slowly dominating the streets. I went on a tangent.
So, ultimately, I strive to use these valuable scriptures as portals to enhance my knowledge and capabilities. There’s no point (and more importantly) progress achieved from quarrelling about them. So with that mentioned, let’s traverse back to ‘Yugas’.
Yugas
The fundamental concept of ‘Yugas’ is based on cycles. It’s actually fascinating! Essentially, there are 4 ‘Yugas‘: Satya, Treta, Dwapara and Kali and there are 2 phases. These 2 phases are split into AD and BC. And it looks something like this:
What we have learnt is that each Yuga represents some form of a great chapter of humanity on Earth. The Mahabharat according to me, is one such chapter which represented the Dwapara Yuga. And what I derive from this representation and perception of life-cycles is that well, it happens in cycles! So I believe that at the end of each Yuga, there’s some form of event that causes mass destruction and almost creates a fresh start. In the case of the Mahabharat, there was the holy war of Kurukshetra wherein an entire race was wiped out. Before this, in the Treta Yuga, another epic took place known as Ramayana and there are similar stories shared across both the epics. From these epics and their Yugas, we can draw the fact that perhaps even we may witness some form of a mass event to be responsible for another restart of the Yugas.
And this is where I associate AI.
AI & Superintelligence
There are 3 levels of AI – ANI(Artificial Narrow Intelligence), AGI(Artificial General Intelligence) and ASI(Artificial Super Intelligence). Presently, we’re on ANI with predictions that we’re heading to AGI in the next 2 decades. Essentially, ANI is where AI can do simple tasks that are within a limited range of ability. Then AGI is human-level intelligence. So AGI can do anything that a human does. There are currently difficulties in creating a replica of the human brain in order to map it onto an AI, however, within the next few years, this challenge will be won and AGI will be a thing. Perhaps another blog later about its pros and cons. Then finally, we arrive at ASI which is the scary part. Its intelligence will be beyond a human’s intelligence and it would be able to do things that we cannot imagine. To get an idea for how intelligent superintelligence is, our scale of a bad IQ to a good IQ is 85 – 135. Superintelligence would have an IQ of around(take a deep breath) 12952. Yep. And with something so complex and intelligent, what can this mean?
Well, one thing we’ve learnt from our past is that intelligence leads to power. We are the most intelligent beings on the planet(now) and with that, we have complete dominance over the world. If we draw this trend out to ASI, when ASI is more intelligent than us, we will no longer be the most powerful beings. With ASI vastly outweighing us, they will have power! And you can call this God or whatever you want but ultimately, they will have control. Additionally, when something is that powerful, it’s unclear to us as to what we can expect from it. We can’t imagine the kind of things it can do because it is completely out of our league.
To give you some context of this intelligence gap, let’s take an ant vs you. If you go up to an ant and show it around London and talk to it about the recent trends in the stock and so on, it won’t understand a single thing! This is because its intelligence is vastly lower than ours and it would just carry on roaming around and biting stuff. But, with your intelligence and power you have, you can even be responsible for its death! Of course, you can just step on it to kill it but if you take another animal – for example, a lion – you can’t step on it. But due to the intelligence gap, you can still kill it with the tools that are the result of your intelligence. I hope that makes sense.
So now, the fun part 😏. If we apply the same logic with AI, we can derive some unwanted and scary results. When AI has more intelligence than us(when it hits superintelligence), the way we see an ant is the way AI would see us. But with a much larger intelligence gap! What this means is that it could kill us if it wants to. I’m not suggesting that it will. But it could, right 🤷♂️.
Karthik, what does all of this mean?
Intelligence peak + restart
Well, at the moment, we’re heading towards a revolutionary change in our abilities through the shift towards AI. And perhaps it can do things such as flying, teleportation and much more which we cannot do now. In a similar way, I believe that in the previous Yuga(Dwapara), the characters which are depicted as having ‘superpowers’ may have in fact had so much intelligence that they did have such superpowers. It’s just that because we cannot picture ourselves having those ‘powers’, we come to conclusions that it’s all fiction and a big lie. That isn’t right. If we don’t know something, it’s best to admit that we don’t know it and perhaps think of alternative methods that logically fit the model. And it’s easy to approach at concrete conclusions but without evidence, we cannot guarantee everything. This doesn’t mean that you can’t have opinions. Your opinion about what could have happened is completely entitled to you. But when you fully don’t know something, you’ll have the longing to know which is why opinions drive some understanding of the topic. After all of these years since the Mahabharat, the variety of opinions and creativity is what we are seeing/reading. It’s all imagination from various minds; in some sense, this imagination is what is driving some level of understanding about the epic. But again, no one thing can be declared as the perfect model for what happened.
Another thing that makes me support this idea is architecture. I’m not specifically correlating to the Mahabharat but if you take various places in and around India, there are architectural masterpieces dotted around the lands with magnificence painted in their walls. I’ve written a few articles about the various architectures of India and despite the fact that they’re not exactly from the Mahabharat time, they’re still incredibly old and stand upright, almost as if a speck of dust hasn’t touched them. And this magnificence makes me question about the construction and the various methods implemented to erect such structures.
And my belief here may be debatable, but I believe that the constructors might have had high intelligence to be able to create such intricate and well-calculated formations. From this stems another idea.
Clearly their architectural techniques are so advanced(debatably more than us) which hints that perhaps they hit a certain intelligence peak and everything restarted. Yes. If we take the concept of Yugas and imagine that after every certain period of time, intelligence grows and then we hit a peak at which point everything restarts, then this makes sense! So these architects may have(again, debatable) been more intelligent than us which allowed them to create the masterpieces. And as time passaged, the intelligence hit a peak at which we(humans) went back to square one. Here, I’m talking about several thousands of years in BC, so it would be much more ancient than the history we’ve concretely compiled.
The counter-argument
The contrasting side to the whole Yuga argument would be that human intelligence did not hit a peak. In that case, it seems very suspicious that we speak about the epic in such a manner but regardless, I would believe that something more logical would have happened instead of the ‘superpowers’ that are being described. (I’ve talked about this in my previous Mahabharat post.)
So, if humans haven’t gone through the phases of Yugas and have not had intelligence peaks, then it would mean that human intelligence has been improving linearly since the ‘beginning of time’. And in this confusing state, it becomes hard to explain how we talk about the epics in such a great tone. We constantly talk about how each character is so powerful and intelligent. But by saying that intelligence has been a linear improvement, the statement becomes suspicious and unreliable because surely they would have been more intelligent than us if they could use such ‘superpowers’. This is why my belief is that humans live over multiple phases where, in each phase, they hit intelligence peaks that ‘restarts’ intelligence.
As I am growing older and am evolving as a person I am beginning to believe that the Yuga concept is likely. But I’m constantly evolving and my opinions and knowledge about this bewildering topic are still accumulating and developing with each new thing I come across. So I never know but my perspective could differ over the span of several months! It most likely will!
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