Thanks for following up, Anartaxius. I am time-limited myself, and won't be able to comment much on your musings, but I appreciated them. I agree that T/F is a simplistic approach to reality and experience that does not seem to be accurate, or even useful. If my experience with Rama and with other teachers/shamans who allowed me to access radically alternate realities -- and sometimes several at once -- had any value, it was to teach me that things can be true and false at the same time, and that neither in any way defines "reality."
I even suspect that this irrelevance of true/false might be at play when discussing the free will issue, and have something to do with belief, and the conditioning that belief imposes on our perceptions. To someone who believes in predestination or even in determinism, their belief may impose upon them a subconscious inability to perceive the world any other way, and thus their actions *are* out of their control, if for no other reason than it never occurs to them to exert control. For someone who believes in free will, *they* may have the ability to act freely in exactly the same situation, because they are not preconditioned to think that they can't. So the same situation can appear to be "true" from one point of view (conditioned by one belief system) and "false" from another point of view (unconditioned, or holding a different belief system). The bottom line, however, is that it still strikes me as a classic waste of time to ponder such things overmuch, because *everyone* juggles their notions of true and false every day. We may "know" intellectually that the balls in the air are really not matter, merely wave particles giving the illusion of matter, but we catch and throw the balls anyway, as if they were matter. Two completely different views of the same reality, both valid, and *neither* "true" nor "false." I am very comfortable with contradictions, and feel for those who are not. By trying to fit everything into little pigeonholes labeled "true" and "false," it seems to me that they're missing at least half of life. ________________________________ From: "anartax...@yahoo.com [FairfieldLife]" <FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com> To: FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com Sent: Wednesday, May 14, 2014 5:28 PM Subject: [FairfieldLife] Re: Beyond True and False Barry, some days ago you posted a link to a page that discussed relevant logics (non-classical logics). This post was largely ignored (I think there was one reply). Perhaps because the author tied his discussion to Asian and in particular Buddhist systems of thought, it was ignored. I read the article several times and looked up more information on its author. That page you posted I found really interesting but did not have time to write a response, and still am short of time. I have been in and out of hospitals and emergency rooms several times in the last month for various reasons, though at the moment I am quite well. The web page you posted in question is linked with a shortened URL service below: http://bit.ly/1mUUyg7 I think that page is really worth reading as it proposes an alternative world view to that conventionally espoused. In other fields, non conventional takes on have led to great advances in mathematics and science, and as Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead showed in the early 20th century, logic and mathematics would seem to be equivalent ways of expressing the same thing. For about 2500 years, Euclid's geometry held sway, but in the 19th century a couple of mathematicians Riemann and Lobachevsky, among others, questioned one of Euclid's basic axioms. They turned some basic assumptions on their head and created alternative geometries that were as self consistent as Euclid's. They pondered what would happen if parallel lines did not stay equidistant but either always met, or asymptotically approached each other but never met, what would happen if the the angles of a triangle did not add up to 180 degrees. These discoveries led to Einstein's general theory of relativity. Einstein also did a similar thing. He pondered what the world would be like if time was not constant, as everyone assumed. So assuming classical logic is the only reality of reasoning, might be a serious mistake. Anyone who has had some sort of spiritual experiences (rather than mystical experiences which tend to reinforce particular beliefs, that is they are more like dreams) probably will come across experiences that do not fit into the conventional classifications of true and false. My experience about free will many years ago was an example of this, an experience that merged two opposing ideas into a single fusion, neither true nor false, or perhaps both true and false at the same time. Further there are paradoxes that Graham Priest mentioned on this web page such as 'This statement is false', which traditional logic does not handle very well. Or Bertrand Russell's paradox also mentioned by Priest: 'Some sets are members of themselves; the set of all sets, for example, is a set, so it belongs to itself. But some sets are not members of themselves. The set of cats, for example, is not a cat, so it's not a member of the set of cats. But what about the set of all the sets that are not members of themselves? If it is a member of itself, then it isn't. But if it isn't, then it is. It seems that it both is and isn't. So, goodbye Principle of Non-Contradiction.' Consider the classically valid inference [discussion taken from the stanford.edu web site] 'The moon is made of green cheese. Therefore, either it is raining in Ecuador now or it is not.' 'Here there seems to be a failure of relevance. The conclusion seems to have nothing to do with the premise. Relevance logicians have attempted to construct logics that reject theses and arguments that commit "fallacies of relevance".' 'Relevant logicians point out that what is wrong with some of the paradoxes (and fallacies) is that is that the antecedents and consequents (or premises and conclusions) are on completely different topics. The notion of a topic, however, would seem not to be something that a logician should be interested in — it has to do with the content, not the form, of a sentence or inference. But there is a formal principle that relevant logicians apply to force theorems and inferences to "stay on topic". This is the variable sharing principle. The variable sharing principle says that no formula of the form A -> B can be proven in a relevance logic if A and B do not have at least one propositional variable (sometimes called a proposition letter) in common and that no inference can be shown valid if the premises and conclusion do not share at least one propositional variable.' Ludwig Wittgenstein, who gave us the conventional truth tables of 'standard' logic also seemed quite aware there were things which standard logic could not express, which thought itself could not express, when he ended his Tractatus with the words: 'My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognizes them as nonsensical, when he has used them — as steps — to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.) He must transcend these propositions, and then he will see the world aright.' 'What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.' Now in his article Priest mentioned that traditional logic has two values {T} and {F} for true and false. He proposed that Buddhists have a four-cornered logic: {T}, {F}, {T,F}, and { }, the latter two categories 'both true and false' and 'empty'. And he himself proposed a five-cornered logic: {T}, {F}, {T,F}, { } and {i}, the last 'ineffable'. If these systems have any kind of utility, what sort of things would we put into those additional categories? Most of the time most people on FFL, You, I, Curtis, especially Judy, use the conventional {T} and {F}. Some, like Share seem to have a looser grip on conventional logic. One of the characteristics of relevant logics, is, in terms of classical logic, they do not work. But they seem to have a facility of being more error tolerant than classic logic, while at the same time seem to weaker by comparison. They were developed to attempt to deal with the paradoxes conventional logic is incapable of solving. My experience of free will versus determinism would seem to me to fit in the {T,F} category. For typical populations belief there is a god fits into the {T} category, and for me that same idea fits into the {F} category. In general I would probably put metaphysics, such as the ideas of classical theism, most alternative medicine, and the ideas relating to a spiritual path in the { } category. In other words such ideas are at heart completely empty, they do not have either the values of true, false or true&false, nor are they ineffable, even though in the use and application of some of these ideas, there seems to be a correlation with awakening [that is an especially thorny logical problem]. Awakening I would probably put in the {i} category as it bypasses basically everything you can imagine. That would of course mean the {i} category is a kind of faux representation of something that cannot even in theory be imagined, though it seems possible to experience. Most of the arguments on this forum seem to try to shoehorn spiritual concepts and experiences into the categories of {T} and {F} and perhaps in doing this we are making some serious errors, and perhaps this provides an explanation of why the discussions here are so rancorous at times, that we are trying to argue with the 'wrong' tools, inappropriate tools. If you want to remove a mountain, using a pick and a shovel is probably dumb. But a hydrogen bomb might do nicely, if you are in a hurry. So just as Einstein made use of non-Euclidean geometry and other axiom changing techniques, maybe to grasp the significance of what we mull over here on FFL needs a different kind of language that has the ability to resolve the many contradictions that appear when we use the conventional tools of reasoning. ================ ---In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, <turquoiseb@...> wrote : Here's a good article from "Aeon" that explains the antipathy that some on this forum display towards Buddhist thought. It's comfortable with contradictions, and they aren't. Besides, this author "gets" database theory, and why I don't believe in a hierarchical universe. That would imply that most things in it are functions, rather than relations, and I don't see that as being true. Read the article...it's a mind-expander if one drops the comforting security provided by "easy answers" and opens oneself up to the notion that there probably aren't any. The logic of Buddhist philosophy – Graham Priest – Aeon The logic of Buddhist philosophy – Graham Priest... Buddhist philosophy is full of contradictions. Now modern logic is learning why that might be a good thing View on aeon.co Preview by Yahoo
