Showing results by author "Boris Kriger" in All Categories

What if the greatest danger to humanity is not ignorance, but the illusions of knowledge? In this provocative collection of essays, Boris Kriger unravels the deceits of human thought—its rationalizations, its comforting lies, its masks of philosophy, religion, and economics. From the absurdities of bohemia to the corruption of charity, from the false promises of systems to the fragile brilliance of uncalculated kindness, Tricks of the Mind exposes how easily we mistake coherence for truth, greed for prudence, ritual for spirit.

What begins as a faint smudge in the night sky becomes, through science, imagination, and reflection, a vast spiral galaxy with billions of stars and a future intimately entwined with our own. Andromeda: Meeting Our Galactic Neighbor is a sweeping exploration of M31—not only as an astronomical object, but as a mirror to human curiosity, time, and destiny. From its mythic naming in ancient lore to its place in cutting-edge cosmology, this book traces how Andromeda has shaped and reshaped our understanding of the universe.

Self-Sabotage: Stop Ruining Your Own Chances reveals the hidden patterns that cause people to delay, overthink, retreat, or give up—right at the edge of growth. With piercing clarity and compassion, this book uncovers why so many driven, intelligent individuals repeatedly undercut their own progress. It’s not laziness. It’s not weakness. It’s a learned pattern—rooted in fear, identity, and outdated beliefs.

Science is often portrayed as a realm of certainty—precise formulas, flawless methods, and sudden “eureka” moments of revelation. But the truth is far more complex, fragile, and deeply human. This book explores the hidden life of science: its adventurism and audacity, its errors and illusions, its entanglement with power, and its uneasy partnership with machines.

This book introduces and develops the concept of Historic Antiteleology as a radical reorientation of historical thought beyond the metaphysics of progress, redemption, or narrative coherence. Drawing on the insights of Wilhelm Dilthey, Henri Bergson, and poststructuralist thinkers such as Foucault and Benjamin, the essay critiques the enduring influence of teleological models in historiography — models that frame history as a purposeful sequence culminating in moral, political, or technological fulfillment.

The Agnostic Mind invites the listener into a journey through uncertainty—not as weakness, but as a source of strength. Moving across the landscapes of philosophy, science, and daily life, it explores what it means to live without final answers yet without surrendering to despair.

What if the greatest strength of humanity has never been competition, but kindness? This book reveals how compassion is not a fragile ideal but a force inscribed in our biology, confirmed by psychology, and proven by the resilience of societies that nurture it. From childhood lessons and family models to schools, workplaces, and entire communities, it shows how small daily gestures accumulate into powerful habits that transform both inner life and collective destiny.

This book introduces the Anthropic-Independent Reality Index, a conceptual framework designed to assess the degree to which ideas are shaped — or distorted — by evolved cognitive structures. Drawing on insights from evolutionary epistemology, cognitive neuroscience, and the philosophy of science, the index offers a non-utilitarian scale for measuring the ontological independence of a concept from the adaptive biases of the human mind.

What happens when particles lose their individuality and merge into a single quantum being? This is the mystery of the Bose–Einstein condensate — a state of matter predicted by Einstein and Bose a century ago, first realized with ultracold atoms in the 1990s, and later extended to photons, exciton–polaritons, and other exotic systems. In this book, Boris Kriger guides the listener through the history of this extraordinary discovery — from a letter written in Calcutta to Einstein, to the Nobel-winning experiments that cooled atoms to the edge of absolute zero.

Why do we create? Why does humanity, confronted with chaos inside and out, insist on painting, writing, inventing, building, dreaming? And could creativity be the one force that makes existence not only bearable—but meaningful? This book is a journey into the heart of chaos and the human spirit’s response to it. It explores creativity not as luxury or pastime, but as our deepest survival tool, our rebellion against absurdity, and our bridge between order and disorder.

A victory so costly it devours the victor. From the weary voice of King Pyrrhus to the ruins of modern empires, the idea of the Pyrrhic victory runs like a fault line through history, politics, and the human heart. This book follows that line—from ancient battlefields to colonial campaigns, from the Cold War to Vietnam, from the struggles of modern geopolitics to the silent wars waged in private lives. It is a journey through victories that turned into defeats, through triumphs that corroded the very hands that seized them.

In a world overflowing with information yet starved for understanding, Prisoners of the Mind invites listeners on a fearless exploration of the hidden structures that shape thought, distort perception, and quietly govern belief. Drawing on philosophy, psychology, cognitive science, and cultural critique, this book dismantles the comforting illusions through which modern life is too often navigated—illusions of control, certainty, merit, and even selfhood.

Ce livre n’a pas été écrit pour vous apaiser. Il ne vous offrira ni espoir, ni promesse de progrès, ni cette douce illusion que le projet humain possède encore une noblesse intrinsèque. Vous n’y trouverez pas la consolation de croire que tout arrive pour une raison, ni même l’assurance qu’il existe un sens à notre lutte commune. Au contraire, cet ouvrage s’inscrit pleinement dans la logique des simulacres de Jean Baudrillard : une philosophie qui ne cherche pas à dévoiler une vérité cachée, mais à diagnostiquer l’état de notre réalité contemporaine.

Unreal Reality: The Paradox of Existence is a lucid and unflinching exploration of reality, illusion, and the ethical demands of being. Blending philosophy, science, and reflective clarity, this book journeys through the shifting ground beneath perception, memory, identity, and knowledge. It challenges the need for certainty, confronts the limits of understanding, and insists that meaning can—and must—be forged even when truth remains out of reach.

This book is a philosophical journey into the heart of uncertainty. From ancient myths of the abyss to modern science, from entropy to fractals, from Michel Serres’s poetics of noise to the digital floods of our age, Pursuing Chaos asks whether knowledge is possible without illusions—and whether truth can survive without rhetoric.

We search for meaning, crave order, and cling to explanations—yet life answers us with silence. In that silence lies the absurd: the fundamental tension between human longing and the world’s indifference. Far from being an error or a failure of reason, absurdity is the very fabric of existence. This book offers not despair, but release. To recognize absurdity is to discover a quiet freedom where the need to justify, to prove, to succeed, or even to “be right” dissolves. Here, guilt loses its authority and purpose its tyranny.

This book offers a radical rethinking of one of modernity’s most mistrusted concepts. Long associated with manipulation, coercion, and failed utopias, social engineering has often meant the sacrifice of individuality for the sake of imagined harmony. But what if its core idea—deliberate design of social life—could be grounded in ethics, humility, and a deep respect for human complexity? Rejecting both the authoritarian logic of the past and the fantasy of pure spontaneity, this work proposes a mature, humane, and sustainable vision of transformation. One that shapes environments, not people.

This book explores the fundamental concepts of fear and fearlessness as driving forces behind human behavior throughout the ages. It offers a philosophical and psychological examination of these emotions, tracing them from the earliest survival instincts to their lingering influence on modern society. The author considers how fears shape identity, cultural norms, and social structures, while also proposing ways to transcend them through awareness, inner freedom, and a creative approach to life.

In a world defined by uncertainty, loss, and relentless change, the human spirit is tested as never before. Desperate Optimism explores the paradox at the heart of endurance: the power to hope, create, and act even when circumstances seem bleak, and outcomes are uncertain. It is neither naïve faith nor passive wishful thinking, but a deliberate, defiant choice to engage fully with life despite its fragility.

A pacifist in a time of drafts, an exile in a time of war, a young man once fled with nothing but a tea tin of memories. From those scraps was born the Plushling Bear—a soft, absurd creature wandering through grotesque landscapes where bottles are empty, folk devour themselves, and the gentle are always hunted. This is no ordinary fable. It is an adolescent tale stitched from childhood images: scraps of paper, torn toys, grandmother’s voice, lemon-juice tears.