Category: Uncategorized
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On cakes and hot cross buns
Nursery rhymes in general are a precious store of cultural history and popular wisdom, and the above rhyme is no exception.
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Sanskrit prompts for ChatGPT
ChatGPT and other large language models (LLMs) are a major technology breakthrough, albeit some of the claims made about their capabilities is overstated. Rather than being genuinely creative or intelligent, what such models can do is to continually repackage, rephrase and recombine things that human beings have already created.
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The Mirror in Indian Art and Literature
I recently read a fascinating article by Christopher P Jones, ‘Decoding Reflections: The Meaning of Mirrors in Art’, where the author talks about some important European paintings featuring mirrors, and explains the role and symbolism of the mirror in each painting. After reading it, I thought of the depiction of mirrors in Indian art and…
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World Happiness and Indian Philosophy
As the exuberant celebrations of the ‘Holi’ festival last month were dying down, a slight dampener came in the form of the release of the ‘World Happiness Report 2023’. The report authors managed to rank India as 126th out of 136 countries surveyed, far behind countries such as Pakistan (108) and Ukraine (92).
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On doubt in science and religion
That doubt is of the greatest value in supporting the scientific tradition has been a fundamental principle for many of the greatest scientists. Richard Feynman has eloquently described how doubt and intellectual humility are values at the heart of the scientific enterprise.
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Animals and the sacred
How did humans first acquire language? It’s is a fascinating and important question. The ancient Egyptians believed that that speech and writing had been taught to humans by the deity Thoth, alternately conceived as an ibis-headed god or a baboon-headed god.
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On poetry and the arrangement of words
“How can we imagine something new? Here I will just develop variety in the arrangements of words. Having once made a garland of flowers, we can make a new one using the same flowers. Just a new arrangement stimulates the curiosity.”
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Haruki Murakami and Buddhist philosophy
Over Christmas I read ‘The Wind-up Bird Chronicle’, a novel by Haruki Murakami, in the English translation by Jay Rubin. The strange tale of the protagonist, named Toru Okada, seemed to have a loose affinity with concepts and themes from Buddhist philosophy, which I briefly sketch out here, but whether or not this affinity is…
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On the moment of insight
This description nicely illustrates something about how the brain works to generate new ideas, alternating between periods of focused intensity of thought and stillness in order to arrive at a sudden moment of insight or intuition. A similar process is behind many such ‘eureka moments’, where the would-be inventor or discoverer sets aside his or…
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On poetic understanding
Just as scientists strive to crystallize deeper truths about the world, so too do poets. However, whereas scientists further our understanding of reality through a process of abstraction, poets develop insights that resists abstraction and stays at the level of ordinary things.
Desire To Think 