The logic of Buddhist philosophy • Hacker News Board

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#71

Post by nodeftw » Thu, May 08, 2014, 3:51 PM UTC

brudgers wrote: post #43

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…

The references to Buddhism and Aristotle are traditional in the literature and go back at least to Bart Kosko's Fuzzy Thinking -- a 1993 best seller about fuzzy logic for a general audience. Specifically binary and multi-valued logic were compared as 'Aristotle v. the Buddha'. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bart_Kosko http://www.amazon.com/Fuzzy-Thinking-The-Science-Logic/dp/15...

oh heck yes! There are a number of great references in this area going back to the early 1980s!! [0] [1]

[0] http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/kasulis1.htm [1] http://enlight.lib.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/thomas.htm

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#72

Post by feralmoan » Thu, May 08, 2014, 3:56 PM UTC

doxcf434 wrote: post #62

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.

I think by extension of the Platonic school of thought Western culture has become deeply ingrained in dichotomous thinking applying such constraints to all areas of life (beyond simple science and logic), whereas Eastern non-dualism supposes all things (existentially) being equal. Neither West or Eastern philosophies do a very good job of describing each others domain space and yet they share many similar concepts. Karma (Theoretical) vs Causality (Empirical) is a basic example - they're exactly the same but few Westerners and particularly those in academic circles would admit to such a thing as it undermines Western status quo.

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#73

Post by logfromblammo » Thu, May 08, 2014, 3:57 PM UTC

Silly Buddhists. Everyone knows that there are nine possible logic values: false, true, unknown, uninitialized, irrelevant, indeterminate, weak false, weak true, and high impedance. Didn't Siddharta read the IEEE 1164 standard?

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#74

Post by ableal » Thu, May 08, 2014, 4:00 PM UTC

(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 Wittgenstein claimed that many things can be shown but not said, and wrote a whole book (the Tractatus), explaining what and why."

The jump from Kant to Wittgenstein elides the step that was Schopenhauer, who did look East and said some cogent things.

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#75

Post by jotux » Thu, May 08, 2014, 4:21 PM UTC

I'm going to go meta here and say the hn discussion here is just fantastic. This is the reason I frequent hn and I wish more submissions would spur discussions of this quality.

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#76

Post by anuraj » Thu, May 08, 2014, 4:22 PM UTC

Sankara (8th century CE) talks about two types of truth - 1) Kevala Satya (Absolute Truth) and 2) Vyavaharika Satya (Relative Truth) - He also says that people who are not one with the Absolute truth (One with God - liberated) can only discern the Relative Truth. He called this state - Maya (illusion). Looks like he was talking similar to Gorampa. To be noted is Sankara was extremely knowledgeable about Budhist thought - and is often called Abhinava Budha (Neo Budha) and was instrumental in propagating Neo Hinduism based on Adwaita (Non Duality) defeating the Budhist schools of the day using their own arguments.

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#77

Post by wfn » Thu, May 08, 2014, 4:28 PM UTC

tel wrote: post #37

Central 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…

Ahh, very nice. While at it: here's a very nice etymological explanation of why the Ubuntu-Yoneda lemma is called the Ubuntu-Yoneda lemma:

https://golem.ph.utexas.edu/category/2013/03/spivak_on_categ...

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#78

Post by EGreg » Thu, May 08, 2014, 4:29 PM UTC

Do you think the Buddha borrowed some of his philosophy from the Stoics?

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#79

Post by dllthomas » Thu, May 08, 2014, 4:38 PM UTC

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…

"This statement is none of {{}, {false}, {true}, {false, true}}" would seem to be simply false and uninteresting, much like "This statement is none of {true, false}."

Re: The logic of Buddhist philosophy

#80

Post by livingparadox » Thu, May 08, 2014, 4:43 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 would clarify that the "paradox" of being fully human and fully divine is an apparent paradox, not an actual paradox. Most theologians I've come into contact with hold to Jesus' nature being the intersection of all divine traits and all human traits, allowing him to be both God and Man without contradiction.

The confusion I think lies in the ambiguity of the word "fully". Its a paradox if we take it to mean "100% of Jesus is human and 100% of Jesus if divine, resulting in a total of 200% Jesus." But if it is clarified as "Jesus possesses 100% of the qualifications required to be considered human and Jesus possesses 100% of the qualifications required to be considered divine," then the contradiction is gone.