Hi, I am Jai Luthra. Welcome to my second little corner on the internet. The first one is at jailuthra.in I hope to blog about (mostly) philosophy here. H...
I have a thought experiment for you. Imagine if the next time you go to sleep you wakeup in someone else's body-mind. And they wake up in yours. A full swap. What would that be like? If your first reaction to that was, "Oh I would be surprised", or "It would be so weird", I have to caution you and clarify the setup. You inherit not just their body, but also their mind. So your old thoughts and…
Let's start with something we think we understand: light. That's where we left off in our last article about Light, Space and Time . You know from high school that light behaves like a wave. When you shine light through two narrow slits, you don't get two bright lines on the screen behind them. Instead, you get an interference pattern. Bright and dark bands, spreading out from where you'd expect…
(or the physics of Duality & Causality) From high-school physics we know that Light is special. It travels through space and time at an insanely high speed (~300 million meters per second). Unlike sound, it is a wave that can propagate in a vacuum. If you were attentive in school, you might even remember how the forces of Electricity and Magnetism together reinforce each other in Maxwell’s…
Do numbers exist? I can count three mangoes, or four pebbles. They’re right there, I can pick them up, I can touch them with my hands. But where is this number called 3 or 4? Well, you might say that the mangoes may rot and the pebbles may get lost, but there is something eternal, a unique value behind the multiple mangoes, called the number 3. Similarly the number 4 is the representation of the…
If you allow me, I want to demonstrate how there is only one thing that provably exists. That is a big claim, you might say. There is a multitude of things. Just look around. Trees, rivers, people going about their day, so many non-living objects, countless grains of sand. Are you mad, you ask. I hope I am not. When you look around, you do see a multitude. Things with clear boundaries. But notice…
Here is a close-up photo of a flower taken using an iPhone 13: The smudginess in the out-of-focus areas—especially the stem and the base of the flower—is very jarring to look at. Recently, whenever I've tried to take an image with even a modest digital zoom of 1.5x-2x—whether it's of a bird, natural scenery, or a concert where I'm some distance from the stage—I see a similar heavily…
I've often been confused when reading religious or spiritual texts that talk about Truth (with a capital T). What do they mean by it, and why the strange capitalization? The confusion usually arises because what these texts are pointing to is often conflated (due to poor translations) with the general, everyday use of the word "truth." In daily life we use “truth” mainly in an ethical or moral…
I have been pondering this question for a long time, and I'm sure many others before me have too. Often, when I'm stuck on a problem or going through a particularly mundane phase of life where nothing seems interesting, suddenly there is light. And by light, I mean a new idea; a potential solution, or a topic that makes me feel giddy with excitement again. So where did this thought come from? Did…
(or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Power) Throughout high school, and later during undergrad, I struggled with finding motivation to work. It was weird because before high school I had it easy, at least academically. I was able to learn new subjects with minimal effort, and there wasn't a lot of boring homework I had to do. Anyhow, there were little consequences for not doing…
I have a tendency to fall into repetitive patterns of thought. They possess me and make me hopeless, agitated and resentful. But these thought loops are not permanent. They only last for as long as I am giving them my attention. During the depressive phases of my life I loved to sleep long hours and multiple times a day. I didn't understand it completely back then, but now I see how waking up…