Choices and hypothesis

You murder a random guy in the street. You are charged with a 2nd degree murder. Then your diary is found where you had written a murder plan. Now you are charged with 1st degree murder. Accidents and murders are treated differently. And, one is accountable for one's thoughts/ intentions . Ouch. Suppose you, a Hindu, finds out that the victim, a Muslim, is sleeping with your wife. You are now motivated to plan and execute the above murder. Let's change the context. You, a Hindu extremist, plan and murder a Muslim guy out of hatred. Now do the contexts matter, should the punishments be different as well? How to apply this new found wisdom? Low probability of capture will encourage crime, so the state should be efficient. Low penalty will also encourage crime, so the state should not go easy on crimes . Ouch. Also your personal value for committing a crime can be unusually high. And consider the state, its  efficiency  is constant/ equal for all citizens. ...

I am not sure about my fellow citizens, but I believe to have been raised with flawed morals and values. Let me reflect on my growing up memories, which I have realized to have an above average level of recall. My intentions is to hope that my reader, even if bad at acknowledgement or articulation herself/himself, can better understand the shaping of one's ethics/values. Growing up, "justice" played an important role in my everyday life. It may be fights with fellow kids, understanding some mythological stories, making sense of complex Bollywood stories, or a situation arising in kindergarten. Once "justice" is given, I found it unquestionable, accepting it to be the fairest of all.  There were some interesting aspects also, based from the emotional memories of my nursery times (It was in 1994-95, Jamshedpur. We stayed there for 10 months and I have some visual clear memories of few incidents. My younger brother was yet to make his entry, so I had less ...

Prelude I spend a lot of time thinking. I don’t brag or bore people around me, but that’s how I function. Some people want to hold to a 9 to 5 job to feel alive, I prefer thinking. Or rather bombarding myself with boundary questions and exploring answers. I prefer no company and often find myself sufficient to dialogue with. It’s more efficient, got no diplomacy to maintain and much of my time is saved from explaining the basic rules and ethics every time. But then one always faces some version of thinker’s block.   To deal with it, I try to ping a random friend or engage in some public commenting on Facebook. Apart from keeping me grounded, it provides me some very vital components to help me come up with tiny structures that help me write articles, as this one. Recently I finished reading a book by Philip Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? It had been on my bucket list since few years but like many of my books I had deliberately postponed it. It is one of the ...

In my years and years of growing up I have encountered a curious habit among the people I have interacted with. They have always functioned in a mental framework incorporating their abstract take on the world around them. And all of us in some way do that. These metrics give a sense of rationality to the individual. Now to what degree the rationality holds is altogether a different discussion. But the basic hypothesis still holds: Each one of has a scale. There is another curious observation further on these lines: these metrics often tend to be one dimensional. My parents, my teachers, my friends and even the Bollywood stories around me followed this pattern. For the early years of my life I struggled to put things in this format. As my world got bigger I discovered a vast majority of crowd also religiously follow some version of this model either consciously or sub consciously while interacting or making sense of themselves, the people within and outside their communities, objects an...

I read a lot of books, all types and sizes. So the first question I am asked is what kind of books I like the most. I take a pause to quickly re evaluate my interests and since last couple of years the answer has been the same: Philosophy. Then, in most occasions, I am asked few FAQs, which I shall be listing here. In the future I can just forward them this post to save some time. 0: I too like philosophy. Especially the structure, logic and meaning of language. You mean linguistics.  1: What do you mean by philosophy? For me it deals with anything which helps me develop and evolve my fundamental framework which I see is comprising of 4 components: 1: Values, helping me in deciding objectives and prioritizing activities in life 2: Ethics (what I consider right and wrong), which determine methods, and reactions to a piece of news or an activity done by a third person 3: Choices, that given absolute freedom what things I choose over others 4: Cushions, ie...