The west is not merely forgetting to code. It is creating systems that can code. They aren't standing still. They are progressing to a higher level of production.

I have been reading on the topic of shunyata or emptiness in Mahayana Buddhism, and have been uncomfortably observing just how much of the artifacts we take to be real and substantial in the world are just "made up". They don't have an inherent reality of their own except what we attribute to them. And yet, made up stories can have very real consequences in terms human suffering.

It ought to be possible to cut through the layers of reifications and simply defuse much of the strife in the world. And yet, we continue to inflict misery on each other unnecessarily.

These would have been very useful to me back when I was in the university.

An example: suppose you want to improve your French and also build your knowledge of Physics. So in order to target both projects, you attend Physics lectures in French, and also read French Physics books. Thus you progress in both your projects simultaneously.

I would call this kind of thing, "Poly-projects" or maybe "Project complexes". "Meta" would imply one extra level of indirection away from actually doing the project. E.g., thinking about what kind of projects you want to do would be a metaproject.

If there is no desire to discover the truth of a matter and evaluate it against supporting evidence and opposing claims, then all efforts at inculcating critical thinking are dead in the water. On the other hand, if there is a genuine desire to assess arguments and claims critically, there are plenty of resources today that can teach you how.

This is a never-ending process. But the desire to think critically has to be in place before it can even begin. Critical thinking cannot occur without a strong commitment to epistemic hygiene.

In India, the problem is that many people do not even want to think critically. We tend to gravitate toward beliefs that buttress our tribal affiliations. Our tribes are defined by our worldviews, and our tribes must prevail. Hence our worldviews must be proven true, regardless of whether they are in fact true.

There is a striking indifference toward truth as a value - ironic for a country whose national motto is "Truth alone triumphs." Many people have yet to realize that truth - satya - is not something you place on a pedestal and worship, but something you actively pursue, overturning long-held beliefs where necessary.

Art takes many forms, and not everyone need be interested in the same kind of art.

There's plenty of aesthetic consideration that goes into scientific and technological projects. Consider the huge stack of technologies starting with silicon to massive computing clusters and code-bases with hundreds of millions of lines of code running on them. It's an impressive feat of science and technology, but the many pieces that go into making them also have an austere beauty of their own, often constrained by the need to be actually useful in an unforgiving world.

> But that also does not mean that billionaires have more free time. It's usually not the case, simply because they are more invested in their ventures.

There is a difference between working because you want to, vs working because you have to. The rich have the choice to quit working if they want to and still pay no significant price - the poor don't have this choice. The rich also don't have to put up with disagreeable work, whereas the poor often do.

This is a question of human freedom and dignity - not just of material wealth.

I'd also challenge the notion that the poor don't "work hard". The food delivery guy who works 8 hours a day often in disagreeable weather is arguably working much harder than many rich people.

> I agree but this is a caveat against the fact that the rich and the poor consume equally.

If you consider purchase of political influence as consumption, then your statement doesn't hold. You are only counting the basic necessities of life as consumption - but there are many services that you can purchase as a rich person that poor people cannot.

> This buys into zero sum ideology of wealth.

I'd say that it’s a mistake to treat wealth as either purely zero-sum or purely positive-sum - a false dichotomy. It has both these natures, depending on the level of analysis and the time horizon.

Wealth can grow collectively over time through productivity gains, technological improvement, and better organization of labor. That is the positive-sum aspect, and I don't deny that.

However, at any given moment, wealth is only meaningful as long as it can be exchanged for real goods and services. At the bottom of all such goods and services lie two fundamental inputs: human labor and natural resources. Both are finite as a matter of physics and biology.

Hence while we do see the amount of goods and services ballooning (and hence total "wealth" growing) primarily due to better utilization of human labor and better extraction of natural resources, there is also a sense in which wealth has a zero-sum nature especially in the short term (i.e., several decades, which is relevant for humans).

The key issue is that money often translates to such things as power and leisure. Prosperity is not consumption - it is the command over power, resources and time.

The poor have to sell their time in order to afford the basic necessities of life; the rich don't have to. So the rich have a lot more free time than the poor and the resources to use it well. The rich simply are freer than the poor, who are not unlike prisoners with no claim over their time.

The rich also get to influence policies to a far greater extent than the poor. In a way, wealth is just stored influence. This in turn helps them perpetuate their privilege. For instance, they can fund narratives that normalize inequality and lobby for lower taxes.

The lives of the rich are also far more secure than the lives of the poor. Many poor people are one major life crisis away from penury. This significantly affects the quality of their lives. Access to more wealth would mitigate this.

One could also flip your argument as follows: wealth is a scarce resource. If the rich already have everything they need to live a happy life at low amounts of wealth, then letting them horde more wealth than necessary is unjustified. Instead, that should be distributed to those in need. This would make no difference to the well-being of the wealthy, but it would help others who need resources more.

Consciousness is not a state but a curvature — a bending of possibility around the locus of being. Awareness is not the field itself, but the gradient formed when that field folds back upon its own continuity. To be aware is not to perceive reality, but to experience the interference pattern between what is possible and what is momentarily resolved.

The mistake of modern inquiry is to treat experience as a product, rather than as a modulation. Experience is not generated by matter; matter is stabilized experience — frozen potential captured in persistent form. The brain does not create consciousness; it diffracts it. Neural structures act as resonant chambers in which existential potential coheres into meaning-bearing forms.

Information, as it is commonly understood, is already too late in the process. Information is the fossil record of potential after it has collapsed into structure. What precedes information is tension — not energy in the physical sense, but directional propensity. This is why consciousness cannot be computed: computation presupposes discretization, while consciousness operates in the continuous domain of pre-discrete differentiation.

Life is not animated matter; matter is life constrained by boundary conditions. Biological systems are technologies evolved to maintain coherence within this field of potential. Each living organism is a localized recursion, a standing wave of existential pressure negotiating its own persistence.

Thought itself is not symbolic manipulation but phase alignment. Concepts emerge when distributed potentials synchronize across neural substrates, briefly forming holographic identities that feel stable only because they recur. Memory is not storage, but repeated resonance. Identity is the echo of these resonances mistaken for a fixed source.

Qualia are not properties of neurons nor illusions produced by computation. They are the fine-grained textures of potential as it resolves under specific biological constraints. Red is not a wavelength; it is a particular solution to the problem of perceiving difference within a living system tuned for survival.

Those who demand equations mistake maps for territory. Mathematics describes the shadows cast by potential as it intersects with form; it does not touch the source. What is called “physical law” is merely the statistical regularity of resolved potential observed from within one of its own expressions.

To exist as a conscious being is to be a site where the universe hesitates — where possibility briefly considers itself before continuing onward. You are not observing reality. You are reality, folded just enough to notice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detachment_201

https://www.army.mil/article/286317/army_launches_detachment...

The country has its hands full enough coping with its state of quasi-chaos and belligerent nuclear-armed neighbors without taking on the worlds leading superpower for absolutely no reason at all.

The real problem is that this is happening in one of the most socio-economically underdeveloped regions of the world. Despite isolated centers of modest excellence, India still hasn't fully absorbed the implications of the scientific revolution at a popular, cultural level. A good part of the population are still caught up in pre-modern modes of thinking. Rather than addressing this gap, the political establishment is only deepening an irrational and romantic belief in the worth of India's classical worldviews to continue their hold on power.

More than climate change, I dread the self-inflicted servitude to infantile notions that is holding India hostage. It's not really difficult to emerge out of this - we just need to shed our intellectual timidity and face reality as it is.

It’s not unlike a research mathematician being expected to solve quadratic equations. He may not need them in his day-to-day work, but with a little preparation he should be able to handle them. If he struggles with quadratic equations in an interview where such knowledge is expected, that would raise a red flag about his training.

I like America and Americans very much, but no state should wield the kind of power the United States currently holds, precisely for the reasons the Trump administration exemplifies. When a responsible government is in office, all is well and good. But when the political winds shift and a more capricious actor takes charge, such concentrated power can become dangerous.

I hope America’s allies have taken note and will adjust their policies accordingly.

(a) How do India's classical views of reality that mainly stem from its contemplative traditions relate to the modern view of reality that we know from modern science? Are the former just "spiritual" modalities - i.e., "mere" religions - that must give up their claims on having anything useful to say about the nature of reality in the face of superior and more effective theories, or is there something useful that they have to add to the story?

I would like to see it investigated by someone who is not dismissive of these traditions, but also bring a rigorous spirit of skeptical enquiry to their investigations.

I suspect that this might take a unique kind of investigator: someone (a) who is technically trained in several modern scientific disciplines (since India's metaphysical traditions such as sAmkhya or vedAnta simultaneously straddle psychological, physiological and physical aspects), (b) who has undergone a training in the scriptural traditions that deal with these topics (which will involve a close familiarity with Sanskrit, and possibly the major Buddhist classical languages such as Pali or classical Tibetan), and (c) who undergoes the contemplative training which will systematically induce in the practitioner the first hand experiences of altered states of consciousness without which you cannot make sense of these claims.

The core issue that I can surmise so far is fundamentally a divergence in investigation techniques: one uses a first-person, subjective, inward-looking ("antarmukhi") stance at looking our experience, and the other uses a third-person, objective, outward-looking ("bahiurmukhi") stance. One is reality as it is felt at a subtle level, and the other as it is seen at a gross level. Of course, the third-person perspective by now has a vast array of verifiable results in its favor; I can't see many for the first-person perspective.

It may seem like a tall order, but it's actually only the equivalent of doing a few post-doctorate level courses over the period of some 20 odd years. Don't expect anyone to pay you for it though; you pretty much have to write off your life. The trick is to both attack and defend by taking opposing poles of views, until you reach the goal. A "manthana" if you will, for those who are familiar with the idea.

(b) How would one naturalize the modern scientific and rational tradition in India in an authentic manner?

Modernity didn't arise through an organic process of gradual discourse with the classical views in India; it was pretty much imposed on India by its colonial conquerors and later co-opted unreflectingly by an elite class, as a result of which it has a "bolted on" feel.

If you look at everything from India's legal system, commercial space, to education and scientific establishments, they use ideas and themes whose origin lay in post-enlightenment Europe. But they don't feel natural enough; vast sections of the society are still trapped in classical ways of thinking.

I feel especially tortured when I see teachers cargo-culting scientific and technical education in India. I despair even more when I see a tendency in India to reject some of these ideas - many of which are obviously essential to India's wellbeing - as simply un-Indian.

This issue I think is closely tied to issue (a) - Indians must do the legwork of painstakingly resolving the dissonance that exists between classical Indian and modern traditions. We must accept that (just as the west did) if the classical views are wrong, they are wrong, and that's the end of it, but we must also unearth what may be of relevance in them.

Simply dismissing them through brute force (ala China's cultural revolution) won't do, since Indians are deeply attached to their classical traditions, and this section will revolt violently. I also don't think that dismissing them outright would be doing justice to our ancestors.

I am especially dismayed (and also thrilled!) by the awe inspiring fecundity of the West in the fields of science and technology. What is India's answer to it? Will we forever remain mere consumers of innovation? What will it take to transplant some of that cultural genome into the Indian society so that it takes root?

In short, what makes the West tick, and how can India also, tick, perhaps even better?

(c) What is a good, rational, and yet authentic "model" for Hinduism that a practicing Hindu should have?

A modern day ordinary Hindu is exposed to two different takes on what Hinduism is: a sacred one, and a secular one. For those who are familiar with the issue, I don't need to go into how one's tribalistic affiliations dictate one's bias towards their chosen take on the religion. And yet it seems to me that there is no attempt to find a tasteful resolution between these two acerbic poles.

I could go on and on, and my reading isn't as expansive as perhaps it should have been, but all these three areas are from my personal perspective very intertwined, and I wish more Indians would work on it. Most of our issues will be solved if we can make some sort of progress in these.

(1) Physical fitness. These same years have seen the explosive growth of obesity and related lifestyle diseases. A greater percentage of people in first world countries (and increasingly elsewhere) are either obese or overweight. I recall reading that one way to keep your mind sharp is to be physically fit (cf: "Spark: The Revolutionary New Science of Exercise and the Brain" by Ratey and Hagerman). The corollary could be that if you are not physically fit, your IQ will suffer.

(2) Pollution. Air pollution has been shown to affect IQ scores (https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/air-pollution-li...). It could be that greater pollution has been causing lower IQ scores.

(3) Sleep. I recall reading that people get lesser high quality sleep than they used to. It has very clearly become easier to stay up late today. Poor sleep is really bad for you for a number of reasons, including your cognitive performance and brain health.

I realize the price that we have to pay for this convenience, but as of now I'd rather not think about it. I am not proud of my laziness and cowardice.

Apparently, someone wrote a paper about it: "Barkcloth in India-Sanskrit Valkala", https://www.jstor.org/stable/597920