WRITING

Below is a recent work of mine on language analysis, human experience, health, AI, and creativity. I wrote this to be published for a magazine, although an overly critical misintentioned editor shattered my dreams !

NEUE NOVEL

I find it hard to recall conversations. Rather than words or specific thoughts I produce a spotty image of the space. Leather couch, living room. Walking side by side, looking at the ground. Driving alone through the hills at night, windows down. I’m left with a feeling analogous to recalling a song from my past. Something unbelievably distant, often gloomy, dismissive. Pause. Looking to the present, I’ve undoubtedly grown. I’ve come so far. You’ve come so far. These distant memories of conversations, failures, dreams, accomplishments, all act in making me, me, and you, you. So from me to you, or you to me, my passions, desires, feelings, my differences, undoubtedly reside internally. But, to get this across externally we need something universal, understood by both you and me. This universality is Language. With language, we have an unprecedented opportunity to solve pressing issues of the psyche. Language is everything. 

 In the sense that we’re all humans existing in the same world, the number of experiences that can be had are limited. This is inherent to experience. A marriage of experience is what makes oneself out as an individual. To someone else, something you’ve experienced is nothing more than your explanation of that experience. Diminish. Your experience to someone else is nothing more than their interpretation of your explanation of your experience. Diminish. The nature of these limits allows for analysis.

Data analysis is our 6th sense. A mundane clairvoyance. We have the ability to take most forms of data, diminish it to numbers, find the correlations between these newly represented phenomena, and make predictions on whether or not certain phenomena will occur in the future. Imagine this as a system of inputs and outputs. Input vehicle weight, weather conditions, stopping power, intermediate distance to an obstacle of interest, and the output is knowing exactly when to brake, avoiding a collision. Now input social trends, desolation, perception of judgment from those you respect, susceptibility to negative internal emotions, and you might output insecurity. 

In theory, your experiences are a series of inputs to the output of yourself as an individual. Everything heals with time. As time goes on, experiential inputs form into outputs of growth, and this growth is cyclical. Regardless of whether or not you explicitly realize, growth is constant, so long as you seek to grow. As soon as someone experiences something, this experience with whatever set of inputs now exists in the space of potential experiences, and who’s to say that it won’t produce a similar growth related result? These phenomenal correlations can tell us exactly why something happens, or at the very least point us in the right direction, and knowing why is important because in many cases of adverse social circumstance, we have no idea what the solutions are. We have no idea what works.

THE SOLUTIONS ARE HIDDEN IN TEXT

Mind cannot control the mind, it needs external catalysts. The bidirectionality of our bodies and our minds makes for a complex system of checks and balances. Something to the equivalent of complete and utter collaboration. The two are not independent, they depend on one another. As humans, our ability to create and reason is amazing, our minds are beautiful because they’re imperfect. We gain satisfaction from success at the level of individual interpretations of success. At the same time, the internal mechanisms that reinforce this satisfaction are the same that can lead to mental detriment. Dopamine. We have easy success, hard success, cheap dopamine, expensive dopamine, instant gratification, genuine gratification. Satisfaction is relative to both your mental interpretation and your physical reaction to this production of dopamine. But what’s the perfect combination? Can you control the checks?

 Balance, our entire physicality is working in congruence. You and I, we both know this is intuitive but something always seems to affect my emotions, whether mildly or overwhelmingly positive or negative. Left or right, up or down, a middle ground presents itself as something you can control. Running will help you think. Speaking will assist your internal dialogue. Ocular Dilation will dictate your focus. Other people influence your self-regard. Environment controls your decisions. Every chance I get, you’ll find me at a coffee shop. The architecture, the atmosphere, furniture, diffused sunlight, all intentional parts of an environment that matters to me, incessantly. I can focus, but then I’m distracted. Movement in my periphery, an uncomfortable chair, cold air blowing in my direction, all unintentional parts of an environment that matters to me. The ups and the downs fuse into my work, into universal mediums of words, art, ideas, and whatever else I did at that coffee shop. 

The Region-Beta paradox: your desire to overcome distress becomes greater as the severity of that distress increases. Mediocrity is the enemy of success, not failure or despair. A partially adverse relationship won’t drive your repercussive actions as much as a glaringly adverse relationship will, and you might end up in a better situation faster in the case where your situation was worse initially. The nature of distress can be learned and we must learn how to act in periods of distress. This cannot be effective if only told, it must be experienced and this experience ought to be guided: input bullying, disrespect, childhood trauma, family issues, and a teacher must be able to evaluate, navigate, and provide experiential guidance to aid this child through their distress, for the heavily weighted state of their well being can benefit from even the shortest pillar of direction. Traumatic events interpreted in a favorable way relative to the subject can provide intense growth. We can reconcile trauma, we thrive on stress, and we have the ability to understand these phenomena as they apply to ourselves, granting an option to use them to our advantage.

This ability to learn is what makes us human, by way of lacking understanding for how exactly we learn and how exactly our minds work. This how is what drives novel research in the field of artificial intelligence and machine learning where neural networks are at the forefront. These algorithms are called neural because they process and interpret data in a way that’s analogous to that of neurons firing in the brain, but communication between these neurons, changes in neuron composition, bodily and mental reactions to altered brain states, etc., all paint the brain as a congruent entity that is very complex and confusing. Here lies the computational hypothesis that every movement, action, and decision in the brain is quantifiable and can be explained mathematically. This is the idea of Artificial General Intelligence, a technological singularity that’s uncontrollable, irreversible, and more than human. 

An obvious difficulty to solving the world’s problems with machine learning is deriving meaning. Meaning requires context. New models for machine intelligence learn context by determining relationships in inherently sequential data, such as language, to then derive meaning. This transformer architecture is the basis for all the Large Language Models (LLMs) you hear about, GPT being one of them. Part of deriving meaning is understanding the human intention behind words. Developed machine understanding of language will further our understanding of the brain. Advancements in understanding of the brain will further our understanding of language. 

Idea generation is at a weird place. Massive commercial successes depend on access to resources and capital. Naturally, ethical questions on whether this level of growth is justified come about. Some might argue that anything past pure sustenance is unsustainable. With AI’s inherent ability to accomplish repetitive tasks, thereby achieving some level of sustenance, we as humans are left with the unique, the exploratory, and the creative. Novel algorithms can analyze, predict, and provide solutions to more than you might think, but we can’t diminish everything to a state of analysis, at least not yet. Work will turn into creative work, and this will be forced. The new novel is a landscape of coalesced creative and technical novelty where anything inherently repetitive has an efficient and effective solution. The fruits of western civilization will not come at the detriment of the third world. Relationships, animals, obsession, beauty, empathy, mountains, reverence, serenity, you are left to explore what matters, and we ought to embrace what makes us human more so now than ever. Human is everything. 

Following Neue Novel are two short works: one on the nature of performance and the other looking at the ethical theory of cultural relativism from both a philosphical and anthropological point of view.  

Rahul Kalakuntla

On Performance

I have trouble distinguishing between the two forefront definitions of performance—one being performance relative to merit/skill, and the other relative to acts/facades. Performance as it relates to actions and facades is an interesting topic but I couldn’t help but deem the interpretation of merit & skill as a more interesting discussion—what exactly designates “good” art, for example. How can we derive merit from art if an individual piece’s effectiveness is largely dependent on subjective determinations. Is ‘effectiveness’ even a characteristic of art that exists?

The conclusion I’ve drawn is that our interpretation of art is almost entirely subjective, but a major evaluation can be made for objectivity—which is how far a piece of art gets from performance. The less 'performative’ a piece is, the more original its creation becomes, which allows for the argument that art can be theoretically judged on a scale from ‘good’ to ‘bad’. Of course, there are many nuances such as periods of art where many artists were absorbed in similar styles, or differing mediums which allow for less overall expression when compared to others. The general solution for this could be to evaluate an artist’s body of work relative to performance and imitation. 

I read something the other day about Bipolar Disorder having to do with individuals establishing a persona which diminishes into who they truly are once they’re alone. These individuals then at some point make a realization that people on the outside only know them for their public persona, causing the original individual to think adversely of themselves, sometimes leading to heinous action. Relating this to myself I realize there’s a large spectrum of performance, similar to Schechner’s continuum in the continuity sense but more relative to amount/quality of performance. Incessant performance, analogous to the Bipolar example, can be very destructive. Light performance, conversely, can simply point to an individual's accordance with responsible societal norms, which comes from the idea that general public critique can, to some extent, point you in the right direction. 

The ideal scenario for me would be to act freely while remaining aware enough to notice when I’m not acting upon my own pure will. Rejecting performance leaves me in my own thoughts. If only my own thoughts led to my own actions. Mind cannot control the mind.

Rahul Kalakuntla

Cultural Relativism

From recent reading and discussion, I’ve questioned my understanding of cultural relativism—in a broad sense relative to its real world applicability. Having studied philosophy for the past couple of years and completing a minor here at UT, a common topic brought up in philosophical ethics classes is the idea of cultural relativism. However, rarely is it spoken about in a positive light as it is in anthropology.

Introductory ethics describes cultural relativism as an antithesis to objective truths. The reason being that Cultural relativism is presented often as the idea that a given set of cultures and beliefs is just as valid as any other set of cultures and beliefs solely for the reason that those ideologies are in and of themselves a tenet of said culture. Some arguments even go to the extent of saying that relativism “In practice, sanctions the worst manifestations of violence and oppression”. Anthropology, from what I’ve seen, has described this relativism as inherent to culture and ideal for anthropological analysis, which I completely agree with. My understanding of the social science point of view is that in real world research, looking at cultures not on an objective basis but rather relative to the developed values and traditions of that culture’s people, helps greatly with developing solutions to internal cultural issues. 

In theory there need not exist problems and solutions from a cultural relativism point of view (since all culture is said to be valid), but I don’t think the theory here is relevant. I do believe that objective truths exist, but I’m also of the opinion that cultures are very diverse and should be analyzed individually on a culture-by-culture basis. Necessarily, I don’t believe in a ‘best culture’ but I do believe that good things can be taken from every culture and applied elsewhere—just as bad things can be critiqued and movement can be made towards some sort of change. For that reason I’ve come to the conclusion that most ideology in this space of culture, regardless of whether or not it’s classified as ‘absolute’ or ‘critical’, is extreme. Extreme to the extent that it’s best not to colloquially classify oneself into any cultural field of thought that deals with even the mildest sense of ideological absolutes. The nature of culture is very complex and ambiguous—so I’m not of the opinion that either this idea or that idea is correct. This is my newfound understanding on the topic of righteousness within culture. Both the social sciences and the theoretical humanities have valid points whose applicability makes sense in different cultural contexts—which are effectively unlimited.