Success – Parts Per Billion

The Essence of Nominalism

Is happiness, love – sadness, hatred just the names we have given certain things? Is that why after achieving something great we fill empty and become clueless about what’s next? Is there something common, universal, essential characteristic shared across things that create reality? Or are we just putting labels on things so we can put them in our brains effectively?
Nominalism says that there is nothing common shared between all the objects existing in reality. Love could be anything for anyone, you cannot pinpoint an object absolute, consistent and repetitive nature across reality and put it in a box and call it love. Same for hatred. Nominalism thus sheds light on how things are more than just their labels and why it is dangerous to chase things if their labels/ tags are the sole motivation for you. There is more to reality of things we are chasing than meets the eye.

Are we just chasing labels, tags in life until we die?

Question- What does Success, Love, Happiness and God mean to you?

Is Reality Same for Everyone?

Do We Share a Common Reality?

Human intelligence is one interesting thing. We can perceive things in better ways, classify them, observe them and use all those understandings to predict the outcome of events in satisfactorily good way, we can create non-existent things out of current given resources which elevate the ways we carry out our living – our lifestyle. The ability to develop various fields of knowledge and understand the reality is the basis of human civilization.

So, we can say that anything which gets distilled down to a specific understanding – an understanding which is consistent throughout our existence can be called as knowledge – knowledge with experience further gets distilled down to wisdom. Even though the knowledge of certain things is not consistent we at least know why it isn’t consistent or we have a well-rounded explanation that ‘this’ is an exception with fair justifications. Knowledge helps us to perceive how the things, ideas around us can be used to build things, the life we want.

The ability to see commonalities and differences between things, objects, ideologies is one important part of how we build our understanding about reality in which we exist. We have notions of right and wrong, black and white, past, present and future, tall and short, thick and thin, good and evil, strong and weak. These attributions help us to identify certain common aspects in things and certain uncommon aspects in the same things.

So, when I am saying Rose – you will understand that I am talking about a flower which looks red, has a particular fragrance. Words thereby names are at the core of how we build knowledge of the surrounding and the reality.

There is one more interesting thing happening here –

When I would say Rose – it is a possibility that someone would understand it as a girl he/she knows, someone would imagine it as a color which somewhat is red but richer in shades, someone would imagine the prickly thorns instead of the gentle nature of the flower.

What’s happening here? The moment I am trying to specify something – some object with a word – a name which shows some common attribute that object shares with others, in that same moment I am failing to describe that object, that idea in its complete capacity.

In our example, the word Rose on surface seems to indicate just a flower, but Rose could mean almost anything to anyone. Rose is just a simple object we are talking about; now imagine how would we define the reality we live in? The reality is multifaceted. People have different experiences, meanings, understandings of reality based on their personal experiences. Does that mean that there is nothing common between the reality we live in? Do we live in our own realities?

Does that mean that words assigned to the things are not what the things are? That the name of objects are just names? Everything that is there is one and only individual rendition of its own? If nothing is same then how do we agree on something common and set our lives to that way? How come we agree to certain religion and follow that? How come we agree that certain things are bad and we should avoid those? How come we appreciate what is happiness and try to achieve that in our existence?

I mean what if happiness is just of name something and goodness is name of the other which does not exist in reality and we are just blindly chasing it? (and we don’t even make out of it alive in the end!) What if we are just chasing names and “there exists nothing like it” – is our realization when we actually achieve that?

Is “the reality” really made of something very fundamental and shared qualities? Or are we just carrying our lives in the chaos of dissimilar (but seemingly similar on surface) things? Even though we call ourselves as humans how come some humans create examples out of their lives that they don’t deserve to be called as humans? How come some humans are so great that calling them humans is disrespecting their life?

Is there something really common among everything or are we just labeling things on whim (or intentionally) to solve the confusions of our minds? Are we living in a matrix and reality is totally different place than where we exist? Are hell and heaven more real that the earth we are living in?

Have we been robbed of the real understanding of reality and cursed to live in an illusion called life?

I mean I could have called the Rose an egg right from the beginning and everybody would have been fine with it. It’s just that now the egg is a flower, has red petals, has thorns and has fragrance. (Shakespeare would have also used egg for Juliet’s dialogue and everybody would have been fine with it. As everyone now knows and agrees what an egg is!)

Now you should appreciate how strongly we are conditioned right from the beginning. Calling an egg a Rose feels unnatural but if someone right from the beginning of the beginning would have called it an egg, we would be comfortable with egg in Shakespeare’s dialogue.

Is there really anything like “Red” color, “Grey” color?

A simple experiment

Look at the picture below:

It’s easy to tell that the cube has one white and one grey colored side.

Now see what happens when I put a blind along the edge of the sides:

There is no manipulation in this image, I have just put a colored box to hide the edges. You can blind the main image with finger and see the same result.

This is popularly called as “Cornsweet Illusion” or “Craik-O’Brien-Cornsweet effect”. This illusion works because our brains try to fill the unavailable information to make sense of the things observed. In this case of the cube example our visual interpretation system tries to determine the edges/ sides of the object by the sudden changes in the illumination of the surfaces.

From this example, you can appreciate how our brain tries to fill in the gaps between the information we are collecting.

Does that mean that there is nothing like what I call grey or white? that there is something totally different for which I am yet to assign a name just to make its identification easy. If that is the case, then are we just naming things in the name of knowledge and don’t have actual hold of the reality? Are we just pretending to be smart just because we can name the things?

Keep in mind we are not simply talking about naming things. If my brain tries to fill the gaps by itself to create a sense of understanding, some part of truth or reality which I carry in my beliefs – are they real or were they some gaps filled by my brain itself?

Following the same train of thought, here is an important question –

Obviously, no one by birth knows what is the “real” nature of reality is? (Otherwise, we would not be discussing all this). You will see that people know reality for how their life experiences turned out to be. They know what reality is, but not all have one singular, absolute concurrence, alignment and unanimous opinion about the nature of reality.

An important idea in philosophy called nominalism tried to question reality in this way (there is a part when the opposite of Nominalism is Realism! I will cover realism in next post). For that we will try to understand what Nominalism tries to solve.

Is there something common characteristic shared across things that create reality? Or are we just putting labels on things so we can differentiate?

Nominalism – There Are Just Names No Essences

William of Ockham is the guy responsible to popularize Nominalism in philosophy although he is not the originator of it. Ockham’s Razor is one very mainstream idea still useful in our pursuits of knowledge. I have covered Ockham’s Razor in separate post.

I think, it is a high possibility that Nominalism and Ockham’s Razor have strong connection not just because they were popularized by the same person but how they align themselves with each other to create a consistent argument.

Ockham’s Razor goes like this –

“Plurality should not be posited without necessity”

In simple words, do not interpret, do not deduce unnecessary things unless they are presented or experienced. (I have somewhat twisted the meaning to align the Ockham’s Razor to align with the train of thoughts and there is hardly anything mistaken here.)

My purpose to rephrase Ockham’s Razor is to connect our brain’s habit to fill unknown gaps with our pursuit of the real nature of reality we live in.

Nominalism thus calls out for the reality which individuals experience for themselves. There is nothing common between the life that we are sharing. Every object existing is an individual, special object in itself. Objects never share something common between them, it may be just our brains filling in the unknown gaps to make sense out of reality and have peace of mind. The labels like Red, Love, Justice, Truth, Loyalty, Happiness are not physical entities, absolute entities which exist in reality. We have created these labels so that we can sort certain thing in certain groups to create a model of reality in our energy optimizing brains.

This is really important point – that things we call real are just labels given by us. A Rose could have been an egg from its creation and nobody would have objected it.

Consequences of Nominalism

Nominalism – in simple words says that there is nothing common shared between all the objects existing in reality. Love could be anything for anyone, you cannot pinpoint an object absolute, consistent and repetitive across reality and put it in a box and call it love. Same for hatred. Same goes for the notion of beauty, fear, justice, truth and what not. Justice is not some type of molecule or an element which can be physically hunted, mined, rigged in reality. It is a label we have created for certain way of things. But, upon full magnification we will see that that certain way of things grouped together are highly individualistic – seeming that they are not same in any way.

Nominalism pointed one interesting observation – the things exist in their individual ways; we are just labeling certain aspects of them so that they can be grouped together or compared against one another.

Do you understand what this leads to? For me it is chaos.

It means that there is no such thing like love, justice, joy, happiness, affection, truth, utopia, passion, enthusiasm, redness, whiteness.

It also means that there is nothing like hatred, unfairness, fear, sadness, fakeness, lie.

These are only labels we are chasing in some scenes and in some scenes running away from or avoiding.

This leads to the conclusion that there is no pivot to the life we are living and the reality in which we exist. This is unsettling – this unsettling feeling leads to existential crisis.

One can here say that Nominalism bridges Phenomenology and Existentialism in better ways in philosophy.

Phenomenology talks about objectively understanding and interpreting reality through subjective experiences. (The one where objective and subjective appear in the same sentence!) It calls for the truth to be one which is realized through personal experiences – phenomenon happening with the individual.

Existentialism talks about the idea that there is no center or pivot to the reality we live in. This is a freedom in such an intense dosage that if we are not creating our own pivot for our own life the sheer possibilities emerging from freedom will overwhelm us concluding that there really isn’t such meaning or sense to life.

Nominalism says that there is no real common thing which can be distilled down between seemingly same things, things were never the same – there is no “essence” which exists across certain seemingly same things. There is no such thing like “universal” which is consistent across the objects in reality. Everything exists individually on its own. One has to experience things for themselves to see their real nature.

It is just your urge to rationalize things so that your brains will save energy. Rationalization is all about making sense of the things, and if everything has its own way of being our minds cannot store each and every aspect of those individual things all the time, thus we have resorted to the pursuit of “essence”, “universality” and hence “labels”.

Conclusion

William of Ockham’s Nominalism from medieval philosophy is reiterated in modern philosophy through Existentialism, Absurdism.

Jean-Paul Sartre – the French Existential philosopher thus talks about how labels are always fooling us. We think our life made to be defined by the achievements of certain labels where upon deeper inspection we see that the labels are mere a creation of our minds, they are how we interpret reality. They are not reality in themselves. Reality was already there even when labels were not there.

This is how Sartre call out Existential philosophy – “Existence precedes essence” and not the reverse “Essence precedes existence”. The later one is just a construct of our mind to create meaning in this meaningless world.

The very freedom granted to us becomes our enemy because we are clueless when we realise that we can do anything. This is where Absurdism peeks in.

Boundaries of Nominalism

There will be different reactions to the explanation of nominalism and that itself will show you how varying types of people exist and their individual renditions of the reality. But interestingly you will find “type” of reactions in people.

One will not immediately agree but everyone on deep inspection will accept this that we always crave for justification for everything that happens with us, it could be in our favor or against us. We crave for justification which will bring peace to our mind, in happiness this peace will amplify happiness and in challenging situations it will give us something to blame.

Once you start appreciating our habit to justify every damn thing you will suddenly see that Nominalism is pretty much good concept in philosophy. Nominalism when says that essences, shared attributes are just labels and nothing real, it warns us that the justification you are trying to give for your situation might just be your construct of mind and not real. Nominalism feels attractive because it feeds attitude of skepticism, which is the first tool of the person in the quest for the absolute truth.

On the other side, nominalism has its innate limitations too. If nominalism is true then it is not there as nominalism itself is our “labeling” to the concept of “not labeling everything together”.

This is where paradoxes begin. If there really was nothing common “essence” among certain grouped things, then it was impossible to group them in first place. So, essence must exist already (this feels even more paradoxical.)

We will search for resolution of these paradoxes in next post on Realism.

How to fail? – Ankur Warikoo’s Failure résumé

“I’ve missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.”

– Michael Jordan

Recently, I came across a book called ‘Do Epic Shit’ by Ankur Warikoo. I actually bought the book for my younger brother so that he will get exposed to the ideas that Ankur shares with the youth through his online content. The book is a collection of all the online contents that Ankur has created and is organized in order to be consumed through a book and it does the job well. I love Ankur’s idea of playing a ‘book cricket’ with this one. That resonates and connects with the today’s youth on a personal and in a nostalgic way. The book covers 6 major aspects that are obviously Ankur’s key points of discussion in every content namely- Success and Failure, Habits, Awareness, Entrepreneurship, Money and Relationships. All these ideas are communicated with the reader in small bits and chunks of ideas with some good quote-worthy sentences. Overall, the book is designed to be not too complicated yet covers the most complicated subjects our young generation faces. Trust me, sometimes for the most confused and most energetic young people even though the things are too much apparent but it takes one experienced opinion to enforce that learning in this age of complete confusion.

Dedicated to all the failures and the roadblocks I faced in life. We rarely wish for them, but upon reflection I realize they are the reason I am here today.

– Ankur Warikoo, DO EPIC SHIT

I will be discussing my most favorite part of this book. The part is ‘My failure résumé’. This part contains all the ways Ankur has failed in his life.

The résumé opens with dream of every Indian science student and apparently his/her parents called “getting in to an IIT”. Ankur’s father crying and the expectations of eradicating his financial ‘miseries’ through IIT for his son is an uncanny depiction of every middle-class parent. Ankur not asking his father the reason for his crying is nerve chilling enough to explain the complexity of emotions and the feeling of dreams crushing into nothingness as experienced by almost every typical Indian parent.

The urge to join IIT in masters even shows that there is that feeling, that guilt, that worthlessness of not getting into an IIT which becomes tied with the youth. They just want to calm this part of themselves by at least getting Masters from IIT where too Ankur failed. Being unable to answer in front of the great maestro Dr. H C Verma is the level of failure nobody could empathize with.

Event after getting somehow into PhD abroad, dropping out of it is a huge NO-NO. The first thing the whole world will be ready and equipped with is all the ways to call you a failure and bring you down. Ankur went through it.

Later on, Ankur shows his epic failures in his Consultancy jobs, Entrepreneurial ventures. The failures are on the level of management where your decisions will be affecting people, their lives, organization’s assets and most importantly investors. Ankur highlights the levels where he failed namely – delegation, leading from distance, getting the results from others, seeking feedback. Ankur also focuses on his “irrational optimism” while discussing these failures.

The next mistakes, failures are closely related to the mistakes in personal finance and personal relationships. They discuss about how his lifestyle suffered due to his larger expenses compared to his savings. The short but clear enough events of his sister’s wedding and his son’s birthday gift are more than enough to clarify the conditions he was in. Failure to connect with his son, parents, failing to not keep up with the expectations of the investors and colleagues are the worst scenarios everybody wishes not to have faced in their life. Ankur went through them too.

I believe, ‘we’ as a part of society are always going through all sorts of transactions. These transactions are personal, emotional, physical, intellectual, financial. In order to have ourselves a value, we never want to portray ourselves as an overall failure. After all, who going to buy you in these transactions then if you are not that valuable enough ! This value is associated with your success.

Everybody wants to project the good of themselves, the better part of themselves in order to maintain themselves in the everyone’s top priority list. That’s how rude and I would say- ‘practical’ the world is. After all, it is the survival of the fittest. The social media and the way we try to project ourselves and compare our lives with the feeds of others is the exact example of this. Hence, “one failure and you are down forever” is the projection of the world and it is imposed on you right from the moment you become aware of how the world works, when you are young and most of the time your parents’ opinions are a part of it.

Ankur’s résumé of failures invoked one idea in my mind that everybody is always going through her/his own battles and they face these failures too. But what prevents us from learning from them or clinging negatively to them is our acceptance of these failures. Nobody wants to ‘embody’ rather accept how they failed because that is sufficient enough to erase all your ‘transactional value’. We as human being have evolved to be attracted to negative things faster because they will compromise our survival right from the primitive times. In today’s age, these negative things are no longer vicious predators or hunters and the physical scars and physical pain they gave; they are the comparisons, mockery, taunting of the surrounding world which give mental scars and mental pain. It is the same reason, I believe Ankur calls these failures the scars which he wants us to be aware of.

Ankur’s résumé of failures carries the core idea that the more you accept the failures, embody them, bring them into the real world the more you will learn from them. It is like having closure with your failed dreams, aspirations and again gearing up for new and better journey, better goals.

Even though Ankur calls himself lucky, if you go through the list of his failures- he has failed great and in an epic way (meaning he was in literally epic shit!) which made him successful in a great way.

I believe that ‘this’ Failure résumé will remove the stigma of failures from the minds youth and making them more open to try and fail at more and newer things. It is very important for people and especially our younger generation to understand that the failure is the way of life and success rarely comes out of it which needs efforts, internal motivation, skills, consistency and what not. It is important to highlight how successful people failed before they became successful. It is also important to control the glorification of failures too. Otherwise, the main purpose – which is to learn from the failures will be deviated (Glorification of failures is also a thing which should not be promoted)

In single sentence and to be more specific- I want ‘Ankur Warikoo’s Failure résumé’ to be included in the textbooks of every young student in India.

Don’t read success stories, you will only get a message. Read failure stories, you will get some ideas to get success.

– Dr. APJ Abdul Kalam

Featured Image Credit- Nicolas Nova -www.flickr.com