Still crunching through this, but it made me think in some interesting ways.

It is India in the fifth century BCE, the age of the historical Buddha, and a rather peculiar principle of reasoning appears to be in general use. This principle is called the catuskoti, meaning ‘four corners’. It insists that there are four possibilities regarding any statement: it might be true (and true only), false (and false only), both true and false, or neither true nor false.

rob05c:

we simply took value of to be a relation, not a function

I'd be interested to see how his perspective changes after being introduced to Lamba Calculus. Everything can be represented with functions. Everything.

Which says something about the nature of many things: sets, relations, computability. Verbs, actions.

If everything is (or can be) a function (a transformation, a verb, an action), does that imply anything about philosophy or reality? Does that give us something resembling Mahayana Buddhism, or lend credence to it?

What if we view energy as a function and matter as a state? Mass–energy equivalence tells us energy can be converted to matter. Then, what if we view matter as a function which returns a state? For example, the C function

  int fortytwo() {return 42;}

acts as a state, to anyone calling it. But it is most definitely a function. What if matter is the same way: a function (energy) which has been configured to appear as state?

The constructions I have described show how to make precise mathematical sense of the Buddhist views. This does not, of course, show that they are true.

posted 3324 days ago