In this post, we discuss an important distinction between Eastern and Western cultures. We note that by East, we mean how historically the East has been associated with spirituality and the West with materialism, but we believe that the contemporary East and West cannot be characterized by their historical meanings.
As we wrote in a previous post, when perceived reality is understood only through the mind, it can be characterized as a cognitive bias, and empirical truth then has to be modelled differently[1][2][3]. This, we believe, is a fundamental difference between Eastern and Western cultures. The spirituality in the traditional East stems from the assumption of characterizing perceived reality as a cognitive bias, or mithya (untruth) as a result of the force of Maya in Advaita Vedanta and other Eastern religions[4].
Thus, we put forth a hypothesis as to what distinguishes the historical concepts with which the Eastern and Western cultures are associated.
[1] https://m-chaturvedi.github.io/blog/058/
[2] https://m-chaturvedi.github.io/blog/056/
[3] https://m-chaturvedi.github.io/blog/055/
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_(religion)