The logic of Buddhist philosophy • Hacker News Board

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#61

Post by Daishiman » Thu, May 08, 2014, 3:16 PM UTC

joelmichael wrote: post #7

Paradox is not really so alien to Western philosophy, as this article initially suggests. It does end up referencing a number of modern Western philosophers, but the idea is older than that. It's ironic he refers to "Western orthodoxy" as being strictly anti-paradox, as traditional Christian theology is full of official paradoxes; a major example would be the doctrine that Jesus is simultaneously fully human and full…

I think the difference between the Christian and Buddhist approaches to the paradoxes is the fact that Christian theologists have spent centuries devising new doctrine that accomodates the contradictory statements in a sort of logical superstructure, whereas no such thing happens in Buddhist contradictions.

Part of the reason why I suspect this is because Christian dogma ultimately reflects on concrete precepts that the faithful must abide to, since belief is an essential component to salvation in Christianity and relates to concrete actions and thoughts.

Buddhist dogman in general, with the notable, extremely fuzzy, and highly opinionated exception of karma, does not have such a problem, since no particular belief system is considered critical for enlightenment, since all beliefs are delusion and only a direct experience with reality (the Deathless) is truly relevant.

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#62

Post by doxcf434 » Thu, May 08, 2014, 3:18 PM UTC

It's interesting that the west would write off eastern philosophy, as though the eastern philosophers were unaware of the seeming contradictions and that there may be a deeper reason for that.

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#63

Post by Strilanc » Thu, May 08, 2014, 3:20 PM UTC

dpierce9 wrote: post #53

Strilanc wrote: post #15

I would have enjoyed this article if it dropped the Buddhism and kept the math. Alternate logics are interesting, but you tend to be able to reduce them into each other in the same way that universal turing machines can simulate each other. They don't add new functionality, they add succinctness. So it's really strange to me to frame them as totally different philosophies . For example, it is the case that self-refer…

It is simply not true that multi-valued logics collapse into two-valued logics. While it is true that you can assign indeterminate statements {true,false} and call it a third value, logic is more than assignments of truth-values to statements, it is also rules of inference for that formal system. The rules of inference are the driving force behind paraconsistent logics and the rules of inference are very different. O…

They don't collapse into two-valued logics, but they can be encoded into two-valued logics in the same way that numbers can be encoded into sets.

The simplest way to see this is to think of a computer. Its operation can be described by a function in two-valued logic, taking the bits making up the state of the CPU and memory as input then returning the next state. And you can write programs that do multi-value'd logic... so within the two-value system you can make a little multi-value system.

In terms of the database analogy: you have to translate the data and the queries. So you can't query "what is their age", you can only query things like "the current time is X, what is their age".

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#64

Post by Uncompetative » Thu, May 08, 2014, 3:22 PM UTC

Well that was amazingly well-written and informative...

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#65

Post by gambiting » Thu, May 08, 2014, 3:22 PM UTC

This made me think of an interesting way I have heard some people answer the question "if God is omnipotent, then can he create a rock so heavy he wouldn't be able to lift it and then lift it? If yes, he is not omnipotent, if no, he is not omnipotent!" with a logical leap also hard to comprehend to western minds - he can do both, and that's why he is considered omnipotent. He doesn't need to follow human logic, hence the third option - creating a rock too heavy to lift and lifting it.

I am completely non-religious,but as a logical riddle it always fascinated me that there could be a "third" option.

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#66

Post by weatherlight » Thu, May 08, 2014, 3:27 PM UTC

I can't remember the last time I read an an article and it's discussion on HN that I enjoyed this much.

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#67

Post by vinceguidry » Thu, May 08, 2014, 3:27 PM UTC

Strilanc wrote: post #29

pera wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I would have enjoyed this article if it dropped the Buddhism and kept the math. May I ask you why? Personally I enjoy reading about the origin of some particular idea/philosophy, even when it's purely anecdotal.

I subjectively don't find those philosophies interesting, and have a distaste for assigning single ideas to heterogeneous groups like "the west". Your mileage may vary. For example, I would consider myself western but I don't have any problem imagining systems with true, false, both and neither. You just treat them as anonymous values with particular operations, instead of getting stuck on "but if we were in this oth…

> I don't have any problem imagining systems with true, false, both and neither. You just treat them as anonymous values with particular operations, instead of getting stuck on "but if we were in this other system that we're not in, this would violate an axiom!".

It's not quite that simple. We've built up entire codes of ethics and law and branches of mathematics with practical applications like computing that rely utterly on these axioms. These are things used in the real world, they don't just live in the realm of ideas. These systems don't tolerate more than two values of truth. Even "Western" religion, from Judaism to Christianity to Islam is intimately concerned with the external world where things are concrete and ambiguity is not to be tolerated. Big-C Catholicism itself considers the Church to be the only institution capable of determining Truth, what it calls dogma. We're very much handcuffed to using two values of truth here in this side of the world.

Buddhism is heavily oriented on the experience of the individual, individuals are free to use whatever sort of logic they want to make decisions. So it can experiment with ideas that are neither true nor false. But you can't build a computer with it, at some level it all is resolved on individual components which are either on or off. We don't even know yet if quantum computers which break the binary hegemony offer any real advantage.

But being able to integrate other kinds of logic might make entirely new approaches to, say, law, possible. It's not enough to be able to imagine an alternative system, it's in making it consistent. I personally am very excited about this.

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#68

Post by logicchains » Thu, May 08, 2014, 3:30 PM UTC

xmonkee wrote: post #52

logicchains wrote: post #39

The logic of Buddhist philosophy: emotional attachment to and/or desire of impermanent things has the potential to result in dissatisfaction, as impermanent things are impermanent. It's hardly rocket science. Desire nothing, and you'll never never feel the dissatisfaction of not getting what you want. Be attached to nothing, and you'll never feel the pain of losing something. Some quotes by emperor Marcus Aurelius, o…

This is a rather gross oversimplification. What you state is true, and is in fact the essence of the first 2 noble truths, but that's hardly the meat of "the logic of buddhism". The hardest attachment is that to the self, and the hardest realization is that the self itself is impermanent. To have the "right view" of the self, one has to understand the illusory nature of phenomena and the paradoxial nature of awarenes…

The illusory nature of the self can also be explained relatively simply to anyone who's familiar with the justification problem[1]. What 'is' the self and what 'is not' the self? That requires a metric for deciding. But that metric in turn requires another metric to determine its validity, and so on ad infinitum. The concept of self is thus arbitrary, and hence logically meaningless. Wittgenstein expresses this idea far better than I do here, in his Tractatus[2].

This equally applies to all phenomena; any attempt to divide anything up into 'things' is ultimately arbitrary, as it relies on ultimately unsubstantiated metrics, and hence is without meaning.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regress_argument 2. http://philosurfical.open.ac.uk/tractatus/tabs.html

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#69

Post by eli_gottlieb » Thu, May 08, 2014, 3:39 PM UTC

dusklight wrote: post #11

This article is kinda missing the point. The "empty" is the undefined. That which has yet to exist, or never will. There is that which is uncountable, for example the number of corners in a circle. Just because it is a contradiction doesn't mean it is wrong -- maybe your models are wrong. The usefulness of eastern philosophy is to free yourself of preconceived ideas. I think it is obviously clear to everyone today th…

>I think it would be supremely arrogant to presume that logic is the best mode of thought that humanity will ever come up with.

Then what is a mode of thought, and what would constitute superiority to the many and varied plausibility-preserving logics we've invented thus far?

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#70

Post by eli_gottlieb » Thu, May 08, 2014, 3:46 PM UTC

dpierce9 wrote: post #53

Strilanc wrote: post #15

I would have enjoyed this article if it dropped the Buddhism and kept the math. Alternate logics are interesting, but you tend to be able to reduce them into each other in the same way that universal turing machines can simulate each other. They don't add new functionality, they add succinctness. So it's really strange to me to frame them as totally different philosophies . For example, it is the case that self-refer…

It is simply not true that multi-valued logics collapse into two-valued logics. While it is true that you can assign indeterminate statements {true,false} and call it a third value, logic is more than assignments of truth-values to statements, it is also rules of inference for that formal system. The rules of inference are the driving force behind paraconsistent logics and the rules of inference are very different. O…

>In other words, contradictory beliefs imply anything and everything is true (and false). This is an odd result especially since anyone with an ounce of humility will admit that there is a reasonably high chance that there is a contradiction in their beliefs or in the logical consequences of their beliefs.

Yeah, but we deal with this very simply: by using probability (conceived as a real-valued logic) instead of boolean logic, at which point any contradiction in our axioms gets us an "exception signal" of some probability somewhere going to 0.0 instead of an equal belief in all possible propositions.

Or we can use constructive logic instead of classical, in which case we'll be able to actually find a contradiction simply by looking for assumptions that lead to a proof for the proposition False.