Still crunching through this, but it made me think in some interesting ways.
- It is India in the fifth century BCE, the age of the historical Buddha, and a rather peculiar principle of reasoning appears to be in general use. This principle is called the catuskoti, meaning ‘four corners’. It insists that there are four possibilities regarding any statement: it might be true (and true only), false (and false only), both true and false, or neither true nor false.
I'd be interested to see how his perspective changes after being introduced to Lamba Calculus. Everything can be represented with functions. Everything. Which says something about the nature of many things: sets, relations, computability. Verbs, actions. If everything is (or can be) a function (a transformation, a verb, an action), does that imply anything about philosophy or reality? Does that give us something resembling Mahayana Buddhism, or lend credence to it? What if we view energy as a function and matter as a state? Mass–energy equivalence tells us energy can be converted to matter. Then, what if we view matter as a function which returns a state? For example, the C functionwe simply took value of to be a relation, not a function
acts as a state, to anyone calling it. But it is most definitely a function. What if matter is the same way: a function (energy) which has been configured to appear as state? int fortytwo() {return 42;}The constructions I have described show how to make precise mathematical sense of the Buddhist views. This does not, of course, show that they are true.
Here's why I hate philosophy, philosophers, and philosophical questions: Behold: four fabled philosophers who are extrapolating "I" to WE. Fuck off, Kant. He didn't say that, anyway - he said that there might be knowledge not derived from the senses but that since we can't sense it we can't derive it. He said it in direct contradiction of Plato and Platonic ideas and you know what? They're both wrong and not-wrong. Trust a philosopher to try and turn Buddha's Venn Diagram into Boolean logic. "No common contemporary critical term raises hackles more quickly than "deconstructionism", and rightly so since those who use the term almost always sound wildly confused. Probably the truth is not so much that they are confused as that they are hamstrung by worship of Heidegger." - John GardnerEmbarrassing as this predicament might appear, Nagarjuna is far from being the only one stuck in it. The great lodestar of the German Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant, said that there are things one cannot experience (noumena), and that we cannot talk about such things. He also explained why this is so: our concepts apply only to things we can experience. Clearly, he is in the same fix as Nagarjuna. So are two of the greatest 20th-century Western philosophers. Ludwig Wittgenstein claimed that many things can be shown but not said, and wrote a whole book (the Tractatus), explaining what and why. Martin Heidegger made himself famous by asking what Being is, and then spent much of the rest of his life explaining why you can’t even ask this question.
Paraconsistent logics actually are useful, not just in philosophy, and the author has done a lot of great work with them. This article just makes his case badly. I think it's because he's trying to leave out anything that might be intimidating, but he made some really strange choices if so; Konig's paradox originally applied to the reals. It applies to the ordinals, because all you need is an uncountably infinite well-ordered set, but everyone is familiar with the reals and not so many are familiar with transfinite arithmetic. edit: but Venn diagrams are always equivalent to expressions in boolean logic, because of the duality of set theory and logic.
But Venn diagrams are used freely and readily by people who would rather drink bleach than study set theory without having to know they're a part of set theory. Forcing set theory down the throat of people who think in Venn diagrams will never be a wise debate move.