January 2019

Study Consciousness in Science?

In this post I will explore some philosophical ideas from Vedic philosophy and try to describe what consciousness is and argue that we cannot reduce consciousness to matter, but we can study matter using consciousness as the model. In short, we begin by assuming the soul, and then explain matter. This scientific study of matter—based on the understanding of the soul—can...

Why the Genome Incompletely Describes the Body

Genetic determinism—or the idea that we are fully determined by our genes taken from our parents—is now a thing of the past. Empirical evidence now shows that genes may exist but may not be expressed. The expression is controlled by some ‘epigenetic’ factors (which are also molecules) but enabled and disabled by the environment. OK, says the geneticist, let’s add the...

The Reality of Rational and Irrational Numbers

In the previous post we talked about the problem of mathematical realism of negative and complex numbers; the issue was that you can construct these numbers logically and conceptually, but you will never find them in the real world. The problem of irrational numbers is the opposite: you can easily find irrational numbers such as √2, π, and e in the...

Do Negative and Imaginary Numbers Exist?

Numbers for the greater part of history have been viewed alternately as concepts and as quantities. Now, this raises problems about many types of numbers, which include negative numbers and imaginary numbers, because these cannot be viewed as quantities although there are compelling theories that can treat them logically as concepts. In what way are these concepts real when they cannot...

Mathematical Novelties in Vedic Philosophy

This is the transcript of the eighth episode of my podcast. In this episode, we talk about a number of unique problems that arise in trying to make Vedic philosophy more rigorous in a logical and mathematical sense. I have been presenting some of these ideas while discussing the theories of creation, cosmology, linguistics, the nature of space and time, etc....