Feedback

This is all on hearsay, but there was recently a singing competition on some Pakistani channel, and Mekaal Hasan was one of the judges. One of the girls sang terribly, and yet she had no idea how badly she sounded (probably something like a cat being neutered). Well, Mekaal sahib wasn't exactly one to pull punches. He told her that one of the aspects of being a good singer was to be able to "hear" onself sing. Apparently, if the girl had been able to do this, she would have stopped singing a long time ago. But again...I didn't see the show.

Essentially, Mekaal was talking about feedback...the ability to return an output of a system back to its input. At lower, subconscious levels, we use feedback all the time. Our eyes use it to adjust their focus. Our ears use it to change the tensions of our eardrum. Our nervous system uses feedback to know exactly where our muscles are in space, relative to the rest of the body. When you're steering your car, you're using feedback to adjust where you're going. The list can fill the damn yellow pages and more.

However, at a conscious level, the use of feedback is comparatively much less, probably because it requires conscious thought to train oneself in the beginning. The girl with the voice of a thousand nails on a chalkboard is one example (lol...I have no idea why I'm dissing the poor girl. I mean, I haven't even heard her sing fergodsakes). But I think, to some extent, such feedback is essential for becoming a better person. Essentially, if you're aware that what you're doing is bad, you have a chance to stop doing it. If, at some level, your thoughts are being fed back into your brain, you have an opportunity not to think sin. But for all this, you need to be aware of these things...you need to have some level of feedback, whether conscious or sub-conscious, real-time or post-processed.

Otherwise, if everything is "open-loop" as it's called in engineering, i.e., if there's no higher-level feedback, I'll remain stuck in my habits, spiralling in a vicious cycle that continues forever.