Viswanathan K's Thoughts

In his book, Finite and Infinite Games , James Carse says there are two types of interactions involving humans in the world: those that have an ending (“finite games”), and those that go on forever (“infinite games”). Finite games have clear boundaries (spatial, numerical, temporal) and agreed-upon rules. After all, without those characteristics, nobody would agree when the game ended. Or who won.   If that sounded too competitive, perhaps you prefer infinite games. But to keep the game going indefinitely, rules need to be changeable, at times to ensure the game doesn’t end! (See why governance is an infinite game?). But such games raise a different kind of problem: “Who, for example, won the French Revolution?” Notice how an infinite game doesn’t end even when players die? Even more confusingly, players can come and go as they please in infinite games.   A finite game forces you to be serious (there’s a specific objective,   you want to achieve it). Whereas ...

Everyone’s heard of Galileo and how the Church persecuted him. But what I didn’t know was why . Sure, Christianity considered the earth to be the center of the universe, but was that such a central belief of Christianity that they’d kill a guy over it? I always felt like there was something more to it. Like everything else in the Western world, the story starts in ancient Greece. Pythagoras believed the earth was at the center of the universe. The sun, moon, planets and stars revolved around the earth, with each pinned inside a sphere. How far did these spheres within spheres extend? To infinity? Or did they stop at some point? If they stopped, what lay beyond the last sphere? Aristotle denied the existence of both the void and the infinite. As far he was concerned, both the void and the infinite were just constructs of the mind: and he felt there’s nothing in the real world (universe) that was infinite. So Aristotle’s answer was that there were only a finite number of spheres and that...