Topic

Consciousness & Self-Identity

A collection of 37 issues

The Enduring Alchemy of Wonder

Why do we chase marvels, indulge in dreams, and embrace grand illusions — even in an age of reason? Let’s uncover the neuroscience, philosophy, and cultural forces that keep us enchanted by the extraordinary, revealing how wonder shapes both our delusions and our greatest achievements.

The Vectorized Mind : Memory, Thought, and Creativity in High Dimensions

Is our memory a biological search engine, powered by high-dimensional "data embeddings"? Let's Explore how thought and creativity arise from neural vectors. Are we just pattern matchers, or something far more profound? Let's dive in and decide ...

What Does It Mean to Think, to Question, to Understand?

What does it mean to think, question, and understand? Let’s delve into the paradoxes of thought, ethics of questioning, limits of understanding, the unknowable, and how misunderstanding fuels progress. Join me in reflecting on how we shape and are shaped by the collective human pursuit of clarity.

Thought’s Harmony : From Fragments to the Zeroth Entropy

What if humanity is a harmony of individual and collective thought, where matter arises from shared consciousness? This experiment ponders thought's duality, the chaos-order tension, and the dream of perfect symmetry — a zeroth entropy state, a glimpse of the divine.

The Subtle Echoes of Memory : Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way Vs. the Maithili Film Gamak Ghar

In a world where time slips through our fingers like fine sand, certain works of art compel us to grasp its fleeting nature, urging us to reconsider what is truly lost and what remains eternally within us. Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way (In Search of Lost Time) and the

Masks in Motion : The Aesthetics of Chaos, Seduction, and Selfhood at the Party

The Shattered Mirror of Selfhood There is a peculiar alchemy at work in the dim glow of a party. The lights flicker, music thunders, and faces shift like waves on a restless sea. Here, amidst the throb of bass and the clink of glasses, something curious happens to the self.

How Our Existence Unfolds as Contradictions?

Existence is a curious paradox, isn’t it? Here we are, suspended between the yearning for infinite possibilities and the stark finitude of our lives, caught in a web of contradictions that define our very being. We crave freedom yet cling to structure, seek connection yet guard our solitude, and

What Becomes of Us When Stripped of Our Illusions?

We live amidst illusions so deeply woven into the fabric of our lives that most of us mistake them for reality. They are comforting shrouds — myths of permanence, constructs of meaning, the false coherence of identity, the allure of progress. These illusions sustain us, individually and collectively, like fragile scaffolding

Death and Sleep : What If They Are Twins?

Every night I lay my head down, surrendering to sleep, it feels like a rehearsal for a greater cessation. Sleep, the most familiar phenomenon of living, so intimately mirrors death that it seems almost poetic, even haunting. What if these two — the darkness of sleep and the abyss of death

The Fragile Reign of Reason : Why Perfect Logic is a Myth?

Logic, they say, is the highest faculty of human intelligence — a tool that sets us apart, elevates us from chaos, and grants us a semblance of control over a fundamentally indifferent universe. But as I sit here, reflecting on countless instances when reason faltered in the face of human complexity,