It is fairly uncontroversial to say that attachment to worldly things is a source of sorrow in our lives. The recognition of this fact doesn’t get us any closer to the actual avoidance of sorrow. Worldly things are tempting. Thanks to rapid proliferation of AI driven recommendation systems, worldly things...
Adani’s recent fiasco, the failure of Silicon Valley Bank and the general instability of financial markets in the past year made me wonder, why is the stock market so volatile ? If the stock prices were efficiently priced (see EMH hypothesis), how can a company lose more that 50% of...
At various points in my life, I have held beliefs that were either deductively/inductively invalid. As I have grown older, I have grown confused by what it means for a belief to be true. I have ignored the metaphysical problem of truth for a long time, but I have realized...
It is an inescapable truth of life that sometimes things don’t go as planned. Even when things go exactly as planned, we still find novel ways to suffer. I was thinking about this during one of my walks and I had an interesting realization. My eyesight is weak and it...
Good Economics for Hard Times: Better Answers to Our Biggest Problems by Dr. Abhijit Banerjee et al. is one of the best books that I have read this year. Chapter 2 to chapter 4 of this book should be compulsory reading in the social science school curriculum. Understanding the connections...
The recent debate about neural networks being conscious made me curious about different attributes of consciousness and to what extent neural networks exhibit them. I came across this interesting paper Roseboom et al. which seems to claim that activity in visual classification networks (like AlexNet) can be used as a...
In this post I will discuss an interesting proposal by Dr. Anil Seth about the nature of self in his book Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. Dr. Seth starts by assuming that phenomenology is necessary for consciousness. For an organism to be conscious, it has to have some...