TOK Fall 2014

Some of these figures might simply reflect more willingness to label an experience as a symptom.

In her book “Depression in Japan,” the anthropologist Junko Kitanaka writes that partly as a result of aggressive pharmaceutical marketing, many Japanese began to think of their fatigue and suicidal thoughts as symptoms created by a disease.

he number of diagnoses of depression in that country more than doubled between 1999 and 2008.

In 2011, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported that the rate of antidepressant use in the United States rose by 400 percent between 1988 and 2008.

What has exploded in India over the past few decades, but also everywhere else in the world, is information about other people. As we watch television, surf the Internet and follow events around the world, we become intimately aware of other ways of living and of others who are richer and more powerful. We place ourselves in a vast social order in which most of us are ants. It may truly be a depressing reflection.

In a city you are more likely to be depressed, to fall ill with schizophrenia, and to use alcohol and drugs. Poverty and rapid urbanization sharpen these effects.

Something Dr. Thara said made me wonder about another factor: “Gadgets. All these gadgets. Nobody thinks for themselves anymore.”

We have recently learned that Facebook leads people to feel less good in the moment and less satisfied with their lives. (Some 85 million Indians use Facebook, most of them at least in part through their phones.)

“Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other,”

By 2010, for the first time in history, more than half the world’s population lived in cities

By 2010, for the first time in history, more than half the world’s population lived in cities. Cities are places of possibility: They are, as E. B. White said of New York, “the visible symbol of aspiration and faith, the white plume saying that the way is up.” But cities also break traditions and fracture families, and they breed psychiatric illness. In a city you are more likely to be depressed, to fall ill with schizophrenia, and to use alcohol and drugs. Poverty and rapid urbanization sharpen these effects.

Bo Burnham named ‘A Letter from God’, he implies (from God’s own perspective – if there is such a higher power) that our lives are just a bizarre ‘game of Sims’

numbers themselves only first came about with the introduction of language to our society

mean that the imagination is the most trustworthy Way of Knowing: if we all believed every single word that came out of a child’s mouth, we would all be constantly dodging lava seeping through cracks in the sidewalk, and checking for dragons under our beds before we fell asleep. Perhaps the imagination is a window into another dimension, but without proof of this, there is little that could possibly convince m

emotion and perception.

am a firm believer in standing up for the things I believe to be true - despite being willing to change my perspective when it is blatantly obvious that I am wrong.

The great logician Kurt Gödel argued that mathematical concepts and ideas “form an objective reality of their own, which we cannot create or change, but only perceive and describe.”

According to this theory, some highly advanced computer programmer of the future has devised this simulation, and we are unknowingly part of it. Thus when we discover a mathematical truth, we are simply discovering aspects of the code that the programmer used.

Do they exist somewhere, a set of immaterial objects in the enchanted gardens of the Platonic world, waiting to be discovered? Or are they mere creations of the human mind?

tatistically speaking, therefore, we are more likely to be living in a simulated world than the real one.

In a recent paper, “Constraints on the Universe as a Numerical Simulation,” th

Are we prepared to take the “red pill,” as Neo did in “The Matrix,” to see the truth behind the illusion — to see “how deep the rabbit hole goes”? Perhaps not yet.

he possibility of the Platonic nature of mathematical ideas remains — and may hold the key to understanding our own reality.