What makes me the same person throughout my life, and a different person from you? And what is the importance of these facts? I believe that most of us have false beliefs about our own nature, and our identity over time, and that, when we see the truth, we ought to change some of our […]
Once local and irregular, time-keeping became universal and linear in 311 BCE. History would never be the same again. What year is it? It’s 2019, obviously. An easy question. Last year was 2018. Next year will be 2020. We are confident that a century ago it was 1919, and in 1,000 years it will be […]
We’ll meet again. The intrepid logician Kurt Gödel believed in the afterlife. In four heartfelt letters to his mother he explained why As the foremost logician of the 20th century, Kurt Gödel is well known for his incompleteness theorems and contributions to set theory, the publications of which changed the course of mathematics, logic and […]
Throughout all previous epochs and periods of history of the development of the human race and society, and the active observation and subsequent direct exploration of space, the process of obtaining answers to some of the most difficult, essential questions seems to be heating up to the maximum, but at the same time complicating. Consequently, […]
I thought I knew that song. My mom sang it the most beautifully, with the piano. She still sings it wonderfully today, only the crowd that followed her with the guitar, the maligans and the drunk carp on St. Ignatius has thinned out a bit. One July, I came back from the sea and a […]
In the novella The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), Leo Tolstoy presents a man who is shocked by suddenly realising that his death is inevitable. While we can easily appreciate that the diagnosis of a terminal illness came as an unpleasant surprise, how could he only then discover the fact of his mortality? But that is […]
Metaphysical debates in quantum physics don’t get at ‘truth’ – they’re nothing but a form of ritual, activity and culture. I first learnt about Plato’s allegory of the cave when I was in senior high school. A mathematics and English nerd – a strange combination – I played cello and wrote short stories in my […]
For more than 1,000 years, the Imperial Family of Japan and its physicians have preserved a treasure of oriental medicine: the complete 30 scrolls of the Ishinhō, or the ‘heart of medical prescription’. This compendium was derived from sources in India, China, Korea and elsewhere, though many of the original documents have since been lost or destroyed. In […]