0.0000000143%

One out of nearly 7 billion people. One out of nearly 3.43 billion males. One out of nearly 5 million Singaporeans. One out of nearly 30 thousand researchers in Singapore. One out of nearly 1 thousand computer science researchers in Singapore. One out of a family of four.

One.

I am just one person on this planet. Just this one person, nothing more, and hopefully nothing less. I am no nobility, nor important person in most contexts; I do not come from a rich nor industrious family. Neither am I particularly famous on my own, be it in financial terms or in raw power or even charisma.

If we were to look even beyond that of this planet we call home, the insignificance is even more staggering. We are just one tiny planet among the multitude of star systems, which are the tiny make up of the galaxies and superclusters and everything else. The total known count of particles in the universe has been estimated to be the eightieth power of ten, while even a normal human has at most ten to the fourtieth power of particles.

One.

No matter how we look at things, the sheer insignificance of a single human start to make one wonder---is it all worth it? Are all the things that we do really worth it?

In many systems, the concept of optimisation seems to be the order of the day. Most dynamic systems will optimise themselves to reduce their potential functions to reach a certain sense of stability, even if the transitions themselves are chaotic in nature. As far as science goes, it is tacitly assumed that the long term outcome of any system will be that where the potential function governing the system is at its global optimal. In some sense, this is codified in the second law of thermodynamics---a system in maximum entropy is taken to be at the most globally optimal configuration, because any other configuration requires an expenditure of energy to do work against the ``nature'' of the system.

But the same cannot be said for human life. Empirically speaking, it would seem to be the case that humans are working against entropy and seeking things that are away from the global optimal configuration of their world. These can be seen from the continual battle between societies and nature, with the creation of artificial domiciles that reside in man-made oases amongst the natural greenery, where the original inhabitants of the land are all but wiped out to satiate the ever-growing lust of space and novelty by humankind.

One.

Perhaps that tirade against humanity in general is too abstract to be comprehended by the mere person, the single entity whose numbers self-organise into the juggernaut known as humanity. Let us try to look at this from a slightly different perspective, but with a similar sort of insight that we are looking for. There are many things that the single person is unwilling to do, for instance, losing a job, or even losing a loved one to either diseases or some catastrophe, man-made or otherwise. But in the larger context, be it in the context of a company or even a country, the concept of ``for the greater good'' keeps appearing as a dictum, and armed with that maxim, sacrifices by the individual have to be made. So, for a company's overall performance, it might be that a single person needs to be fired for incompetence, but to that person fired, it would appear to be ``unfair'' that he/she be axed from the work force like that. To the company, it is exercising a global optimisation option, to optimise the benefit of the larger group that comprise the company, but to the individual, he/she wants to optimise locally, for himself/herself so that he/she can still be a part of the whole, whether or not it is ultimately successful in the global configuration or not.

A similar inductive argument can be made from the level of companies with some other higher hierarchical sytem, with the company playing the old role of the individual and the higher level playing the old part of the company, and ad nauseum. What is the point of it all, you might ask.

Humans are inherently selfish.

This is where my self-doubt comes in. I see myself as a hard core computer scientist, in the sense that I believe strongly that theories of computation are at the core of everything that comprises the universe. I also believe that in many instances, it is often a good idea to operate such that we perform a global optimisation of the system as much as possible to better use the limited resources that we have.

Up to this point, things are mostly idealistic.

And then I look at myself. As noted right in the beginning, I am just a nobody. If I truly believed in my ideals that things ought to be done such as to optimise the global system, then a natural deduction would be that my existence is meaningless and thus is a consumption of resources that produces no useful output. Within the reasoning that I had set forth, I should be thusly removed from the system to better allow other more useful components to get the extra resources to be even more useful.

But by that reasoning, almost all of the other people need to be similarly eliminated because almost everyone else is not contributing to the overall system in a meaningful way. Clearly there is something wrong with that reasoning.

I suppose that part of the problem comes from the human's selfishness/survival instinct, and part of the problem comes from the fact that we are not wholly conversant of the form in which the universal potential function looks like at our granularity. Physicists assume that the laws of physics work exactly the same in spite of the frame of reference/location within the universe, but even they have big issues predicting things that get increasingly local, as can be seen by the current irreconciliation between quantum theories that govern the most local of reactions and relativity that governs the massive scale interactions. If the physicists, who are claimed to be the explainers of reality, cannot figure out the equations that fully describe our universe at all its resolution, then how do we lay people and people of power can claim that what we are doing is indeed ``optimal''?

There's another thing that bears mentioning. In many cases, the potential functions used to determine the state of a system have an asymptotic form---the functions are deemed correct only when given what is effectively a very very long time, infinite in most cases. Unfortunately, this does not translate readily into our local frame of reference, simply because our own existence is often not a very long time. Thus, it might even be logically sound to deduce that we will never truly know what the potential function is. Put in another way, there is no real way of telling what the global optimisation strategy ought to be, because we do not even have a proper model that can describe the system under study.

Put even more simply, we are all operating on a basis of mistakes ever since day one.

In a somewhat roundabout sense, this helps reconcile my doubts of self-worth. While it is true that in the larger scheme of things, I am completely worthless like other people, but if I am happy enough to restrict the domain of discourse, then no one can truly find fault with me for dictating my own terms for a potential function and thus optimise it the way I want.

In short, I think I have justified to myself that being selfish is alright and it is indeed a natural part of being a human. Altruism is a fad and has little to no evidence to support that it is indeed something worthy of pursuit.

But that said, it will take me many a year to undo all that altruistic thought patterns and habits that I have been socially programmed to do over the last two decades of my life. While not going into yet another extreme, I think that this is probably what I need right now to reinject a sense of purpose into what has been a decline into obsoleteness.

World, watch out. I am coming back with a vengeance.