Namaste. Thank you for your perceptive response to my message [now posted on our blog at Beyond First Person Egoic Epistemology ]As mentioned in that message there are more than the three mentioned epistemological methods of knowledge, and as you rightly mentioned the method of logical reason does indeed have more than one meaning. The first person egoistic concept of logic relegates that subject to a mere abstract consideration of subjective thinking [of a first person ego]. This perspective determines the whole epistemological foundation of modernity, including modern science, and is an attitude that characterizes many of the members of modern society who have been influenced by modern education and culture based on that viewpoint.The Vedas are first and foremost NOT based, or more precisely not primarily or only based upon the first person egoistic epistemological viewpoint. As explained in the Bhagavad-gita and Brahma-sutra the Vedas do not have a finite historical origin. Thet may have been written down at some historical point, but they are essentially shruti or what is heard or revealed. The modern scholars will never aceed to this idea because of their particular epistemological stand, and insist that they must have an historical origin, but that is not consistent with the internal message of the Vedas. This transcendental conception of origination is much like that found in the Bible which states that in the beginning was the Logos (Word). In Hegel's Science of Logic a similar notion is offered that Logic pertaining to the absolute thinking that thinks itself of Aristotle may be conceived as "God before the creation of the world and finite spirit." This non-egoistic logic is thus a higher conception Logic than is implied by finite subjective thinking.The idea of "seeing the world through many eyes" is basically the notion that any knowledge we have is in actuality a collective result of the society in which we happen to be born. We may call this the Zeitgeist or spirit of the times, and which is in fact one aspect of the spirit (the third person of the Trinity or the holy spirit) that religion reflects upon. And yes, in the Vedic tradition this may be related to Brahman as you have guessed. Society exists as a second nature, a conscious world, upon the natural world that appears to consciousness as objective to it. But egotistic epistemology never considers anything beyond its own individual knowing. In its unfortunately delusional independence it can't imagine that there is anything like social conditions from which its thinking is a product or result. The Vedas are certainly not based upon this misconception in the name of knowledge.The metaphysics of Samkhya and Yoga are critiqued in the Brahma-sutra although they are highly regarded, as well as other schools of thought at that time which are not so highly reputed. The abstract monistic advaita viewpoint fails to comprehend the authentic metaphysics of advaita that has a dignified position in the great tradition of Indic philosophy that is self-conscious, dynamic, dialectical and inclusive. In the Occident modern science has its own brand of abstract monism that causes it to get bogged down in materialsm, physicalism, naturalism, and worst of all mathematicalism.
"Oh what a tangled web we weave when we first practice to deceive" ourselves by thinking we can mathematize Nature.We never find such a badly misconceived idea in the Vedas. Even in Greek philosophy, Pythagoras perhaps was the chief proponent of a geometrical view of the world. Plato also had a high regard for geometry and mathematics because of their abstract nature, but he was never guilty of confusing it with the philosophical pursuit of truth.
at one point he did hold the view that fundamentally Nature was composed of five geometrical figures. But his philosophy was based on the idea that of the three epistemological methods of acquiring knowledge1 .opinion (Gr. doxa)2. Mathematics/geometry (Gr. dianoia)3. Philosophy (Gr. noesis)philosophy was the highest and proper method for attaining to Truth or the Good. One of the members of this group stated that mathematics was the Queen of Science, but the fact is that she is the traitorous usurper of the throne.
Philosophy is the true Queen of Science, and before the advent of Galileo and others science was known as natural philosophy.
Science seems to be the process of making stupendous blunders that drive it to all kinds of naive and foolish conclusions.
This is because it is blind to its own epistemological foundations which can only be comprehended by careful philosophical examination.
This cannot be done by one who is already entangled and defined by an epistemological perspective because he/she has no other means to transcend that position. Descartes tried to transcend his own conditioning in that regard by absolute negation, de omnibus dubitandum - doubt everything!
This is certainly a long story and as you have correctly noted a very serious and essential issue which, unfortunately, most people are either not prepared to be that skeptical of themselves, or feel unable to make such an examination on their own. But there is hope, because ultimately it is not all up to the individual when we understand things properly. The seed of revolution [antithesis] has already been planted and as Hegel reminds us that despite our finite contribution "one must, moreover, become and do what one can."
B Madhava Puri, Ph.D.Princeton Bhakti Vedanta Institute
From: Paul Werbos <wer...@ieee.org>
To: "online_sa...@googlegroups.com" <Online_Sa...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Monday, May 29, 2017 8:09 PM
Subject: [Sadhu Sanga] types of knowledge in Vedas/Upanishads
Thank you for posting a review of three types of knowledge according to Vedas/Upanishads. Unfortunately, I read your post when I was on travel for a month, and cannot copy the original, but the issues are important and easy to remember.Your post reminded me of warm memories of reading the Hume translation of principal Upanishads in 1963, initially sitting on the concrete floor of the Princeton (undergraduate) library and then later in the house I lived in at Lawrenceville. It also reminds me of a friend who knew Oppenheimer very well, who discussed how Oppenheimer learned Sanskrit just in order to be able to read the Upanishads in the original.
If I understand you correctly, you are reviewing and applying a three-fold classification of knowledge into: (1) knowledge based on direct personal experience (essentially, the flow of direct sensory inputs) to a person; (20 knowledge based on what we impute the experience of others to be, and (3) knowledge based on logical reasoning. As I recall, some parts of the Upanishads suggest that mystical enlightenment, the seeing of the world through many eyes at once ( i.e. the brahman/Atman viewpoint), appears as a manifestation it extension of the third principle, the reasoning.
In 1964, that was my interpretation of what I saw in the Upanishads and in reality. It seemed more elevated and pleasing and logical than the "yoga alternative," present in other parts of the Upanishads, in which enlightenment could be seen "merely" as an extension or manifestation if the first type of knowledge, the direct and substantive personal experience. Sometimes an abstract concept or representation is of real value only to the extent that it "opens our eyes," by enlarging what we consciously see, expanding the power of the direct personal experience. That is how I see this now, after many years of reassessing based on all three types of knowledge.
On netlix there was one great season of a show called "sense8," which ultimately failed commercially (perhaps due to unnecessary confusion and baggage related to sex) but which did contain beautiful images of what it means to see through many eyes at once.
This is not just an academic issue. At the present stage of development of the economy and technology of humanity, the species itself us under very clear threat to its very existence, and traditional concepts of balance of power may not be enough to offer us hope of a sustainable resolution of deep conflicts of ideas. The yogic approach in general (which has manifestations in all the great cultures of the world) is more and more essential, and of course in need of more advanced development.
Just as parts of the ocean nay be mapped according to depth and longitude, not just latitude, the ocean of knowledge can also be mapped according to other dimensions in addition to .., .. and .. For example, there is great value in being mindful of the distinction between knowledge which takes the form of strings of words, versus knowledge which takes a form like images in fields of neurons exactly as we see in the brains and minds of other mammals who do not use words. A key part of the yogic approach, and of some enlightened aspects of Confucianism (like Meng Tzu's concepts of zhengqi), is to respect always the nonverbal "half" of our minds. Professor James Anderson of Brown has compared the formal "half" to a "new but still buggy alpha version of software." It gives a great extension to the power of the mind, but we do need to get the bugs out, and put it into proper relation with the bigger, older part.Best regards,Paul
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It seems to me that your thoughts on mechanism, arithmetic, physical reality,theology and their relations are either quite muddled, never clearly articulated, or perhaps merely difficult for you to express in what seems to be for you a second language.First of all, I have tried to make it very clear what the idea of a mechanistic system is by stating that its concept lies outside of the system itself. In other words, its form (meaning concept or, if you like, purpose) or "that for which the constituents of a system exist" lies in the mind of the person constructing the mechanical system.
This in turn means that a mechanical system can be assembled, disassembled, and reassembled using the same original external concept.
As we know from experience and knowledge this process of assembly is not possible for any living organism of any type.
Kant identified living organisms as consisting of a Naturezweck or natural internal purpose or what can be called their soul or concept. Thus natural organisms are clearly not mechanical systems.
To claim that mechanical systems implies an arithmetical system does not in any way follow from the idea of the mechanical.
Arithmetic, counting numbers, may be a mechanical process it that counting does not involve its own own concept and thus can be done on a machine with the same nature. But this is only true because the machine is used by a self conscious agent as a tool in this particular application,
not in general. A mouse trap, for example, is a mechanical system that does not imply arithmetic.
To claim that the mechanical is physical does not follow,
since arithmetic itself may be mechanical but not physical.
The distinction between physical and natural should not be muddled. Nature is real but its truth is not the physical but self-conscious Spirit.
This requires Hegel's lengthy philosophical exposition to explain. The distinction between real and true is also to be clearly understood. The judgement that A is real or has being relative to other beings, is different from the determination of whether that judgement is true or not which further requires knowing the self-concept of the real in order to determine whether content is consistent with concept.
Once the essential importance of Concept is understood in science and by scientists, namely 'that for the sake of which anything exists or is,' then the relevance of virtue, morality, ethics and theology in science can be reintegrated.
It is not possible to establish the purpose by arithmetical, mechanical or digital methods because they are essentially analytic processes.
The example of the False Elephant was posted to this group to explain the problem of analysis as clearly as possible.For Plato the Idea of the Good was that purpose for which everything has its existence.
For Aristotle the Good or final cause is not only "the good for something," but also "the good which is the end of some action." [Met. 12.1072b] When the Good or final cause is known as God then theology is indicated.
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I must weigh in here, based on a conversation earlier today. Ive been thinking about how to express my diagreement with the idea that a "digital mechanism" can be the best model for nature.
According to Rosen, it can only be a simulation and not a model at all because it is already entailed in too causally impoverished a way to reflect natural relations. But how to proove that, or at least give a demonstration?
My thought is admittedly based on an assumption about nature, but so is the claim that such mechanisms can account for a soul or that they can give the best description of nature.
My starting assumption is unity ... nature is ultimately and originally whole, and in addition to that universal principle, it can then divide into the fractions we can see, count, measure, think, etc.
The Western tradition is to go the other way, to say that nature is fundamentally made of fractions and these can be combined to give the impression of something whole.
So that much is a choice that can only be decided over time using both ideas to see which gives the more parsimonious explanations of the more kinds of phenomena.
If we assume the universe is whole, and wholeness is retained in all natural systems (even though we can see fractions of the whole), then the number 2, referring to distinct objects, is fractional - it cannot exist in nature without a context containing and relating the two objects.
This means that any binary model must be unnatural, as Rosen said, a simulation, not a true model. I think that may be a proof that digital mechanism cannot model life or true complexity, but can only simulate it via "complication"; i.e., through non-parsimonious calculations that can never converge on the missing whole because it was left out in the beginning. There is no convincing way to recover it. Thus binary logic, for as fascinating as it might be, does not reflect nature even though, like a menu at a restaurant, it can give a description of a fractional aspect.
R-theory proposes that all of reality has this basic relation, say mind-body-whole. On the Indus Valley Seals you can see a number system that progresses 1, 3, 7, .... I am sure they were counting whole systems, as described in the Isa Upanishad invocation "Whole from whole". It is the sequence 2^n-1 and they were saying that 1+1=3. It is how you add systems as opposed to adding discrete objects. The difference, and question about underlying nature, is if fundamentally we have discrete particles, or overlapping systems.
But without some contextual overlap, there is a good argument that nothing at all could ever happen. It must be overlapping systems. I gave the example earlier of adding two languages .. the result is three.
Now, I also suggest digital simulation of my holons. But there is a trick. It is to distinguish inverse simulations and then couple them. This way we can approximate wholes in an unfocused way, rather than using highly particularized focis to simulate only thT fractional aspect. I cant proove that this idea gets around the problem entirely, probably it does nor, but I argue that it gets us a more parsimonious simulation at least, focused on the complex relations rather than discrete states.
Note that the context I speak of is not just a wave in measurement space .. that too requires a non-local relation, a relation with its inverse entailment. Rosen' conclusion was indeed to 'objectify the relation', not the particulars.
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Dear Bruno
Namaste. Thank you for your response.
The so-called Turing machine seems to me to be wrongly named. It is a mental or theoretical narrative of a series or list of contingently posited operations that really have no articulated relation to one another. The real crux of the matter is thus left unexamined and implicit - this is its rational concept. Kant criticized mathematics for not having to do with concepts but abstract determinations of sense intuitions. Insofar as the list of operations are not comprehended in their relational unity they may be considered mechanical due to their externality to one another. But that would be an incomplete understanding of their true origin and grounding in a prior concept.
In a simpler sense we can say that operations of a mind are never mechanical in the sense that they have a meaning to the interpreter or self, whereas the operations of a machine are done without meaning to the machine.
When a mind calculates 2x3 there is a meaning involved, whereas a machine does it blindly without meaning.
Machines don't operate themselves to meditate on the meaning of their existence, for instance.
They merely reply to input data without which they would not act. Minds spontaneously meditate or self-mediate themselves as indicative of free self-determinate thinking.
It is interesting that Alan Turing himself when contemplating the question "Can machines think" dismissively replied it was a question "too meaningless to deserve discussion." [1950] But latter finessed his position and said the better question would be ‘can machines do what we (as thinking entities) can do?’The answer in my consideration is - of course not! Machines can't think or even emulate it.
Thinking involves dialectic and contradiction which mechanical systems cannot bear.
When i wrote:a mechanical system can be assembled, disassembled, and reassembled using the same original external concept.You replied:Yes, and that is what our cells do all the time at the molecular level. All our biochemical components are replaced rather quickly. My motivation for mechanism stemmed from the observation of nature, and the fact that living beings contain a program (DNA) forcing them to renew their constituants all the time using external source.Yet your ideas of biology are from the dustbin of 20th century biology. First of all, the catabolism, anabolism, and metabolism of cells are intrinsic to the life process itself, they are not externally applied to the molecular constituents of a cell – i.e. they are not assembled. Rather the metabolic process itself is what we can call the manifest operation of the dialectical movement of the life principle [the synthesis of thesis and antithesis]. Secondly, DNA is no longer considered a program for the cell but rather a read-write medium that is controlled by the cell itself as a cognitive entity. [see James Shapiro, Evolution: View from the 21st Century].
You write:Machine have souls, at least if we are willing to define the soil by the knowing part of the mind.Unfortunately you are presuming that mind is mechanical in principle,
and because minds have a soul you are concluding that machines have souls.
This is completely erroneous in my opinion because, as explained previously mind is not mechanical.
Certain mechanical operations may be possible for the mind such as rote memorization, but that has to do with memory rather than mind per se. Just as Godel showed that most of arithmetic is not mechanical, so too mind is generally not mechanical either.
Regarding hallucinogens they can sometimes help concentration because after all brains are influenced by such substances as dopamine and serotonin, thus they can produce extreme effects on focus but that can also lead to distortion of understanding. Spiritual knowledge is not influenced by such means because by its non-material nature it is transcendental to material influence.
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Namaste. Thank you very kindly for your extensive and detailed reply. It is a wonder to me that your ideas, which you admit arose from the 20th century concept of programmed gene-centered control of organisms, seems to remain impervious to and even supported by the radical paradigmatic change to 21st century epigenetic cell-centered cognitive control. It reminds me of the theory of evolution which is so accommodating it can be invoked to explain both the struggle for existence and altruistic self abnegation in the survival of a population.
I appreciate that mathematics is important for your current understanding of your spiritual position. I think that is admirable and the most that can be expected of any mathematician.
I do question the ability and validity of mathematics and metmathematics to support some of the claims you make. For instance, as I understand it, Lôb's theorem does not really have anything to do with self-reference but with provability and self-provability. [Hallbach (2013)]
Of course, proof and truth are not the same thing since even an untruth can be proven.
It is also interesting to read about the relations and limitations between the logics of Hegel, Godel, and Turing.
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