Deep Fried Neurons Podcast

Lugwig Van Wittgenstein wrote Tactatus Logico Philosophicus and Philosophical Investigations centred around a central question: Is language a competent tool to compare expereinces of reality to the end of demystifying it. This episode talks about foundational language in learning psychology, the growth of children in terms of cognitive abilities and how that relates to an operative person cognitively conveying intention. We look at the barrier of language resulting in a sea of context, that causes for Witgenstein's "language game" to have implications in real life governance, and legal procedure.

Recommended reading:
Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein
Philosophical Investigations, Ludwig Wittgenstein
Psychology - Cicarelli
Developmental Psychology - Harlow
K. Puttaswamy V. Union of India
Criminal Law - Ratan Lal and Dheeraj Lal

Blasphemy, according to a quick google search is "Actions or speech that is done in irreverence or dismissal of God". To no one's surprise there are laws in place even today in more than a comfortable number of countries to punish blasphemy as a crime. In this episode, we briefly discuss the origin of this phenomenon, and see why is it that the state chooses to use it's monopoly of violence over speech and literature against God. In continuation of the discussion, we discuss the rationale given by the Supreme Court of India, as the justification for the constitutional validity of the blasphemy law in the Democratic Republic of India. Additionally, we discuss the the largest incident of blasphemy in the 20th century - the fatwa against Salman Rushdie and the complexities of having geographical granted autonomy to write and say something, while another geographical and cultural taboo to the extent of demanding death of the blasphemer across jurisdictions. In addition to the Fatwa, we also talk about incidents of "Blasphemy" and how it defines the identity of a culture and location. The end of this episode discusses India and the choice as a culture we stand to make, whether the State should penalise the blasphemer on behalf of religions over the fear of violence. 

Music: @triggerfish.wut, logo by @poorwow on instagram

Recommented Reading:
Any and all religious texts you can find - specially pertaining to Islam, Christianity and Hinduism (Ones I have glossed over are Bhagwat Gita, Quran and the Bible across commentaries)
The Portable Atheist - Christopher Hitchens
Satanic Verses - Salman Rushdie (if it is legal in your country)
The Satanic Verses Affair (2009) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ilbNgCWgnwE
Ramji Lal Modi V. the State of Uttar Pradesh 1957 AIR 620
Superintendent, Central Prison, Fatehgarh V. Ram Manohar Lohia 1960 AIR 633
The letter provided by Bangalore Police to Munawar Fariqui's organisers is attached in an article by the wire at:
https://thewire.in/rights/bengaluru-police-make-organisers-cancel-comedian-munawar-faruquis-show

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This episode of deep-fried neurons deals with the societal concept of Law and its placement at the center of society as a guide to the operating checkpoint of autonomy. In this episode, we discuss the necessity of law and how the law came to be in human civilization, Along with which, we also focus on how once the law was changed from the command of the sovereign; it would become a collective human sanction in favor of truth, the moral good and reason. We also discover the philosophical arguments advanced that suggest this pursuit is cloaked by a  will to exert power. 

After we go through the philosophical literature, we look at the Legislative battle for the rights of the LGBTQIA+ individuals in India to decriminalize same-sex relations previously classified as "unnatural" under the law, and how our studies in jurisprudence show the vertical limits of our courtrooms and reading of our legislation when it comes to actually protect justice.

Literature Reviewed / Recommended for this episode

- Jurisprudence and Legal Theory (EBC Publishers)
Atchutan Pillai

- Beyond Good and Evil
 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

- A Hero of Two Worlds
 Mike Duncan

- The World of the Homosexual
 Shakuntala Devi

Cases read and referred for this episode 

KeshavNanda Bharti V. State of Kerela AIR 1973 1461

Naz Foundation V. Government of NCT Delhi 2010 CrLJ 94 (Del.)

Suresh Kumar Koushal V. Naz Foundation and Ors. MANU/SC/1278/2013

Navtej Singh Johar V. Union Of India (2014) 5 SCC 438

Please consider supporting the podcast by buying me a coffee

at www.buymeacoffee.com/deepfriedneuron

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This episode deals with the logistical solutions that human society had to come up with to effectively share resources and quantify value: money. In this episode, after understanding the anthropological necessity for money, we understand how the transference of money evolved. Dheeraj Shah helps me understand why currency or money was agreed upon to be rare metals like gold, and then how and why we shifted to cash transactions equivalent to gold, and finally how money came to have its own value and generated through our current debt systems. Dheeraj Specifically helps us with understanding what Decentralised Finance is and how bitcoin in specific is the ultimate experience in decentralized finance.

Books reviewed for this episode:

Treaties on Civil Government - John Locke

The Problem with Indian Rupee, and its Solution - B.R. Ambedkar

Simulacra and Simulation - Jean Baudrillard

History of Weimar Republic - Charles River Editors

Gold Standard in Theory and History - Richard Eichengreen

Other Content reviewed/suggested:

This episode discusses the philosophical history of rebellion from the age of enlightenment to the contemporary times in a literary review for 'the rebel' by Albert Camus and Animal Farm by George Orwell. The object of the episode is to understand what is rebellion, and what is it that causes rebellion to be meaningful or desirable to society. We discuss egocentrism, profiteering, and messianism along with desperation leading means to be justified by the ends of rebellion as demerits of this political occurrence, and how deeply cultural or societal the phenomenon of rebellion really is.

Books reviewed for this episode:
The Rebel - Albert Camus
The Emma Goldman Collection - Emma Goldman
On Anarchism - Noam Chomsky
Like a Thief in Broad Daylight - Slavoj Zizek
The Second Sex - Simone De Beauvoire

Ancillary references to:
Thus Spake Zarathustra - Freidreich Neitzsche
Animal Farm - George Orwell
Inglorious Empire - Sashi Tharoor
Hero Of Two Worlds - Mike Duncan

For this episode, get on a call with Far From Fact and talk about colonization, our lives that are shaped by it, crowbars and hosting and producing a podcast. Far From Fact also bring us their perspectives on  adultery and their curation process for their stories. Also, a big  announcement for the future of the show for those who have been  listening for a while

Check out Far From Fact with Keshav Naidu and Hussian Merchant:
https://open.spotify.com/show/6VEqlTf1A46UNZfD7PmrEg?si=I-MI7P27QvOf4K3Yl98K4A

For this episode, I sit down with Sultana Zana, and I talk to her about her artist project from her residency in Bir, where she discovered a   colonial footprint in the ecological habitat of the Mountains of   Himachal Pradesh. Building the story off of her experience, we talk about the morality of anthropological interpretation and exploration along with the nature of entropy, and how that relates to the human experience as a civilisation.

Check out Sultana's Work at:

In the eternal words of the backstreet boys, the primary question that  prompts in my head every time i do something is "Tell me why?".  Individual behavior in tandem with society is an extremely overlooked  but equally interesting field of study, and I think it says a lot about  the way our political realities unfold or even how our personal  relationships shape themselves. One of the things we do to lubricate our  presence in society in general is conform with the norm of our  environment, and today we mostly explore "why?"

With the release of Cyberpunk 2077 less than a week away and either full commitment or full disillusionment of people with the game, I thought it was a great opportunity to talk about a hyper-specific aesthetic in film and art - retrofuturism. Retrofuturism represents aesthetically exactly what it sounds too, a representation of the future in the past. This means the future as shown in artistic representation will be limited only by the technology of its time, but not by imagination. We also discuss cyberpunk, an aesthetic that has been consistently allied with anxiety about future societies - that represents over-urbanisation and a crippling dependency on technology along with a struggle for individuality that kinda life brings to human civilization.

K.M. Nanavati V. State Of Maharashtra (AIR 1962 SC 605) was a case from  the 1960s Bombay, a time of walking out of the colonial identity for the city, and a murder trial unfolded in the quiet neighbourhood of the  Mumbai locals. We discuss the politics and implications on the legal history of the case, and the sensationalism around the "three bullets that rocked the country".

This episode is an imaginary argument I had with a person who I couldn't tell the importance of history in an argument in a rather jarring cab ride to a concert. This episode we talk about Friedrich Nietzsche's essay from the book Untimely meditations, that talks about how history should be looked at. How history should be learning in problem-solving,  and we understand lessons from the law in it. We also discuss understanding missteps in history, and how accommodating them in our perspective is important.

This episode, we take a trip down the history lane to understand why thinking about your own history feels a certain way. We visit the behaviour history of nostalgia, and what it means today and how it results in  Juvenoia, and how it could map you to patent boomer behavior. We explore the medicinal history, psychological and philosophical understanding of nostalgia with help of cultural anchors to contextualise how personal the experience of nostalgia can be.

Angry Maushi is an ongoing comic book series by comic book artist and illustrator Abhijeet Kini. Over this episode, he talks about his inspirations and his vocabulary and process of creating political commentary in the form of graphic novels. We majorly talk about his work in the form of angry Maushi, and it's extremely Mumbai context of existence.

Checkout Kini Studios:
http://abhijeetkini.com/

For this episode, we revisit the first piece of Dalit literature that established the aesthetic to understand most dalit writings of contemporary times. We talk about how violence against lower caste women is a constant and recurring theme in our country and is perpetuated by the existence of caste identities and customary practices. We talk about the hypocrisy of the caste system and a pinch in a very particular part of the Indian caste society which provides perspective to understand how deep-rooted it really is.

In 1964, Nikolai Kardashev addressed the problem of how to classify civilizations in case we came in contact with any interstellar intelligent life. Kardashev scale is an attempt to map the progress of a  civilization on a universal scale with the parameters of technological capability, and how that maps our own progress as a species. This episode, we try to understand why this scale is the closest to an objective parameter we can come to when trying to understand extraterrestrial life.

Episode #71 - Time Capsules:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DyO6pPVYSE

Kurzgesagt's video with better everything on this topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhFK5_Nx9xY

This Episode of the podcast talks about Neil Postman's Book about media consumption and learned helplessness that inspired some of the lyrics in the new Arctic Monkeys Album. we talk about how a certain amount of skepticism was relevant even 80 years ago  and how the disparity in the information we consume and what we are able to do about it permanently changes the nature of the human condition as we understand it today. I also indulge myself and talk about Niel Postman talking about Aldous Huxley's brave new world, and spend 15 minutes soaked in information that makes the existence of this episode ironic.  

Bad And Bollywood return to the podcast for 75 minutes of pure banter. we talk about the Bible, Pop Culture, fallen heroes in post-modernist scepticism and misunderstood anti-heroes in a nihilistic view. These episodes exist more for me than for you, this is party time episode. thank you for supporting Deep Fried Neurons so far.

   Support me on Patreon!

One of the biggest crimes that the community of Psychiatric / Psychological studies has part-taken in helping conceptualise in its brief existence of a century is the pseudo-scientific methods of conversion therapy, that tried to change the sexual orientation of individuals. This podcast gives a brief on the history in medical sciences and cultural impact and recorded commentary on the same.

For episode 73, we visit the multiple murders that my subconscious brain combined with a little bit of its own imagination and formed a new one  - and I thought it was documentation worth sharing with the world. From our television to the popular rock music in our playlists, we are surrounded by content that is a result of musing about serial killers and what they represent in the time and place we share in this microcosm of space.

The murders discussed are:
Satanic Murders Of Thiruvananthapuram
The Moors murders - "Suffer Little Children" by the smiths
Manson Murders
Joshi Abhyankar Murders
Bloody Benders

While I was researching for episode 71, I just happen to stumble on to this concept of library of babel and how it challenges my understanding of language, time, predictability, predestination, originality, communication, theory and even praxis of literature and how we treat it. I just thought it was too cool to not do an episode on.

Over the course of time, one of the peculiar ordeals that humans in civilizations have engaged in are leaving buried/stacked or preserved messages for people of the future to find out. a message stationery in space but to be delivered in time. It is a very amusing way of communication for me, given time only moves in one direction and it is even more curious what some of these messages contain; sometimes what these messages translate to and what does curation of the contents of this message say about human psychology and historical records. Also, I just thought it was plain cool.

Since we finally made it to the most important milestone in the history of this podcast, I thought it would be nice to do a podcast about sex and the way it has been viewed in society and the way most people think about and why. the intent and purpose of this episode are to open a  discussion into why and how we think and talk of sex and what does that mean for us as individual beings.

I was just curious why I enjoy fail compilations so much and why are they so prominent on social media platforms. that's all you get for the description of this episode.

For this episode, I talk about how we find answers to the question of "who we are" in our purchases, and come to the point in our existence as a society where the derivation of who we are is defined by what we purchase; and how purchasing as it becomes an activity we find comfort and relief in. This podcast asks more questions than it answers. Hope you enjoy it.

This episode of the Deep Fried Neurons Podcast follows up on a keen interest we peeked into in episode #4 - HP Lovecraft's literature and the deities/creatures from the Cthulhu Mythos.   is an outer god from this mythos and occurred to HP Lovecraft in a dream, where an entity toys with the human race in response to admiration and appreciation, along with blatant disregard for the existence of the species altogether.

for those having trouble catching on:
THIS IS REFLECTION ON FICTION AND NOT INSPIRED BY TRUE EVENTS.

This is an episode about how pandemics have been viewed in world history, and how our records of history have shown a trend of refusal to accept that a non- anthropological event could have more impact than human agency on the way the human species turns out. Diseases rank, to this day, as a strong fear and existential threat to the species, and the following records and reflect on the same.

For Episode 64, I brought you guys a sort of an audio essay about how war makes victims of us all over conflict which can be non-violent some times. The absurdity of death that humankind was thrown into with the First World War coupled with our inevitable marriage with regret as a species sort of lead me to make this episode. The fact that it contextualised Wilfred Owen's work to be cited along with Sigfried Sassoon was a great pleasure for me. 

For this episode, Yashasvi and I sit down mano-a-mano and talk about truth like a bunch of thinking Chads. We try to explore mainly the observation that consensus on what the truth is very important for our understanding of what the truth is. we also touch upon political and religious monopolies on truth, which as dominated the shit show of human civilisation.

Yashasvi, Karan and Madhavi join me on the podcast again by popular demand and we discussed if we have any original personality at all. The entire battle of dealing with the knowledge that autonomy, as we experience it, might not be autonomous enough is our point here, and the entire idea was to have a discussion about it to explore the possibilities that might be fun and existant if life is a simulation. I hope you are predisposed or programmed to enjoy this episode.

Not exactly the proudest content brought to you, but young man realises chasing ideals is what he has been doing all his life and that he will die without ever getting there. A bunch of books I read and a little clarity in Plato's world of forms coagulated in this episode. Not to mention, the frustration of not having good enough leadership in politics for me right now bleeds into this episode, and a few political readings for the global scenario might be made in blanket statements, and I apologise if that's how it came across I hope you enjoyed listening to it.

Episode 60 brings you a conversation about Growing up, how your environment and genetic predisposition affects you to become the person you are; and how internet adds to that shaping in an ever so chaotic way. Dr. Sairaj Patki, a Professor of Psychology helps us understand and talks about parents as it has traditionally worked and how the internet and parental attention (either too much or too little) meet in a concoction of complicating social lives that make human contact as optional as possible. The Role of the internet as a learning source is only strengthening, and there is very little to go around it, and dealing with parenting and guardian concerns around the same might be helpful to all of us.

By HEAVY requests and cyberbullying (that's a joke in case you missed it), I finally found time to record the memes we should remember from the 2010s and why they stand out to me from the abundance of online content. If your fav memes did not make it, then I'm sorry but this is my final word. My youtube channel hasn't exactly been shy about having a keen interest in memes, and since one (1) person in my audience was extremely interested in having this episode made, I decided to make it.

For this episode, I sit down with Senior Game Tester and resident gamer (TM) Machi.wut (Siddharth Merchant) and an App Developer and Rushing B with P90 expert Madh.avi (Madhavi Mohoni) and talk about how gaming has become more and more niche and where does adaptability to perspectives, controls, skills and map exploration cut ties of the gaming world to rest of the media. We also talk about gatekeeping and Indian Gaming culture in general.

Special thanks to @machi.wut and @madh.avi for featuring on this podcast.

For this episode, I sit down with Anokhi, an architect and a new media artist who recently curated a show named "Cyberia" at TIFA Working Studios, Pune. We talk about how is it that the digital realm and the space in virtual reality have invaded our day to day life and how they are bound to collide and become the same at some point. Anokhi also helps us understand what are the most out-there examples of this happening in contemporary culture.