Metaphysical Musings

The portrayal of female characters in fiction can be simplified to an admixture of stereotypes. Stereotypes inform the gender roles that female characters are often written into a piece of literature to fulfil. It starts with a material role to which some broader social expectation is imputed. In older classic texts, rarely is the woman something beyond a wife, a mother, a widow or a servant. In playing stereotypical roles, they provide love, support, maternal sympathy and ot

What is a custodian? A custodian has a responsibility to protect a field of knowledge. Through that responsibility, a custodian has the power to influence this field of knowledge by controlling what affects it. Custodians appear in many forms: critics, researchers, academics; executives in large firms and high-ranking officials in governments. A custodian has a connotation of being ethical, moral, and one with expertise in their field. The consensus of custodians should theor

1) What is P(Doom) and how do we assess it? 2) Is there anything systematic we know that impacts these assessments? 3) How do naive people versus tech professionals make these assessments? P(Doom) is the probability that artificial intelligence will lead be an existential risk to humanity.  The subject of existential risks of AI has been trending recently, with many senior and well respected figures in the field giving worrying views on it (this will be discussed later on). T

I look from afar, Ablaze, aglow, askance, I see the tears crawling down And I see the rancour of ecstasy, The rancour of misery, Arraigned to the chain of Dancing bodies, in trance, In the bear’s snare. Trap. Trapped. I see the rose madder on the cheeks and around the eyes and on their lips, Dry and drier. I see the indwelling rose bud, it swells with desire, it blooms, it blooms, and then the monophthong strikes and the petals darken and fall off and it diffuses into the smo

In the twisted melody where all falls into the gutter I saw it but did you see it too? Have you ever seen something like it? A bleeding man in a false platoon. The arabesque chiaroscuro, it played to the night, The strobes of light evade my sight, But where were you, where were you? I beckoned, I called But you remained in the budding grove Refusing to recall How the sun has passed and into the night we come How the white lilies have bloomed The young child has awoken Yet you

The Big Lebowski is a film released by the Coen Brothers in 1998. Despite being pigeon-holed into the crime-comedy genre, which is true...

Historically, India has always been a diverse, and more importantly inclusive nation.  Transgender people have been a part of Indian society for centuries. There is evidence in Puranic texts of people whose gender was neither male nor female, called the third gender, who were prevalent in ancient India. This prevalence stretched to the Mughal Empire, where transgender individuals had powerful and respected roles within the Royal Court of the Mughal Empire as administrators, p

Robert Nozick was one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century and an extremely important figure in ethics, moral and political...