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Showing posts with the label Bio/Philosophy

Mayfly Philosophy

One humid night outside my front door, I was sitting in boredom waiting for the sun to go down so I could maybe catch the twilight dusk. The sky turned dark pretty fast that day and it wasn't nearly as impressive as the day before. Flies started buzzing all around and to my surprise, were suddenly gone. In intrigue, I looked up. Turned out, the light above the door frame had been turned on. Like a pilgrimage, little bugs from all around flew right up to it and made tapping sounds at the glass casing. At first I felt pitiful. For these tiny beings could only have so much energy and were wasting it for no reason. Almost like they wanted to break into the bulb and touch the filament, they battered their heads on the glass repeatedly. Fluttering their little wings with all their might. It was indeed pitiful to watch. Still is, whenever I see them. Near bulbs, tube lights, signboards or open fires. “How could one of nature’s creations be so flawed?” I thought. Moreover, it wasn’t like m...

Novelty of the Mind

Every thought one can have is nothing but a complex and new permutation of known facts and memories. A man without any memory, knowledge or experience of all life senses technically, should not be able to imagine, well... anything! Every thought we have is but a mere extrapolation and combination of pre existing thoughts. Or is it something more.  Our thoughts are but a product of all stimuli ever received. Just piled up. Being consumed, processed, replayed, remodelled.. In all the permutations and combinations that strike our mind first. I would honestly love to be disproven in this matter. It is eerie how missed out experiences in life contribute more to our path than we could ever know. Merely because, we do not know what we've missed out on! Stimuli is replayed behind our eyes again so that we make sense of the world around us. The catch is, this constantly changes the way we think or - the permutations used before the memories fade. Forcing us through a fixed, rigid path of wa...

The 7 Billion Cyborgs of Earth

'A fictional or hypothetical person whose physical abilities are extended beyond normal human limitations with mechanical elements.' This is what the term- 'Cyborg' means.  But,  does it  ?   " Hey! V-Sauce, Michael here-" no lets not do that.  Pop culture has defined a cyborg's appearance like this: But the way I see it, this is a more realistic cyborg. (DC don't sue me) You're probably thinking why this harmless depressed lady can be called a cyborg. It's all about perspective. We are born in a world where things don't change drastically, so we grow accustomed to our surroundings. Take a look at this scenario. A human communicates with a machine by releasing static from her phalanges (fingers) into the screen which the machine processes and via a global network, fetches the required data and interprets it in the form of light emitted by pixels in a coordinated succession that then enters the human's light receptors and causes a rush ...

Limit to optimisation

Whenever I look at some of the old technology, I can't help but think, "That was normal for the time!" Spending several minutes setting up a film roll, or the effort spent on trying to dial in a phone number was never looked at as tedious or time-consuming during that age.  Unless given something to contrast with, any process/thing seems normal for us humans. A similar thought occurred to me when reading a book. Anyone who has seen a book doesn't think much while flipping through it, or writing in it. But for a person in the far future, a book will be looked at the same way we look at stone tablets. Ancient and delicate. This shift to digital media is already underway and I can't help but think, is there a limit? A limit to the extent of optimisation and comforts. Recent previous generations did not know how to carve on stone walls, or thatch a hut. Ours, does not know how to dial a number in a vintage telephone. The future generation shall never know how to flip ...