Monday, November 8, 2010

the Teh of Tao

- 8 -

The supreme good is like water,
which nourishes all things without trying to.
It is content with the low places that people disdain.
Thus it is like the Tao.

In dwelling, live close to the ground.
In thinking, keep to the simple.
In conflict, be fair and generous.
In governing, don't try to control.
In work, do what you enjoy.
In family life, be completely present.

When you are content to be simply yourself
and don't compare or compete,
everybody will respect you.
 

History of western Tao

«A few words of apology and explanation are called for if this book is to escape even more severe censure than it doubtless deserves.
Apology is due to the specialists on various schools and individual philosophers. With the possible exception of Leibniz, every philosopher of whom I treat is better known to some others than to me. If, however, books covering a wide field are to be written at all, it is inevitable, since we are not immortal, that those who write such books should spend less time on any one part than can be spent by a man who concentrates on a single author or a brief period. Some, whose scholarly austerity is unbending, will conclude that books covering a wide field should not be written at all, or, if written, should consist of monographs by a multitude of authors. There is, however, something lost when many authors co-operate. If there is any unity in the movement of history, if there is any intimate relation between what goes before and what comes later, it is necessary, for setting this forth, that earlier and later periods should be synthesized in a single mind. The student of Rousseau may have difficulty in doing justice to his connection with the Sparta of Plato and Plutarch; the historian of Sparta may not be prophetically conscious of Hobbes and Fichte and Lenin. To bring out such relations is one of the purposes of this book, and it is a purpose which only a wide survey can fulfil.
There are many histories of philosophy, but none of them, so far as I know, has quite the purpose that I have set myself. Philosophers are both effects and causes: effects of their social circumstances and of the politics and institutions of their time; causes (if they are fortunate) of beliefs which mould the politics and institutions of later ages. In most histories of philosophy, each philosopher appears as in a vacuum; his opinions are set forth unrelated except, at most, to those of earlier philosophers. I have tried, on the contrary,  to exhibit each philosopher, as far as truth permits, as an outcome of his milieu, a man in whom were crystallized and concentrated thoughts and feelings which, in a vague and diffused form, were common to the community of which he was a part.
This has required the insertion of certain chapters of purely social history. No one can understand the Stoics and Epicureans without some knowledge of the Hellenistic age, or the scholastics without a modicum of understanding of the growth of the Church from the fifth to the thirteenth centuries. I have therefore set forth briefly those parts of the main historical outlines that seemed to me to have had most influence on philosophical thought, and I have done this with most fullness where the history may be expected to be unfamiliar to some readers-for example, in regard to the early Middle Ages. But in these historical chapters I have rigidly excluded whatever seemed to have little or no bearing on contemporary or subsequent philosophy.
The problem of selection, in such a book as the present, is very difficult. Without detail, a book becomes jejune and uninteresting; with detail, it is in danger of becoming intolerably lengthy. I have sought a compromise, by treating only those philosophers who seem to me to have considerable importance, and mentioning, in connection with them, such details as, even if not of fundamental importance, have value on account of some illustrative or vivifying quality.
Philosophy, from the earliest times, has been not merely an affair of the schools, or of disputation between a handful of learned men. It has been an integral part of the life of the community, and as such I have tried to consider it. If there is any merit in this book, it is from this point of view that it is derived.»

The Nobel Prize in Literature 1950 was awarded to Bertrand Russell "in recognition of his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought".


The fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt.

Thursday, November 4, 2010

Participation (4 of Wands)


Each figure in this mandala holds the left hand up, in an attitude of receiving, and the right hand down, in an attitude of giving. The whole circle creates a tremendous energy field that takes on the shape of the double dorje, the Tibetan symbol for the thunderbolt.

The mandala has a quality like that of the energy field that forms around a buddha, where all the individuals taking part in the circle make a unique contribution to create a unified and vital whole. It is like a flower, whose wholeness is even more beautiful than the sum of its parts, at the same time enhancing the beauty of each individual petal.

You have an opportunity to participate with others now to make your contribution to creating something greater and more beautiful than each of you could manage alone. Your participation will not only nourish you, but will also contribute something precious to the whole.



Have you ever seen night going? Very few people even become aware of things which are happening every day. Have you ever seen the evening coming? The midnight and its song? The sunrise and its beauty?

We are behaving almost like blind people. In such a beautiful world we are living in small ponds of our own misery. It is familiar, so even if somebody wants to pull you out, you struggle. You don't want to be pulled out of your misery, of your suffering. Otherwise there is so much joy all around, you have just to be aware of it and to become a participant, not a spectator.

Philosophy is speculation, Zen is participation. Participate in the night leaving, participate in the evening coming, participate in the stars and participate in the clouds; make participation your lifestyle and the whole existence becomes such a joy, such an ecstasy. You could not have dreamed of a better universe.
 

the wind-up Tao chronicle


"Between the end of that strange summer and the approach of winter, my life went on without change. Each day would dawn without incident and end as it had begun. It rained a lot in September. October had several warm, sweaty days. Aside from the weather, there was hardly anything to distinguish one day from the next. I worked at concentrating my attention on the real and useful. I would go to the pool almost every day for a long swim, take walks, make myself three meals.
But even so, every now and then I would feel a violent stab of loneliness. The very water I drank, the very air I breathed, would feel like long, sharp needles. The pages of a book in my hands would take on the threatening metallic gleam of razor blades. I could hear the roots of loneliness creeping through me when the world was hushed at four o'clock in the morning."



I. point of view of Kasahara May

Tao Types


The formal treatment of hierarchical logical levels was carried out by Bertand Russell and Alfred N. Whitehead in the first decade of this century, and appeared in final form in 1910 in the monumental work of mathematical logic with the title of "Principia Mathematica".
A major aim of this work was to preserve classical logic from paradoxes and antinomies. The simplest example is the kind of paradox:
"This statement is false"
If the statement is true then it is false, if it is false then it is true.
By examining the logical structure of this statement is known as having two characteristics simultaneously valid:
  • The statement is self-reference, that is it refers to itself. For example the statement 'this apple is red"is not a paradox, since a statement is not an apple, while it may be true or false depending on whether the apple is red or not.
  • The statement has the logical structure of the type "assertion of a negation" or -equally- "negation of an assertion", and being self-referential denies himself. For example the statement "this statement is true" is not paradoxical, if it is true is true and if it is false is false.
In the classical Aristotelian logic such a situation is devastating, and is determined by the principle of contradiction, which asserts the falsity of every proposition implying that a certain proposition A and its negation, the proposition that non-A, are both true at the same time and in the same way. In the words of Aristotle (Metaphysics):


« it is not possible to say truly at the same time that the same thing is and is not»
In order to preserve classical logic from paradoxical and self-referential problems Russell and Whitehead was assigned to the hierarchical logical levels, which they called "logical types" special rules, establishing a hierarchy of logical types that can not be broken, especially the rule that objects (elements) of a class (together) are at logical level lower than the class and, to prevent the formation of paradoxes, a class may not have as an element itself or anything that presupposes all the elements of a collection should not be an element of the collection itself.
With this split-level logical types on two different planes, one for the class and the other for its members , along with the rule to prevent logical links between the two planes, Russell and Whitehead intended to prevent the formation of the paradoxes in logic. With this subdivision and rule logic
"self-swallowing" classes, in which an element of the class is the class itself,  become meaningless and without any logical validity.
A class of classes, ie, a metaclass, is not really a class, say for example that the set of all concepts is itself a concept is meaningless since it is a 'concept' of a higher logical type. The components of a Russellian hierarchy are among them as an element to a class, a class to a metaclass or one thing to their name.


The work of formal systematization and logical foundation of the Principia Mathematica posed the possibility of creating a unique logical-formal system and organize all of mathematics and then physics. The vision was that romantic due to the success of classical physics, namely that the universe was extremely complicated but fully describable if the logic and the math behind the physics were a complete formal system of description of the physical layer.
Thus arose the question of
completeness and consistency of such system; it is complete if all true statements of mathematics are derivable "demonstrable" at its inside, it is coherent-consistent  if no internal contradictory statements can be derived, namely a proposition and its negation. A question of this sort comes in metamathematics, because it is a math survey on mathematics.For this purpose D.Hilbert launched the so-called "Hilbert's program" in the 20s: to demonstrate the completeness and consistency of the PM, or the attempt to axiomatization of mathematics. The main points were: 
  • Formalization of all mathematics: all mathematical propositions should be written in a precisely formal language , and handled according to well-defined rules.
  • Completeness: proof that all the statements that are true can be proved mathematically in the formalism.
  • Consistency: a proof that no contradiction can be obtained in the formalism of mathematics. This test of consistency should preferably use only methods "finitistic" about finite mathematical objects.
  • Conservation: proof that all the results of "real objects" obtained using the argument about "ideal objects" (as uncountable sets) can be tested without the use of ideal objects.
  • Decidability: there should be an algorithm to decide the truth or falsity of any mathematical proposition.


The Russell and Whitehead's monumental effort to save the classical logic and the Hilbertian program that followed were literally swept away forever by the work of Kurt Gödel in1931, in particular the two incompleteness theorems, not by chance entitled "On formally undecidable propositions of Principia Mathematica and related systems", that demonstrate how a axiomatic theoretical building can not simultaneously satisfy the properties of consistency and completeness, and that no consistent system can be used to demonstrate its own consistency.
During those same years, the development of quantum physics and relativity poses a definitive end to the idea that complete formalization of the physical Universe, together with its logical foundations, was possible.


The work of Russell and Whitehead has today an historical significance, however paradoxes and paradoxical situations exist, as well as in logic, also in life. Its use was, unexpectedly, in the description of the interaction and communication with animals and humans by Gregory Bateson. In his words:

"What Russell and Whitehead had faced was a very abstract problem: logic, which they believed, had to be rescued from the tangles that arise when the "logical types", as Russell called them, are mistreated in their mathematical representation.
I do not know if, while working within the "Principia," Whitehead and Russell had any idea that the object of their interest is essential for the life of humans and other organisms.
Whitehead certainly knew that playing with the types you can have fun and you can make the humor emerge. But I doubt that he ever passed the stage of fun and has come to realize that the game was not insignificant and that would throw light on the entire biology.
While not having to contemplate the nature of the human dilemmas that would have been revealed they avoided - perhaps unconsciously - to arrive at a more general understanding."




Wednesday, November 3, 2010

fractalised Tao



«Never-ending wonders pop out from simple rules, if these are repeated ad infinitum.»

Benoît Mandelbrot

the (not) certainty of Tao



Hieronymus Bosch
The Crowning with Thorns 
about 1485, oil on oak, National Gallery - London

In medieval iconography the four characters who surround Jesus symbolize the four human representations considered in the Middle Ages. In particular, the character in the bottom right, is still holding Jesus for the mantle and the ground freezes, represents the slavery of certainty in relation to the transcendental: "If I know, I already know"

from H. Maturana, F. Varela, "Tree of Knowledge", 1984