Many people who look at Vedic philosophy in current times, understand it as Advaita, which is an interpretation of Vedānta, that claims that the ultimate reality is a singular, unified existence called Brahman, from which the world is produced as māyā or illusion. The Brahman is equated with consciousness, although how consciousness comes under illusion …
My two previous posts explored the flaws in the materialist reduction of free will to rationality and discussed the use of free will in science. The second post concluded by arguing that every conscious experience involves choices, and these may be good or bad―depending on whether they are successful. This post extends the above arguments …
The previous post examined the materialist critique of free will and showed why the reduction of free will to rationality (and then to the mechanization of rationality) is flawed because rationality itself involves choices of axioms that themselves cannot be rationalized―i.e. reduced to more fundamental axioms. The only way to solve the problem of free …
Attacks on free will have become fairly common. While the attackers often recognize what is at risk — namely the sense of responsibility and accountability — they are motivated by establishing the primacy of what science seems to be telling us over what we have commonsensically believed over the centuries. This post examines the critique of free will and …
I generally refrain from commenting on theological topics and restrict myself to issues in science, but in this post, I will make an exception. The issue of interest is whether a soul “falls down” into matter. There is often confusion around this topic, which, in my view, rests upon a misunderstanding about the nature of …
During recent online conversations with commentators, I heard a refrain about science: science is only a model, it has nothing to do with reality; our models may get closer to reality over time, but we have no way of knowing that they have gotten to reality, nor do we know that they will eventually get …
Even a broken watch tells the right time twice a day. However, to know that the watch is broken, we must observe it when it tells the time incorrectly rather than when it tells it correctly. This analogy is a useful way to understand the problem in modern science because clearly there are times in …
The below is a response to the question about the conflict between reason and faith. It is also detailed in the book Uncommon Wisdom. The gist of the argument is that the manner in which science has construed the use of reason (and experience) – i.e., the path to discovery – cannot deliver truth. There is, …
The problem in any kind of existence begins from a very old distinction between appearance and reality. Appearances are obviously how things seem to us in our perception although not everything that we perceive does really also exist. How things seem to us is a property of our perceptual apparatus—senses, mind, brain, etc. The reality, …
In the Srimad Bhagāvatam, a Vedic text widely regarded as the culmination of Vedānta (which is in itself considered the conclusion of all knowledge), Sage Kapila elaborates the Sāńkhya theory of material nature to his mother Devahuti and concludes (SB 3.32.32): Philosophical research culminates in understanding the Supreme Personality of Godhead. After achieving this understanding, …
A common argument against the mind-body duality is that the mind is an epiphenomenon of chemical reactions in the brain much like the fluidity of water is a consequence of molecular interactions. This argument seems appealing because if we reduce water to its molecules, we don’t see fluidity in each molecule; fluidity is only a …
