I'm interested in investigating foundational questions of reality such as the reasons and mechanisms related to the existence of our universe and the nature of consciousness. Specifically, I want to integrate advances in scientific understanding to **clarify foundational questions and propose explanations with testable predictions.** ### Why are these foundational questions important? Science has made tremendous progress over the last 300 years and today we understand more than ever before. However, the questions that have baffled philosophers since thousands of years are still largely unresolved. Since the time of ancient Greeks in the west and the Advaita Vedanta / Buddhist philosophers in the east, we have seen countless conjectures and counter-conjectures when it comes to fundamental questions. The reason these questions have been raised for thousands of years is because they're so *personal*. I can't imagine a more fundamental question than why anything exists at all. People were asking this question even before formal, experiment-driven science was a thing and that indicates how important questions of such type are. **I want to continue the tradition of such investigations but try to utilize the advances that different fields of sciences are making in order to ensure our conjectures are empirically verifiable and, hence, are closer to truth than mere thought experiments.** As a concrete example, the symmetries involved the standard model of particle physics *might* be hinting at something deeper about how universe bootstrapped itself into existence. This empirically verified information was simply not available to philosophers of the past. But we do have access to this information, along with insights about the world of quantum mechanics, scientific basis of pain/suffering, success of machine learning. The question is: how can we use this information about how reality works to illuminate age-old fundamental questions that were traditionally the domain of philosophy. Our scientific knowledge is accelerating by the year, and hence it justifies the existence of an institute that puts the effort to integrate such advances into frameworks that illuminate the most fundamental questions a person is capable of asking about where it finds itself: the universe. ### Broad themes of investigation Foundational questions mean different things to different people. As a guiding principle, however, we will consider questions as foundational if they can be said to lie at the heart of all other questions. These are the questions that arise when one wonders about the "nature of reality" at the deepest level. Like reality (as far as we understand), there are no neat categories in questions about reality. But we can attempt to roughly divide our questions into four broad categories: #### 1. What does understanding mean? Getting a grip on the nature of understanding is important because all other questions depend on it. We need to answer what does the mental "click" suggest when we feel we've understood something. Does understanding something mean we should be able to make a scientific model of it? Does it mean being able to visualize something? What if the phenomena we're dealing with cannot be neatly visualized/imagined? Do "black boxes" that make successful predictions count as understanding? Unless we're able to answer what an explanation means, we will probably not resolve explanations for the rest of the questions. So, to answer what we mean by the nature of reality, we need to start by: - [[Defining reality]] - [[Philosophy of science]] #### 2. Why does the universe exist? We wake up and look outside the window and find **concrete** reality. Why does it exist? What is the reality running "on"? We know something exists rather than nothing. But why? Is the existence of "nothing" impossible? Why? Is it possible that everything logically possible actually exists and we happen to find ourselves in a slice of possibility that allows for human existence? How do we prove or disprove this? There are many questions pertaining to the existence of our universe. Some of them may turn out to be linguistic confusions but others may point us to the most sublime directions. To begin understanding the universe, we need to begin understanding our most basic fundamental physical theories: - [[Demystifying quantum theory]] - [[Demystifying general relativity]] - [[Demystifying special relativity]] #### 3. What is consciousness? We're made out of fundamentally the same physics as a mechanical clock. Then why and how is that we feel a rich *inner world* of our feelings and perceptions while the clock supposedly is a dead object? Or does the clock (or parts of it) feel alive as well? Sure, the molecules and atoms of the clock and human body are different, but it can't be the case that carbon atoms are conscious while iron atoms aren't. If so, lots of things are made out of carbon atoms (diamonds, charcoal) and we have no reason to propose that clocks aren't conscious but charcoal is. Since we have access to nothing _beyond_ our subjective perceptions, explaining how they exist and their relationship with reality becomes utmost important. In fact, we're nothing but what we experience. Hence, to understand ourselves, we need to understand the nature of experience. - [[What is consciousness?]] - [[What non-living things are conscious]] - [[Evolution of brains, consciousness and suffering]] - [[If panpsychism is true, what systems are capable of suffering]] #### 4. What's a good world? How do we create it? At the most fundamental level, everyone agrees that they'd rather have a good world than a bad world. However, people disagree all the time about what's a good world. Traditionally, this question has been the domain of ethics. However, our investigation into the nature of consciousness and the universe can help illuminate the question with new lenses and enable us to propose dimensions and ways in which we can improve our current state of affairs to a better one. - [[Suffering focused ethics]] - [My moral code](https://invertedpassion.com/my-moral-code/) ### What would progress look like for these questions? This is research effort, so most of the time will be spent in reading existing and newly published arguments and scientific results. Since research is expected to be inter-disciplinary in nature, I expect to collaborate with and make use of expertise of researchers in other institutes. The output will be of intellectual nature such as essays, reviews, reports, peer-reviewed papers and new results/data from experiments. ### Other efforts for investigating foundational questions There are organizations such as [FQXI](https://fqxi.org/) and [Edge.org](https://www.edge.org/) that invite writings from different researchers on a variety of fundamental questions. Their existence is an indication that enough people in the world are interested in these questions. <iframe class="signup-iframe" src="https://invertedpassion.com/signup-collector" title="Signup collector"></iframe>