A lull ...

I have been reading Buddhism again this week.
Doing so completely destroys my ability to write cogently.

A note there-on:
To the extent which the Buddha's first speech tells us to avoid pain and pleasure altogether, i find the theory revulting. I am still at odds with myself on whether it actually says that, or means that but is limited by the knowledge and language of the day.

Today we might say something like ... the pain and pleasure are there and are fineas basic sensations. Its our emotional reaction to the base sensations of pain and pleasure that need the controls, and our sensations thus, and our reactions to such sensations really are capable of being split apart. The phrase, "it still hurts just as much but it no longer bothers me," is physically quite possible. [see Antonio Damasio's neuroscience work].

If we can wall off the affect of pain and pleasure and, obviously in Buddhistic terms, accept what is there and not pursue (and perhaps, then, not avoid either ... though that becomes extremely tricky to state as a theory without finding oneself not looking both ways before crossing the street).


See

Bordering on politics ...

I try to avoid politics altogether in my philosophy, as well as morality. That is, they come up from time to time, but i hope to only talk about the structure of thoughts involved, and hopefully i do not weigh in too heavily with moral and political opinion. (I know, i know ... as if that is not itself one. "We Benjaminites ... Donkeys live a long time, none of you has ever seen a donkey die")

With that disclaimer ... right into Ward Churchill. I want to talk about the language of moral equivalences.

This is an old topic for me. My immediate post collegiate years were filled thick with it.

We begin with the Sermon on the Mount where Jesus says (parapharing) that to even look at a woman lustfully is to have committed adultry, to call a man a fool even in your heart is akin to have committed murder. In short, to have thought of it is to have sinned already.

The question comes to mind, then, of why not kill and rape? If i am guilty already from even a simple thought ... if i am already damned but for the grace of God, why stop and thinking, why not act too if it is all the same. We would like to say the point of having moral distinctions between thought and actions is precisely to stop the action at the level of thought, to prevent the actualization of such thoughts. It is just such distinctions that helps prevent the human societal world from being completely "nature raw".


And it is just this blurring of the moral boundry that drives me crazy in a paper like Churchills. If the mere act of a man moving to west Omaha to get his child into a better school, even if that means driving many extra miles a day in his extra-safe SUV, and takes the job that pays an extra 10k a year even though that means working for a global company, just so he can send his child to a fine private university when the day comes ... if that lifestyle is morally equivalent to NAZI genocide, why then not just go ahead and have his manager knocked-off to gain another promotion. What is one more death if one has already responsible for the killing of millions in the Middle East and other global flashpoints that sustain his lifestyle (which is "for his children").
If he accepts the moral responsibility requisite by the Churchill piece he has only two choices ... 1) "Leave everything and follow me" proverbially speaking. Abandon whoever will not move to Montana with him and build a log cabin, wife, child, friends, co-workers. 2) Accept what he is and work harder at it: lie, cheat, steal and kill his way to the best place for his family.
-- or -- the thrid option, live hypocritically.
Something has to give.

The moral distinctions were created to stop certain actions, generally at the inter-personal level. The global society creates the need for a new moral code, not the logical extension of the old. (I greatly fear such moral extensions. I find them to be the root of much evil. One tends to eventually find themselves with Kant, saying something akin to Kant's notion that one has to hand one's loved one over to the axe-murderer because truth is more important than any one person's life.)

[[ to be continued ]]

Master Kung II

Confucius was asked about what knowledge we may have of the spirits. Confucius replied that there must first be knowledge of the self. If I cannot even know myself, how am I to learn anything of the spirits? [The Analects]

I think this applies too to "the other", be that other a thing or a place or a time.

Language and distinctions

The distinctions made in language are false.
This is true.
(... if you'll forgive me that.)

But ... what we mean is not that the are absolutely false,
merely that there are uncountably many perspectives from which they are false.
This is true.

Still ... there are uncountably many perspectives from which the are true.

And ... there are uncountably many perspectives from which they are neither true nor false,
and morese, uncountably many from which they are unintelligible.

So ...
Should we focus on what is true in the statement? ... or what is false?

Knowledge and Paradigms, II

The below listed thought experiment can help us think about 3 problematic kinds of knowledge, where-in we experience similar kinds of problems ... our languages, natural or therwise, convey certain kinds of facts better than others. This is because of the way words refer to things. Words that refer to the relation between things hold so long as the relations hold (so long as the systems are functionally equivalent). Words that refer to things in-themselves lose their bearing and their meaning when the underlying system has changed (or may have changed).

The thought experiment was written to speak about non-natural language (logic and math) descriptions across scientific paradigm shifts.

I believe the 3 primary uses to be:
1) Cross-paradigm investigations
2) Cross-world-view investigations (What is it like to be a bat?)
3) ... and of interest in cases such as the Roman engineers mentioned below ... how do they transfer information from one to another [within a paradigm] when the ontological words of their scientific paradigm are by all standards incorrect.

Knowledge and Paradigms, I

What kind of knowledge is possible across paradigm shifts?

Imagine a very simple closed system. The system contains 3 things: a bog, a log and a frog. The frof sits on the log in the bog. Once an hour the frog jumps off the log, into the bog, swims around the bog, and climbs back onto the log.

We could fairly easily build a computer model of such a system in which all the same elements exist, and the same event occurs on an hourly basis.

Just this simple case of modeling highlights something important. There are some kinds of knowledge that are true across even closed systems, and some kinds of knowledge it makes no sense to compare across the boundries.

The former knowledge falls out in terms of measurements and relative scales. The log is 18 frogs long. The bog is 16 frog lengths by 25 frog lengths. The frog displaces X amount of bog water. The ripples in the bog caused by the from move at some pace Y and dampen to nothing at some pace Z (where the hourly frog dive is the standard measure of time). Questions based on these kinds of facts are true of both systems.

Now, if we start asking other finds of questions, such as "what is a frog" and "what is the phenomenal feel of the log?" and "How much colder does it feel like to be the frog in the bog as opposed to being the frog on the log?" These questions are from the ontological and phenomenological class. The answers to these questions are very different across the closed systems. We can assign numbers to represent the phenomenal components of these questions, sure, but in doing so we are only going to be answer abstract relational versions of the questions, and not the question as asked.

Scientific knowledge "at its best" (physics and chemistry) is more like the former kind of knowledge.

This is not meant either to disparage the other kinds of knowledge (they are indeed important factual components within a paradigm) nor is the thought experiment meant to completely disuade the pursuit of non mathematical/logical forms of thought across paradigms. (We can know something of what it must be like to be the frog in and out of the bog based on what the modeled math tells us about temperature fluctuations ... we just can't say exactly, in the same sense "exactly" as we can give the volume of water in the lake, we can't say exactly what it is like to be the frog in one state or other in the organic world.


The Duhem-Quine thesis talks about the kind of knowledge that crosses scientific paradigm shifts. "f=ma", for instance, is not thrown out as we move into the Einsteinian paradigm, but we descibe it differently (mass becomes a variable instead of a constant). Mach's theorums are not thrown out, the math comes through. Even Newton's older 3 laws of motion are kept, mathematically, though they are now described as special cases of other physical theories. And science at the cutting edge ... theoretical scientists barely belong in the science department of the universities, their ideas look so bad from hindsight. Yet there is nothing wrong with their intelligence or logic or the facts they are describing, it is just that the right questions have not yet been asked, more-or-less been provided with a proper answer. (We are thinking of cosmological theoretical sciences here mostly, like a Hawking or a Bohm might put forth.)

more to come ...

Being Peace

My philosophy reading time this week was actually spent in theology, so i have not had much to say. The text i have mulled over the last couple days is Thich Nhat Hanh's "Being Peace". I'll make a few comments on the text.

The five positive notes i made in the book are these:

1) I like his conception of dharmakaya. Often in the West it is interpreted along the lines of a root of being, an ontological interpretation. In Hahn it is simply element in any thing in the world that can remind the viewer/listener of joy (of his or her buddha nature).

2) Many Buddhists push for the annihilation of feelings, or at least the negative feelings. Hahn does not want to waste energy fighting that battle. Rather, the focus is on noting the felling, such as anger, and why you have it, and then look at the origin, the cause, from other angles to charitably interpret the events from the views of the others, the persons that caused your state. That is, he hopes to turn the anger energy into sympathy energy.

3) The Meditation Center is not, for Hahn, a place to escape from society. It is a place merely to re-invigorate oneself for one's tasks in and for society. The Meditation Center is a place of rest and healing, but once accomplished, one must return to the world.

4) The book is about become peaceful oneself before one can bring peace into the world. He notes that the peace protesters are themselves angry and without peace and therefore cannot possibly accomplish their goals. To bring peace, one must be peaceful.

5) He states that every country must form its own version of Buddhism. An interesting thought. As a Nietzschean philosopher i like the angle. I need to review some of the classic texts, though, to determine if it is defensible. Would it still be Buddhism, or just "like" Buddhism?

Hanh has a lot of what i describe as Middle Path Buddhism beliefs, and since that is my prefered school of Buddhism [Narajuna!] (with Zen/Chan being a close second, though in a very different mode of rigor) i did like the Hahn book.
That said ... for those who know my mode of thought it will probably not be a surprise that i have heavy epistemological issues with many Buddhist claims. Its that rationalism -vs- anti-rationalism thing.
But i very much enjoy the reading.

Conveying thought in language

Roman bridges ... big ancient structures, still standing.

Roman engineers taught Roman engineering students how to make these magnificent and long-standing structures. What is it they taught? ... what is it that they conveyed? The science of the day was Aristoteleon. It was not for this that the bridges are still standing. There is not even a concept of "stress" in Roman science, the main force that the dridges have to resist to stay standing. There is no gravity, only stones wishing to return to their natural place.

The "engineering tricks" of the day were better. Certainly some of this was taught. But it was not "understood" like a student understands science, understands what is going on below the surface. Learning the tricks of the engineering trade is more akin to effectively working with a computer as opposed to knowing how a computer actually works. Useful but surface knowledge.

And yet the bridges still stand. Someone who firgured out how to make the first bridges stand for ages was able to pass that knowledge on via instruction, via language and example. He could write the instructions down and later generations could follow them and build bridges for the ages as well. Yet, much of what was written down was scientifically flat out wrong.

But the theory flaws were made up for in other ways ... in the enginerring tricks, in the examples, in the diagrams, in the day-to-day assumptions underlying what the science of the day said about how certain things worked.


The knowledge about how to build such bridges was passed on, and language, flawed language, was a big part of it, but not the whole.