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Manjula Menon
Contributing Scholar

Manjula Menon

PID: PV-2026-1820
X (Twitter) Website manjulamenon1@gmail.com
Ideas Essays & Dialogues
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Poorvam Ideas Discourses, Essays & Dialogues

2 publications
Essays Free Access Science & Knowledge
50 min read · Sep 25, 2026

The 'New' Physics and the Return of the Questioner

This essay examines how relativity and quantum mechanics transformed modern understandings of physical reality and reopened questions concerning the role of the observer. It explores the quantum measurement problem, the Copenhagen and von Neumann–Wigner interpretations, and their implications for consciousness and observation. The essay then considers Erwin Schrödinger’s reflections on life and consciousness, including his conception of a unified consciousness, before turning to Bertrand Russell’s neutral monism and epistemic empiricism. It concludes by asking whether the rise of artificial intelligence may force renewed engagement with the metaphysical question of what consciousness reveals about reality.

Essays Free Access Philosophy & Ethics
40 min read · Sep 25, 2026

The Making of Modern Observer

This essay explores consciousness through a personal and philosophical inquiry into mind, reality, and experience following the death of philosopher Anand Vaidya. It examines physicalism and the explanatory gap surrounding subjective experience, alongside Vaidya’s engagement with panpsychism, Vedāntic illuminationism, and Rāmānuja’s account of the conscious self. The essay then traces changing conceptions of knowledge, perception, causality, and reality through Descartes, Newton, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant. It concludes by considering how modern physics reopened questions concerning fundamental reality, challenging the apparent completeness of earlier mechanistic accounts of the world.