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The House Builder (Revision from June 2015)

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“House-builder, you’re seen!
You will not build a house again.
All your rafters broken,
the ridge pole destroyed,
gone to the Unformed, the mind
has come to the end of craving.”

—Siddhārtha Gautama (the founder of Buddhism), upon reaching enlightenment (Dhammapada)

It was speculated by Thanissaro Bikkhu that the “house” meant selfhood, or perhaps entity-hood, in the commentary of the Dhammapada.

I would propose a model for logic that is a house. Some logical structures are immense. The light that passes through a window would be Truth; the laws that light follows as it interacts with the building would be the laws of logic; the specific form of this particular building would be the logical statements, determining the way truth (light) moves through the logical structure. (And by “truth” here I mostly mean the clarity and warrant that travels with what we can rightly assert—what survives transmission. Edit based in Pierre’s feedback: I will develop this idea of a clarity that degrades from true proposals partially true conclusions, to more partial conclusions, etc. The next essay will apply this loss in a truth property as a loss in the meaning of a number, or the numerousness of a number, as they progress indefinitely toward infinity. Then I will apply this idea to probability theory, which are revisions of my line of thought from 2015)

The trouble is completing the logical elements: what is falsehood? Obviously it is darkness, but the building would have to have no qualities except its form—no colors, no features, just featureless glass mirrors—otherwise the light would fade as it interacts with opaque surfaces, making truth and falsehood mingle. If the walls are perfect mirrors that propagate the light perfectly, a false space would have to be totally cut off from the light. Hypotheticals would be doors, sometimes open, sometimes shut. The only danger of falling into darkness would be entering through a door and closing it, completely cutting yourself off.

The theory that comes to mind is Anaximander’s, who thought the sun was just a hole in the cosmos, where light could enter from outside the Universe. And why is this ideal of logic impossible in the real world? There are no perfect mirrors. Matter has color that absorbs light, making it an intermediate between truth and falsehood. When logic from true principles is applied to real things—interacting with matter—the truth will dim as the logical statements progress, regardless of how perfectly the laws of logic are followed. If the world of logic were to be perfect, the truth could not originate from our world, or else light that is reflected back out the window of our house would fall, logically, onto ambiguous matter. Thus passing out the window must lead to a world that looked mostly the same as the building of mirrors.

With the modern conception that words can provide totally transparent access to an object, matter would be the only medium between truth and falsehood. But words simply aren’t transparent. They grow out of metaphors (as argued in the essay linked in my first post). The word “be” grew out of a Proto-Indo-European root which also meant grow—so that someone aware of the ancestry of words would resurrect the feeling of metaphor in the word “be,” coloring the word, giving it a connection that is warranted because “be” would not be what it is now without a fathering metaphor: being is growing.

And the design or form of this fun-house of mirrors—would it carry nameable concepts with it, concepts one would come to know or feel by living there? It would if it had any architectural design. How is this different from allowing a word, or a sign for an idea or feeling, into our logic?

The house of logic cannot allow matter, words, or form—except in a part of the house that is totally dark and without doors. They can be allowed into the part sectioned off as unconditionally false. Otherwise we are allowing degrees of truth, qualifications of truth, and a co-mingling of truth and falsehood.

The focus of this blog (expressed in the previous post) has changed to looking for systems of truth that gradually and naturally falsify themselves. What if we allowed matter in our house, and accepted gradations of truth? How could Aristotelian logic be modified so that each “step” in a logical progression reduced the amount of truth it propagated? The goal would initially be a logic that is calculable. So while we could take our lessons on how the logical system would be set up from how light interacts with matter, the resulting system would not be realistic initially. (For example: if a statement has “brightness” bbb, perhaps each inferential step discounts it by a factor k≤1k\le 1k≤1, so that long chains necessarily dim.) Following the logical system leads you out of the logical system, however, since the logical laws are not perfect propagators of truth. The logic I am formulating here, while not realistic, leads into a real world.

The Monk Who Looked for Space Final Version

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The Monk Who Looked for Space

by Andrew Nightingale

Adapted from the Dhamma for Children

Once upon a time, there was a monk who wanted to know where Space was.

So he meditated and meditated and meditated, until his mind reached the angels.

He asked the angels, “Oh Angels, where is Space?”

The angels replied, “We don’t know. But if you meditate longer, you will reach even higher angels. They might know.”

So the monk meditated and meditated and meditated, and his beard grew long and grey as he sat still, until he saw the higher angels.

He asked the higher angels, “Oh High Angels, where is Space?”

And the High Angels replied, “We don’t know. But if you meditate longer, you will reach the Highest Angels. Maybe they will know.”

So the monk meditated and meditated, until his beard grew down to his feet and turned white as he sat unmoving, until he saw the Highest Angels.

He asked them, “Oh Highest Angels, where is Space?”

And they replied, “We don’t know. But if you meditate even longer, you will reach Brahma, the Highest of the High, Creator of all the worlds. He will know.”

So again, the monk meditated and meditated, until his hair fell out and his skin sagged from his bones, spotted and pale with age. At last he reached Brahma.

The monk asked, “Oh Brahma, Highest of the High, Creator of all the worlds, where is Space?”

And Brahma replied, “I am Brahma! Highest of the High, Creator of all the worlds!”

For some, this would have been enough. But the monk persisted.

“Yes,” said the monk, “and… where is Space?”

Brahma realized the monk would not go away. He drew him aside, away from his choir of angels, and whispered,

“Look, don’t tell anyone—but I don’t know where Space is. You are asking a dangerous question. If you must know, go ask the Buddha. But go at your own risk, for you go beyond my domain.”

And so the monk rose slowly from his meditation. His body trembled with age, his steps were unsteady, but his will was clear. Luckily for him, the Buddha was living then, residing in a nearby town.

He reached the Living Buddha, sat respectfully to one side, and asked his question:

“Oh Buddha, the Well-Gone, where is Space?”

The Buddha replied simply,

“It is good you came to me, for no one can answer this question except one who has finished the Noble Eightfold Path. Space can only be found in the mind of the Saint — one who has followed the Way and gone to the end of the world with his mind. For he has found Space, and it is in his mind.”

Then the Buddha, saying nothing more, imparted this knowledge in silence. And at that very moment, the monk attained Enlightenment.

From then on, he lived in supreme peace, knowing the bliss of the boundless mind, until his death and beyond.

The Two Fools

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The first story is about a girl who loses her family to illness and cannot keep her house because of debt. She leaves her house with only her winter clothes and a loaf of bread, and begins walking down the road with no-where to go. As she walks the day goes by, and a beggar comes and asks for some food. The girl gives half her loaf of bread and keeps walking. But then she meets another beggar on the road who asks for food, so she gives her other half of the loaf. Again she meets a beggar on the road who says he is cold, and she gives him her coat. And again, a beggar with bare feet asks for her shoes, and she gives. Finally it is night on the road, and she has only a little cloth to wear. As the stars come out, they fall down to her feet. She picks them up and realizes they are gold. So many stars fall that night, that she lives the rest of her life without a worry for food or things.

The second story is about a man who works for his employer five years and after completing his work is paid a lump of gold as big as his head. The man takes his wages, the lump of gold, and begins making the day-long trip down the road to his mothers house. As he is walking he meets a man on a horse. The man on the horse explains that a horse can make a lot of money because it can do a lot of work on a farm, and can carry him home to his mother as well. So the Fool agrees to give his 5 years wages to the man with the horse, in exchange for the horse. As the Fool rides down the road on his new horse, he meets a man with a goat. The man with the goat explains that a goat can give milk, and can be shorn for its coat of hair to make clothes. The Fool agrees to exchange his horse and takes the goat, walking on down the road. The Fool meets another man, who is standing next two millstones. This man explains that millstones can do great work grinding the wheat for bread, and so the Fool agrees to exchange his goat for the millstones. Now the Fool is heavily burdened by the stones and grows tired. He finds a well, and thanks God that he can drop the millstones into the well to make water come up so he can have a drink. Finally he reaches his mother with nothing for his 5 years of work.

These two stories at first seem to have two very different ideas about what a Fool is. In one, the girl is not at fault, but continues to give everything away. The idea being that there is an accountancy in an invisible world of magic that repays her for her selflessness. It is rather easy to see that the second Fool is not being selfless, because he is being duped into making bad exchanges for his wealth. The second Fool makes no gain in any invisible world, or so the story goes. There is a strange part of the second story, taken from Grimm’s Fairy Tales, where he thanks God for easily being able to give up his millstones at a well in exchange for a drink of water. Here the logic of the story admits that there is an invisible world, and even though he has failed in this world, as well as the material world, God cares for him anyway, and relieves him of the burden of the stones out of mercy. The girl getting gold coins from magic is not mercy, I think, but the universe paying the debt incurred in the invisible world in the form of gold coins.

We can see clearly here that the world of the invisible and the material world is getting confused. If the girl knew the universe would repay her, she would not be repaid, of course. And if the Fool in the second story knew his exchanges were not savvy in the material world, he would have gained some repayment from the invisible world, beyond mercy. If you use knowledge, you had better get it right, because even though the trades for the second Fool were done with knowledge of the merits of millstones, etc, the loss incurred from this knowledge was complete. The Fool who plays the game of exchange to lose, wins; and the Fool who plays the game of exchange to win, loses. It is clear that if you know you are a Fool, you should play to lose. And, well, it is rather easier to be a Fool and play to lose than to be wise and play to win… isn’t it?

Speaking as a diagnosed Fool, I have to attest that the game of losing is a lot harder than it seems. Eventually you will find that you are wise in spite of yourself, because if you do things for people expecting to gain in the invisible world, you can gain nothing. Eventually you have to learn to control your mind and do things without expectation, and what do you end up doing then? Forest-wandering, or anything else practiced by both involuntary fools and the deliberate ascetic.

I will end with Whitehead’s quote in his masterwork on process philosophy. “God is the Fool of the World.” The World card is the end of the Tarot, and the Fool is the beginning.