Amit Goes Blogging

I encourage you to read my prior post on atheism . Here's a thought experiment for you. Imagine 100 crore individuals flip a coin. Only participants flipping heads move to the next round. The probability of flipping heads or tails is 50%. So, in our experiment, half a billion people would flip tails and leave the game. The game continues up to the 29 th or the 30 th round where we are left with just two players. And finally emerges our winner, from among a billion, who flipped heads in all 30 attempts. Wow! What is at play here? Grace or probability? Let’s tweak the rules of the game to have the last man standing beheaded. You would probably hear the lament, ‘Of all people, why me?’ Statistical probability, nothing else. This thought experiment checks the innocent tendency of human mind to celebrate a certain turn of events in the universe as incontestable signs of Supreme Intelligence or Providence. Among the billion minus one chances of the universe remaining lifeless, life w...

Another book that was lying with me unread for 25 years. Never could make it beyond three chapters.  Had it not been for the purple patch of reading that I have struck recently, I would have abandoned the book much early in the game.   Nonetheless, reading An Outline of Philosophy  was an uphill task. It slowed me down. It felt as if I had never read anything. A fiction novel with that page count would be a 3-day affair. I  fancied what it would be like to punch  much above my weight.   Reading a sentence over and over and then reading the paragraph over and over, carefully holding up a bunch of ideas in my immediate attention long enough for them to make sense so much so that a sneeze or a brisk movement could dissipate away sense, feeling anxious whether I would be able to follow Russell any further before my nerves give way — that was my experience with this book. After finishing a chapter, instead of getting caught up in self-congratulatory em...