On the Nature of Knowledge

(These were the thoughts I had penned down a long time back after watching this outstanding movie Solaris by Andrei Tarkovsky)
What is knowledge?
Today, I watched Solaris. It raises questions about the nature and limits of knowledge, something that I had thought about for a long time now.

In the movie Snaut says, “Man wants to see man when he goes to outer-space. He is unwilling to see or learn anything that does not fall under the realm of human knowledge”. It is true, isn’t it? We see and understand everything on the basis of the knowledge we already possess.

For example, we see everything in terms of numbers – two eyes, many people, a blanket. No matter what we think it is not possible to get rid of the number. I had long back written a blogpost in which i posted a picture of a bunch of men and I asked what would you think of this picture if you did not have the number system. Well, what would we think? No matter what we think – it always seem to come back to the concept of numbers.

What if there is a different basis of knowledge that does not belong to the realm of numbers? What if it was an accident that human knowledge chanced upon the number-realm rather than the other? Sure, it was an act of pure genius, the invention of numbers. But all the subsequent knowledge that we built was based upon this one basic premise, which in the end was probably an accident.

So, if we have to talk about truth, the existence of which is unknown as far as i am concerned, the knowledge that we possess today is true only as long as the premise is true. But the premise is an assumption at best. So is all knowledge an assumption?

Is our “understanding” of nature our own fabrication and nothing more?

weread.com

I love reading books and its great if I can find a place where I can document/share my experiences. I was trying out weread.com. Their portable BookShelf (once you create your bookshelf you can carry it with you to orkut, facebook etc.) idea has generated a lot of traffic to the website, so it has a lot of users and content. But I am not entirely happy with the design of the website.

- When I sign in, I want to see a personalized home page. I want to see the books I have added, the reviews I have written, activities of my friends etc. The information on what general population is doing is secondary to me. Instead when I sign in, I see a page where a huge chunk of page is occupied by iReaders’ activities and there is no space for activities of my friends.

- I have already created a bookshelf. Why does the homepage still ask me to create a bookshelf after I sign in? Top quarter of the screen space is occupied by that, which is meaningless.

- There is no link to “Home”. But that is also because there is no homepage. I think that is bad design.

- Screen space seems to be poorly used in most webpages. There is a lot of content but the webpages are sparse which requires you to scroll a lot. Not cool. (A “An iReader has reviewed Blah Blah” takes 2 inches of screen space. I think that is unreasonable.)

I really want to use this website, but I get irritated when things are not intuitive or are cumbersome. I hope the weread.com people will read this blogpost. That is the only purpose to this post

Life update

I am moving to US in the first week of January for pursuing Master’s at the State University of New York, Stony Brook.

Funny error message Part 2

Numbers

I was wondering how I would perceive this image if I didn’t have the knowledge of numbers. I always seem to arrive at numbers in some way or the other no matter where I start. Any inputs?

Mobile on storage

Always wanted a portable harddisk, as burning dvds everytime you want to move data is such a lame thing to do. But was not ready to shell out the 3k. I had a spare 10GB hard-disk which wasn’t of much use to me elsewhere. So bought a USB casing for it and now I am Mobile on Storage. Yey!

And my comp has all USB 2.0 ports, so the data transfer rate is awesome too.

My proud new possession

My new steering wheel and brake set. I use it for playing NFS MW.
Frontech stuff. Cost me a good 1300/-, but it is money well spent.