Unreal Blog

To say that Humboldt’s Gift is a masterpiece is like saying that sugar is sweet. It goes without saying. I will read this book many more times in the future because of its educational values (and because I love the reader in my audiobook edition). I would not necessarily recommend the book to others though. I think it takes a peculiar mind, one that finds sanity only in insane gibberish, and sees unreality in all the painted veils of reality, to appreciate this book. In short, you have to be a bit cuckoo to like it. (If you like the book and still maintain that you are not cuckoo, well, you just feel that way because you are!)

Read the rest of "Humboldt’s Gift by Saul Bellow"

This post is a collection of reviews of my first book The Unreal Universe. As I’m beginning to work on my second book (Principles of Quantitative Development, commissioned by Wiley-Finance), I felt that these thoughts on my first book might be of interest to some of you.

Read the rest of "The Unreal Universe – Reviewed"

This essay, originally written for a Singaporean newspaper The Straits Times, was published in an altered form in a philosophy magazine called The Philosopher. The published article (also posted in this blog — Perception, Physics and the Role of Light in Philosophy) had too much editorial input, I felt.

We know that our universe is a bit unreal. The stars we see in the night sky, for instance, are not really there. They may have moved or even died by the time we get to see them. [...]

Read the rest of "The Unreal Universe — Seeing Light in Science and Spirituality"

In this blog version of an article published in Omega, I discuss how Eastern and Western views say essentially the same things when it comes to the nature of space and time. And how that view can be interpreted as a basis for understanding Einstein’s theories. [Journal Ref: Omega - Indian Journal of Science and Religion, Vol. VI, (Dec. 2007), pp 138-150.]

Read the rest of "The Philosophy of Special Relativity — A Comparison between Indian and Western Interpretations"

My impressions of George Orwell’s 1984.

[...]In 1984, the immediate story is of a completely totalitarian regime. Inwardly, 1984 is about ethics and politics. It doesn’t end there, but goes into nested philosophical inquiries about how everything is eventually connected to metaphysics. It naturally ends up in solipsism, not merely in the material, metaphysical sense, but also in a spiritual, socio-psychological sense where the only hope in life becomes death.[...]

Read the rest of "1984"