Myth And Mind

Indian mythology is a teeming storehouse of heroes and heroines, who are psychological studies in themselves. Did you know, for instance, how Krishna’s son, who was his father’s alter ego, tackled the curse to be the destroyer of his entire clan? Did you know that sage Gargi was the only lady amongst legendary sages who competed for the prize for the greatest sage in the sub-continent? Did you know that Sahadev, the youngest Pandava, had qualities lacking in any of his other, better-known brothers? Did you know that Shakuni is actually a tragic hero? Myth and the Mind is a collection of six short stories about very interesting personalities in Indian mythology. These men and women are all great, and they are all human beings in whom we will all discover a small part of ourselves.

The book examines the assumptions and confusions regarding misuse of constructs (constructions) in mainstream psychology. The confusions involve a failure to distinguish constructs from concrete events. Four controversial topics of psychology, namely mind-body, consciousness, free will vs. determinism, and sensations are examined.

Addressing general readers as well as software practitioners, "Software and Mind" discusses the fallacies of the mechanistic ideology and the degradation of minds caused by these fallacies. Mechanism holds that every aspect of the world can be represented as a simple hierarchical structure of entities. But, while useful in fields like mathematics and manufacturing, this idea is generally worthless, because most aspects of the world are too complex to be reduced to simple hierarchical structures. Our software-related affairs, in particular, cannot be represented in this fashion. And yet, all programming theories and development systems, and all software applications, attempt to reduce real-world problems to neat hierarchical structures of data, operations, and features. Using Karl Popper's famous principles of demarcation between science and pseudoscience, the book shows that the mechanistic ideology has turned most of our software-related activities into pseudoscientific pursuits. Using mechanism as warrant, the software elites are promoting invalid, even fraudulent, software notions. They force us to depend on generic, inferior systems, instead of allowing us to develop software skills and to create our own systems. Software mechanism emulates the methods of manufacturing, and thereby restricts us to high levels of abstraction and simple, isolated structures. The benefits of software, however, can be attained only if we start with low-level elements and learn to create complex, interacting structures. Software, the book argues, is a non-mechanistic phenomenon. So it is akin to language, not to physical objects. Like language, it permits us to mirror the world in our minds and to communicate with it. Moreover, we increasingly depend on software in everything we do, in the same way that we depend on language. Thus, being restricted to mechanistic software is like thinking and communicating while being restricted to some ready-made sentences supplied by an elite. Ultimately, by impoverishing software, our elites are achieving what the totalitarian elite described by George Orwell in "Nineteen Eighty-Four" achieves by impoverishing language: they are degrading our minds.

Mind is a Myth talks about a man who had it all, including looks, wealth, culture, fame, travel, career, etc. and gave up everything to find answers to questions for himself. This book aims to introduce the readers to the unknown truths in life and discuss this topic: behind all the abstractions thrown by religion to us, is there really such a thing as freedom, enlightenment, or liberation?

Presents a study of mythology based on the analysis of nonlinear form, the self's confrontation with its world, and the nature of mythic truth. Drawing on texts world-wide and on many theorists, including Cassirer, Eliade, Jung, Levi-Strauss, and Buber, the book develops a complex view of the relation between consciousness and culture. A conception of nonlinear, or 'qualitative, ' logic provides the basis for a survey of mythic space, time, cause, identity, and values, with an emphasis on the experience of wonder through mythic imagery and narrative processes

Religious zeal, suicide terrorism, passionate commitment to ideologies, and the results of various psychological tests are often cited to show that humans are fundamentally irrational. The author examines all such supposed examples of irrationality and argues that they are compatible with rationality. Rationality does not mean absence of error, but the possibility of correcting error in the light of criticism. In this sense, all human beliefs are rational: they are all vulnerable to being abandoned when shown to be faulty.

We're used to thinking about the self as an independent entity, something that we either have or are. In The Ego Tunnel, philosopher Thomas Metzinger claims otherwise: No such thing as a self exists. The conscious self is the content of a model created by our brain - an internal image, but one we cannot experience as an image. Everything we experience is ''a virtual self in a virtual reality.'' But if the self is not ''real,'' why and how did it evolve? How does the brain construct it? Do we still have souls, free will, personal autonomy, or moral accountability? In a time when the science of cognition is becoming as controversial as evolution, The Ego Tunnel provides a stunningly original take on the mystery of the mind.