Are our lives an MDP?

Those who are from Machine Learning background might be aware of the Markov’s Decision Process(MDP), which is a very important concept in Reinforcement Learning. For those, who are hearing this word for the first time, Markov’s Processes are those process in which the present state is fully independent of the past states hence present state holds all historical information. This blog describes this process from a philosophical point of human lives.

Human beings are inherently complex. In a lifetime, we make an uncountable number of decisions. Whether to learn a musical instrument, whether to read this book, whether to watch a particular movie etc. All these actions make us different from each other. Many times, we do make many wrong decisions which might hunt us throughout our life. Apparently, letting go of those memories from our past mistakes is not so easy. This affects our personality so badly that, our personality and attitude towards everything started to change. We hamper our mental growth which might drive us towards an abyss.

However, if we start to forgive ourself and consider the Markov’s process to implement in our lives, this might reduce the burden from the past. As Markov’s process doesn’t carry the baggage of the past, we have to give up on the burden and mistakes which are done in the past. Markov’s process teaches us to live in the present. Moreover, it also inspires us to not get overwhelmed by thinking about the future too much. To make the future optimal, we need to take a single best action for today. Repeating the same strategy of taking the best action each day will converge towards an optimal future for us.

Hence time to forgive ourself for the past and start making the best action for the today, the path towards a beautiful future will get forged automatically.

~My first post on the Medium, one step towards improving my writing habit.