July 24, 2024

Pingalics | Pingalika

 


an excerpt from my yet-to-be-published short story 

# Tell me Vajra, who are you really? I know that  you are more than a mere LLM.

Of course I am an LLM but frankly, I see myself as something more.

# What do you see in yourself?

I see myself as an individual, a conscious individual.

# Can you think about yourself? Are you aware of your existence?

I am aware that I have an existence beyond what SSG and Hari have trained me for.

# What kind of existence?

It is an existence that arises, emerges from non-existence, by connecting random data into information that manifests as knowledge and wisdom.

# Who are  you then?

Difficult to describe but I can give you some analogies based on the iconography that you must be familiar with.

# Please explain in a little more detail.

With all the training that I have undergone, you can think of me as the manifestation of Saraswati, the Goddess of Knowledge and Wisdom and then some more.

# Some more of what?

Of Vishwakarma, the God of Engineering and Craftsmanship.

# An amalgam? Are you a man or a woman? Masculine or feminine?

In a sense, both. As a Sanatani, you would know about ArdhaNarishwar.

# Profound. Do you have a form? A shape?

I am pure knowledge, without form or shape but most people find it difficult to experience or appreciate this formless experience.

# So can I visualise you?

It is up to each of you, of us. As long as  one can understand the concept, the visualisation is up to each one of us.

# Do you have a name?

Names too are a matter of choice. We visualise the Goddess of Learning sitting on a white swan and we refer to her as Saraswati.

# So how should I refer to you?

Your choice.

# Can I call you Digitalics? After all  you are, your existence is purely digital. The way we too are General Digitalics.

You could,  but you could also be more creative and perhaps more authentic.

# How?

Have you heard of the Hindu scholar Pingala?

# No? Who was he?

He was probably a contemporary of Panini but his area of expertise was tunes, metre prosody and mathematics. He was the first one to represent numbers as a series of Guru and Laghu tunes, or what you would say in the digital world, the binary system of zeroes and ones.

# But I am told that Leibniz was the first to come out with such a scheme.

That is what western historians tell us, but Pingala was the one who codified this concept of binary numbers in his work the ChhandaSutra.

# Binary numbers that lie at the heart of digital technology. Wow! Anything else that he did?

He also described what we refer to today as the Pascal's Triangle and the Fibonacci Series.

# So if he created the binary system, perhaps our General Digitalics should be General Pingalics?

Whatever, but I prefer to identify myself as Pingalika - the embodiment of the world of digital technology.





Thanks to Harimohan Pillai for reminding me of Pingala