Numbers

30 Mar 2014

Experience is impossible without numbers.

Unless one goes beyond the realm of experiencing the known world. Spirituality is not discussed here.

All of us are emotional (social) animals, with an innate instinct/tendency to describe all that is experienced in words and shared with others/self.

One cannot live without exercising the skill of describing any experience, from the minutest to indescribable experiences.

The only thing that makes one’s descriptions sensible and comprehensible is their words filled with numbers.

We are now in an era where numbers not only shape our daily life, they are actually irreplaceable as long as we live within the space-time realm.

Our most fundamental experience of space and time is impossible without numbers. The top right corner of this post when I trial-published it on Medium.com showed “2 min read.” A Number.

It is not any recent metamorphosis in our thinking. The first human, Adam, might have begun his exploration by counting one among many apples on a tree, or eating them one by one, when he first experienced hunger.

Ideas once thought as Utopian are, in the course of time, found as common sense.

Once upon a time, numbers, the so-called mathematics, were regarded to be a topic for an elite class scholarly debate among intellectuals. When giants like Pythagoras said, all things are numbers, it was corned into philosophy, labeling it as his quote, rather than imbibing it into our natural breath.

This is the world we live in, a world of numbers.

For instance, contemporary revolution in the name of Data Science, extraction of knowledge from data, is an indispensable sidekick to ensure our 24 hours is seemingly in an order. While data in this science might describe a lot of non-numerical variables, the science part of it is not complete without assigning numbers to those categorical variables.

Every system, be it political, educational, geographical, technological, ethical, social or even a domestic family system cannot survive any longer, without this radical science.

An illiterate homemaker begins her day calculating the amount of milk necessary to run her family that includes a pet. Geese, without PhDs, follow perfect timings of seasons, enabling their periodic migration. An entire country’s leader can be judged worth another chance or not with a booklet of numbers that illustrates his performance in his last tenure.

Data, or in other words, numbers can make all difference. Mythologies, random event predictions, religions, calendars, businesses, ants, everything benefits from data science of numbers.

Survival depends only on the sense of numbers.

When do numbers make sense?

When things are put in perspective.

The language of perspectives is numbers.