Vyasa's Vighnaharta

Much has been written about the Gita but few mention the elephant in the room.

For Hindus- it is Ganesh.

The main obstacle Vyasa faced in composing the Mahabharata was finding a faultless scribe to take down his inspired verses. As 'destroyer of obstacles' our friendly elephant headed God volunteered to be Vyasa's amanuensis.

But Ganesha is also the 'creator of obstacles' and His presence lets us focus on the biggest obstacle that would arise in the composition of a work which shows that the Just King must learn Statistical Game Theory to overcome 'vishaada'- debilitating angst or Moral Uncertainty.

What is that obstacle? Well, in any didactic exercise or gedanken there is always the danger that either the speaker or the auditor, or both, will forget the wholly metaphorical nature of the underlying discourse and begin indulging in 'meta-metaphoricity'- i.e. taking a metaphor for a fact and constructing another metaphor, itself taken as fact, upon this illusory basis. In other words, there is a slippery slope to Alice in Wonderland type nonsense.

Interestingly, Ganesha warns Vyasa that he must not stop the flow of his dictation- in other words, Vyasa has to have a heuristic against facile nonsense- and Vyasa adds the stipulation that Ganesha should pause if he does not understand a couplet- thus always being able to buy time for himself by employing Vedic 'Slehsa' or metonymy.
Thus Vyasa, internalizing a Noether type symmetry conservation heuristic, remains on his guard against facile prolixity while Ganesha, who only pauses for what is deep- i.e. Vedic- is able to remove the obstacle he himself, as Vighnakarta, created so that as a matter of fact, not conjecture, the Mahabharata becomes a truly divine book dispelling all delusion, though only for stupid debased drunkards like me. Savants and people of good character can always study the Vedas which I am too stupid and evil to propound, while my aleatory exposure to the 'fifth Veda' enables me to have a good laugh at the silly things scholars say about it.

In particular, in Game Theory- the dramatic scenarios it invokes- the word 'rational' is used in a wholly metaphorical sense. The elephant in the room is Muth rationality- human beings are social animals and only that is rational which we would all agree - this is called Rawlisan 'overlapping consensus'- is the correct theory all can act upon for the best empirical outcome.

Game theoretic exercises show how 'rational' following a rule leads to irrational catastrophes and this has instrumental value provided we don't forget the motivation of the elephant in the room- viz. the fact that we only created an artificial obstacle so as to improve our insight into how to get rid of a real stumbling block.

In other words, Game theory studies rationality artificially constrained to be irrational so that the actual constraints on Muth Rationality- re. Information aggregation and decisional heuristics- are better understood and circumvented.

The Mahabharata, though showing that Policy Principals need to apply Statistics and Game Theory, also reveals that Moral Agents need something else entirely to escape Vishaada- i.e. existential angst.
The Bhagvad Gita- in which both the incarnation of the Divine and the representation of the human-too-human are merely Agents, not Principals- comes to the conclusion that human life is ontologically dyshoric- even Presentism must turn into Theistic Occassionalism such that this world is devalued- it is rejected as heimat- and ontlological dysphoria is itself celebrated as 'Vishaada Yoga' and becomes foundational to Raja Yoga and Karma Yoga and Bhakti Yoga- i.e. all the good stuff.

Apurvata, Antarabhava & Backus Naur Part II

Backus Naur Form (BNF) is a notation for Chomsky's context-free grammars which in turn depend on a distinction between 'I' internal (or intensional) Language in the mind of a 'fluent' speaker and 'E' external or extensional Language.

For BNF to eliminate the need for natural language for purposes of unification it would need a second level of syntactic restrictions. However, this could make it too strong- i.e. Turing complete. Similarly, I-language can't be univocal with E-language otherwise it would face a halting problem.

Thus, contra Homi Bhabha, 'newness enters the world' anytime an imperative character string encounters an intensional receiver. This is the 'apurvata' of the Mimamsika- that novel or unprecedented (we might say high entropy) thing encountered in the text which determines its i-language meaning.

Apurva has another meaning- it is what is unexpended in karma whose seed has not yet come to fruition. It links to antarabhava as 'birth determining jati' and, more especially in Buddhism, with the Gandharvas who act as the efficient cause in karmic transmigration.
This idea is an old one present even in the Avesta's Ram Yasht. As for the antarabhava, it is better known nowadays as the Tibetan 'bardo' or, for Sufis, Ibn Arabi's barzakh.
That last, 'as a limit which unites what it otherwise divides'- or more simply a membrane- at one time, looked a promising method of ridding philosophy of false binaries and sorites type problems and Derrida/Deleuze type diarrhea about 'difference'.
That promise hasn't been kept because 'limits' aren't particularly interesting if they arise out of sequences of already existing but unknowable objects. Overlapping choice sequences, however, can define a co-evolutionary finitary fitness landscape corresponding to approximable reals.
Thus, Hindus are perfectly at liberty to think of antarabhava as not so much a limit, but a membrane, damming up and releasing capacitance diversity according to embedded triggers for which it has a co-evolved receptor. Thus the lyric, Vak's love child by the Gandharvas, can lead us back to the Vedas to discover

So rich and strange it each moment reappears

True Beauty's tribute is ever in arrears!

Apurvata, Antarabhava & Backus Naur Part I

I am writing this as an initial response to the following comment on my previous blog entry-

Could you kindly post about the relationship between Panini's grammar and the Backus–Naur Form? Cheers.


Every language, at some time or another, has claimed supremacy on the grounds of some supposedly unique quality it possesses.

My ancestors certainly thought Sanskrit and Tamil were special but, since they admitted that deaf people could gain Gnosis, they did not develop a chauvinistic mentality like that of the Nazi, Heidegger, who claimed that German was the language in which Being thinks itself.

Over the last four or five decades, the great expansion of job opportunities in Software engineering has meant that particularly risible claims have been made regarding Paninian Sanskrit.

This extract from a Time of India article is by no means the worst offender-

 The human-programmable computer languages that exist today, say C++ or Java or Ruby, can be described precisely in a few hundred rules. This precision allows these languages (and Paninian Sanskrit) to be lexically analyzed by a parser, which can then create a semantic tree structure that encodes the underlying 'meaning' of the statement (or program). That semantic tree can then be translated precisely into machine code (binary, ie 0 and 1, or hexadecimal, ie 16 characters, 0123456789ABCDEF) which will then run on the machine.The above is what compilers do – the programs that translate human-readable languages into the incomprehensible machine code (or slightly less obscure Assembly Language) that machines can understand. I worked on compiler construction for several years, and they are among the most sophisticated software in regular use.

'So what exactly does "context-free" mean? It means that the meaning doesn’t depend on contextual knowledge or common sense. Obviously human languages are context-sensitive: you just have to know certain things as a user of the language or else you will be confused. Here is an example of two sentences in English:

1. Fruit flies like an apple
2. Time flies like an arrow

'The two sentences are lexically identical, but to the human reader, based on contextual knowledge, they are vastly different. But to a computer, which has no context, they are identical. If the computer is fed the first and told that fruit flies are a kind of fly and that apples are fruits, it will create certain semantic model. Then, when given the second sentence, it will conclude that 'time flies' are a kind of fly and that arrows are fruits!

'It is essentially impossible to write such ambiguous sentences in Paninian Sanskrit. That is one of the reasons why word order doesn't matter in Paninian Sanskrit, as it does in English (imagine "Rama killed Ravana" and "Ravana killed Rama" as examples).

'That someone millennia ago was able to conceptualize, and even more astonishingly, create a Grand Unified Theory of Language is simply stunning. Let us note that even a widely acknowledged genius like Albert Einsten failed to come up with a Grand Unified Theory of Physics, even though he tried hard. Arguably, Panini’s successful effort then was the greatest accomplishment of a single mind in all of recorded history: creating something so advanced that it took 2500 years to figure out how to use it!'

Older languages- like Latin 0r Old English- tend to be highly inflected and thus word-order doesn't matter. However the corruption of a single morpheme radically changes meaning so, in practice, both increased redundancy and loss of inflection feature in the evolution of Language.
Paninian Sanskrit wasn't different from other Synthetic languages. However, it evolved on a less synoecist fitness landscape and empowered intellectuals irrespective of their geographic location. Sill, there were 'collocational availability cascades' based on superior aesthetic status accorded certain paradigmatic works. Thus, in practice, Sanskrit literature appears as if it it were the univocal expression of a single, timeless, Imperium or Oikumene. Some learned authors continued to exploit its infinite semantic potential- by devices like  vakrokti (indirect expression) or slesha (double meaning) - for example by writing texts which carry forward two wholly unconnected narratives (bahurasyakavya). However, this has tended to be seen as a blameworthy departure from the simplicity and naturalness of true poetry.

In other words, Sanskrit- thanks to Panini- is much more ambiguous, at least potentially, not less so, than other synthetic languages.

Ambiguity means that there is more than one possible meaning. Human beings can't communicate without ambiguity. Why? They have intentionality. In other words, they intend something not present which, on analysis, is fuzzy even to themselves.

If I say- 'My hand is on fire.' I might mean that I have got a good set of cards, or that I am painting really well today or that  I feel a burning sensation in one of my limbs.
Things become more clear cut, unless I am being rhetorical, if I add the following three sentences, 'Pick up the fire extinguisher. Direct the nozzle at my hand. Release the foam by pulling the trigger.'
Is there any ambiguity left in the string of sentences I have uttered? Wouldn't every ambiguity be cleared up if enough supplementary sentences were added?
Surely, Language is just a tool and, as the more extreme of the Logical Positivists suggested, any statement that isn't purely factual (e.g. my hand is on fire) or imperative (e.g. pick up the fire extinguisher) or mixed ('Release the foam by pulling the trigger' isn't wholly false just because the trigger is actually released by squeezing not pulling) is simply poetic nonsense or mystical mumbojumbo?

The answer, I am afraid, is that everything depends not just on my intentions and what I assume to be your intentions and to a possible contract curve between us, but also to a possible 'overlapping consensus' between us regarding both Facts and Values in possible future states of the World. However, if Knightian Uncertainty obtains, future states of the world can't be differentiated without ambiguity.

Why is it that, in the real world, we say things like 'Fuck, my hand's on fire, get the fire extinguisher for God's sake'. The obvious answer is-the word 'Fuck' conveys urgency as well as sense of camaraderie. 'God's sake' implies that you have a duty to the Creator to protect the life of one of His Creatures. However, using words whose meaning is essentially ambiguous or even omnivalent, signals something else- viz. we are not sending a coherent message at all because we can't currently afford the computational cost of clarifying it. In this case our utterance points to, without naming, the default focal point for communication's co-ordination game.

What if we were robots without any theory of mind? What happens when our sensor picks up a character string? 

There are 2 possibilities. Either the character string is noise in which case it is disregarded, or it satisfies a certain protocol in which case further protocols regarding authorization, priority, feasibility etc. have to be fulfilled before anything happens.

Notice that at each stage the signal is ambiguous w.r.t. reception- either it is noise or it is not noise, either it is authorized or it is unauthorized etc. This ambiguity can be reduced by devoting more Computing power to the signal. Even if computing bore zero cost, ambiguity would not disappear because- by a corollary of Razbarov-Rudich- there is no way of distinguishing pseudo-random from truly random stings (unless P=NP has a proof using current methods). 

As a matter of fact, computing is costly and, what's more, the type of  Concurrency and Race Hazard problems specific to this field soon become intractable.  But this is what we would expect to happen if Life evolved. Individual brains exist because Ambiguity is everywhere and so heterogenous trade-offs must be made at the individual level so that there is an Evolutionarily Stable Equilibrium on a higher scale.

Let us drop the supposedly simplifying assumption that we are 'basically' mindless robots because it involves an Open Question for Maths. What happens when we make the opposite assumption- viz. that that, for a philosophically advanced enough member of our species, unambiguous Reception is possible? This is equivalent to the claim that some human mind can have certainty re. what he knows and/or how he came to know it. In Sanskrit, this is covered under the rubric of Prakaasha and Praamaanya respectively.

The claim that sentences in Paninian Sanskrit are unambiguous implies that they can be 'svatograhya'- i.e something empirically received (because it is heard)  yet apprehended as intrinsically true at the same time as it is cognized.  This is a much more reasonable claim than that any sentence in any language could have this property. After all, back then, a guy who was speaking to you in Classical Sanskrit probably wasn't an idiot or a babbling drunkard but a respectable person careful with his words. Still, no Indian thinker was so foolish as to say that anything said in proper Skt. must be true. On the contrary, Religions like Jainism and Buddhism used Paninian Skt. to guard against commentary being taken for Revealed Text. In other words, Prakaasha/Praamaanya theory promotes the notion that Language is not just instrumental but strategically so- it is gamed as part of a wider lila- or sportive play of Gnosis.

Interestingly, there is a convergence between Sanskrit Literary Theory and the modern study of 'formal languages' in certain respects. In the former, aporias regarding Prakasha/Praamaanya gave salience to 'Dhvani' theory which highlights the freedom and creativity of the receiver, not the sender, of the signal. In the latter, Turing, on Bearnay's suggestion, had to take recourse to Brouwer 'over-lapping choice sequences' to get to something we might term 'context free'- i.e 'absolute'- with respect to its representation in this or that formal system.

Brouwer's constructivism, like Abhinavagupta's Dhvani, which gives rise to 'apurvata'- 'newness' in Reception- is of an intuitionistic, non-deterministic, type and exceeds computability or purely algorithmic methods.
I will argue, in my next post, that overlapping choice sequences naturally describe what is essentially a co-evolutionary fitness landscape and that the concepts of  apurvata and antarabhava gains salience in that context. My contention is that Paninian Sanskrit, yoked to the apophatic project of Gnosis, does indeed merit comparison, if not emulation, by current Research Programs in 'context free' formal languages.

The Utility of Futility

Suppose there is a market which clears- i.e. a price is established at which everyone who wants to buy can do so and everyone who wants to sell can get rid off their stock. Suppose further that no buyer or seller now has an unanticipated change in wealth. Suppose this is true of all markets and that everything people want to buy and sell has a market.
Then, Economists say the Market has achieved an equilibrium with a certain valuable property- it is Pareto efficient. No one can be made better off without someone being made worse off.
By some magic, it appears that individuals, knowing only their own endowments and preferences and the price called out by the auctioneer, can co-ordinate their activities just as well as an omniscient God.
However, there is a problem with this story. Suppose my buying the last chocolate eclair at one dollar means that, unknown to me, my diabetic twin brother, kidnapped by Monetarists and raised in a freak show, doesn't get that life saving confection for which he was prepared to pay 99 cents. The market may have cleared but, with hindsight, it wasn't Pareto efficient.
(The same thing is true is I didn't have a twin brother of that description but you, with unknown probability, believe you might do so and there exists some series of arbitrageurs, or 'externality internalising entities, to connect us.)
More generally, at the margin, unless I know the endowments and preferences of everybody else, the Market may be inefficient even if there are no unanticipated wealth effects.
One way round this scandal for 'Democratic' Social Choice- which is that there is no way to co-ordinate human beings as efficiently as an omniscient God- is to believe that God, for some reason of his own, wants us to put zero value on any gain or loss received outside the market.
Call this new 'Purushartha' Utility and define it as follows- suppose God only wants you to know what our theory assumes you know, then, Utility is the Purushartha that God has ordained for you to maximize. Surely, in this case, Utility theory is Muth Rational- i.e. free of hysteresis effects?
Following Samuelson, we could go on to say 'Ours is the only true Economics because we have the assurance that we are only dealing with ergodic processes. Otherwise, our subject would be empty or 'anything goes'. It is surely reasonable that we all constrain our discourse to path-independent Utility functions.'
In other words, just as ritualists accept certain constraints on what they can do so as to have an inter-subjective 'Purushartha' which they can fulfill as a signal to God of their devotion- this is like making Mum a mud cake for her birthday coz u know she like Black Forest gateaux- so too can people foolish enough to have studied Economics at University pretend Utility functions are integrable and hysteresis free.
Though Monetarists and Libertarians and other such fucktards disliked Samuelson, they raised no objection to a well paid class of Pundits arising who pretended to believe that this sort of Utility function was indeed Man's Purushartha.
Sadly, Moore's Law kept making computing cheaper and so from the Eighties onward larger and larger data sets became available which attracted the attention of, not failed Physicists, but the real deal.
A prominent 'Econo-physicist', Joseph L McCauley, wrote a scathing paper some fifteen or twenty years ago titled 'the Futility of Utility' in which he said- ' Economists usually assume that price is the gradient of utility in equilibrium, but I observe instead that price as the gradient of utility is an integrability condition for the Hamiltonian dynamics of an optimization problem...
'Hamiltonian dynamics shows that it is dangerous blindly to assume that the question of path dependence of a utility functional can be divorced from the question of integrability of the underlying dynamics. Gibbs tried but failed to make a similar point to I. Fisher , who was not as strong a mathematician as was Gibbs and didn’t understand integrability. Gibbs pointed out that the utility is generally path dependent, and suggested that Fisher address the problem of nonintegrability in relation to a possible underlying dynamics. Fisher did not understand nonintegrability of differential forms (neither did Walras or Pareto), so that Gibbs’ point was entirely lost on Fisher, who erased all mention of nonintegrability from his last papers on utility after he had become established as an economist... Fisher’s failure to address the path dependence of utility left Samuelson and other economists to worry about nonintegrability some fifty years later. The economists finally stopped worrying about it, but never solved the problem. It is not clear that they became aware of Liouville’s integrability theorem, connecting the existence of a utility function to integrability of the dynamical system, during the heyday of deterministic chaos.'

The problem here is that, Muth rationality can still obtain in over determined dynamical systems- indeed, must do, otherwise the sort of noise needed to drive liquidity would actually dissolve it- thus price can be the gradient of anything it likes, including the Utility function.
No alethic or instrumental argument Econophyics can marshal in this connection gains any purchase because, whereas agents have some knowledge of price and endowment vectors and could choose to subscribe to Samuelson type integrable, non-path dependent Utility by reason of Muth rationality, of almost any Walrasian equilibrium involving such agents, all we can know is that its price vector is not effectively computable in the life time of the Physical Universe.

Utility, thus, isn't futile at all. It is about co-ordination problems and reflexivity and Schelling focal points, on the one hand, and, on the other, it is Ninomiya concession and Upanishadic neti, neti.
In other words, if Econ aint empty, Utility is that Purushartha wherein, uniquely, God might find us wanting but only to show all wanting futile thus leaving only the undiminishable plenitude of Om Purnamadah Purnamidam &c

Telegony is Ulysses' Price

I'm tired of Civil apologies for Criminal views

Descrying Crypto-Zionists in but Credentialized Jews

Who, compiling our Chrematistic Chrestomathy

     Are Sykophántēs to Sophia's sociopathy

Apollo's Sabbath at the Omphalic shrine

Its but builders keep; tho' drinking wine

Who die not young yet know joy

Only as Trophonius' shabes goy

Dick, the first vagina you issued from

Has as hymen this Jungle drum

Telegony is Ulysses' 'Price

'Equation' or Nietzsche nice

Your Genidentity flee else our Gestalt
Is Hannan consistent- oy gevalt!
& tho' the Universe perish, Opportunity's spume
Is Regret's diminuendo's stave salt of doom.

Envoi                              

 Prince!  All call it a wizard wheeze

To fuck Aeon's arse while yet it freeze.

Impossible Duty

To say nothing in this first quatrain

 That nothing in the second explain

so our Secretary be, not pi, e 

  Euler! sine i my refrain

Quoting Batalvi at Glassy Junction

Shiv Kumar, thy extremest unction

So scrupulous tho' the Saqi pours

As Gelassenheit yet overflows

Envoi-

Prince! Kajdar-o-marez means the impossible Duty

To so tilt the flagon naught flow but Beauty.

Ghalib's suvaida & Pascoaes Saudosismo

The word Melancholia derives from the Greek melaina chole- black bile.
Rufus of Ephesus, two millennia ago, explained that there were 2 types of black bile- one which is natural and present as a sort of sediment in the blood and which only becomes harmful if stirred up- as by Spring, which is why April is the cruelest month- and another sort which is yellow bile which has either been burnt and which gives rise to a violent raving madness, or else yellow bile which has been frozen (afsurdagi) and which yields depression and abulia.
With the advent of Islam, this Greek doctrine of the humours was adopted by the Arabs who termed black bile 'sauda' and poetically linked it to the pupil of the beloved's eye- vide Mohr Siebeck's monograph.

the theory of black bile as causing madness.
Ghalib has a couplet linking the Sufi suvaida (a small black spot on the heart) with the pupil of the eye-

مت مردمکِ دیدہ میں سمجھو یہ نگاہیں
ہیں جمع سویداۓ دلِ چشم میں آہیں

These are not enchantment's rays that enter my eyes 

But smoke from my charred heart escaping as sighs.

Ironically, the Arabic word 'sauda'- which means both 'blessed', 'joyous', 'profitable' as well as 'black- may, because of its medical usage,  have influenced the Portuguese 'Saudades' associated with melancholic yearning for every Sonnet's Shulamith or Kleinian 'dark lady' who yet is fair, & for such our Black Sun, all Despair, for all that has been loved & lost to sight, yet lies at the back of blind Belisarius' obol of Light.

Fuck me, I jus' realized this theme, or 'mazmun', is tailored made for Post Colonial pricks and Subaltern Studies shitheads & Eco Feminist fuckwits to vomit all over. Iyer, they will say, is a Hindutva fanatic. He is referencing the Chandogya Upanishad's Black Sun- the light beyond the heavens, beyond the realm of transmigration, that apocatastatic light behind Love's blighting light which illuminates how all things end. Why? Coz this worthless Mayavadi cunt wants to restore the Manuvadi caste system. As for Pascoaes' Saudosismo- fuck is it but a proto-Fascist Sebastanismo?- a harking back to a golden age when Christian Portugal was on an almost victorious warpath against Moors, Marranos,  Malabaris and other such dusky what have you. Thus, in Arabic, the word 'black' also means 'happiness', 'joy', etc. because black people were a source of profit for slave traders. Similarly, Krishna means both 'black' and that God who takes on the sins of the 'ujali paraj' lighter colored oppressors.
Yet, there is another way to read Ghalib's sauda & Pascoaes Saudosismo,-one that evokes Hindu/Buddhist 'antarabhava' (which carries an erotic charge) Tibetan 'baro thodol' (which is permeated with a mono no aware sentiment) & Ibn Arabi's barzakh (which is a philosophical solution to the problem of genidentity).
According to this reading, Love, as Jagganath Pundit realized, is in truth a Second Creation, but its God is Grief. Why? Because to fall in Love is to seek to create a World in which there is nothing but yourself and the beloved. Too late you see it is a gas-chamber to whose noxious vapors only you are immune.

Kordig proves God exists, but it turns out he's a smelly old child molester.

Deontic logic concerns itself with duties not facts. It is my duty, even if it is not a fact, to attribute to Carl Kordig the following proof that God exists but only as a smelly old child molester

My Kordig type argument goes as follows-
1) If we ought to believe that deontics isn't empty, or wholly ontologically dysphoric, it must be the case that we ought to believe that a deontically perfect being ought to exist. Why? Well, suppose the reverse. Then, either deontics is well founded (i.e. there is always a minimal duty and thus deontics is non empty) but not upwardly so or it can't be well ordered and ought to be junked straight away. What if it is not upwardly well founded? Then it cashes out as a Dialethia or Polyalethia or Anything Goes or faces a Halting problem- again, a good reason we ought to junk deontics coz it can never give us a substantive answer to even the simplest question unless, obviously, it happens to be Kleene-Brouwer well ordered (no infinite trees) in which case it could be utterly apophatic and intuitionistic  and so suddenly everybody's either got a long beard, like Brouwer, or crazy eyes, like Wittgenstein, and is starting to get smelly and it abruptly becomes (coz now Maths, i.e. Logic, i.e. Reason, is wholly outside Language) 'common knowledge' impossible to discriminate the brain dead child molester from the tortured genius who just likes beating kids coz that's proper Aryan Paideia or some other such shite.
Thus, if we really ought to believe deontics isn't wholly useless- i.e. empty- and provided we aren't, most of us, living in the wrong Universe- then we ought to believe
2) If a deontically perfect being ought to exist, then such a being can exist. Moore's paradox gives us two choices- either we can say 'we ought to believe that a deontically perfect being can exist while simultaneously knowing that nothing of the sort is the case' or else we can say 'we ought to believe that a deontically perfect being can exist and also know that this is the case'. Suppose, we choose Moore and affirm the latter.
3) Then something we know can exist is a deontically perfect being.  What? Well, a deontically perfect being cannot be a contingent being. Therefore, a deontically perfect being must necessarily exist.
4) We know smelly old child molesters exist. We ought to beat them to death so they cease to exist. If they continue to exist, then their existence is deontically necessary not contingent. Since a lot of smelly old child molesters claim either to be God or his Holy Vessel or Vassal or Vaseline or whatever, pragmatics tells us 'smelly old child molester' is a rigid designator for God since words like smelly and old and child molester are merely contingent and not descriptive at all.
Q.E.D

Rawls's Reasonableness vs Robot Rationality

Suppose there are N identical robots which can connect to M heterogenous Wireless Networks. Each robot would prefer the Network that assigns highest priority to its requests. Suppose further that the co-ordination problem for all robots is best solved if all are connected to the same Network and that the gains of co-ordination far outweigh any other consideration. Now assume 'common knowledge'.
What happens?
Presumably, ceteris paribus, in an infinite repeated game, sooner or later all robots will connect to one Network which is robustly (i.e. non-gameably) neutral re. the identity of the robot making the request.
How does the Network solve its concurrency problem in order to make this happen?- i.e. when it receives 2 or more simultaneous requests, of the same semantic class (which cashes out as cash offers), how does it decide which request to deal with first such that no bias towards a particular robot obtains?
Suppose there is an effable, white box as opposed to black box, method to do this for at least one Network. Then either there is a zero-knowledge proof of robust (i.e. non gameable) neutrality which that Network can give the robot or such isn't the case. The ability to discriminate such zero knowledge proofs would be a desirable feature for our robots. Assume they have this ability.
Now, what we have is a Network which can give a zero-knowledge proof that it solves concurrency problems in an unbiased, non-gameable and thus robustly neutral manner. But (Razborov Ruditch)  this means a proof of P=NP exists or, equivalently, pseudorandom strings can always be efficiently discriminated from truly random strings. Why? Because the string of robot requests arising from the same response to a global event will be received as truly random yet the Network can discriminate this from a pseudorandom string generated by an attempt to game it and thus violate its neutrality.

Rawls, in 'Justice as Fairness' draws a distinction between being 'reasonable' and being  'rational'. The robots aren't reasonable, they fail a Turing test but, provided there is a proof that P=NP, adhere to a Coordination Solution which is identical to the Co-operative solution for Rawls's 'reasonable' human beings.
 'Throughout I shall make a distinction between the reasonable and the rational, as I shall refer to them. These are basic and complementary ideas entering into the fundamental idea of society as a fair system of social cooperation. As applied to the simplest case, namely to persons engaged in co-
operation and situated as equals in relevant respects (or symmetrically, for short), reasonable persons are ready to propose, or to acknowledge when proposed by others, the principles needed to specify what can be seen by all as fair terms of cooperation. Reasonable persons also understand that they are to honor these principles, even at the expense of their own interests as circumstances may require, provided others likewise may be expected to honor them. It is unreasonable not to be ready to propose such principles, or not to honor fair terms of cooperation that others may reasonably be expected to accept; it is worse than unreasonable if one merely seems, or pretends, to propose or honor them but is ready to violate them to one's advantage as the occasion permits. 

'Yet while it is unreasonable, it is not, in general, not rational. For it may be that some have a superior political power or are placed in more fortunate circumstances; and though these conditions are irrelevant, let us assume, in distinguishing between the persons in question as equals, it may be rational for those so placed to take advantage of their situation. In everyday life we imply this distinction, as when we say of certain people that, given their superior bargaining position, their proposal is perfectly rational, but unreasonable all the same. Common sense views the reasonable but not, in general, the rational as a moral idea involving moral sensibility. '

Rawls says that an agent may be rational but unreasonable. Can there be a reasonable agent who is also irrational? For example, given that no rational argument obtains for assuming P=NP or that an efficient way exists to discriminate pseudorandom from random sequences or that a robustly neutral solution to Race hazard or Concurrency bias exists- could Rawls be considered reasonable for making an argument which depends crucially on assumptions such as these?
Certainly. Why not?  It may be that 'common sense' views Reason as irrational in so far as it involves a moral idea or moral 'sensibility'. If human beings are socially canalised to ontological dysphoria- i.e. to not feel at home in the world- then, it may be, Reason counsels irrationality (itself a moving target) or elite susbscription to a 'noble lie'.
But, surely, this is not Rawl's implication- he seems to be saying that Reason is a sub-set of the Rational with 'Moral Sensibility' providing the Partition. If this is not in fact, by the Maxim of Relevance, his Gricean implicature, then how is his political theory of Justice-as-Fairness different from an arbitrary theory based on some supposed 'Revealed Truth' or Supernatural Oracle or bogus Ideology like 'Post Colonial Reason'? Why would any rational person want to be Rawls reasonable?

Indeed, common sense tells us that, contra Rawls, no 'reasonable person would be ready to propose, or to acknowledge when proposed by others, the principles needed to specify what can be seen by all as fair terms of cooperation.' Why? Suppose I say to you- 'go get the pizza and I'll pick up the beer.'- and you reply- 'Cool'- is it really the case that either of us needs to specify what principle is involved so that everybody in our society can see that what we are doing is an example of fair co-operation?
Suppose a stranger who overhears our conversation says- 'Stop! It's unfair that Vivek gets to go for the beer just because he's got a bigger dick than you. Why shouldn't he go for the pizza for a change? Could you please justify the principle underlying this proposed co-operative act of yours in a manner which sets to rest my doubts as to its fairness by reason of gender bias and like Vivek just having such a huge swinging dick which is like itself unfair.'
I suppose, if we were both as reasonable as Rawls, we could spend a few months or years or decades attempting firstly to grasp what the underlying deciding principle was (hint- it's the theory of Comparative Advantage) and then to prove it was Baumol super-fair, or zero regret or whatever. We would fail because  'Fairness' is like a Wealth effect in Sonnenschein, Mantel, Debreu, i.e. not independent of the comparative statics or concurrency of the system.

Any 'political' regime (and Rawls redux is offering us only a purely Political conception of Justice) is going to display the same level of unfairness as arises out of an Economic regime purely because of concurrency problems in co-ordination games even if there is no other source of scarcity or even conflict of interest. Indeed, monarchy, oligarchy, the market, GOSPLAN etc. all reappear as concurrency solutions which fail the neutrality test. This means the Benthamite planner has a choice between devoting resources to reducing Race hazard rather than expanding the Network which is similar to the dilemma of the 'Super Intelligent Self improving Machine' approaching FOOM

Borges's Orbis Tertius vs. Dummett's Frege's

'...for Frege, several people may grasp the sense of one word or of one thought, and that just as the sense of a name denotes an object, the sense of a thought denotes a truth-value'- 

In other words,  Sense (Sinn or Acceptation) is the name Frege gives to the solution of a co-ordination problem which itself is described by the 'Reference' of the word or phrase or 'thought'- i.e. its context. If there is a canonical solution- then Sense corresponds to a 'truth value'. In other words, if you can be sure of finding the Schelling focal point without discussing it with anyone (i.e. gaming it) because there is an obvious, unique,  quick to halt algorithm you can run- then you have a proposition in a first order language of a certain type.

'What is involved in grasping a sense?'

The answer, obviously, is a zero knowledge mimetics or cheap-talk Preference Falsification. But that's not Frege’s response  which is- 'that senses are neither part of the world of spatio-temporal objects, nor do they exist inside the minds of individuals. They belong to a “third realm”, a timeless world, to which all of us have access.'

Access how? Well, d'uh, collaboratively like Borges's 'Orbis Tertius' project.  The Tlon thus collectively created is, of course, a Psychologism- which from the Evolutionary p.o.v it's useful for us to cultivate, even in hyper-mentalist, hypo-mechanist, form. In this sense, so long as one is autistic enough to reject Psychologism as Teleology, there is no ontological scandal- anymore than there is a Christological scandal in Tertullian- in Frege's, surely Game theoretic, not hyper-mentalist at all, 'third realm'.
However Dummett, Frege's greatest English language commentator,' is far from endorsing the suggestion that thoughts occupy a third realm beyond time and space. He describes this doctrine as a piece of “ontological mythology”, the term “mythology” here being used in a purely pejorative sense (Dummett, 1993a, 25). Dummett thinks that these two loose ends should be tied together. Rather than being content to describe the act of understanding as involving a mysterious connection between our minds and timeless entities known as senses, we should focus on the practice of using sentences in a language. This, in turn requires us to think about the purpose of classifying sentences as true or false, and that requires that we think about the purposes for which we use a language (Dummett, 1981a, 413). The result of this process might be to vindicate Frege’s semantics, or it might vindicate the intuitionist position. Dummett’s most influential contribution to philosophy can be understood as an attempt to resolve this unfinished business.'

In other words, here again is that paranoid and programmatic- as opposed to sane for self-sublatingly schizophrenic- 'linguistic turn' which coincided with the de-Industrialization of Higher Education and the Great Credentialist Moderation now nakedly revealed as a Ponzi scheme rendering us all asymptotically Third World.
Why? Coz everybody needing a PhD in order to understand that, like, Language speaks them- is only par for the course for discoordination game Elitism or Chauvinism but fucked for the true purpose of Higher Education-as-Paideia which is Universal and Transcendental and consists entirely of telling kids not to masturbate so much otherwise they'll go blind as opposed to just getting  more and more myopic. Mind it kindly. Aiyayo.

Envoi-               Prince! Since by hic sunt leones  the State's burgeoning is naturaliter permitted
                                Ex ungue leonem,  our I & Thou, is now  to a Third Estate demitted.

What are we entitled to say about Entitlements?

All Professors are entitled to say stupid things but how can one be sure of saying the stupidest things possible at any given time while still retaining currency as a pukka pointy headed Public Intellectual?
One answer has to do with equating essentially contested, or holophrastically indeterminate, words or concepts- like Justice, or Capabilities, or Entitlements- with mathematically rigorous Sets and then looking at situations where we can good-faith agree that elements of a certain type belong in the Set in question. Our naive intuition is that, once a sufficient sequence of such elements is admitted, then some structural feature of the Set will become evident such that all our theorems can be 'relativised' w.r.t that set and a Bernays (second order) Reflection Principle obtains such that we have an assurance that the Set as a whole will exhibit the property we have painstakingly discriminated and what's more all our Knowledge is relevant to it and every correct form of Reasoning applicable to it.

If words and concepts are essentially ontologically dysphoric- i.e. not at home in this world- and thus if the Sets that describe them bear no relation to the 'Universal Set' (V)  of all that is- no objection can be raised, other than the obvious one- viz. why pay Professors to spout Schizophrenic shite when our Lunatic Asylums supply a better product for free?
Suppose words and concepts, save when used disingenuously, aren't gaping wormholes into madness, then any Set they define must be a subset of V. However, in that case, either some Set of algorithms exist, within the Universal Set, which with provable consistency partition V so as to yield the Set you are interested in- which is impossible by Godel's second incompleteness theorem- or there is no provably consistent algorithmic method of wholly distinguishing that Set within V.
As Godel put it-

I suppose, if one still wants to gain the academic respectability of Mathematics, one could still do so by invoking Fuzzy Set theory- indeed, there are some approaches to Entitlements which do so- but, while this might be sensible- and the sort of back-room drudgery Bureaucrats ought to be doing for the good of their souls- what it isn't is Sen-tentious.

Consider the following-

Wow! So Entitlements are a Set distinguished by the property of being unknown, at any moment in time, to any living being and, what's more, unknowable tout court.
Why?
Well, 'opportunities' are what Evolution has designed us to search for on an unknown, unpredictable, fitness landscape. Similarly 'rights' are co-evolved and subject to even more uncertainty including strategic uncertainty.
As for the Law- it is scarcely static and unchanging.
In the case of the Bengal Famine, which Sen studied, it wasn't the Law 'which stood between food availability and food entitlement'. On the contrary, the elected Govt of Bengal could have implemented the Bengal Famine Code- or at least acknowledged that a Famine caused by food availability deficit existed instead of pretending them evil Hindu Money-lenders were hoarding all the food.
Sen's hilarious theory is that workers in the Cities were so gluttonous and callous that they ate 5 times as much rice as previously and stood around with jutting bellies sneering at their own brothers and cousins from the countryside who had come staggering into Calcutta only to collapse and die in the streets.
Yes, there was an Entitlements type failure- it became impossible to sell or mortgage land while the Japs (aided and abetted by Subash Chandra Bose's Indian National Army) were at the door- and, no question, the Army and the Administration worsened things initially, till an Army man became Viceroy- but that wasn't the root of the problem.
The fact is, in a rain fed Agricultural economy (as opposed to a 'no escape' zone of fertility) , Entitlements create Famines.
Why?
Well, the evolutionary stable strategy- absent belief in Entitlements- is to have highly diversified food resources and also to maintain mobility. Thus if one or two or three food sources collapse, agents can still survive or walk away. Should land become scarce- head hunting is a good Zahavi type signal.
The alternative- viz. producing a surplus to support a class of fungible asset producers- depends crucially on the notion of Entitlement- legal, contractual, theological, moral or what have you.
The Law guarantees that food availability deficit will translate into food entitlement collapse. Why? It fools people into investing in, if not an otological dysphoric, then a wholly naked Ponzi scheme rather than, as Evolution dictates,  making a Career Move into Head Hunting.
Like Charu Mazumdar, Kanu Sanyal, Jangal Santhal et al.

Sankaracharya vs Sai Baba

As a Smarta follower of Sankaracharya, should I suffer the installation of an image or icon of Shirdi's Sai Baba in my family 'Puja' room or, more importantly, in the grand temple I have promised to build utilising the proceeds of your kind donations which I hereby solicit?

H.H., the 90 year old, Sankaracharya of Dwarka, who endeared himself to us by delivering a powerful slap to a too well-spoken reporter a few months ago, says- 'No. Sai Baba's mantra was 'Allah Malik'. He was probably a Muslim fakir and ate meat in his youth. Hindus should not worship him.'

This is a perfectly reasonable argument with some alethic or descriptive force. What it isn't, what it can't be, is doxastic or prescriptive.

Why? Adi Sankara broke the rules of Smarta orthodoxy by conducting his mother's obsequies despite having previously renounced the World. Without question, he and his lineage are authoritative (Acharyas) with respect not to Vyavaharika Dharma but its transgressive sublation.

What we have here is the Hindu version of an halachic ordinance- but one that is impredicatively 'halachah v'ien morin kein'.

Slapping reporters is contrary to our Secular Scientific Sittlichkeit, but I'd love to have been that reporter because News is shite, all Views are shite, only that cow is holy whose tail doth at us gadflies deliver a slap that's tight.
In this sense, there is nothing here to drive the news-cycle re. some supposed Sankaracharya vs Sai Baba mega-smackdown pitting trident wielding, cannabis smoking, Congress supporting, naga sadhus (naked monks) against deeply petit bourgeois voters for Modi or saffronized votaries of Uma Bharti.
Indeed, though Sai's deepest devotees at Shirdi saw that donations went up not down because of the Sankaracharya's seemingly senile provocations, they nonetheless, and not from a mere motive of patriotism, decided to just ignore him henceforth.
The Sankaracharya, too, in his reply to Uma Bharti, strikes, not a martial strain, but piteous chord whining about how like Sadguru Adi Sankaracharya don't got no Temples though them Swaminarayans' got plenty and what's more middle class cunts, like the worthless N.R. Iyer writing this, prefer to go to them hyper-clean and family friendly places and put their little pittance into Dualism's hundi coz to quote a Malyallee Christian poet- 'In the heart's collection-box, 'twas Thou dropped the button/We count sheep waking, thus dine not on mutton'.
Sankara, who refers to himself as 'thy Tamil child', is of course- for what is 'of course' is merely autumnal- only capable of creation by being joined to Sharada- thy studious dawn, my drunken dusk- and though the heart is but a tear ripened fruit, we faster yet circumnavigate its route, so thy infinite alterity, Ganesha, elder brother- keep safe our sleep twixt Father & Mother.

Anyway, now I've had my say on the topic of the day as indeed is meet coz, at least, on this street, I'm a leading Hindutva blogger- which is why all the Hindus round here have converted to Islam so as to prevent my drunkenly dropping in on them and trying to shuddify their aged grand-mothers with Ganga Jal & Glenfiddich- which would be cool except them old broads go easy on the Ganga Jal and, ever since the London riots led to the strict enforcement of licensing laws, getting after-hours Whiskey delivered is now as expensive in Acton as it has always been in Ahmedabad- & anyway, the point I'm getting at is that I am now, at least within this parish, the peerless Pundit of anti Muslim polemics, the sole Sanakaracharya of Seriously Sandeep type anti-'Sickular' Scription, not to say Fulham's foulest fuckwit & West Brompton's biggest bore.

Aumann agreement and Arjuna's Vishada

The Bhagvad Gita tackles Arjuna's Vishada (Depression) which arises when he realizes that by doing his duty as a warrior in the Kurukshetra War he will have ended up bringing about the worst possible outcome for all sides- including his own.
Previously, a Gandharva (demi-god) had granted Arjuna the gift of' 'chaksushi vidya' such that Arjuna could always visualize whatever he wanted to know, that too in the manner he wished to visualize it.

"The Gandharva said 'O Arjuna, I would like to impart to thee the power of (producing) illusions which Gandharvas alone have... This science is called Chakshushi. It was communicated by Manu unto Soma and by Soma unto Viswavasu, and lastly by Viswavasu unto me. Communicated by my preceptor, that science, having come unto me who am without energy, is gradually becoming fruitless. I have spoken to thee about its origin and transmission. Listen now to its power!rly One may see (by its aid) whatever one wisheth to see, and in whatever way he liketh (generally or particularly). One can acquire this science only after standing on one leg for six months. I shall however, communicate to thee this science without thyself being obliged to observe any rigid vow. O king, it is for this knowledge that we are superior to men. And as we are capable of seeing everything by spiritual sight, we are equal to the gods.'

Unlike Yuddhishtra, whose Vishada was only dispelled by having to learn Statistics and mathematical Game theory, Arjuna just gets, by 'moral luck', the equivalent of a perfect information, Bayesian predictor for everything. What's more, it has a neat little g.u.i such that it can show its results as a perfect simulation of a real world video, or even a Supernatural video, where Gods or Abstractions or  'Emergents' do the Narration, which is super-cool.

What has this to do with Aumann's agreement theorem? (which states that two people acting rationally (in a certain precise sense) and with common knowledge of each other's beliefs cannot agree to disagree. More specifically, if two people are genuine Bayesian rationalists with common priors, and if they each have common knowledge of their individual posteriors, then their posteriors must be equal.<sup>[1] Ziv Hellman has recently extended this result.)

Well, the Gita looks forward to a piquant situation where Arjuna fights his eldest brother, Karna, and slays him under the influence of 'Manyu' (dark anger).  Karna knows that if he reveals his birth, then Arjuna won't fight him and there will be no War. But Karna wants the War to go ahead- the condition for it is that 'common knowledge' is blocked by Karna's desire that his paternity remain unknown. It may be that Arjuna, who wants to obey his eldest brother, is constrained in some magical way by this wish of Karna. However, Arjuna- as is quite natural- does want to know the outcome of the War and immediately gets a vision of the horror and destruction and futility of it all. He still doesn't see the worst aspect of it for him personally- which is that he kills Karna in a mood of dark fury, exulting in revenge, and thus violates his own Dharma by committing the moral equivalent of parricide- but, perhaps, he doesn't want to see this because what he wants is already determined by Karna's desire that his paternity remain a secret and the War proceed as a great sacrifice by which warriors gain Heaven.

Interestingly, the Gita would still have the outcome if Arjuna had no special feeling of filial piety.Suppose Arjuna and Karna were not younger and older brother but two independent scholars of equal stature. Suppose both want 'common knowledge' except if at some later point they might regret it. Suppose, further that they each receive Arjuna's chaksushi vidya so they have zero computational or informational constraints. In that case, 'regret minimization' or 'Hannan consistency' militates for not Aumann agreement but disagreement iff the multiplicative weights index algorithm is efficient. Another way of saying the same thing is- Life is what makes the price of anarchy negative- or, as Heraclitus put it, Gods and Men die each others lives, live each others deaths.</sup>

Reading this interview with Hannan, what astonished me was how far ahead the Indians (mainly Bengalis and Maharashtrians) were in Statistics some seventy years ago. But, truth be told, there was nothing surprising at all about this.
The Indian clerisy- Revenue officials in the main- were doing boring Statistical Decision theory most of the time though, no doubt, with a bit of ars dictaminis Sycophancy as the cherry on top.

Thus, the traditional Indian reading of the Gita was always, au fond, Decision Theory based. It's basic finding- viz. Prescriptivity is vector not scalar- agree to disagree and then try to kill each other but stop short of complete genocide so some diversity at the margin is retained- is pretty much what Nature- the chrematistic aspect of Life- keeps telling us.

Since Hannan's result was known to the Indian Math/Stats community some sixty or seventy years ago and since, furthermore, Game theory was going from strength to strength over the same period, how come Maharashtrian Statisticians, like Kosambi, and Bengali Academics, like Amartya Sen, write utter shite about the Gita?

Well, clearly, it's because they are smarter than you and me- 'drunkards, fools and fishermen' that we are- because, though the Mahabharata was written for us, only the savants are blinded by it and proceed to enact their genocidal illusory wars coz Aumann agreement actually means not that you can't agree to disagree but that everybody has to just go on shitting all over everybody else lest, by some mischance, whatever strain of bacteria it is that makes our own farts pleasant to only our own nostrils go entirely extinct and it is to that great end that Poetry as Socioproctology too is a true emanation of the Blessed Gita.

Bilgrami's Evil Enchantment.

Akeel Bilgrami believes that Gandhi was an erudite philosopher rebelling against some terrible metaphysical atrocity that occurred in the Seventeenth Century which involved killing off 'Enchantment'- i.e. fairies and elves and hobbits- and turning Mother Nature into an ugly quarry or all polluting iron-works for evil Orcs laboring under the blazing eye of Sauron who had somehow managed to unite all the multitudinous forces of Darkness under his sole command.

Bilgrami believes that Pantheists protested against Sauron but were mercilessly crushed. Perhaps, if he were writing about Islamic history, he would equate the Zanj rebellion (whose leader, though claiming to be a Syed, had an Indian slave in his maternal lineage) with a similar Pantheistic protest against Puritanical Plutocratic Capitalism. However, the crushing of the Zanj rebellion did not involve a Sauron who co-ordinated Capital, Religion and Science in such a manner that they turned into an evil 'thick' concept of Scientific Rationality which went on to rule the World and systematically exterminate fairies and elves and hobbits and everybody just worshiping trees and peacefully having orgies under the Midsummer Moon and other such hippy shite.
Why did Seventeenth Century succeed in yielding all power to Sauron while Ninth Century Iraq failed to achieve the same thing? The answer, judging by the evidence Bilgrami provides, is that Ninth Century Iraq did not have the Printing Press and so all manners of Pantheistic nutjobs- Ranters, Diggers, Quakers, Levellers, Anabaptists, Monetarists etc- did not get to circulate their silly pamphlets. True, they were crushed, just as the Zanj rebellion was crushed, but they were not exterminated and continued their corporate existence and textual availability cascades and preference falsification hypocricy down to our own day. Gandhi, according to Bilgrami, was part of this long running tradition of stupidity but for the shrill existence of which Sauron doesn't get hegemony and the ability to enforce 'thick' scientific rationality which is like totally evil and genocidal and not at all nice.
So there we have it. For Evil to triumph- i.e. for 'thick' Scientific Rationality to become hegemonic and make fun of Pantheism's pee-pee- it is both necessary and sufficient that Gandhian shite is endlessly spouted. Suppose Gandhian shite isn't spouted or its spouting is ended by killing those who spout it then Sauron doesn't get the Magic Ring which enables the unification of Capitalism and Science and Metaphysics and Ethics and dunno other such shite such that the entire planet is laid waste and no blade of grass is spared by Mammon's maw.
Bilgrami writes - 'Were we to apply the thin conception of “scientific” and “rationality” (the one that I imagine most of us in this room embrace), the plain fact is that nobody in that period was, in any case, getting prizes for leaving God out of the world-view of science. That one should think of God as voluntaristically affecting nature from the outside (as the Newtonians did) rather than sacralizing it from within (as the freethinkers insisted), was not in any way to improve on the science involved.
'Both views were therefore just as “unscientific,” just as much in violation of scientific rationality, in the “thin” sense of that term that we would now take for granted. What was in dispute had nothing to do with science or rationality in that attenuated sense at all. What the early dissenting tradition as well as Gandhi were opposed to is the metaphysical orthodoxy that grew around Newtonian science and its implications for broader issues of culture and politics. This orthodoxy with all of its implications is what has now come to be called “scientific rationality” in the “thick” sense of that term and in the pervasive cheerleading about “the West" and the Enlightenment'.'

So, kids, what have we learned in School today? Bilgrami admits that Pantheistic shite is shite. He doesn't say- 'if stupid Lefty nutjobs stop spouting holier-than-thou Pantheistic shite then there would be no market for 'thick' Scientific rationality and endless triumphalist cheerleading for 'Western Enlightenment' values and that would be a good thing coz Sauron would be foiled in his quest for the Magic Ring'. He doesn't need to say it. That's the only possible take-away point from his lecture. Unless you really believe there are fairies at the bottom of your garden. In which case, lay in a couple of six-packs and get busy with the weed whacker.

This follows if you believe, as Bilgrami does, that Spinoza was right when he said you can't predict and intend to do something at the same time- i.e. if you intend to do something it can't be because you predict it is what you want to get done. Hence, if your are an Ethical Consequentialist or Epistemological Instrumentalist, you can't intend to do anything at all- unless you are stupid and don't get Spinoza though you intend to get Spinoza and haven't predicted that you won't coz Spinoza is stupid and so are you and there is nothing to get anyway. But this also means there really are fairies at the bottom of the garden whom you are currently killing with your weed whacker while drunk off your head on Special Brew. This is because there is a predictive element in visual and all other perception. But, since you can never intend to see what you predict you will actually see, the fact that you don't see you are in the garden killing fairies proves that you can't have the intention of not killing fairies at this very moment.
 Predictions can be falsified, not so intentions. We can imagine a situation where you can intend to have your predictions falsified in a systematic way. Perhaps not seeing you are killing fairies when you intend to do so and are doing so is good strategy on your part. Ergo you can't prove you aren't killing fairies if and only if you don't see that you are killing fairies.
Bilgrami wants us to see that the World may be value laden. This is the phenomenological project which features such egregious shite as Hegel's refutation of Newton and Goethe or Schopenhauer's theory of Color and Malfatti's crazy Tantric nonsense and so on down to Weber's silly ideas about Capitalism and Protestantism and Husserl's wasting his time on Phenomenology and Heidegger's worthless rubbish and so on and so forth.
Bilgrami doesn't get that Gandhi fucked up big time with his Khadi (his chakri added negative value to cotton) and Basic Education (Zakir Hussain ultimately called it a fraud) and other such fuckwittery.
Kenneth Boulding, a Quaker and Environmentalist avant la lettre but also a great Economist, has written about why Gandhians fucked up. It was because they were as stupid as shit and refused to use their brains. Screw Scientific Rationality. Common sense tells us that prediction and intention are inextricably intertwined. But this means when you see that stuff aint panning out as you intended you stop doing what you're doing and try to think of a better solution.  Scratch that. Don't try to think of a better solution. Ask around till you find a guy who HAS a better solution. Copy him.
The alternative is killing fairies.
To see why consider Bilgrami's rejection of Economics on the basis that it doesn't permit a 'secular enchantment' of the world such that if you see a glass of water you don't think of the opportunity cost of your drinking the water but rather ask yourself- whom does that glass of water want to be drunk by?- and then go out on a mystic quest to hunt down that suffering Grail-King because only in this way can you end your own 'alienation'.
That way all the water gets spilled and you lose your job as a waiter at the Tandoori Restaurant coz the customer choked to death on his onion bhaji when you snatched away his water and so your kids back home starve to death and as for them fairies they all just laughed themselves to death at the spectacle of your stupidity.

Bilgrami thinks Gandhian politics in pre-Independence India was made possible because Indians were stupid and believed in fairies. He is wrong. Gandhi got money off the Hindus and Jains and Khojas and Memons and other such business castes. They got a 'reputational' benefit from such largesse as did lawyers who signed up with Gandhi. In the short run, some weavers did get a bit of money out of it and, ultimately, secured their main goal which was to get a quota of mill-spun (NOT HAND SPUN) yarn. Still, the Gandhian interlude meant a lot of weavers starved to death and the industry as a whole was de-skilled. Capitalist methods have revived some sectors. Gandhi himself wanted to boycott the one prosperous section of weavers because they were doing well by supplying the luxury market.
The reason the 'Untouchables' are so angry with Gandhi is that his ideas fucked them up big time. They now shrilly campaign for compulsory English medium Govt. schools. They have even declared English a Goddess and worship a statue of Macaulay!
 Scientific rationality says all human beings have evolved such that there is territory specific canalization of Cognitive and Perceptual faculties.
Bilgrami type shite says that fairies are a persecuted minority or silently suffering subaltern majority whose cause only Ivy League Professors of Philosophy can legitimately champion. But, this is killing fairies with a vengeance because only kids can see fairies and a Credentialized 'Liberal Arts' Education System,  the apex of which pyramid Bilgrami occupies, is itself the blazing eye of Sauron which destroys all that is enchanting about this our, albeit ontologically dysphoric, World.
For which, needless to say, I blame David Cameron. That boy aint right.

Bilgrami's Gandhi- 1

Prof. Akeel Bilgrami, a nice guy- not obviously a witless careerist- has some extraordinarily foolish things to say about Gandhi. So what? So does Prof. Sorabji- an all round good egg. Surely, writing foolish things about Gandhi is what Indian origin Philosophers are supposed to do?

My contention- and, sure, I admit it is a scandalous one- is, NO, nice guys needn't write shite even if it's about Gandhi.  Omitting to publish one's quota of shite every other year won't directly result in Modi becoming P.M.

Writing non-shite, at least for an Ivy League Prof who has the ear of Rahul's elite buddies,  could however, at the margin, have helped the 'Secular' forces (by definition, anti-Modi) put up a better show in the recent elections. If nothing else, it might have given Modi an excuse to cull some of the more repellent senile shitheads in his own party- like the 84 year old Home Minister of Madhya Pradesh, Babulal Gaur Yadav, who reckons rapes are okay provided the rapist is a Yadav but a bad thing if the reverse is the case.

In what follows, I'll be quoting Bilgrami's Essay on Gandhi from his Columbia Uni. Webpage. My remarks are in bold.

Bilgrami's Thesis
1) Gandhi held a consistent but highly unusual philosophical position. 
'Universalizability suggests merely that if someone in particular holds a moral value, then he must think that it applies to all others (in relevantly similar situations).'
Bilgrami is wrong. A moral value can militate for a 'mixed strategy'- i.e. one with a stochastic component- which can't be simply dominated. Thus a man who abhors gambling may still permit a contentious zero-sum issue to be decided by a coin toss. Yuddhishtra was a moral man. If some people in his kingdom MUST be slaves why should he and his kin themselves become slaves by virtue of a coin toss? It's a perfectly plausible Rawlsian, or 'overlapping consensus' solution IFF Econ 101 in the original position tells you that some necessary Public Good only becomes available if some people are slaves. Otherwise the species goes extinct.
As a matter of fact, in the Mahabharata, the Just King, to overcome his vishada or harmatia, has to learn both Game theory (in the Nala episode) as well as the wisdom of the low-caste butcher (the Vyadha Gita) which shows that perfect felicity in this world and the next is attained by ignoring Kings and Priests and just taking your own elderly parents as your Gods. Notice, the Vyadha's ethic is universalizable; yet entails no obligation to go around making a nuisance of yourself lecturing all and sundry on their moral shortcomings and ignorance of the Chandogya's highest truth which is known equally to the carter and Krishna Devakiputra neither of whom go in for pi-jaw.
2) Philosophers aren't stupid and Gandhi was a philosopher
 Yet despite the fact that it is much weaker than universality in this sense, it still generates the critical power that Gandhi finds disquieting. If moral judgements are universalizable,  one cannot make a judgement that something is morally worthy and then shrug off the fact that others similarly situated might not  think so. They (unlike those who might differ with one on the flavour of ice cream) must be deemed wrong not to think so.
Why? All we can say about them is that they have a different Vyavahara/Jati dharma/Verstehen than we do. Since Gandhi claimed to have read the Gita- indeed, he claimed to understand it better than anyone else- why should we assume he hadn't read its dual, the Vyadha Gita? Furthermore, Gandhi learned a little Jainism from his greatest supporter's brother-in-law. Where is the scandal for Anekantavada in what Bilgrami is saying? Indeed, there is no scandal for European thought here either.  No doubt there is some narrow textual availability cascade in the Academy that pretends otherwise- but it is fuckwitted merely and has had zero impact on anyone whether Western of Eastern or whatever.
3) Gandhi was a hermeneut of traditions he was entirely ignorant of.
Gandhi repudiates this entire tradition. His integrating thought is that violence owes to something as seemingly remote from it as this assumed theoretical connection between values and criticism.
Gandhi was blissfully unaware of any such tradition. People would tell him about it and he'd basically tell them to fuck off in a polite way while underlining his firm conviction that everybody else was a moral worm or eunuch and he alone was worthy of worship. Why did Gandhi do that? The answer is because that's what guys who run expensive Ashrams with other people's money do if they want to be successful and get to sleep naked with young girls.
Take the Maharishi, instead of saying 'ply chakri and Universal Peace will reign' he said 'Do Yogic Levitation and then Universal Peace will reign'. Still, Mia Farrow wouldn't sleep with him. The Beatles wrote 'Sexy Sadie' to commemorate this terrible crime which the Materialistic West inflicted on the Spiritual East.
4) Shite gobshites write can cause violence even without the instrumentality of a sociopath
Take the wrong view of moral value and judgement, and you will inevitably encourage violence in society. There is no other way to understand his insistence that the satyagrahi has not eschewed violence until he has removed criticism from his lips and heart and mind.
Urm...not just satyagrahis, every one who knew him well,  was constantly tempted to criticise Gandhi for sleeping with naked chicks and making his wife cook mutton chops for Maulana Azad and fucking up the Independence Movement, the Khadi Movement, the Basic Education scheme and anything else he stuck his oar into. Telling his wife she was guilty of 'himsa' (violence) if she didn't cook mutton chops (coz Azad really liked them and was a total fuck-wit of Gandhian proportions who had dreamed of becoming the Imam ul Hind and buggering with all them smart Aligarh M.U. types) was par for the course.  
Gandhi, himself, of course, criticised everybody and anybody unless they got stroppy and made him stop. That's just standard operating procedure for charismatic fuckwits running a Credentialized Ponzi scheme is all.
5) My name is Bilgrami and I'm an Indian Muslim and can't reason for shit. Watch Slumdog why don't you?
But there is an interpretative challenge hidden here. If the idea of a  moral value or judgement has no implication that one find those who disagree with one's moral judgements, to be wrong, then that
suggests that one's moral choices and moral values are rather like one's choice of a flavour of ice cream, rather like one's judgements of taste. In other words, the worry is that these Gandhian ideas
suggest that one need not find one's moral choices and the values they reflect relevant to others at all, that one's moral thinking is closed off from others. But Gandhi was avowedly a humanist, and repeatedly said things reminiscent of humanist slogans along the order of 'Nothing human is alien to me'. Far from encouraging self-enclosed moral subjects, he thought it the essence of a moral
attitude that it take in all within its concern and its relevance.
A guy running a Ponzi scheme has an interest in broadening the base of his pyramid to cover not just all sentient beings but imaginary ones too.
Now, it is true that there is a Jain Gandhism- originating with Dr. Pranjivan Mehta and Raichandhbhai and very effectively developed in vernacular languages like Gujerati and Hindi (see for e.g. H.H. Amar Muni Upadhyay of Veerayatan fame) but it is based on a monadology which is 'self-enclosed' and which rejects the notion that one substance (dhravya) can, for woe or weal, operate directly on another. However, this is a dynamic conception- i.e. a field theory- and features fuzzy logic and other such high I.Q stuff- so forget I mentioned it okay? 
How, then, to reconcile the rejection of universalizability and of a value's potential for being wielded in criticism of others with this yearning for the significance of one's choices to others? That is among the hardest questions in understanding the philosophy behind his politics, and there are some very original and striking remarks in his writing which hint at a reconciliation.
Name one. Go on. I dare ya.
So far, I have presented the challenge of providing such reconciliation as a philosophically motivated task.
Why? Gandhi was a stupid guy. He passed the University entrance exam, but realised he'd gotten as far as he could and, sensibly, never pretended otherwise- at least to himself.
But it is more than that. It is part of the 'integrity' that I am pursuing in my interpretation of Gandhi that it also had a practical urgency in the political and cultural circumstances in which he found himself.
We know very well that it was close to this man's heart to improve India in two ways which, on the face of it, were pointing in somewhat opposite directions. On the one hand there was the violence of religious intolerance, found most vividly in the relations between Hindus and Muslims. This especially wounded him. Religious intolerance is the attitude that the other must not  remain other, he must become like one in belief and in way of life. It is an inclusionary, homogenizing attitude, usually pursued with  physical and psychological violence toward the other.
Right! Jinnah was constantly trying to get Hindus to convert to Islam wasn't he? Liaqat actually did convert one person- his second wife, but she was Xtian to start of with and, come to think of it, she converted voluntarily. Under Muslim Law, Liaqat could have kept an Xtian wife. 
Who else? Savarkar was constantly badgering everyone to like get with the program and worship a cow already. Same was true of Bal, Pal and Lal.
Are you fucking kidding me? The whole point about Ashraf Muslims like Bilgrami is they didn't want their Kayastha clerks or Bania agents to convert to Islam and then start inviting themselves around on the excuse of Eid or whatever.  If nothing else, it would damage their efficiency.
Similarly, no Iyer has ever tried to convert a Muslim. Them guys are way smarter than us Smarthas.  The last Tamil Avadhani was a Muslim. As for Sanskrit- don't even start.
As a particularly vicious Hindutva nutjob myself, suppose I have a chance to slip A.R. Rehman a mind-altering drug and then to 'shuddify' him- i.e. reconvert him to Hinduism. Would I do it? Fuck no! The Tamil film (music) industry was a sewer of drugs and drink and dishonourable conduct to women. God bless the Pir who- WITH NO INTENTION TO CONVERT- helped the family when the father was dying in hospital. Thank God, the young genius took shelter in Islam! That way he could refuse drink or drugs on the grounds of Religion. Had he remained a Hindu, those bastards would have forced him because- don't you know?- Hinduism is very evil and the best way to escape its to get drunk and rape some girls belonging to a lower caste.
Modi has been in power for 12 years in Gujerat. Show me the Muslims he has converted even from his own 'Ghanchi' caste (for example those in Godhra). 

Ethnic monopoly and/or cleansing is a different kettle of fish. Partition wasn't about converting people- it was about coveting their possessions and perquisites of office and then conducting a cull. Still, it is noteworthy, Pakistan banned the exodus of 'bhangis'- i.e. the guys who did the dirty jobs- while, Paul Brass tells us, the Jat Sikhs deliberately cleansed their own Muslim 'service castes' so as to create space for Mazhabi Sikhs. (I don't personally believe this story- but a 'Secularist' like Bilgrami is bound to pay lip service to it.)
On the other hand, for all his traditionalism about caste, there was something offensive to Gandhi within Hinduism itself.
Yes. It was the notion that he himself wasn't educated enough in it to claim a scholarly or clerical title.
The social psychology of the Hindu caste system consists of an exclusionary attitude.
Unlike the non-Hindu caste system.
For each caste, there was a lower caste which constituted the other and which was to be excluded from one's way of life, again by the most brutal physical and psychological violence.
Is this true? Let us look at Dr. Ambedkar's biography.  Parsis beat him and throw him out of their lodge. Muslims deny him water. A low caste Hindu 'banjara' won't carry him to his destination- even though he's just a child and well educated and affluent.
By contrast, his teacher is a Brahmin who delights in him and gives him his own surname- which is why Gandhi thought him to be some over-educated Westernised Brahmin who didn't really understand the 'Harijans' and thus was heating his brain for no reason- and, later on, his second wife- a Medical Doctor whom he married to care for him because he was diabetic- was also a Brahmin. She was ostracized and accused of having poisoned him after his death by his own son.  Yet, right from the start, the educated Mahar (thanks to the British Indian Army) was a significant threat to the Maharashtrian Brahmin. 
Yet it is from that equally martial community that he received most support. Hegdewar and Gowalkar loved him. He himself appreciated the R.S.S for its anti-caste attitude. That's why, later on, people like Barrister Khobragade had no compunction in allying with the BJP or Shiv Sena even though it wounded the hearts of LSE fuckwits like me.
Why? What was the reason?
The Chitpavan, who were getting demoralized and sinking as a community, knew that the Mahars were a heroic people like themselves.  
Dr. Moonjee volunteered to serve during the Boer War, as did Gandhi, so as to learn Military tactics. Any future Indian Army which neglected the Mahars' martial prowess- their sheer courage and intelligence and long tradition of uprightness and pietistic 'Bhakti' religion- would be bound to fail.  The great qualities of this 'caste' are visible to all- then and now. But, I can multiply instances.  Look at the Balmik caste, the Jatavs, or (for Tamils) the Valluvars who technically are 'Pariahs'. Can you imagine Tamil without Tiruvalluvar? Hinduism without Valmiki? A.K Ramanujan tried but he also told us his grandmother enjoyed being taken from behind by underemployed fishermen, but only with the fell purpose of using her vagina dentata (I'm not making this up) to bite off their low caste dicks.

Army discipline requires that the 'high born' show 100 per cent obedience to the orders of his 'low born' superior. Nothing else will do.  This is the basis of the R.S.S ethos and the real reason people like me used to hate them. Don't get me wrong. I love the Indian Army- but only coz their officers looked so smart and their lovely wives and daughters spoke such beautiful English.
Now, because my 'posh' English accent (hey! I went to St. Columba's!) is starting to fray,  and I can't understand Rahul Baba's English (he did spend a little time at St.Columba's but then Harvard got hold of him) and have to settle for Modi's Hindi- what? I'm a fucking Madrasi!- all bets are off. Let the Indian Army promote according to Merit. Let English die in India. But fucking fix it so children don't get raped!
Sorry, for that outburst. I'm truly shit, I am. Senile fucking debility, mate. 
Anyroad...
Returning to Bilgrami's thesis, there may well be 'alterity' here. But it is an alterity which cries out for an, I will not say Levinasian, but 'Mussar' response such that 'the spiritual needs of the other are my material needs'. If Acharya Kosambi, a Brahmin, and Babasaheb Ambedkar, a Mahar, both embrace Buddhism- where is the problem for the 'Caste' Hindu?
Are we so fucking stupid that we prefer to be ruled over by Mlecchas just so as to preserve our 'Smarta Vicharams' and plague afflicted 'Agraharams'? 
Bilgrami, as a deracinated emigre, may believe Gandhi's return to India marked something genuinely new. It didn't. If Khilafat was a success- was it because of Gandhi? As for Hindu 'Anushilan' or 'Jugantar' type radicalism- Gandhi was no where in the picture.
As a prematurely senile but active man, no doubt, he provided a cover for those- like Birla- who needed to retreat from Revolutionary politics. He was the provider of a 'Good Conduct' certificate which kept you out of the clutches of blackmailers and police-spies while also granting you a sort of post-obit on the resources of the dying Raj.
When I think sometimes about caste in India --without a doubt the most resilient form of exclusionary social inegalitarianism in the history of the world-- it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that even
the most alarming aspects of religious intolerance is preferable to it. To say, "You must be my brother", however wrong, is better than saying, "You will never be my brother." In religious intolerance there is at least a small core that is highly attractive.
Bilgrami Sahib, you must know the expression 'sag bash birader-e-khurd na bash' (better a dog than an younger brother). Is that not what has happened in the Indian subcontinent? 'You must be my brother' means- 'you must be my younger brother and let me shit in your mouth.'
You may find this 'small core' in Religious intolerance highly attractive. Why? Believe me, the stuff they are serving you isn't goulash- it's shit. I found out the hard way.
The intolerant person cares enough about the truth as he sees it, to want to share it with others.
Why, Bilgrami Sahib, why? What you describe is a strategy that is easily dominated if the other has an equal endowment of knowledge and/or reasoning power. Even if he doesn't, still, the optimal strategy is to only grant the privilege of being witnesses to your truth to those who immediately die for it- i.e. martyrs or shaheeds.  
Of course, that he should want to use force and violence in order to make the other share in it, spoils
what is attractive about this core. No need to do so. Just pretend that the truth is esoteric or requires some long praxis of unquestioning obedience. If you are speaking of 'cognitive dissonance reduction'- just pretend to be a bien pensant humanist till some over-educated shithead from somewhere else turns up to sit at your feet. It was Gandhi's humanistic  mission to retain the core for it showed that one's conception of the truth was not self-enclosed, that it spoke with a relevance to all others, even others who differed from one. How to prevent this relevance to others from degenerating into criticism of others who differed from one and eventually violence towards them, is just the reconciliation we are seeking.
O...kay. You're about to say something real interesting, right? After all, you're one smart dude and, more to the point, belong to the Bilgrami khandan.
In the philosophical tradition Gandhi is opposing, others are potential objects of criticism in the sense that one's particular choices, one's acts of moral conscience, generate moral principles or imperatives, which others can potentially disobey. For him, conscience and its deliverances, though relevant to others, are not the wellspring of principles. Morals is only about conscience, not at all about principles.
There is an amusing story about two Oxford Philosophers, which makes this distinction vivid. In a seminar, the formidable J. L Austin having become exasperated with Richard Hare's huffing on about how moral choices reveal principles, decided to set him up with a question. "Hare", he asked, "if a student came to you after an examination and offered you five pounds in return for the mark alpha, what would you say?" Predictably, Hare replied, "I would tell him that I do not take bribes, on principle!" Austin's acid response was, "Really? I think I would myself say, 'No Thanks.' " Austin was being merely deflationary in denying that an act of conscience had to have a principle underlying it. Gandhi erects the denial into a radical alternative to a (western) tradition of moral thinking. An honoured slogan of that tradition says, "When one chooses for oneself, one chooses for everyone". The first half of the slogan describes a particular person's act of conscience. The second half of the slogan transforms the act of conscience to a universalized principle, an imperative that others must follow or be criticized. Gandhi embraces the slogan too, but he understands the second half of it differently. He too wants one's acts of conscience to have a universal relevance, so he too thinks one chooses for everyone, but he does not see that as meaning that one generates a principle or imperative for everyone. What other interpretation can be given to the words "One chooses for everyone" in the slogan, except the principled one?
WTF! That's your apercu culled from decades and decades of elitist Anglo education? Austin was clearly wrong. He said 'No thanks'- which means the other guy has to offer him more money or a beating or a buggering or whatever. The point about deontics is that it solves a co-ordination problem. It is Eusocial. Austin should have punched the student. A punch has illocutionary force. A.J Ayer once argued Mike Tyson out of raping some hot chick. How? Flattery and nimble footwork. Language is strategic or not at all. 
Gandhi was too making a privileged claim re. his Conscience. It was the voice of God. Marie Stokes heard the Voice of God in 'a dark yew wood' and it is to her we have all harkened. Flaubert spoke of Art as being the Soul's condom in this brothel of a World; Bilgrami spouting Gandhian shite too is a prophylactic but not for the Soul, no, rather for a burnt out Careerism which now must take recourse to the dirtiest sort of Senile, Syphilitic, gesture politics.