Abihu and Nabadh, the two eldest sons of Aaron, the brother of Moses, offered an improper sacrifice to the Lord and were themselves consumed in the flame. They left no offspring.
Pinchas was a grandson of Aaron, but he was not a 'Kohain' (part of the hereditary priesthood, because his father was elevated to the Priesthood after he was born). However, he was raised to the Priesthood by the Lord after he killed Prince Zimri who was co-habiting with the beautiful Kosbi.
Pinchas' action was correct because the Lord approved it even though the Law did not. In other words, by reading the Bible we know that it is algorithmically verifiable that Pinchas acted correctly- because that is what the Text says- yet his action is not algorithmically computable by the Laws revealed in that same text- i.e. there is no process of halachic reasoning that can arrive at the same conclusion.
Thus, at least on one interpretation, it is a paradoxical sort of action- a halachah vein morin kein- a teaching which, if known, prohibits the very action it would otherwise enjoin.
When Pinchas realized the terrible nature of what he had done, according to a mystical interpretation of the Bible, his soul fled him in fear. The Lord then caused the ibbur (entry into his body) of the souls of Nabadh and Abihu who thus became the spiritual progenitors of the Kohain- or Cohens.
Interestingly Pinchas is said to lose this ibbur at a later time for somehow failing to avert the tragedy of Jephthah sacrificing his own daughter as a holocaust to the Lord as a result of a rash vow. In other words, the Hassidic commentators are making clear that Jephthah's fire sacrifice was not legitimate or ordained by God, just as Abihu and Nabadh had made an improper sacrifice.
The interpretation given by the Zohar, or other mystical sources, may seem bizarre or superstitious to a lot of ordinary Christian people. However there can be no doubt as to the humane message of the Rabbis which we can summarize thus
1) Yes, Abihu and Nabadh did something improper from the ritual point of view. Maybe they'd had too much wine. But their intentions were good and so though they perished in the flesh yet the Lord's mercy was upon their Spirit. They could still serve the Lord- which was their only desire.
Thus, on this interpretation, from the Spiritual point of view, the Cohens- who are their descendants in the direct male line- need not fear that the Lord will judge them too harshly for some small ritual mistake or over hasty halachic decision- i.e. there is no grounds to hold Judaism to be a 'fossil' religion inculcating Kantian 'heteronomy'. On the contrary, the teaching of the Hassidic Sages is that Autonomy, Creativity, unremitting Zeal for Universal Welfare is what is pleasing to the Lord. The nightmare vision of a capricious God who punishes you for an unknown or unintentional crime has no place in our reading of the Old Testament because the keepers and transmitters of that text- who surely know more about it than ordinary people like you and me- have given a far more closely reasoned and hermeneutically rich interpretation which we can all feel to be more in consonance with the promptings of our own humble and heartfelt Faith in our Creator.
2) Political assassination, or Religious persecution or whatever it was that motivated the slaying of Zimri and Kosbi- though perhaps 'necessary' in some sense, is nevertheless very strictly forbidden precisely to those who know of this legal precedent and who might use it to justify fanatical persecution, or even genocide, of other peoples.
The paradoxical halachah here does not have the effect of crashing the whole deontic system, rather it enables it to evolve in a more humane manner. Yet, from the logical point of view, this is a very difficult problem. After all, the Rabbis say if we break one law we break all laws. If we slay one person we slay all humanity. Furthermore, though ignorance of the law can be an excuse, surely knowledge of it can never be so. Yet, there are situations where something which is enjoined is forbidden because it is known to be enjoined. This paradox resolves itself under the gentle guidance of the Rabbis who show that the only way to escape from the quicksand of Legalism is through moral and spiritual evolution- by opening oneself to the ibbur of the self-less tzadikkim. I have written more about this here.
3) The concern shown for the daughter of Jephtah indicates that the truly enlightened person- even if born in barbarous times, when the weaker was enslaved by the stronger- rejects the creed of Male supremacy. It has no place in Religion and Spirituality.
One interesting aspect of the manner in which the Hassidic Sages enrich our reading of the Bible is that, like Umaswati, they formulate the problematic of 'incarnation' (ibbur is actually more like partial incarnation as found in the Mahabharata) as a 'matching problem'. Essentially, a resource is cached in a liminal state- like the Bardo of the Tibetans or the Barzakh of Ibn Arabi- so that it can be drawn upon to resolve paradoxes in a manner that 'climbs the local hill', on the relevant Hermeneutic landscape, so as to grant the reader an expanded Moral and Spiritual horizon.
Showing posts with label umaswati. Show all posts
Showing posts with label umaswati. Show all posts
Monday, 23 September 2013
Thursday, 5 September 2013
Jain monks and Dworkin's morons
The late Ronald Dworkin, in 'Justice for Hedgehogs', defines a 'moron' as a truth-making particle for moral judgments. He thinks they can't exist.
He says - One might say that moral judgements aren’t made true by anything, because they’re not true. Maybe they’re not the kind of thing that can be true, like emotional outbursts. That’s one view, and it’s wrong, and we can have an argument about that.”
“Someone else might say that some moral judgements are true, and when they are true they’re made true by something real, something out there, some moral particle … “morons”. If you think that, then you have no reason to deny that there are fundamental conflicts of value. If moral judgements are made true by morons, there could be different kinds of morons. But that’s very silly, because there are no such things as morons, but that is a view you could have.'
Jainism is a pretty ancient religion which has a lot of substantive moral content arising out of a 'hedgehog' value- viz. Ahimsa, that is non-injury. It also has a realist ontology of a dynamic and relationist type such that mechanism design is an internal property of the system and, hence, aporias and antinomies have a work-around.
Jainism specifies different sorts of 'karma binding' particles whose influx (aashrav) is dependent on one's actions and which can ultimately be terminated by some monastic practice. Jainsim has a relativistic epistemology and so its 'morons' can be considered as mere mental constructs- i.e. the name given to a class of heterogenous sub-atomic events which appear to us to have had a particular karmic result.
Furthermore we are welcome to stipulate that all karmic events only occur over one life-time- i.e. belief in reincarnation is not required for a thought experiment using Jain morons. Indeed, one could reinterpret the experiment such that morons become purely nominal markers conforming to our subjective value system- thus ending up with something like Gandhian karma-yoga philosophy.
Dworkin isn't saying morons of a Jain type are bound to be utterly unreal. They may be real in the same way the valency of an emotional outburst is real. He just thinks there are no such things as morons because they are silly.
This is the other side of Hume's Guillotine- belief in an 'ought' causes us to arbitrarily restrict the domain of what 'is' for the purpose of our argument. In other words our preferred ontology is no longer at home in the world. What we are doing is an exercise in ontological dysphoria. Which is fine, if we are up-front about it. But is that what Dworkin is doing? Perhaps, he has found some sub-set of things in the world which are necessary and sufficient to fully determine a truly 'Hedgehog theory of value'- i.e. something based on knowing one 'big thing'- and so Hume's Guillotine isn't relevant. There is a way to partition the Universe such that only the good bit- which Dworkin knows about- counts.
Thomas Nagel, Dworkin's old partner from the NYU colloquium on Law & Philosophy, has aroused considerable ire from Darwinists by coming out as a supporter of Natural Teleology, not because the data looks that way to him, but for a priori reasons. In his new book, Mind & Cosmos, he says- “Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.”- which is sweet except he fails to add, 'and blowing its head off coz doing the walk of shame out of a middle-aged Tam Bram's flat is simply not an option what with all the mean things them other Universes will text and twitter each other and OMG was I wearing granny panties last night? That's it. Goodbye cruel Multiverse. Remember me on Facebook.'
Dworkin's argument isn't teleological but based on the Aristotelian conception of the good and worthwhile life in which self-abnegation, or the Kantian sort, and self-aggrandizement, of the Nietzchean, are kept in equipoise. Addressing an interlocutor equally harmoniously constituted, Dworkin writes-
Let us say you are required to serve on a Jury. To determine the defendant's degree of guilt, you have to answer the substantive, first order, question- would a reasonable person consider this person's action to be morally wrong? Dworkin says that you, as a member of the Jury, have an additional obligation- viz. to find answers to 'meta-questions' like 'is our morality really moral?' which are consistent with your decision in the jury room and to affirm those answers with equal moral conviction simply as matter of good conscience.
At this point, alarm bells should be ringing. Is it really a requirement for Jurors to have a full fledged Moral philosophy?
After all, if evidence is produced that Jurors typically have a cognitive bias resulting in their awarding damage awards markedly divergent from what they would have assessed if properly trained in Bayesian methods, then there is a legal remedy- either Legislative or Judicial.
Does the fact that I now know I have cognitive biases and that I also know that the Judiciary will seek to compensate for this, somehow change either the nature of the moral work I am required to do in the Jury room or my own confidence in my ability to discharge that work?
He says - One might say that moral judgements aren’t made true by anything, because they’re not true. Maybe they’re not the kind of thing that can be true, like emotional outbursts. That’s one view, and it’s wrong, and we can have an argument about that.”
“Someone else might say that some moral judgements are true, and when they are true they’re made true by something real, something out there, some moral particle … “morons”. If you think that, then you have no reason to deny that there are fundamental conflicts of value. If moral judgements are made true by morons, there could be different kinds of morons. But that’s very silly, because there are no such things as morons, but that is a view you could have.'
Jainism is a pretty ancient religion which has a lot of substantive moral content arising out of a 'hedgehog' value- viz. Ahimsa, that is non-injury. It also has a realist ontology of a dynamic and relationist type such that mechanism design is an internal property of the system and, hence, aporias and antinomies have a work-around.
Jainism specifies different sorts of 'karma binding' particles whose influx (aashrav) is dependent on one's actions and which can ultimately be terminated by some monastic practice. Jainsim has a relativistic epistemology and so its 'morons' can be considered as mere mental constructs- i.e. the name given to a class of heterogenous sub-atomic events which appear to us to have had a particular karmic result.
Furthermore we are welcome to stipulate that all karmic events only occur over one life-time- i.e. belief in reincarnation is not required for a thought experiment using Jain morons. Indeed, one could reinterpret the experiment such that morons become purely nominal markers conforming to our subjective value system- thus ending up with something like Gandhian karma-yoga philosophy.
Dworkin isn't saying morons of a Jain type are bound to be utterly unreal. They may be real in the same way the valency of an emotional outburst is real. He just thinks there are no such things as morons because they are silly.
This is the other side of Hume's Guillotine- belief in an 'ought' causes us to arbitrarily restrict the domain of what 'is' for the purpose of our argument. In other words our preferred ontology is no longer at home in the world. What we are doing is an exercise in ontological dysphoria. Which is fine, if we are up-front about it. But is that what Dworkin is doing? Perhaps, he has found some sub-set of things in the world which are necessary and sufficient to fully determine a truly 'Hedgehog theory of value'- i.e. something based on knowing one 'big thing'- and so Hume's Guillotine isn't relevant. There is a way to partition the Universe such that only the good bit- which Dworkin knows about- counts.
Thomas Nagel, Dworkin's old partner from the NYU colloquium on Law & Philosophy, has aroused considerable ire from Darwinists by coming out as a supporter of Natural Teleology, not because the data looks that way to him, but for a priori reasons. In his new book, Mind & Cosmos, he says- “Each of our lives is a part of the lengthy process of the universe gradually waking up and becoming aware of itself.”- which is sweet except he fails to add, 'and blowing its head off coz doing the walk of shame out of a middle-aged Tam Bram's flat is simply not an option what with all the mean things them other Universes will text and twitter each other and OMG was I wearing granny panties last night? That's it. Goodbye cruel Multiverse. Remember me on Facebook.'
Dworkin's argument isn't teleological but based on the Aristotelian conception of the good and worthwhile life in which self-abnegation, or the Kantian sort, and self-aggrandizement, of the Nietzchean, are kept in equipoise. Addressing an interlocutor equally harmoniously constituted, Dworkin writes-
Let us say you are required to serve on a Jury. To determine the defendant's degree of guilt, you have to answer the substantive, first order, question- would a reasonable person consider this person's action to be morally wrong? Dworkin says that you, as a member of the Jury, have an additional obligation- viz. to find answers to 'meta-questions' like 'is our morality really moral?' which are consistent with your decision in the jury room and to affirm those answers with equal moral conviction simply as matter of good conscience.
At this point, alarm bells should be ringing. Is it really a requirement for Jurors to have a full fledged Moral philosophy?
After all, if evidence is produced that Jurors typically have a cognitive bias resulting in their awarding damage awards markedly divergent from what they would have assessed if properly trained in Bayesian methods, then there is a legal remedy- either Legislative or Judicial.
Does the fact that I now know I have cognitive biases and that I also know that the Judiciary will seek to compensate for this, somehow change either the nature of the moral work I am required to do in the Jury room or my own confidence in my ability to discharge that work?
No. I still have a duty to help administer Justice as part of the Social Compact by which my own life and property are safeguarded. The Judge can still clarify to me what a phrase like 'morally wrong' means in the context of the trial.
Let us suppose I hold heterodox meta-ethical views. During the course of discussion in the Jury room, I might well say something like 'Well, I can see that what the Judge requires of me is not a decision according to my own beliefs but according to what I judge to be the commonly accepted belief amongst ordinary people. So, from that point of view, I agree or disagree with this verdict.'
Dworkin thinks there must be 'internal reasons' by means of which everybody can have a Morality consistent across all orders of questions. There should never be a need to look at 'external reasons'- which bracket questions of morality- and which have to do with what exists and how things work in the World we inhabit.
Let us suppose I hold heterodox meta-ethical views. During the course of discussion in the Jury room, I might well say something like 'Well, I can see that what the Judge requires of me is not a decision according to my own beliefs but according to what I judge to be the commonly accepted belief amongst ordinary people. So, from that point of view, I agree or disagree with this verdict.'
Dworkin thinks there must be 'internal reasons' by means of which everybody can have a Morality consistent across all orders of questions. There should never be a need to look at 'external reasons'- which bracket questions of morality- and which have to do with what exists and how things work in the World we inhabit.
Trivially, one such person must exist- at least in the eyes of the holder of this opinion. Equally trivially, we could define that person as living the Aristotelian good and worthwhile life, at least in a certain respect. Everything else follows by mimesis.
But Dworkin is not making this trivial claim. Rather, he describes the first order, substantive, moral decision situation, regarding whether certain actions are right or wrong, as operating in a very particular way such that information from the external world is grist to a purely 'internal' moral mill which, once its wheels have begun to grind, can soar aloft to tackle second order and third order questions re the morality of our morality or the morality of our moralizing over our morality and so on.
Dworkin thinks there is a Morality engine which can operate like a Research Program in Mathematics- it is independent of the external world, in terms of its inner consistency and though an 'internal sceptic' can arise (in the manner that Constructivists are sceptical about some Mathematical entities) still, the discipline is sheltered from 'external sceptics'. But this begs the question- Mathematics is not just tolerated but widely taught because it has proved 'unreasonably' successful in advancing Technology and Productivity and Military Power. The same is not true of Moral Philosophy. Even if it could be reconstituted in a manner analogous to Mathematics (indeed, there are systems of deontic logic which are mathematical) it is still not safe from the external sceptic because either
a) it yields unequivocal answers even to first order questions- e.g. is abortion wrong? Is it wrong to attack Syria?- whose salience as wedge issues arise from considerations of strategic dynamics involving the inertia of preference falsification availability cascades. Here, there is a clear signal extraction problem- because of an entangled political element and a moral element. How can there be a truth making cascade of purely moral arguments, as Dworkin prescribes, which yields a bright line judgement WITHOUT reliance on a signal extraction mechanism? Either information is being thrown away- which is a defect in a truth maker- or else Dworkin's solution is not genuinely interpretative
b) it doesn't answer tough questions. It weeps and turns back when faced with hard cases. Ergo it's a waste of time. That's first order immoral.
Dworkin and Rawls and Nagel and Putnam and Sen and Nussbaum and so on, aren't going to come out and say 'abortion is wrong' because that would upset the Feminists. Sen and Nussbaum can harp on about female foeticide, but won't attack abortion itself, because clearly killing boy babies is a good thing. Similarly, Nagel might niggle about Global Justice, but he isn't going to come out and say anything substantive which might get him labelled an Islamophobe or as against us darkies or as a hater of little children.
Now, there is a way round this which is to say, well it doesn't matter what we think is right or wrong, what matters is that we have a passionate interest in the subject. Thus, the serial killer stalking Lailah is just as good as the heart-broken poet Qais Majnoon. Both are passionately interested in that obese maiden though the stalker wants to peel off her skin to make a roomy garment for himself, while Qais just wants to Email her a few more plaintive ghazals preparatory to broaching the topic of a Neo Platonic three-way with God.
Does Dworkin's 'internal error sceptic' really advance Moral Philosophy? Suppose he says- 'if x is wrong, then our moralizing is wrong because in some respect what we are doing is like x'. Following Dworkin we might reply- 'Dude, you just said x is wrong. That's moralizing and it can't be wrong in the same way that x is wrong coz that's a category mistake. Words aren't like the thing they describe. The word hot isn't hot. Nor is saying 'eating babies is wrong' itself wrong because no babies get eaten when we make the statement. What? You ate the baby while I was busy saying 'eating babies is wrong'? And that makes it my fault? I will beat you with my hockey stick.'
Clearly, this is pointless.
On the other hand, if, as I have suggested, Moral Philosophy is considered to be a bunch of Research Programs then one can have a sensible type of 'internal status sceptic' who says- 'look you guys are deriving a result by assuming something- like Dworkin's simultaneous equations which perfectly capture everything related to Income distribution in an economy- which not only can't but ought not to exist in a world where Morality isn't empty. Stop it. You are being silly. Look, I've found a workaround which derives the same substantive result but in a manner that gives more insight into the decision situation.'
If we admit that this type of internal status sceptic (who says some moral claims are neither true nor false because they can't be constructed or are impredicative or incompossible) can help Moral Philosophy to move forward- on an analogy with Mathematics and Physics- then Dworkin is hoist by his own petard. His disbelief in any such animal (a disbelief which arises from the way he has set up his definitions) makes him a particularly egregious type of external status sceptic. He is using morality to denigrate morality. More importantly, Dworkin's notion in this regard prevents him from seeing that if Moral Philosophy is driven by 'internal reason' then it must also be the case that it's trajectory is unknowable, at any given moment in time, for computational reasons. Either the subject is empty or it has the capacity to surprise its assiduous students.
Dworkin's criticism of the external sceptic also misses the mark. It doesn't matter that, by definition, whatever the guy is doing isn't Moral Philosophy because we don't know in advance that it isn't isomorphic to something which is. The notion that a process of external reason is necessarily separate from, or can set limits in advance to, the cognitive space generated by an 'internal' process of reasoning is sheer question begging Scholasticism. Granted, internal reason is either Nagel's bat or it is nothing. But bats are genetically canalized. We don't know if Dworkin's 'Moral Philosophy' might not generate the same phenotype as something like Binmore's Whiggish Game theory. Chances are, they will if they address the same substantive issues.
There is a way- the Jain method of anekantavada- whereby Public discourse can admit Dworkin or Putnam type arguments without committing intellectual hara kiri- but the only reason Jain Epistemology doesn't cash out as anything-goes relativism is because it is founded on both Monks and what Dworkin also calls 'morons'. For Jainism to work properly, the Monks have to go out into the world. They have to enable incohate situations to evolve to a point where there is a bilateral moral claim which is either true or false. One way of determining how and when to 'ripen' such a claim has to do with being sensitive to the 'aashrav' of karma binding particles. Morality is Physics, it is zero-intelligence Agent Economics, it deals with 'morons'- but only because what is truly moronic is metaphysics and, at that Circe's Symposium, we are all drunken swine.
But Dworkin is not making this trivial claim. Rather, he describes the first order, substantive, moral decision situation, regarding whether certain actions are right or wrong, as operating in a very particular way such that information from the external world is grist to a purely 'internal' moral mill which, once its wheels have begun to grind, can soar aloft to tackle second order and third order questions re the morality of our morality or the morality of our moralizing over our morality and so on.
Dworkin thinks there is a Morality engine which can operate like a Research Program in Mathematics- it is independent of the external world, in terms of its inner consistency and though an 'internal sceptic' can arise (in the manner that Constructivists are sceptical about some Mathematical entities) still, the discipline is sheltered from 'external sceptics'. But this begs the question- Mathematics is not just tolerated but widely taught because it has proved 'unreasonably' successful in advancing Technology and Productivity and Military Power. The same is not true of Moral Philosophy. Even if it could be reconstituted in a manner analogous to Mathematics (indeed, there are systems of deontic logic which are mathematical) it is still not safe from the external sceptic because either
a) it yields unequivocal answers even to first order questions- e.g. is abortion wrong? Is it wrong to attack Syria?- whose salience as wedge issues arise from considerations of strategic dynamics involving the inertia of preference falsification availability cascades. Here, there is a clear signal extraction problem- because of an entangled political element and a moral element. How can there be a truth making cascade of purely moral arguments, as Dworkin prescribes, which yields a bright line judgement WITHOUT reliance on a signal extraction mechanism? Either information is being thrown away- which is a defect in a truth maker- or else Dworkin's solution is not genuinely interpretative
b) it doesn't answer tough questions. It weeps and turns back when faced with hard cases. Ergo it's a waste of time. That's first order immoral.
Dworkin and Rawls and Nagel and Putnam and Sen and Nussbaum and so on, aren't going to come out and say 'abortion is wrong' because that would upset the Feminists. Sen and Nussbaum can harp on about female foeticide, but won't attack abortion itself, because clearly killing boy babies is a good thing. Similarly, Nagel might niggle about Global Justice, but he isn't going to come out and say anything substantive which might get him labelled an Islamophobe or as against us darkies or as a hater of little children.
Now, there is a way round this which is to say, well it doesn't matter what we think is right or wrong, what matters is that we have a passionate interest in the subject. Thus, the serial killer stalking Lailah is just as good as the heart-broken poet Qais Majnoon. Both are passionately interested in that obese maiden though the stalker wants to peel off her skin to make a roomy garment for himself, while Qais just wants to Email her a few more plaintive ghazals preparatory to broaching the topic of a Neo Platonic three-way with God.
Does Dworkin's 'internal error sceptic' really advance Moral Philosophy? Suppose he says- 'if x is wrong, then our moralizing is wrong because in some respect what we are doing is like x'. Following Dworkin we might reply- 'Dude, you just said x is wrong. That's moralizing and it can't be wrong in the same way that x is wrong coz that's a category mistake. Words aren't like the thing they describe. The word hot isn't hot. Nor is saying 'eating babies is wrong' itself wrong because no babies get eaten when we make the statement. What? You ate the baby while I was busy saying 'eating babies is wrong'? And that makes it my fault? I will beat you with my hockey stick.'
Clearly, this is pointless.
On the other hand, if, as I have suggested, Moral Philosophy is considered to be a bunch of Research Programs then one can have a sensible type of 'internal status sceptic' who says- 'look you guys are deriving a result by assuming something- like Dworkin's simultaneous equations which perfectly capture everything related to Income distribution in an economy- which not only can't but ought not to exist in a world where Morality isn't empty. Stop it. You are being silly. Look, I've found a workaround which derives the same substantive result but in a manner that gives more insight into the decision situation.'
If we admit that this type of internal status sceptic (who says some moral claims are neither true nor false because they can't be constructed or are impredicative or incompossible) can help Moral Philosophy to move forward- on an analogy with Mathematics and Physics- then Dworkin is hoist by his own petard. His disbelief in any such animal (a disbelief which arises from the way he has set up his definitions) makes him a particularly egregious type of external status sceptic. He is using morality to denigrate morality. More importantly, Dworkin's notion in this regard prevents him from seeing that if Moral Philosophy is driven by 'internal reason' then it must also be the case that it's trajectory is unknowable, at any given moment in time, for computational reasons. Either the subject is empty or it has the capacity to surprise its assiduous students.
Dworkin's criticism of the external sceptic also misses the mark. It doesn't matter that, by definition, whatever the guy is doing isn't Moral Philosophy because we don't know in advance that it isn't isomorphic to something which is. The notion that a process of external reason is necessarily separate from, or can set limits in advance to, the cognitive space generated by an 'internal' process of reasoning is sheer question begging Scholasticism. Granted, internal reason is either Nagel's bat or it is nothing. But bats are genetically canalized. We don't know if Dworkin's 'Moral Philosophy' might not generate the same phenotype as something like Binmore's Whiggish Game theory. Chances are, they will if they address the same substantive issues.
There is a way- the Jain method of anekantavada- whereby Public discourse can admit Dworkin or Putnam type arguments without committing intellectual hara kiri- but the only reason Jain Epistemology doesn't cash out as anything-goes relativism is because it is founded on both Monks and what Dworkin also calls 'morons'. For Jainism to work properly, the Monks have to go out into the world. They have to enable incohate situations to evolve to a point where there is a bilateral moral claim which is either true or false. One way of determining how and when to 'ripen' such a claim has to do with being sensitive to the 'aashrav' of karma binding particles. Morality is Physics, it is zero-intelligence Agent Economics, it deals with 'morons'- but only because what is truly moronic is metaphysics and, at that Circe's Symposium, we are all drunken swine.
Wednesday, 22 May 2013
Umaswati & Neale's slingshot
Suppose there is some proposition which everybody would agree was purely factual. On analysis, would we expect to find that this proposition is a part of just one big super-Fact?
In philosophy, what are termed slingshot arguments, appear to militate towards this conclusion- a very old one, which, in Jainism is attributed to Lord Mahavira- viz. 'whoever grasps one thing in its entirety, grasps all things'. The underlying notion here is easy to grasp. Everything is subtly connected to everything else so a 'true' fact about one thing turns out to be an Ariadne's thread which leads us to every other 'true' fact of the Universe. Since you are part of the Universe, it would be enough for the project 'know thyself' to yield at least one 'true fact' for you to be on your way to pontificating on everything under the sun.
What happens if 'facts' aren't once-and-for-all statements but rather self-subsistent dynamic systems?.
Since Jainism has a dynamic conception of substance (parinami dravya) such that a sort of 'evolution' from insentient to sentience continually occurs, it was possible for it to embrace a sort of heat death for the Universe such that all beings eventually enjoyed 'kevalya' undifferentiated omniscient-bliss for a truly infinite eternity after some inconsequential and purely momentary infinity of striving- or the illusion of striving- on this earthly plane. One corollary was that Jainism had a sort of 'scientific' rationale for fantastic adventures- e.g. teleportation to a 'bliss universe' so as to gain an omniscience not available down here at this time- and that it gave impetus to the Novel as a literary form. The other side of this coin was a renewed interest in fact driven disciplines- Medicine, Astronomy, Metallurgy, comparative Linguistics- in a manner that turned Jain monastic centers into catalysts of 'Knowledge Based' Psychic Capital formation across the breadth Classical India.
Similarly, in Nineteenth Century Europe, for at least some neo-Hegelians, it came to be the case that grasping one factual thesis would be enough to reconstruct the entire family tree of a dialectic process stretching both forward and backward in Time. Thus for the anatomist J.P. Muller, the Malthusian or catastrophic element in Darwinism was of no account. Facts about an organ were all he needed. Similarly the Marxist project was associated with turning' facts' about factory work in 1840 into an ineluctable family tree describing all possible History for everybody and at all times.
Essentially, the notion I'm seeking to articulate is that 'slingshot arguments' or the intuition that 'facts' are collapsible and nested truths, while encouraging a particular sort of, 'pattern cladist' or 'ideal type' analysis- we may describe this as a sedulous ergodics of process-less phase spaces- though, on an analogy with Sraffa style theory, apparently militating for Psychic Capital formation, nevertheless carried the seeds for something wholly stultifying and unwelcome. For Jainism, it was the idiocy of Caste and the fetishizing of Ahimsa. For J.P Mueller's intellectual heirs, it was the noxious doctrine of 'Race Science'. For Marx, it was the relegation of 'Dead' Capital to a Vampiric 'repugnancy market'.
In this context, Stephen Neale's work on the slingshot- which shifts the focus of attention to the trade off that must always arise in a complex system between precision ('fine graining') and significance (predictive power) as in Zadeh's Law of Incompatibility- provides some valuable footholds for our reading of Umaswati so as to restore syadvad to us as having a genuine soteriological, rather than casuist, function.
In this context, I had previously thought 'right cognition' might be expounded w.r.t the theory of repeated games- but this involved me in either committing to a Tim Maudlin type metaphysics or getting stuck with actual karmic rebirth in various Universes- whereas, Neale's clarifications and the literature it has given an impetus to is far closer to the sort of debate from which Umaswati's work arises- it's just we don't have the lecture notes and working papers- and so a better alternative is to stick with logic and refine our notion of the manner in which the 'karmic obstructor' is the logical 'internal opponent'- i.e. rather than turn a philosophical debate into an adventure story in parallel dimensions, or make game theory do work it isn't fit for, the better approach would be to go back to one's own homework assignment on syadvad logic- which consists in working out how to be less of an all round shit- but this time without a meretricious crib downloaded from the always irrelevant Internet.
In philosophy, what are termed slingshot arguments, appear to militate towards this conclusion- a very old one, which, in Jainism is attributed to Lord Mahavira- viz. 'whoever grasps one thing in its entirety, grasps all things'. The underlying notion here is easy to grasp. Everything is subtly connected to everything else so a 'true' fact about one thing turns out to be an Ariadne's thread which leads us to every other 'true' fact of the Universe. Since you are part of the Universe, it would be enough for the project 'know thyself' to yield at least one 'true fact' for you to be on your way to pontificating on everything under the sun.
What happens if 'facts' aren't once-and-for-all statements but rather self-subsistent dynamic systems?.
Since Jainism has a dynamic conception of substance (parinami dravya) such that a sort of 'evolution' from insentient to sentience continually occurs, it was possible for it to embrace a sort of heat death for the Universe such that all beings eventually enjoyed 'kevalya' undifferentiated omniscient-bliss for a truly infinite eternity after some inconsequential and purely momentary infinity of striving- or the illusion of striving- on this earthly plane. One corollary was that Jainism had a sort of 'scientific' rationale for fantastic adventures- e.g. teleportation to a 'bliss universe' so as to gain an omniscience not available down here at this time- and that it gave impetus to the Novel as a literary form. The other side of this coin was a renewed interest in fact driven disciplines- Medicine, Astronomy, Metallurgy, comparative Linguistics- in a manner that turned Jain monastic centers into catalysts of 'Knowledge Based' Psychic Capital formation across the breadth Classical India.
Similarly, in Nineteenth Century Europe, for at least some neo-Hegelians, it came to be the case that grasping one factual thesis would be enough to reconstruct the entire family tree of a dialectic process stretching both forward and backward in Time. Thus for the anatomist J.P. Muller, the Malthusian or catastrophic element in Darwinism was of no account. Facts about an organ were all he needed. Similarly the Marxist project was associated with turning' facts' about factory work in 1840 into an ineluctable family tree describing all possible History for everybody and at all times.
Essentially, the notion I'm seeking to articulate is that 'slingshot arguments' or the intuition that 'facts' are collapsible and nested truths, while encouraging a particular sort of, 'pattern cladist' or 'ideal type' analysis- we may describe this as a sedulous ergodics of process-less phase spaces- though, on an analogy with Sraffa style theory, apparently militating for Psychic Capital formation, nevertheless carried the seeds for something wholly stultifying and unwelcome. For Jainism, it was the idiocy of Caste and the fetishizing of Ahimsa. For J.P Mueller's intellectual heirs, it was the noxious doctrine of 'Race Science'. For Marx, it was the relegation of 'Dead' Capital to a Vampiric 'repugnancy market'.
In this context, Stephen Neale's work on the slingshot- which shifts the focus of attention to the trade off that must always arise in a complex system between precision ('fine graining') and significance (predictive power) as in Zadeh's Law of Incompatibility- provides some valuable footholds for our reading of Umaswati so as to restore syadvad to us as having a genuine soteriological, rather than casuist, function.
In this context, I had previously thought 'right cognition' might be expounded w.r.t the theory of repeated games- but this involved me in either committing to a Tim Maudlin type metaphysics or getting stuck with actual karmic rebirth in various Universes- whereas, Neale's clarifications and the literature it has given an impetus to is far closer to the sort of debate from which Umaswati's work arises- it's just we don't have the lecture notes and working papers- and so a better alternative is to stick with logic and refine our notion of the manner in which the 'karmic obstructor' is the logical 'internal opponent'- i.e. rather than turn a philosophical debate into an adventure story in parallel dimensions, or make game theory do work it isn't fit for, the better approach would be to go back to one's own homework assignment on syadvad logic- which consists in working out how to be less of an all round shit- but this time without a meretricious crib downloaded from the always irrelevant Internet.
Sunday, 27 January 2013
Umaswati on right cognition
Is 'right cognition' necessary to achieve Moksha? Surely 'right faith' gives rise to the right cognition by itself? So, is Umaswati's dictum merely a copying of other Indic traditions or else a meaningless rhetorical flourish?
Suppose the following
1) There was an ancient discrete maths tradition for the kind of O.R problems bound to arise in the management of wealthy Monastic orders.
2) Umaswati's early date puts him at the center of that discrete maths tradition which uses finite operations of a cellular automaton type and included Monte Carlo based cross entropy type methods.
In that case the thermodynamic conception of the 'heat death' of the karmic universe, which his work suggests to us, faces the problem we identify with the Third Law- viz. It is impossible for any process, no matter how idealized, to reduce the entropy of a system to its zero point value in a finite number of operations. Indeed, for the Jain novel with its intricate 'matching' of karmically obstructive acts between reciprocal agents, the problem of 'geometrical frustration' arises in an acute and psychologically compelling way.
One way out of the dilemma posed by such 'strange attractors', for Economics, is to assume Muth rational expectations. In this case something is added to 'right faith' viz. a particular type of cognition whose adaptive fitness is by no means obvious. Since the Jain system forbids substance to act directly on substance, whether for weal or woe, the possibility of correlated equilibria, arising from strategic public signalling by a benevolent omniscient being, is, I think, ruled out. (Unless birth-determining karma particles condemn you to the duties of your jati- as in the Gita- but this ISN'T Jain doctrine- i.e. no public signal exists, anyone can become a Jain, even women can become Acharyas and Arhats.) So, the solution concept here has to add something- viz. 'right cognition'- which, plausibly, all beings in a repeated game might stumble upon.
However, the sort of 'right cognition' able to do the work Umaswati requires of it is no longer tied to a particular Universe but is heavily involved in counter-factual induction across, not Stallnacker-Lewis type 'closest possible worlds', but the logically impossible or in-compossible worlds which densely interpolate them.
The reason for this is because karma is treated as something real, a particle that binds itself to the jiva and purely mental acts are subject to karma. Furthermore, there is no restriction on travel to other Universes such that karmic consequences arise including even the maximal consequence of gaining Omniscience. What is interesting about this point of view, for us, is that it is by no means apparent that possible worlds have any means of knowing if they are logically possible till they run the whole program, so to speak. Had we been brought up on discrete maths, rather than calculus, this would be the natural way to conceive things. Of course, if information about possible worlds is compressible, this argument fails and something like Tim Maudlin's metaphysics would be 'natural' for everyone to subscribe to. But, surely, that remains an open question. Does this means there is no method of discriminating 'genuine' Stallnacker-Lewis worlds from logically impossible worlds such that a weak ordering metric obtains?
Looking at things from the point of view of physical rather than Information theoretic entropy, i remains a fact that we don't know if the world we're living in will always comply with entropy. Lewis argued that we can and do think of 'divergence miracles' such that two worlds, identical till something happens at time t, diverge greatly there after but that a 'reconvergence' miracle is implausible. Lewis confessed he didn't know how this asymmetry fitted with that of physical entropy.
Adam Elga has an argument against Lewis based on the fact that entropy can reverse but that this not robust to a very small change in initial conditions. Thus, a 'reconvergence miracle' can't be ruled out and Lewis's proposed asymmetry can't be relied upon.
In Jainism, the exact ontological status of Time remains a subject of debate. Ordinarily, it is considered a substance (dravya) and thus possesses modal possibilities or alternatives (paryaya) which function in a characteristically dynamic way, reminiscent of the world of discrete maths, cellular automata, Conway's 'Game of Life' and the surprises they throw up, rather than the abstract and featureless world of Euclidean geometry.
In this context, Umaswati has a special importance as the Sage most closely associated with the notion that all souls achieve kevalya and thus the eternal cycles of Time become empty of significance for an eternity much much longer than that of mere Time.
In an earlier post I adverted to the subtlety and psychological insight attaching to his notion of karmic obstructors. It seems to me, that this has a bearing on his theory of 'right cognition' as well.
Jain ontology, by reason of its distinctive features, repays study but, it seems to me, when explicated by a great Sage, its phenomenology enriches a common Indic imaginative Lebenswelt in a manner singularly adapted to create a meaningful dialogue with contemporary Philosophy..
Suppose the following
1) There was an ancient discrete maths tradition for the kind of O.R problems bound to arise in the management of wealthy Monastic orders.
2) Umaswati's early date puts him at the center of that discrete maths tradition which uses finite operations of a cellular automaton type and included Monte Carlo based cross entropy type methods.
In that case the thermodynamic conception of the 'heat death' of the karmic universe, which his work suggests to us, faces the problem we identify with the Third Law- viz. It is impossible for any process, no matter how idealized, to reduce the entropy of a system to its zero point value in a finite number of operations. Indeed, for the Jain novel with its intricate 'matching' of karmically obstructive acts between reciprocal agents, the problem of 'geometrical frustration' arises in an acute and psychologically compelling way.
One way out of the dilemma posed by such 'strange attractors', for Economics, is to assume Muth rational expectations. In this case something is added to 'right faith' viz. a particular type of cognition whose adaptive fitness is by no means obvious. Since the Jain system forbids substance to act directly on substance, whether for weal or woe, the possibility of correlated equilibria, arising from strategic public signalling by a benevolent omniscient being, is, I think, ruled out. (Unless birth-determining karma particles condemn you to the duties of your jati- as in the Gita- but this ISN'T Jain doctrine- i.e. no public signal exists, anyone can become a Jain, even women can become Acharyas and Arhats.) So, the solution concept here has to add something- viz. 'right cognition'- which, plausibly, all beings in a repeated game might stumble upon.
However, the sort of 'right cognition' able to do the work Umaswati requires of it is no longer tied to a particular Universe but is heavily involved in counter-factual induction across, not Stallnacker-Lewis type 'closest possible worlds', but the logically impossible or in-compossible worlds which densely interpolate them.
The reason for this is because karma is treated as something real, a particle that binds itself to the jiva and purely mental acts are subject to karma. Furthermore, there is no restriction on travel to other Universes such that karmic consequences arise including even the maximal consequence of gaining Omniscience. What is interesting about this point of view, for us, is that it is by no means apparent that possible worlds have any means of knowing if they are logically possible till they run the whole program, so to speak. Had we been brought up on discrete maths, rather than calculus, this would be the natural way to conceive things. Of course, if information about possible worlds is compressible, this argument fails and something like Tim Maudlin's metaphysics would be 'natural' for everyone to subscribe to. But, surely, that remains an open question. Does this means there is no method of discriminating 'genuine' Stallnacker-Lewis worlds from logically impossible worlds such that a weak ordering metric obtains?
Looking at things from the point of view of physical rather than Information theoretic entropy, i remains a fact that we don't know if the world we're living in will always comply with entropy. Lewis argued that we can and do think of 'divergence miracles' such that two worlds, identical till something happens at time t, diverge greatly there after but that a 'reconvergence' miracle is implausible. Lewis confessed he didn't know how this asymmetry fitted with that of physical entropy.
Adam Elga has an argument against Lewis based on the fact that entropy can reverse but that this not robust to a very small change in initial conditions. Thus, a 'reconvergence miracle' can't be ruled out and Lewis's proposed asymmetry can't be relied upon.
In Jainism, the exact ontological status of Time remains a subject of debate. Ordinarily, it is considered a substance (dravya) and thus possesses modal possibilities or alternatives (paryaya) which function in a characteristically dynamic way, reminiscent of the world of discrete maths, cellular automata, Conway's 'Game of Life' and the surprises they throw up, rather than the abstract and featureless world of Euclidean geometry.
In this context, Umaswati has a special importance as the Sage most closely associated with the notion that all souls achieve kevalya and thus the eternal cycles of Time become empty of significance for an eternity much much longer than that of mere Time.
In an earlier post I adverted to the subtlety and psychological insight attaching to his notion of karmic obstructors. It seems to me, that this has a bearing on his theory of 'right cognition' as well.
Jain ontology, by reason of its distinctive features, repays study but, it seems to me, when explicated by a great Sage, its phenomenology enriches a common Indic imaginative Lebenswelt in a manner singularly adapted to create a meaningful dialogue with contemporary Philosophy..
Friday, 25 January 2013
Umaswati & Entropy
Jainism was late in coming to the attention of Western savants. Interestingly, Jacobi, the pioneer in this regard, started off as a Mathematician and Umaswati too was a mathematician of repute. His doctrine of the perfectibility of all beings has an interesting consequence viz. the heat death of the karmic world such that all beings attain a univocal kevalya and thus Time with its infinite cycles is but the vanishingly small denumerable component of the nondenumerably dense eternity of universal bliss.
This result arises because, though all beings have free will, nevertheless
1) acts which generate karma have to involve some other jiva and acts which prevent the ingress of karma determining particles can't arise by Grace because substance can't act directly on substance. For Narratology, such a doctrine gives rise to something like a stable marriage problem such that out of the tangled events of the jiva's innumerable past lives there emerged stable antagonists or reciprocal obstructors. Umaswati treats of this in his consideration of the concept of VIGHNAKARANAMANTARAAYASYA |6-27|- 'Creating obstacles constitutes the cause of the influx of obstructing karma. Obstructing karma prevents a worldly soul from achieving its potential.'
2) Since an askesis exists such that some jivas can migrate out of the world of karma to kevalya it follows that the amount of Gibbs free energy in the system degrades. Indeed, karma is 'exergy' because it alone can produce work, kevalya can't do so, thus- considered as a closed system, which it must be if jivas are eternal, the Jain Universe is subject to entropy and suffers a heat death when all Suffering ends and Time itself becomes but an evanescent, far-from-equilibrium aberration governed by a sort of Fluctuation Theorem such that though Jainism's ontological distinctiveness is preserved, it becomes indistinguishable, from the point of view of eschatology, from other optimistic soteriologies, including Theistic ones.
It is interesting that the various Sociological Theories of History that Thermodynamic notions of equilibrium- predating even Carnot's Theorem, for example, the sorts of Utilitarian Utopianism inspired by 'the baronised Yankee, Benjamin Thompson (alias Count Rumford)'- similarly postulate the heat death of Profit, Speculation, which, of course, was the original meaning of karma. Only when it allowed itself to be degraded to work, that too of a ritualistic or rule governed sort, did it become the victim of Soteriology.
The irony here is that, to whatever degree of atheism we might aspire, we remain caught in the reciprocal process of Vighnakaranam- maliciously obstructing each other but doing so in the name of Philosophy and the Greater Good- both now regarded as work, not profit, a joyless audit, not a giddy speculation, and subsumed under a wider Socio/Ecological askesis which repudiating poetry- or repudiated by it, for Suka flies by the nets of his father, Ved Vyasa- drags down the kavi, the maker, the shaper, the widsith, to the fallen world of karma.
This result arises because, though all beings have free will, nevertheless
1) acts which generate karma have to involve some other jiva and acts which prevent the ingress of karma determining particles can't arise by Grace because substance can't act directly on substance. For Narratology, such a doctrine gives rise to something like a stable marriage problem such that out of the tangled events of the jiva's innumerable past lives there emerged stable antagonists or reciprocal obstructors. Umaswati treats of this in his consideration of the concept of VIGHNAKARANAMANTARAAYASYA |6-27|- 'Creating obstacles constitutes the cause of the influx of obstructing karma. Obstructing karma prevents a worldly soul from achieving its potential.'
2) Since an askesis exists such that some jivas can migrate out of the world of karma to kevalya it follows that the amount of Gibbs free energy in the system degrades. Indeed, karma is 'exergy' because it alone can produce work, kevalya can't do so, thus- considered as a closed system, which it must be if jivas are eternal, the Jain Universe is subject to entropy and suffers a heat death when all Suffering ends and Time itself becomes but an evanescent, far-from-equilibrium aberration governed by a sort of Fluctuation Theorem such that though Jainism's ontological distinctiveness is preserved, it becomes indistinguishable, from the point of view of eschatology, from other optimistic soteriologies, including Theistic ones.
It is interesting that the various Sociological Theories of History that Thermodynamic notions of equilibrium- predating even Carnot's Theorem, for example, the sorts of Utilitarian Utopianism inspired by 'the baronised Yankee, Benjamin Thompson (alias Count Rumford)'- similarly postulate the heat death of Profit, Speculation, which, of course, was the original meaning of karma. Only when it allowed itself to be degraded to work, that too of a ritualistic or rule governed sort, did it become the victim of Soteriology.
The irony here is that, to whatever degree of atheism we might aspire, we remain caught in the reciprocal process of Vighnakaranam- maliciously obstructing each other but doing so in the name of Philosophy and the Greater Good- both now regarded as work, not profit, a joyless audit, not a giddy speculation, and subsumed under a wider Socio/Ecological askesis which repudiating poetry- or repudiated by it, for Suka flies by the nets of his father, Ved Vyasa- drags down the kavi, the maker, the shaper, the widsith, to the fallen world of karma.
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