Crossing the divide: A website about Literature, Art & Philosophy by Venkat Ramanan

(This is a collection of my letters to media over the years) The letter below to "Philosophy Now" was published in Issue 108 (June/July 2015) of the magazine. Dear Editor: A number of the articles in Issue 106, and also  Grant Bartley’s Editorial , tend to reinforce the premise that human beings are “reasoning animals.” It is also indisputable that our philosophical reasoning is based on logic. Moreover, as Bartley points out, logic “is concerned with what is thinkable through language.” But we do not all speak the same language. Language being a system of symbols, each language could possess different sets of symbols, or the meaning attributed to a symbol may differ from one language to another. Do these limitations of language and mathematics also restrict the efficacy of logic, thus constraining our understanding of the world? This thought echoes Kant’s caution that our inability to accommodate the illogical could limit our comprehending the world beyond our minds. Th

We use the brain as an adjunct to our life, as a highly sophisticated tool to facilitate our actions. However, do the functions of the brain alone amply explain the whole of the human condition? W hen I throw a ball to someone else, I show the unfailing workings of a natural law. That however does not mean that I represent that law of physics, let alone become an embodiment of that law. Similarly, when a particular set of neurons in my brain gave rise to my intention to throw that ball, those neurons were merely involved in a physiological activity underlying that intention. That does not mean that this particular of set of neurons is the intention itself. My MP3 player tells me that exceeding a certain volume level may harm my hearing in the long term. By indicating that this man-made device is “telling me” something, I use here language that anthropomorphises an artefact. I could have said instead that a warning message is displayed on the music player's screen. But I use

The reality we cook up is quite distinct from what actually exists. By this we also seem to posit that with reality there could be more than one version of the truth: an objective unchanging reality – the Kantian thing-in-itself - ontologically akin to mathematics; and then there is the reality we actually perceive which is subject however to constraints borne of both nature and nurture. W hen I have a camera in my hand I am like one of those small pesky dogs: I snap , snap, snap all the time. But this profligate output rarely translates to good quality. There is always some blemish with my photos: either they are out of focus or the sun is behind the subject - so ill-composed that I cannot even pass it off as a silhouette - or part of the head has been guillotined or, more often than not, a mix of all of these in the same shot. I therefore recently bought myself a DSLR camera in the hope that it will help me with learning to take better pictures. As part of this exercise in self-impr

The machines in this case exhibit not only vast intelligence but also considerable wisdom that far exceeds the purpose for which they were built and the algorithms that defined them. They have apparently acquired such wisdom by somehow transitioning from syntactics to semantics, gaining an ability to possess content and meaning. The leadys are not just a brain in a vat anymore; they are persons (or even better?) Will machines take over the world one day? This question has been in the news recently with leading thinkers like Professor Stephen Hawking and Elon Musk of Tesla expressing the worry that uncontrolled evolution of machine intelligence may one day presage the end of humanity. [i] This fear of rampant technology ruling the world is however is not of recent vintage, especially among the literati. Writers ranging from HG Wells and Aldous Huxley to more recent ones like Arthur C Clarke and scientist and writer Baroness Susan Greenfield have produced some well-known an

By being too distant and dispassionate could our writers, judges, social theorists and others in the public space be accused of not bestowing requisite warmth and empathy in their actions and pronouncements? Is it in other words proper to apply the above praxis of detachment in all human encounters that call for the use of both judgement and empathy and compassion? T he defendant is one of six accused of not having gone to the aid of several hundred women prisoners locked into a church that was later bombed by the Allies. All defendants were women guards at a Nazi satellite concentration camp near Auschwitz. Photo: Edward Onslow Ford , Justice , partie d'un monument au maharajah de Mysore During a moment in the trial the defendant does not apparently know what she should or could have done differently. She therefore poses that question to the judge asking him what he would have done. The judge replies that there are matters “one could not get drawn into”. By using the

This is perhaps the irony of life: we would like our lives to last as long as possible: but how do we live with its exhausting continuity? M ost of us have a Janus-like approach to the temporality of our lives: we have one eye on the past and one on the future with no time for the present. With the past, we have this persistent urge to dissect it and in the process are swayed by a whole gamut of feelings and emotions. We recall with evident pleasure some of these past events. Some of us are so proud of our journey so far and our previous ports of call – and confident that others will wish to celebrate this voyage and emulate it even – that we publish memoirs or at least ask others peep into our private lives via things like social media. And we may regret too that some events had not happened and attempt to suppress these memories whenever they try to escape their hiding places in our minds. In his magnificent novel, The Towers of Silence , Paul Scott uses the tin-trunk that M