What is love? Is it one thing or many? Is there anything in common between brotherly love and motherly one? Why is love so elusive to understand, even though many of us may have felt it? Why is love often equated to sacrifice, service, and dedication? This post deconstructs the idea of love into three components—attraction, vulnerability, and strength. These are respectively progressive stages of love. That is, you begin with attraction, then you share your most intimate self to the person you love, and finally you demonstrate commitment to stick to the person in good or bad times. Table of ContentsThe Principle of AttractionThe Principle of VulnerabilityThe Principle of…
Consciousness is Rooted in Inner Conflict
This post discusses how choice arises from conflict, in the act of conflict resolution. The nature of this conflict, how conflict resolution leads to compromises in which one side goes dominant and the other subordinate, and how the dominant-subordinate structure is later reversed, producing a cyclic change, are interesting consequences of this idea. This also leads us to think of matter as the cause of inner conflict, and consciousness as the resolver of these conflicts. It helps us understand matter in a new way, as something that is always inconsistent rather than logically consistent. To describe matter as the substratum of conflict requires a fundamentally different way of thinking than…
How Living Systems Violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics
When James Clerk Maxwell proposed the second law of thermodynamics, he envisioned a thought experiment in which two chambers of gas were joined by a small door under the control of a ‘demon’ who would selectively open the door depending on which direction the gas molecules were moving. If we think of the two chambers as containing mixtures of blue and red molecules, and they were randomly flitting about, the demon would open the door just as a red molecule was about to move into the right chamber or a blue molecule was about to move into the left. The door would remain closed otherwise. If such a demon were…
