This is an awesome article.
So much of our daily life in the west rests directly on fundamental assumptions we make about reality. I believe it's mind expanding to have those base assumptions challenged from time to time.
The logic of Buddhist philosophy
171–180 of 210 posts
Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy
#172Central to his teachings is the view that things are ‘empty’ (sunya). This does not mean that they are non-existent; only that they are what they are because of how they relate to other things. Immediately I thought of Category Theory as this statement is a not terrible expression of what CT tries to teach. I'll immediately recommend the paper Numbers Can Be Just What They Have To ( http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/phil/Nu…
Haskellers may recognize (a -> r) -> r as a way to represent "a"... you'll see that type signature in more than a few libraries.
For what purpose? Surely the type checker doesn't recognize the equivalence.
a1 :: a
r1 :: r
f :: a -> r
f a1 = r1
b :: (a -> r) -> r
b f = f a1 -- == r1
m :: a -> (a -> r) -> r
m a1 f = f a1 -- m === (flip ($)) === (flip id)
Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clojure transients are linear types.
How? Please refute this claim: "Transients have very little, if anything, to do with types." Why would I claim this? Transients are about the internal nature of a function but have nothing to do with the return value or type. See "Transient data structures are a solution to this optimization problem that integrates with the Clojure model and provides the same thread safety guarantees you expect of Clojure." at http:/…
Transients are a different type from the corresponding persistent, as seen by the fact that different operations are supported. Clojure's programmer-facing type system doesn't expose the transient type explicitly, but the semantics certainly implements a linear type system.
From the page you linked:
"""
Capture return value, use for next call
Not persistent, so you can't hang onto interim values or alias
"""
From Rich Hickey himself: http://www.infoq.com/interviews/hickey-clojure-protocols
More context: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LinearTypes
Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy
#174(Just a quick note, don't have time for more now.) "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 W…
Wittgenstein would say that the Buddha and Schopenhauer were playing a quite similar language-game.
He might say that, but I think "language-game" is not quite the right take.
Anyways, to shore up my impression I looked up "Schopenhauer eastern philosophy" and hit a few things. The "Schopenhauer and Buddhism" piece by Peter Abelson ( at http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/peter2.htm ) seems good:
"When the tenets of Buddhism became known in Europe during the third and fourth decade of the nineteenth century, Arthur Schopenhauer was delighted with the affinity they showed to his own philosophy. Having completed his main work Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung as early as 1818, he considered it an entirely new (and thus pure) expression of the wisdom once taught by the Buddha."
I would have been gladder if the original article, by a professional philosopher, which I am not, had said something about this.
Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
>>The "empty" is the undefined. That which has yet to exist, or never will. The "empty" is the un- defined . Direct experience, that which can't be talked about, labeled or categorized. That (this) which has always existed, and always will. The void is that which can't be named. It's all around you! You can never leave it because it is you, stretching from your center in all directions. There are no contradiction her…
So true. To experience the un-manifested one has to just be actively aware: - listen to sounds/silence; - look at where you're looking out from; - feel the tickle of the body's energy. Bluntly said, you have to fucking shut-up! Here are some links to people that go directly to the essential: http://www.eckharttolle.com http://www.adyashanti.org http://www.headless.org
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Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy
#176I can appreciate the depth of research behind the article. The many-valued notions of logic are quite helpful. Here's are two ways that I would distill the message for different audiences. 1. A computer science audience: Not all sentences have a computable boolean truth value. Here's why. To find the truth value of the sentence "This sentence is false.", you have to figure out the truth value of the following stateme…
> In short, complex things consist of parts that vary over time. So their components or transient values can seem to change or stand in contradiction.
Forgot something, one's self is also transient. Given that the observer itself is constantly changing, mind blowing is possible.
Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
> law The law is about as non-binary as it gets. There are two states of the law: proven guilty, and not proven guilty. We say things like "innocent until proven guilty" but we all know and accept that reality does not work that way. There is no law of the excluded middle here. EDIT: Actually, adding some excluded middle might make our law better and more fair. For example, cases could be dismissed if it is shown tha…
I believe in law it is perfectly possible to settle with no admission of guilt. Are you then innocent or guilty?
You could point out that "law" is more than just crim and you can make a bigger point. Civil litigation is much messier than Guilty/Not guilty. If you really want to drive this line of reasoning home comparative vs contributory negligence seems like the way to go.
Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy
#178The 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…
Interesting, while there may be similarities between the stoic approach and extant Buddhist teachings, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that a stoic would never write something like this:
Four and fifty years I've hung the sky with stars. Now I leap through – What shattering!
Eihei Dogen (death poem)
Buddhist logic seems to have religious experience as its foundation.
Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy
#179Central to his teachings is the view that things are ‘empty’ (sunya). This does not mean that they are non-existent; only that they are what they are because of how they relate to other things. Immediately I thought of Category Theory as this statement is a not terrible expression of what CT tries to teach. I'll immediately recommend the paper Numbers Can Be Just What They Have To ( http://www.cwru.edu/artsci/phil/Nu…
Haskellers may recognize (a -> r) -> r as a way to represent "a"... you'll see that type signature in more than a few libraries.
I recognise it as the type of continuation returning something of type a. Also, if you instantiate r to Void then
((a -> Void) -> Void) a
is just double negation elimination.
Am I getting sidetracked or does this line go somewhere, tel?
Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
Fuzzy logic is a vary useful non boolean logic system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuzzy_logic In practice it's somewhat like neural net's but in a far more human readable format and vary useful for things like washing machines that have lot's of flakey sensors and little processing power. But the basic idea is statements truth is percentage based. For example "this statement is true" would be 50% true and there is…
Do you have personal, real-world examples of fuzzy logic being useful to you? I find Bayesian statistics useful regularly; fuzzy logic not so much. What am I missing?
The tradeoff between accuracy and speed. Real world devices ofen have tight feedback loops and flakey sensors so you need something that aproximates Bayesian logic without being bogged down.
The only real world example I have Persionaly used was a controller for a hacked together hot tub, the basic problem was generally adapting a simple program concept to both limited processing power and flakey data. You want to write if temperature is > value instead you go if 70% sensors in area x say temperature > value. You could try to find a better aproximation but the more you calculate the longer it is until you can process more data. We also had ~380 bytes of RAM and 2000 bytes for sorce code so things needed to be simple.
Sure, you could try and find the actual energy in the hot tub water but that's not needed, you really just want to know if the heater is on for to long with the pump off then shutdown for safety otherwise shutdown if temperature is probably to hot.