Vide Rationale

Every philosophical question seeks to understand some particular feature of reality – how does brain produce consciousness? where does knowledge come from? are there moral truths? – but only one of them seeks explanation for reality as a whole, and it’s the deepest question one can ever ask. Indeed, why not nothing instead of this… Continue reading

It’s a politically radioactive topic, so I’ll try my best to convey my points without getting myself into trouble. I want to do two things here: (1) explain what gender is and (2) explain why the question of whether trans women are real women is a moral question instead of a descriptive one. Let’s start… Continue reading

We’ve lived in India our whole lives. Though you see other parts of the world on screens, it never registers as a tangibly real place. You can’t quite feel them. Our last international trip (to Switzerland) was a year ago and the memories had started fading. Only some shallow impressions remain. Being in Dubai reminded… Continue reading

Today I want to talk about Information. It might not seem like an interesting topic, but I assure you it’s worth your attention. I’m trying to pin down exactly what it is. And it’s a little more complicated than you might think. We first notice that information appears in many forms. If we look at… Continue reading

Inspired by Julia Evan’s post “Blogging principles I use” I also started thinking about how I want to write. So here’s the list of principles that I aspire to live up to (but which I don’t). Interesting If it’s boring or obvious, it doesn’t deserve to be a blog post. You’re not writing documentation, and… Continue reading

I want you to consider what you are for a moment. Forget everything you know about the world, about human beings, brains, and the universe. Forget what you’ve been taught and what you’ve come to accept. Forget all of that and think from first principles, and answer this question – what kind of a thing… Continue reading

Bohr told Einstein to use Quantum Mechanics to just predict probabilities, and to not ask anything more from it. “Don’t worry”, he said, “about what’s happening behind the scenes”. History books tell us that Bohr won the famous Bohr-Einstein debates. Bohr insisted that QM was a good theory on its own, not needing any modification.… Continue reading

By the way, I don’t actually know how to write food reviews. A few days ago I had my first granola bar. I always assumed they tasted bad. I think I had a yoga bar once and didn’t like it. Can’t remember really. In any case, this category of slighty-tasty-but-mostly-healthy snack bars were something I… Continue reading

There’s no one-stop solution to solving procrastination. It has multiple causes and they have to be dealt with differently. Make it interesting by challenging yourself to complete it blazingly fast. Find the first step that’ll require less than five minutes to do, and just do that. You will no longer be the same person and… Continue reading

Recently my wife (B) and I settled on a life philosophy. It boils down to two principles: (i) Lead a life that we’re proud of(ii) Lead a life where we’re not stressed. Doesn’t matter what exactly we do, just that we have to be proud of it. Which means doing things that seem worthwhile in… Continue reading