[ If you want to be removed from the mailing list, please send NI and we shall oblige. Wordsmith has come back to Calcutta after seven weeks of leave of absence. This dialogue is an excerpt from a long conversation between Wordsmith, Dr. Philo and Ms. Paramita in Wordsmith Ashram – a private and privately funded Ashram by Wordsmith Communication in the tea gardens of Silchar]
Extramarital affairs and Network Theory
Dr. Philo has the virtue or vice of an Enlightenment age person of formulating any essential theme of life into a tractable and manageable problem statement. He is a bachelor and thus was teased that he was not very qualified to say anything of personal experience on the subject matter. Brushing this, he continued to argue, one can think of the cause of extra-marital affairs as proactive, reactive, triggered, irrational, unknown and unknowable. Leaving the unknowable one, he explains that proactive means those classes who are actively searching irrespective of their marital experience, reactive are those who are searching after an unpleasant experience, triggered are those who suddenly discover it, irrational is one level higher of triggered where the behaviour cannot be explained within reason and unknown classes have sub-conscious underpinnings and is in the domain of psychoanalysis. However, our bachelor doctor then argues that in all through one’s life, out of 7 billion people on the earth, one’s opportunity to “network” with people remains finite, punctuated by the hard limit of duration of one’s life and the soft limit of actually coming in meaningful contact with people. Network theory’s great insight, the good doctor informs, is the pivotal importance of linchpins or choke-points which appear to control most of the network. A man or woman searching for extra-marital affairs can consider social media, that neighborhood bar or that club such choke-points. Dr. Philo argues that extra-marital affairs of a person is powerfully determined by the closeness or the openness of the network one “moves” in and this explains why film people have marital and extramarital within the community of film people.
Soul Mate
Ms. Paramita, a married woman with children, a PhD in molecular biology and interested in Eastern Mysticism, especially Tantra of Bengal. She astonished us by stating that the unconscious drive for extra-marital affairs comes from the search for a soul-mate or what the Tantra calls “the inner man / the inner woman”. Thus, she says that as technological pace accelerates, it will be creating more and more immoral society in the traditional sense but will be emphasizing the search for soul-mate. According to her, the marital system is a construct by society and has no strict biological imperative. Addressing Dr. Philo and to emphasize her point she argued that just like Fundamental Constants in the Equations of physics has no imperative. There is no known law of Physics that mandates that Laws of Nature should have constant entities like c(velocity of light), G(Gravitational Constant), h(Planck’s constant).
Search for a Soul Mate – the mathematical analysis
I listened to the arguments of both of them, very fascinated and then thought that considering Ms. Paramita’s premise that extra-marital affair is an effect of the search of soul-mate and Dr. Philo’s insight of network theory, let us calculate the probability / time for a person today to test his compatibility with someone else, i.e. soul-mate and to complete the search & lock operation. I designed a rough algorithm using permutation and combination and tweaking parameters to make this little anthropomorphic (time for a man to interact, court a woman and vice versa), to my surprise, the time needed to complete this comes to its lesser bounded limit as to the close to the age of the Universe ! However, one can still argue, when one completes, in theory this search and lock that the soul-mate is still not found. Thus, using the beautiful system of negative and positive time axis, one can extend this forward and backward. Immediately, Dr. Philo interjected, this takes a premise of infinitely oscillating universes. Ms. Paramita laughed and said – “So what, search for the soul mate continues from one life from another life because it is your being, your very core.” Dr. Philo interjected again : this is also an untested and unverified premise.
End Note
My algorithmic analysis points to the fact that search for a soul-mate through an algorithmic process, i.e. computationally is intractable. The computational process forces us to assume untested and unverified premises (past lives, oscillating universes) to even give the process a totality.
On the other hand, to have even a single instance of soul-mate being found (whatever it is) must have happened against an astronomically high chance of not being so. Ms. Paramita says this is because search for soul-mate is through consciousness and not through algorithms. The probability is as close to the mathematical probability of Life emerging by chance in our Universe, i.e. 1 with 72 zeros behind which for all practical purposes means : zero.
Dr. Philo was unconvinced. Ms. Paramita was silent.
I chanted : Do all charms fly at the touch of cold philosophy ? The charm being the charm of extra-marital affairs and the philosophy being Principia Mathematica Natural Philosophia.
Wordsmith
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