Time is a wheel to whose kiln is day
& Night a river for we tryst with clay
Lest Kabir sigh or Suhuni frown
Let Sita burn & Rama drown
Wednesday, 30 January 2013
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.
Thursday, 24 January 2013
What Herbert Spencer actually believed
Like J. S. Mill, Spencer struggled to make utilitarianism authentically liberal by infusing it with a demanding principle of liberty and robust moral rights. He was convinced, like Mill, that utilitarianism could accommodate rights with independent moral force and yet remain genuinely consequentialist. Subtly construed, utilitarianism can effectively mimick the very best deontological liberalism.
That's from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Spencer sound like a right ray of sun-shine doesn't he? No wonder Shyamjee Krishna Verma admired the old man so much or that he came to be affectionately known as Harbhat Pendse in Marathi.
But this was his confidential advice to a Japanese statesman circa 1893-
1) Restrict political representation to elderly clan heads and then too only permit a right to petition- 'You have, I believe, in Japan still surviving the ancient system of family organization. ... Under this family or patriarchal organization it habitually happens that there exists in each group an eldest male ascendant, who is the ruling authority of the group – an authority who has in many cases a despotic power to which all descendants of the first and second generations unhesitatingly submit. This organization should be made use of in your new political form. These patriarchs or heads of groups should be made the sole electors of members of your representative body. ... Several beneficial results would arise. In the first place, your electorate would be greatly reduced in number, and therefore more manageable. In the second place, the various extreme opinions held by the members of each group would be to a considerable extent mutually cancelled and made more moderate by having to find expression through the patriarch who would in a certain measure be influenced by the opinions of his descendants. And then, in the third place, and chiefly, these patriarchal electors, being all aged men, would have more conservative leanings than the younger members of their groups – would not be in favour of rash changes.
I suggest that, for three or four generations, the assembly formed of representative men elected by these patriarchal heads of groups should be limited in their functions to making statements of grievances, or of evils or what they think evils, which they wish to have remedied – not having any authority either to take measures for remedying them, or authority even for suggesting measures, but having the function simply of saying what they regard as grievances.
2) Permit no free trade or foreign direct investment- Apparently you are proposing by revision of the treaty powers with Europe and America “to open the whole Empire to foreigners and foreign capital.” I regard this as a fatal policy. If you wish to see what is likely to happen, study the history of India. Once let one of the more powerful races gain a point d’appui [Online editor’s note: a base or secure location; a foothold. – RTL] and there will inevitably in course of time grow up an aggressive policy which will lead to collisions with the Japanese; these collisions will be represented as attacks by the Japanese which must be avenged; forces will be sent from America or Europe, as the case may be; a portion of territory will be seized and required to be made over as a foreign settlement; and from this there will grow eventually subjugation of the entire Japanese Empire. I believe that you will have great difficulty in avoiding this fate in any case, but you will make the process easy if you allow any privileges to foreigners beyond those which I have indicated.
3) Don't permit inter-marriage with foreigners. To your remaining question, respecting the inter-marriage of foreigners and Japanese, which you say is “now very much agitated among our scholars and politicians,” and which you say is “one of the most difficult problems,” my reply is that, as rationally answered, there is no difficulty at all. It should be positively forbidden. It is not at root a question of social philosophy. It is at root a question of biology. There is abundant proof, alike furnished by the inter-marriages of human races and by the inter-breeding of animals, that when the varieties mingled diverge beyond a certain slight degree the result is invariably a bad one in the long run. I have myself been in the habit of looking at the evidence bearing on this matter for many years past, and my conviction is based upon numerous facts derived from numerous sources. This conviction I have within the last half hour verified, for I happen to be staying in the country with a gentleman who is well-known as an authority on horses, cattle and sheep, and knows much respecting their inter-breeding; and he has just, on inquiry, fully confirmed my belief that when, say of different varieties of sheep, there is an inter-breeding of those which are widely unlike, the result, especially in the second generation, is a bad one – there arises an incalculable mixture of traits, and what may be called a chaotic constitution. And the same thing happens among human beings – the Eurasians in India, and the half-breeds in America, show this.
So there we have it. Political Philosophy is about pretending to be all sunshine and roses and then, sub rosa, being a bigger asshole than the worst sort of elderly misogynist, red-neck, drunk.
That's from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Spencer sound like a right ray of sun-shine doesn't he? No wonder Shyamjee Krishna Verma admired the old man so much or that he came to be affectionately known as Harbhat Pendse in Marathi.
But this was his confidential advice to a Japanese statesman circa 1893-
1) Restrict political representation to elderly clan heads and then too only permit a right to petition- 'You have, I believe, in Japan still surviving the ancient system of family organization. ... Under this family or patriarchal organization it habitually happens that there exists in each group an eldest male ascendant, who is the ruling authority of the group – an authority who has in many cases a despotic power to which all descendants of the first and second generations unhesitatingly submit. This organization should be made use of in your new political form. These patriarchs or heads of groups should be made the sole electors of members of your representative body. ... Several beneficial results would arise. In the first place, your electorate would be greatly reduced in number, and therefore more manageable. In the second place, the various extreme opinions held by the members of each group would be to a considerable extent mutually cancelled and made more moderate by having to find expression through the patriarch who would in a certain measure be influenced by the opinions of his descendants. And then, in the third place, and chiefly, these patriarchal electors, being all aged men, would have more conservative leanings than the younger members of their groups – would not be in favour of rash changes.
I suggest that, for three or four generations, the assembly formed of representative men elected by these patriarchal heads of groups should be limited in their functions to making statements of grievances, or of evils or what they think evils, which they wish to have remedied – not having any authority either to take measures for remedying them, or authority even for suggesting measures, but having the function simply of saying what they regard as grievances.
2) Permit no free trade or foreign direct investment- Apparently you are proposing by revision of the treaty powers with Europe and America “to open the whole Empire to foreigners and foreign capital.” I regard this as a fatal policy. If you wish to see what is likely to happen, study the history of India. Once let one of the more powerful races gain a point d’appui [Online editor’s note: a base or secure location; a foothold. – RTL] and there will inevitably in course of time grow up an aggressive policy which will lead to collisions with the Japanese; these collisions will be represented as attacks by the Japanese which must be avenged; forces will be sent from America or Europe, as the case may be; a portion of territory will be seized and required to be made over as a foreign settlement; and from this there will grow eventually subjugation of the entire Japanese Empire. I believe that you will have great difficulty in avoiding this fate in any case, but you will make the process easy if you allow any privileges to foreigners beyond those which I have indicated.
3) Don't permit inter-marriage with foreigners. To your remaining question, respecting the inter-marriage of foreigners and Japanese, which you say is “now very much agitated among our scholars and politicians,” and which you say is “one of the most difficult problems,” my reply is that, as rationally answered, there is no difficulty at all. It should be positively forbidden. It is not at root a question of social philosophy. It is at root a question of biology. There is abundant proof, alike furnished by the inter-marriages of human races and by the inter-breeding of animals, that when the varieties mingled diverge beyond a certain slight degree the result is invariably a bad one in the long run. I have myself been in the habit of looking at the evidence bearing on this matter for many years past, and my conviction is based upon numerous facts derived from numerous sources. This conviction I have within the last half hour verified, for I happen to be staying in the country with a gentleman who is well-known as an authority on horses, cattle and sheep, and knows much respecting their inter-breeding; and he has just, on inquiry, fully confirmed my belief that when, say of different varieties of sheep, there is an inter-breeding of those which are widely unlike, the result, especially in the second generation, is a bad one – there arises an incalculable mixture of traits, and what may be called a chaotic constitution. And the same thing happens among human beings – the Eurasians in India, and the half-breeds in America, show this.
So there we have it. Political Philosophy is about pretending to be all sunshine and roses and then, sub rosa, being a bigger asshole than the worst sort of elderly misogynist, red-neck, drunk.
Monday, 21 January 2013
Pascal's Dutch Book as Harbhat Pendse's
Pascal, I wager, the Dutch book of thy Pensées
Was Savarkar's Marathi for Harbhat Pendse's
Ah! Animula vagula, twixt Jyoti's gang-rape and Pratibha's Suttee
Revere who Rudra, recall na Vishnu-hu pritivi-pati!
Notes
1) V.D. Savarkar read Herbert Spencer (affectionately known, he tells us, as Harbhat Pendse) in Marathi translation as an adolescent. Spencer awoke in him a great indignation at British exploitation of India. Sadly, Savarkar failed to see the idealistic humanism and revolutionary potential of the British working class- people like Guy Aldred, 'the boy preacher of Holloway', who took over publication of the 'Indian Sociologist' and served a harsh sentence of penal servitude for his temerity. Spencer's Economics/Evolutionary Theory did not have the benefit of Game Theoretic insights and should, perhaps, be re-examined at least from the point of view of Bergson's critique of him.
2) na Vishnuhu pritivipati- Vishnu is the Lord (or husband) of the Earth. Suttee- i.e. Sati- is the wife of Shiva that is Rudra.
Orphic lies
(Husserl probably thought that each possible world has a unique possible transcendental subject but in so far as two such transcendental egos are directed at the same Nature, then they are compossible and so intersubjectivity aint empty. I often feel the same way about having to pick up my dry-cleaning.)
All characteristica universalis so hideous to our eyes
In what un-natural numbers must Siren rhapsodize?
That galley slave or Captain, all equally are rapt in
Ego's web, the world-tide's ebb- Orphic lies
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