Ideas We Believe

Before the Newtonian phase of philosophy, when natural philosophy was segregated from ordinary philosophical ventures for its commitment to repeated experimentation and scepticism, which would later be called the scientific way of knowing, there was an abstruse language. Unlike its well-known counterparts, this was extremely difficult to communicate and required well-defined logical reasoning to understand or expand. Essentially the worst kind of language, even millennia after its origin, it continues to haunt people by the name of mathematics.  Mathematics, as a language, starts with well-defined axioms. The most visible of them is in geometry, with the definitions of a point and a line. But such esoteric definitions continue all across mathematics. They do serve a great purpose, though, building one abstract concept over another because only when the idea of points well learn is it became easy to build that there can be another abstract concept of line, which passes through two p...

Before it was named science, this branch of rational debates on natural phenomena was a part of philosophical discourses. However, the biggest differentiator was the approach. Scientific truths were to remain objective and under scrutiny forever when one phenomenon that contradicts a hypothesis is enough to bury it. This explains that scepticism is the central facet of scientific thinking. Today, the nature and physics of systems have gone too complex for the truth to be objectively identified. We gamble on the empirical formulation of reality and quantify its error. Also, specialisation has made science disciplines wander so far off that a singular authority is hard to conceive. This has ushered into an era where unscientific theories conspire to challenge established truths. This problem is pressing since it seeks to undermine centuries of human intelligence. Today, when information is abundant, the means of verification are limited and sources of authority in multitude, what could b...

One way to put a banner on the course of human civilization is to call it an escape from uncertainty ( most of which would have led us to death). Why do we live in societies? To save ourselves from the uncertainty of getting attacked... Why do we build houses? To mitigate the uncertainty of getting our food washed away in the rain... Why do we rear children? So that we don't fast ourselves to death in old age. So in all these cases, the sheer uncertainty in the future has made us make expensive investments in the present. And those who didn't give in to these fears took a risk.  The pay-off of that risk is, however, independent of the past. In some cases, the risk turned out to be a golden gamble. Just like a flood washing away houses of people...the ones who hadn't built their houses were a little less sad. Risk can give an unexpected reward, but the higher the risk, the greater the return.  But at times, the risk is otherwise. Instead of choice for the individual, it beco...