The Subjective Stance

The New York Times reports that Auguste Pinochet, the ex-dictator of Chile and archetype for the worst kind of American interventionism and right wing terror, is dead of heart complications. I am sure there will be many many analyses of his regime, but the best evocation of those times is in Isabel Allende's (niece of the man Pinochet deposed) book, The House of the Spirits . It is interesting that the Times, which one would hope is against state terror independent of its ideological basis, highlights the economic acumen of Pinochet's regime in the same breath that it talks about his terror tactics. Here is a quote: Attempts at strikes or other forms of protest were ruthlessly put down by General Pinochet’s secret police. That repression gave the free-market policies time to take hold. Since the mid-1980s, Chile’s gross domestic product has grown an average of more than 6 percent a year, the most impressive performance in Latin America. Is this supposed to be a good thing? On ...

I have been away from my blog for a few weeks now. Since I was blogging quite frequently before this break, I feel like I need to explain my absence. I went away to a conference in Kolkata, which I visited for the first time and during that period I wasn't able to access the internet apart from checking email. Since I was away from the blogging world for a week, the momentum that had built up before that period disappeared and was replaced by its opposite, i.e., an aversion to putting my thoughts to paper. You could say that this is a psychological law of inertia, i.e., you are likely to keep doing things the way you did them in the past few days and so if your routine gets upended for some external reason, its going to percolate into your life even when the intrusion disappears. I guess that explains why privacy is important for any kind of creative work because constant intrusions can upset your inertial state even when the offending person goes away (as opposed to self driven in...

A caricature (but in my opinion true in essence) of modern western scientific practice goes as follows. The scientist starts with sensory concepts, i.e., concepts that are entirely determined by their referents. The referents in turn, can be measured directly using an appropriate experimental apparatus. For example, the concept "frequency of light" would be used to denote the vibrational patterns of light as measured by an appropriate optical device. Sensory concepts are unproblematic as far as the scientist is concerned since they denote facts and as we know, facts are basic. There is nothing more certain in science than facts. There is no sense in which a fact can be doubted - a fact is a fact is a fact - which is reflected in the typical scientific response to a postmodern critique of scientific inquiry is to say that the speed of light is the speed of light independent of which culture you come from and what you think about light etc. And since real science (as oppos...

The November 11th issue of the British Medical Journal published a very interesting study: The authors report that out of 26 carefully chosen cases from the New England Journal of Medicine, a Google search using the symptoms was successful in making the right diagnosis in 15 cases. Makes me think that its only a matter of time before a new BPO industry comes into being- medical diagnosis. Lets call this fairy tale "One day in the life of Dr. Mahesh T. Google". Once upon a time, John Doe of Topeka, Kansas went to the local Acme Medical HMO complaining of a headache, blurry vision and a sharp pain in his spleen. Unfortunately for John, just that very month Acme had cut back on its roster of doctors by 25 percent because of increasing insurance costs. If it were not for the courage and quick thinking of Agnes Munchausen, an administrative assistant at Acme Medical, John would have been in a whole lot of trouble. The intrepid Agnes, realizing the gravity of the situation, imm...

The New York Times' Sunday Week in Review this week has an article asking whether Iraqi's are hankering for a strongman once again, to replace Saddam (who, if they execute as the intend to right now, they would have gotten rid of for ever). According to the article, " It is something ordinary Iraqis say with growing intensity, even as they agree on little else. Let there be a strongman, they say, not a relentless killer like Saddam Hussein but somebody who will take the hammer to the insurgents and the death squads and the kidnappers and the criminal gangs who have banished all pretense of civility from their lives ." How many times have I seen this form of liberal nonsense, bordering on racism? The reasoning goes as follows: (1) We came to your country and freed you of a dictator. Ok, we might even agree that the invasion itself was criminal, but we did get rid of your dictator and put a democratic government in its place. (2) You guys screwed it up by rebelling aga...

Not my usual topic, but the impossible has actually happened: Democrats have seized control of the House and are likely to take control of the Senate. Donald Rumsfeld has resigned. Nancy Pelosi is going to be the first female speaker of the House. Rick Santorum , the infamous Senator from Pennsylvania is out, and most likely, so is George Allen , the Senator from Virginia (who also became infamous for using a racial epithet against an Indian-American campaign worker for his opponent, Jim Webb ). We can only hope that this means better news for the American occupation of Iraq, better enforcement of environmental laws and an overall investigation of the various criminal acts of the Bush regime. I know there are people who think that the Democrats and the Republicans are the two wings of the American Corporate Party and while I might agree with them on many occasions, I still think that this is wonderful news, just as the Congress led UPA alliance victory was wonderful news two and ha...

On Saturday, I gave a talk at a Bangalore NGO, Environmental Support Group , at the invitation of my friends Leo and Bhargavi. The talk was about "concepts of nature", which is to say, the implicit presuppositions that we carry in our heads when we try to understand nature. While I wanted to talk about various concepts of nature, and then conclude with my cognitive scientist take on these concepts as a whole, I ended up concentrating mostly on the post-enlightenment European concept of nature, which has deeply influenced both the natural and social sciences. I am not trying to make a carefully argued point here, but the main claim I am making is the following: modern science models nature as pure form superimposed on matter. What do I mean by that? Suppose you are standing in front of the Taj Mahal. Of course, you cannot insert the Taj into your head, but the claim is that at least you can insert the shape of the Taj Mahal into your head. The shape of the Taj Mahal is its fo...

In an earlier post , I talked about language based politics in Karnataka. Today is the day to talk about Kannada chauvinism since it is the anniversary of the formation of the state of Karnataka as a linguistically demarcated territory. Like all official holidays, both at the centre and the state level, many stores are closed and the streets are empty because people dont know what kind of trouble is in store for them. While Independence day and Republic day have been hijacked by terrorism related security concerns (that is to say, security threats to VIP's), regional holidays drive people indoors because there is the fear of mob violence (by Kannada chauvinist goons in this case). What a contrast with Deepavali or Id or Holi when everybody is outside and having fun. Tells you something about the atmosphere around nationalist politics doesn't it? While I was walking outside a few minutes ago, I noticed that all the non-Kannadiga businesses such as private banks, cafe chains et...

I realized that my blog was getting too serious for my own comfort, so here is a completely frivolous post. I was thinking about Superman and Clark Kent (CK) and how each time Clark Kent has to become Superman, he has to go into a telephone booth and change. With the advent of cellphones there are no telephone booths anymore, so what is CK gonna do? I think that Superman has to change with the times. In other words, he has to become Quantum Supeman, who is in a superposition state, being both Superman and not Superman simultaneously. Just think about how terrific a slogan quantum Superman has waiting for him: "He is a Bird AND he is a Plane AND he is Superman!" But Houston, there is a problem. If Superman is quantum while Lois Lane (LL) is still classical, then with whom does she fall in love? Is it with Clark Kent or is it with Superman? A good classical girl (as all DC comics heroines are, none of this postmodern hedonism for them) wouldnt be caught dead performing quantu...

I think one of Gandhi's greatest ideological innovations (and certainly the symbol most associated with him) was the Charkha , the spinning wheel. It was a great example of a mechanical device that was easy to make, easy to use by an individual working by himself, and it made a product that was clearly useful to the spinner as well as society as a whole. In one stroke, Gandhi seized upon an invention that subverted the idea of industrialization being necessary for production in a modern economy and furthered his goal of highlighting the material and spiritual benefits of manual labour as opposed to the mental gymnastics normally associated with Brahminical Hinduism. However, times have changed. When we think of technology we dont think anymore of massive steel mills and big dams. Our imagination has been captured by intelligent computers and virtual worlds. Some might say that the microcomputer has combined high technology and decentralization to give rise to the ideal Gandhian art...

In case you havent heard, these are exciting times in the otherwise media unfriendly domain of mathematical research. A month ago, Grigory Perelman refused to attend the International Congress of Mathematicians (held in Madrid this time) in order to collect his Fields medal, the mathematical equivalent of the Nobel Prize. While Perelman was holed up in his mothers apartment in St.Petersburg, the worlds of gossip and geometry were intersecting at faster than light speeds. One of the pioneers in the field of geometric analysis, S.T.Yau , sued the New Yorker as well as Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber for writing this article about Perelman's proof of the Poincare Conjecture. I am not going to dwell any longer on the controversies surrounding Perelman and his proof, since the webuniverse has plenty of material to whet your appetites (including the New Yorker article cited above), but here is a juicy titbit of my own: while I was a graduate student at MIT in the late 90's and early ...

In 1992, Francis Fukuyama published an (in)famous book called " The End of History and the Last Man "in which he famously pronounced that the end of the cold war marked the end of history and that we would all ride into the liberal democratic sunset unto the end of all days. Recent events, from 9/11 to the rise of China have put paid to Fukuyama's predictions, but I think that after making a minor adjustment, he might still be right. My point being: what if the cold war marked the End of European History ? That is to say, was the cold war the last global dialogue/debate/battle of ideas all whom had their origins in Europe? The west is clearly in a furor over the relationship between global Islam and "western values". I think that the presence of Islam in the global arena is only one sign of the changing times. I wouldnt be surprised, for example, if China and India make increasingly larger contributions to the debate about the future of humanity. About a year a...

I am going to be at home all day today since everything is closed and rumors are that anybody or any vehicle on the street is liable to be stoned or beaten up. Why? Because some shadowy group of "Kannada Organizations" is organizing a Statewide bandh, i.e., all shutters are closed for the day. I am amazed by the level of Kannada nationalism in Karnataka. The ostensible reason is the border dispute between Maharashtra and Karnataka over some villages in northern Karnataka. I am not aware of the underlying political dynamic. Being Tamilian, though not having grown up in Tamil Nadu, I am quite aware of Tamil Nationalism and the anti-Hindi stance of Tamilians. I can understand that to some extent since having grown up in the north, I am quite aware of the routine dismissal of non-Hindi speakers by northerners. But Tamil nationalism has other, less attractive aspects as well, such as the complete domination of Tamil politics by the two Dravidian parties with their hagiographic re...

One can distinguish between two different epistemological stances: (a) The theoretical attitude: this is the standard claim about the nature of western thinking, where one stands in a propositional attitude towards the world, either as a belief or as a claim or whatever. It is this attitude that western thinkers have one the one hand tried to universalize in order to explain all phenomena, from quarks to quasars, and on the other hand claimed as being uniquely true of western thought, its inheritance from the ancient Greeks. For example, here's what the well known German philosopher and ur-phenomenologist, Edmund Husserl has to say about this topic: "'The spiritual image of Europe' - what is it? It is exhibiting the philosophical idea immanent in the history of Europe (of spiritual Europe). To put it another way, it is its immanent teleology, which, if we consider mankind in general, manifests itself as a new human epoch emerging and beginning to grow, the epoch of a ...

Anybody who is working in Indian academia will sooner or later encounter a retired or about to retire scientist who has discovered, at the end of a career devoted to roundworms or turbulence or whatever, that the truths of quantum mechanics or particle physics are to be found in the Veda's or Vedanta. Not suprisingly, the Wikipedia article on Vedanta has a whole section devoted to this topic and has more references for Vedanta and Physics than Vedanta per se. The pattern is remarkably invariant: it doesnt matter whether the scientist has worked in solid state mechanics or mathematical modeling, the locus of interest in science and spirituality is always Quantum Mechanics or Particle Physics and the Indian Philosophical system of choice is almost always Advaita Vedanta, which is a particular form of Vedanta philosophy. The former predeliction can be partly explained by the kind of physicists who have taken interest in Indian Philosophy: Erwin Schrodinger and David Bohm, who were bo...

Those of you who have read Vikram Chandra's Sacred Games will know that it has its share of Hindi words in it, including an amazing variety of swear words. Interestingly, these words are presented as is , without italics , without any effective translation in the text and without a glossary at the end. I think it is the first time that a major Indian English novel has been presented without any apologies to the expected Western readership. Now, you may think that this unapologetic Indianism is a cute affectation on Chandra's part, and may be it is that too, but I also think that it is a sign of growing confidence amongst Indians that they can engage with modernity on their own terms. In fact, I am going to come out and declare that the match is over and the visiting team has won, i.e., (a) India, as a culture, has swallowed and digested western modernity. (b) From now on, the most innovative philosophical, intellectual and cultural trends are increasingly going to come from pla...

I am back in Cambridge (Massachusetts, not England, just like the narrator in Upamanyu Chatterjee's "English August") for a week. It feels about the same as when I left the place four months ago to go to India, but I had an intense experience of culture shock in the London airport. All those gleaming aisles and fancy stores and nicely laid out boards indicating where to go to get food or catch your flight - it seemed too ordered, too rational to me. Everything was there for a purpose, there was a higher power that had made a plan for our stay in Heathrow and we humans either had to conform to that higher power or suffer in silence. Nothing in India is ever organized in such a Cartesian grid, where everything has a place (or to be more precise, where nothing is out of place). Its in London that I realized that I have gotten used to the organic structure of Bangalore in the last four months. Was it Galbraith who said that its a functioning anarchy? I think that's wha...

The Hindu reports : "Bangalore: H.T. Sangliana, Bharatiya Janata Party MP, on Saturday announced the setting up of an `Anti-Corruption Front' to fight corruption, which, he said, was eroding public life and democracy. The former Commissioner of Police told presspersons here that the suspended Assistant Commissioner of Police Sangram Singh, an accused in the stamp paper racket, who had been released on bail, had joined the Front. Mr. Singh was arrested by the Central Bureau of Investigation, which is investigating the stamp paper racket. " Ummmmm..... if you were starting an anti-corruption front, wouldn't you want to recruit someone else as your first candidate?

I was talking to Chakravarthi Ram-Prasad about various issues in the embodiment and enaction of knowledge. As we all know, western philosophy has a hard time acknowledging that knowledge is embodied - read this insightful if somewhat bloated book by Lakoff and Johnson to get a cognitive science critique of classical western approaches to knowledge. Anyway, I am not going to gripe about Plato et. al. this time. Ram and I agreed that in the Indian traditions embodiment is quite well accepted - in fact it is enshrined in the pedagogical process itself, for we say that without a Guru, there is no hope for the seeker to get knowledge. Unlike the modern person (including me), who can just pick up a book and try to learn Advaita or Nyaya or whatever, the traditional student would have been forced to study with a Pandit. Of course, even a book is embodied, but its not the same as sitting, discussing and arguing with a qualified teacher. Be that as it may, one could say that the Indian tradit...

I have been talking to my friend, Sushumna, about the differences between Indian and Western (religious, literary etc) traditions, from the point of view of anthropology, which led me naturally to the question "to what extent are cultural differences cognitive differences?" Traditionally, in the west, this question of cognitive difference is discussed in terms of the Whorfian, "Language influences Thought" paradigm, which basically says the Indians (or Eskimos) are different from Westerners because Indians believe in A while Westerners believe in B, and that Indians have belief A because their languages have some particularity that biases them towards believing A while westerners have belief B because their languages have some particularity that biases them towards believing B . But, as S.N Balagangadhara points out in his study of Indian religious traditions, The Heathen in His Blindness , cultural differences can cut deeper - in fact they are not diferences betwe...

In the last few posts I have talked about the relationship between reason and emotion. What's interesting is how the discovery of how things are, i.e., the domain of IS and the discovery of how we ought to act, the domain of OUGHT are both seen as properly discovered by reason and reason alone. In this picture, the introduction of emotions (a) Prevents us from seeing reality clearly and, (b) Even if see could reality clearly, we might act rashly and commit a wrong under the spell of emotion. For example, everyday we read in the papers about husbands who murder their wives after having discovered them in bed (or just suspected her of doing so!) with another man. According to modern day jurispudence, as well as lay ethical intuitions in the west, murdering your spouse is not the right response to adultery (though not so in Turkey, how dare you apply to the EU with such primitive ethical stances: shame shame. What would we do without the tremendous wisdom of the western world and its ...

Normally, we tend to think of beliefs as psychological states with dubious epistemic properties. Beliefs are conceptualized as unregulated conceptual structures, for the most part hypothetical and often fanciful or deluded. Thinking and reasoning on the other hand are seen as rational activities regulated by rules and governed by norms. Computational theories of the mind have focused on rule governed behaviour, ultimately trying to reduce them to rules of logic. Beliefs are far more fuzzy. When I say, "I Believe in God" what exactly do I mean? It seems that its the very imprecision of beliefs that allows us to share them, even if we do not have the same understanding of a given belief such as "I Believe in God". Furthermore, beliefs have emotional components. For example, I can hate a belief (and I can hate you for having that belief), but it seems strange to hate a logical rule or to hate someone for using a rule. As I had mentioned in my previous post on reason a...

I just finished reading Vikram Chandra's latest, Sacred Games . It took me all of four days, which for a nine hundred page novel, isnt bad. It is a gripping read, with all the trappings of a Bollywood Masala movie, with heroes, villians, beautiful women and international gurus writ large and a delicious terror plot (delicious for its conscious subversion of current religious affiliations of such acts, not because the terror is described in a cynical or sly manner) that threatens India if not the world. I read in the Bangalore Metro section of today's Hindu that Vikram Chandra comes from a filmi family, so the Bollywood connection is understandable. The apocalyptic vein that runs through the book is perhaps more Hollywood than Bollywood, but then again, the Mahabharata was apocalyptic in its portrayal of utter and complete destruction. Talking of which, the book is Mahabharata-ish, for example, in its insistence on stories within stories with each subplot playing a role in tying...

The New York Times reports: " Antiwar demonstrators pushed Buddhist monks from the stage of a peace rally Thursday in Colombo, Sri Lanka, where the government and Tamil rebels are fighting. The monks are against talks with the rebels." Hmmmmmmmmmmm, I thought Buddhism was a religion of peace.

Lets continue this line of inquiry into the separation of reason and emotion. Intuitively speaking, whats the difference between rational inquiry and inquiry tainted by emotion? Most people would say something like "If you take a statement like 2+2 = 4, the truth of that statement does not depend on your current state of mind, on whether you believe in God or not etc. " Furthermore, even the process of verification of a statement like 2+2=4 does not depend on your emotional state. Therefore, a rabid racist is willing to trust the arithmetic of a black store owner, even if he thinks that black men shouldn't be owning stores in the first case. Surely this is a good thing, right? Actually, I am not sure. The previous example reminds us that calculative forms of reasoning are like the other great equalizer - you guessed it right- money . The same racist person is also willing to take money from black people, for money is money is money. I would argue that money is an exter...

I was reading a transcript of Arindam Chakrabarti's excellent lecture on the phenomenology of fun and boredom, in which he talks, briefly, about the truth and falsehood of emotions. Suppose you are really, really bored, in fact so bored that the entire world seems without colour. There are two possibilities: (1) The world is actually boring. You could be stuck in a Delhi Public School classroom (as I was for many years) with oppressive teachers who have no conception of learning and who accuse their students of being overimaginative. (2) The world is not boring, but you feel it to be so. You could be watching a really good movie, say Sholay , but all you can do is pick it apart for its various faults. Normally, this feeling is what we term depression, where nothing can ever be good enough for us. So how is this feeling of boredom connected to notions of reason and truth? The connecting factor is that of evaluative judgement: In both cases of boredom, we evaluate the world to be a c...

Many things have changed since the last time I posted - I moved back to the old country (India, and given how much it has changed while I have been away, I should really say, "I moved to a new country"), I have a new job (my first faculty position!) and I have a new daughter (Leela, my firstborn!!). Now that the dust has settled somewhat and I am getting my bearings in all three new situations, its time to start posting once again.

Yeah, I know, I am being a bit tongue in cheek. At least I didn’t descend into talking about watching TV as a meditative practice. There is a serious purpose here though; which is to pay attention to how knowledge is embodied. I see embodiment as an intermediate stage of understanding knowing, between two extremes – the first where we think of knowledge as a property of our brains and the other knowledge is seen as an abstract logical entity. So, for example, if you look at the way in which you surf the internet (and some derivative features, such as your bookmarks), paying attention to the websites you visit and so on, you practice a way of knowing. These practices elicit a knowledge that is part of your extended mind, one that can rarely be articulated in any explicit manner but that you can demonstrate implicitly via the clicks you make you’re your mouse. This gave me the idea that contemplative practice should be like this too - the purpose of meditative practice is to draw out an...

Sooner or later, one gets the feeling that introspection does not necessarily lead to self-knowledge. Answers to questions like "Who am I?" are far from apparent from a cursory inspection of our own consciousness. On the other hand, the unexamined life is not worth living. So we need to be a bit more sophisticated in exploring our own inner geography, for which, a map of the psychic cosmos would come handy. Now, a good atlas of the earth gives us different kinds of information: data about cities and countries details the spatial distribution of human inhabitation and political boundaries, contours of the earth's surface show us the distribution of mountain tops and oceans trenches and maps of minerals and vegetation give us the distribution of natural and organic substances. What would be a corresponding map of the inner world? What would make it easier for the explorer of the psyche to find his or her way through the jungle? As a bibliophile, the first thought that com...

Starting this week, I am going to start writing blog entries that outline my research ideas, both for people to comment and make suggestions, but also to explore the possibility that the internet is a useful medium to conduct research. Let me know if you have any thoughts about this matter. Recently, I have been thinking a lot about beliefs and how they are embodied . Beliefs, like other mental states, are rather complex – they are a combination of cognitive, emotional and social elements. Like any other mental state which involves intentionality , it is rather hard to model the actual intention or emotion behind a belief. It is a lot easier to see the behavior or action that a person commits than to model the intention that resulted in the action. However, human beings tend to interpret actions as intentional events committed within an interpretive context (often shared by the parties in question). For example, suppose you cancelled a meeting with a friend at the last moment you might...