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
