The Next Vishnu Avatar

यदा यदा , ही धर्मस्य , ग्लानिर भवति भरता:,

अभ्युथानम अधर्मस्य , तदात्मानं सृजाम्यहम .

परित्रनान्य साधुनाम , विनाशयाच दुष्कृताम,

धर्मं-संस्तापनार्थाया:, संभवामि युगे युगे.

Meaning:

Whenever Dharma is discouraged,

To eradicate the Adharma and to establish the Dharma,

To help the holy people and to finish the evil,

To establish Dharma, I come and come in every era

Although I am not a very religious person but I do believe in the above shloka. My belief germinates from a logical point of view rather than being derived from scriptures. In this post I will try to reason why the above may be true and also the why the way it has been said would never let it be desecrated. Finally I will delve a little into fictional world of Matrix to further elucidate my points.

It all starts with evolution and the way it works. Evolution, roughly, operates like a computer chess engine. At any point in time, it calculates all the possible changes in a species within a given set of rules. Rules in the case of Evolution can be survival factors like sun, water, temperature, pressure etc. and also societal factors like predators, intra-species competition etc. It distributes all these possible changes to the new generation of off-springs(according to the genes of parents, but taking a big enough sample size, we can assume it to be random because there are several factors governing distribution like regressive and aggressive traits in parents etc.) and allows them to compete with factors above. The better changes survive and others perish. Among all those who survived the same process is repeated again.

I cannot say the same about lesser animals categorically but in humans evolution also have a alternate side. Evolution-like-process called conditioning governs the distribution of virtues and vices in humans. After conception of the child, the evolution slows down and conditioning begins. Some of this conditioning is hard-wired in the genes of the new born but most of this is formed socially on interaction with family, friends, peers, government, and experiences. The only difference between conditioning and evolution is that none of the holders of the attributes of conditioning (i.e. vices and virtues) die to make a difference in their distribution. Thus both streams of attributes gains power over the time. This process of conditioning is what makes the prophecy of Avatar true.

To see why this assertion may hold true, for the same of argument let us assume there are 100 attributes of human nature and there are 100 severity states for each of these attributes. Every person will have all these 100 attributes. Let me define an Avatar in terms of these attributes. An avatar will be the one has all these hundred attributes at their best possible state. What, then, is the probability than any one person on earth is an avatar. The probability is 1 / 100 (rasied to the power of 100) i.e. the avatar will be one among 100000....(1 followed by 101 zeroes) individuals. To see this in perspective, there are only 6 billion people in this world (6 followed by 9 zeroes). 

So how many years will it take for the avatar to materialize after the last one? Assuming a life of 40 years per person, every year 150 million people die and are newly born. it will take 6(followed by 92 zeroes) years. Now here is the catch, no one really knows how many attributes there are in human nature and how many severity states they can exist in. All we can see is their effect on us and to some extent the society in general. Thus, it can never be accurately predicted, when the avatar will appear, or how good he / she will be. Only the affect can be seen. Thus, we find that, when the bad people have make it impossible for the good to exist and whenever a deliverer comes to end the misery, the avatar has risen. Since there are no time bound commitments which can be calculated, there is no way the argument made by the shloka can be denied . It is bound to come true!

A pertinent question now is why can't the avatar preempt the misery and not allow it to happen? My take on this is that, since the definition of virtue is based on vice (o yeah! the concept that we should always speak the truth comes from the fact that there are people who do not speak the truth), it is the vices which will arise first and those with a conscience will create a virtue of not practicing the vice. Thus, this runs on a feedback mode. When the bad becomes powerful, the good realizes that and then it starts to congregate all its energies to fight it. I always wondered, why is it that when some farmers die, the relief package is announced? Why is it that when a aggressor attacks the defender moves? I think questions like these can be some what answered in the light of argument above.

There is a related concept and argument which also holds in the fight between good and bad its nuances. The concept is that of entropy. I will touch upon that in some later post.

Just to elucidate what I have argued above, the analogy from Matrix is very fitting. Matrix is a system which is a colony of half conscious minds, duped into believing as reality what really is a fictional computer world. They have a concept of free-will. Thus, when a person realizes that he may be in an artificial world, he is given a choice to explore that or to disregard it. Most people disregard the choice. Some people make a choice to explore it further but give it up midway. Some other explore it to the end and end up fighting the system, but they lack the attributes to beat the system. One among them, though, is the right mix of everything required to beat the system. This ONE is described as sum of the anomalies in the system. He is born to resuscitate the populace and end the evil.He is the avatar.