Author: Atanu Dey

Our descriptions of reality are necessarily based on our perception of reality. But our descriptions are not what reality is because what we can perceive given our limited faculties cannot be comprehensive or even undistorted. The world appears magical but magic does not explain the world, if and when we do attempt to explain the world. Myriad explanations have been advanced. Each points to a limited aspect of that which lies beneath it all. Looking from each of those varied viewpoints and somehow integrating them may help us approach a better appreciation of reality.

Decades ago during my engineering undergraduate days, I had read a few of Carlos Castaneda’s books about a Yaqui shaman named don Juan Matus from Sonora, Mexico. Castenada was an anthropology student at University of California at Los Angeles in the 1960s. He wrote a book The Teachings of don Juan: A Yaqui Way of Knowledge, and submitted it as his master’s thesis. It was published by the University of California Press in 1968.
Continue reading “A Path with a Heart”

The wiki page about virus says that it “is a small infectious agent that replicates only inside the living cells of other organisms. Viruses can infect all types of life forms . . .” Ideas are analogous to viruses because they too are infectious agents that replicate in living brains. The evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term meme to mean a unit of idea that can infect a brain and get transmitted to other brains. Viruses are responsible for genetic diversity through horizontal gene transfer. Analogously, ideas are responsible for diversity of human mentality.

Viruses of biological kind are generally bad for the organism, just like the software variety are bad for computers. There are no good viruses. In contrast, ideas come in two principle varieties: the benevolent and the malevolent. The good kind leads to overall benefits, both to the individual with the idea and to the collective of individuals that have that idea. The malevolent kind inflicts great harm but they eventually die out. There are two pathways. One, they just destroy the host collective, thus resulting in the extinction of the bad idea. Or, two, they mutate into a less malevolent form that does not kill the host, or even into a benevolent idea that benefits the host. Good ideas are forever and bad ideas are never forever.
Continue reading “Viruses, Ideas and their Life Expectancy”