A short introduction
Aditya Prasad is a software engineer by profession, having worked at most of the usual Silicon Valley suspects. While an undergraduate at the University of Michigan, he published several papers as a member of the Quantum Circuits Group (his first at age 18). While at Google, he co-authored several publications with the Psychophysiology Lab at Stanford University, during which he gained proficiency in fMRI analysis—and also became acutely aware of its pitfalls. At a very early age, through close contact with the Advaita Vedanta tradition, he was fortunate to encounter certain insights regarding the nature of mind. He has been passionate about using his analytical skills in the service of sharing them ever since.Publications:
All matter is a cognitive ‘hallucination,’ even the brain itself
Neuroscience has conceded that the same cognitive structures that generate dreams also generate our experience of waking reality. It’s just that, unlike in the former case, in the latter the ‘hallucination’ is modulated by external factors. Be that as it may, the implication is still that all we colloquially refer to as ‘matter’ is a cognitive construct of our minds. However, as Aditya Prasad highlights, despite such acknowledgment most neuroscientists still surreptitiously seem to assume that the chunk of matter we call a ‘brain’ is special: unlike all other matter, which is ‘hallucinated,’ the brain is the thing that generates the hallucinations. But for the account to remain consistent, we must understand that the brain, too, as a material object, is part of the hallucination. The implications of this consistency, Mr. Prasad argues, are ineffable.
On the self-validating nature of idealism
While physicalism is impossible to confirm even in principle, idealism suffers from no such limitation. This intrinsic verifiability makes it a more fruitful avenue of investigation.
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