Echoes

Originally, I was uncritical and borderline superstitious. However, at the same time, I was a mathematics student. When it occurred to me to apply similar standards of inquiry and confidence to reality as I applied to mathematics — i.e. when I became a skeptic, and started questioning beliefs and considering things like what “meaning of life” and “purpose” meant — I became more confident, more self-reliant, and more able (mentally and emotionally) to deal with problems in life. In short, I matured a lot emotionally.

As a result, I eventually became a pragmatist, which in turn had implications for my professional development in mathematics: I could better distinguish between something that was not properly defined, something that was almost well-defined but lacked clarity, and things where more information was needed. As well, I became better able to make good distinctions when it came to what questions to work on.

Finally, it had a more direct impact on my philosophy of mathematics, in that I went from being a naive Platonist to a formalist, which really helps when one comes across strange definitions for mathematical objects — it’s easier to do pure mathematics if you treat it like a puzzle than if you treat every question as though it has to be a part of some imagined reality.

Ideally, philosophy is nothing but intellectual honesty while thinking about many different subjects. That is no more or less than what Socrates did, after all.

“Meaning” generally concerns a way of understanding something; so, the meaning of life is the way in which you understand your life and your place in the universe. A popular way of attaining an understanding of your life (”bringing meaning to your life”) is to persue a purpose. But purpose is not somethingthat has to come from the outside; one can choose a purpose (or ideally, several purposes) to pursue oneself.

Long-term satisfaction with life, then, comes from choosing goals for oneself, and accomplishing them.

These goals should not be too easy, and it may be a good idea to choose goals which are part of a larger project which you can never actually fully accomplish (so that you are never at a lack of goals for yourself, and you can always measure your progress against the idealized goal). This role has often been played by religion, which is a partial explanation of the popularity of religion; but religion isn’t the only way to fulfill this goal, and a skeptic must find some other source.

Personally, I have chosen the persuit of mathematics (and in particular, a decades-long personal project in mathematics research) and advocacy of mathematics and rationalism generally, with maintenance of a moderately athletic level of fitness as a lower priority project.

In the spiritual context the following have been defined as the six major weaknesses of a human being:
1) kaam (sex)
2) krodh (anger)
3) moha (lust)
4) mada (ego)
5) matsara (jealousy)
6) chinta ( worry)

It is expected from a human being that during his life time he should control and win over all these. The difficulty level in conquering the above has been in the given order. (with 1st the most difficult one to conquer)
Unfortunately today there is a loud display of all the above mentioned emotions by most.

Well, fear used to be a great survival instinct in ancient times. When challenged by an animal the hair on the body of a human used to stand up to increase his size, his heartbeat used to go up and he used to get prepared for a fight or flight situation.

But today that fear is more over the loss of materialistic things than survival.