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I subjectively don't find those philosophies interesting, and have a distaste for assigning single ideas to heterogeneous groups like "the west". Your mileage m

I subjectively don't find those philosophies interesting, and have a distaste for assigning single ideas to heterogeneous groups like "the west". Your mileage may vary. For example, I would consider myself western but I don't have any problem imagining systems with true, false, both and neither. You just treat them as anonymous values with particular operations, instead of getting stuck on "but if we were in this other system that we're not in, this would violate an axiom!". (If I thought this was a flaw in the article, instead of my opinion of it, I would have just said it was terrible instead of saying I didn't enjoy it. Its style just grates me sometimes.)

vinceguidry 12y ago
> I don't have any problem imagining systems with true, false, both and neither. You just treat them as anonymous values with particular operations, instead of getting stuck on "but if we were in this other system that we're not in, this would violate an axiom!". It's not quite that simple. We've built up entire codes of ethics and law and branches of mathematics with practical applications like computing that rely utterly on these axioms. These are things used in the real world, they don't just live in the realm of ideas. These systems don't tolerate more than two values of truth. Even "Western" religion, from Judaism to Christianity to Islam is intimately concerned with the external world where things are concrete and ambiguity is not to be tolerated. Big-C Catholicism itself considers the Church to be the only institution capable of determining Truth, what it calls dogma. We're very much handcuffed to using two values of truth here in this side of the world. Buddhism is heavily oriented on the experience of the individual, individuals are free to use whatever sort of logic they want to make decisions. So it can experiment with ideas that are neither true nor false. But you can't build a computer with it, at some level it all is resolved on individual components which are either on or off. We don't even know yet if quantum computers which break the binary hegemony offer any real advantage. But being able to integrate other kinds of logic might make entirely new approaches to, say, law, possible. It's not enough to be able to imagine an alternative system, it's in making it consistent. I personally am very excited about this.
- kazagistar 12y ago
  > law The law is about as non-binary as it gets. There are two states of the law: proven guilty, and not proven guilty. We say things like "innocent until proven guilty" but we all know and accept that reality does not work that way. There is no law of the excluded middle here. EDIT: Actually, adding some excluded middle might make our law better and more fair. For example, cases could be dismissed if it is shown that a law is being applied selectively, forcing any "discrimination" to be written into law explicitly. For example, if tax code is more often enforced against the wealthy, or drug law against members of poor neighborhoods, that would have to be explicit, instead of systematically hidden, or else enforcement could be nullified. As for computing, the reason we use binary logic is simple: weakening makes many problems more tractable. We spend all our time building abstractions and rules to limit what a programmer can express within certain bounds, to enable a compiler to better optimize it. If all we need for an application is boolean logic, then using other logics adds unnecessary power, and power leads to bugs.
  - grifpete 12y ago
    I believe in law it is perfectly possible to settle with no admission of guilt. Are you then innocent or guilty?
    - dfc 12y ago
      You could point out that "law" is more than just crim and you can make a bigger point. Civil litigation is much messier than Guilty/Not guilty. If you really want to drive this line of reasoning home comparative vs contributory negligence seems like the way to go.

vinceguidry 12y ago

> I don't have any problem imagining systems with true, false, both and neither. You just treat them as anonymous values with particular operations, instead of getting stuck on "but if we were in this other system that we're not in, this would violate an axiom!". It's not quite that simple. We've built up entire codes of ethics and law and branches of mathematics with practical applications like computing that rely utterly on these axioms. These are things used in the real world, they don't just live in the realm of ideas. These systems don't tolerate more than two values of truth. Even "Western" religion, from Judaism to Christianity to Islam is intimately concerned with the external world where things are concrete and ambiguity is not to be tolerated. Big-C Catholicism itself considers the Church to be the only institution capable of determining Truth, what it calls dogma. We're very much handcuffed to using two values of truth here in this side of the world. Buddhism is heavily oriented on the experience of the individual, individuals are free to use whatever sort of logic they want to make decisions. So it can experiment with ideas that are neither true nor false. But you can't build a computer with it, at some level it all is resolved on individual components which are either on or off. We don't even know yet if quantum computers which break the binary hegemony offer any real advantage. But being able to integrate other kinds of logic might make entirely new approaches to, say, law, possible. It's not enough to be able to imagine an alternative system, it's in making it consistent. I personally am very excited about this.

kazagistar 12y ago
> law The law is about as non-binary as it gets. There are two states of the law: proven guilty, and not proven guilty. We say things like "innocent until proven guilty" but we all know and accept that reality does not work that way. There is no law of the excluded middle here. EDIT: Actually, adding some excluded middle might make our law better and more fair. For example, cases could be dismissed if it is shown that a law is being applied selectively, forcing any "discrimination" to be written into law explicitly. For example, if tax code is more often enforced against the wealthy, or drug law against members of poor neighborhoods, that would have to be explicit, instead of systematically hidden, or else enforcement could be nullified. As for computing, the reason we use binary logic is simple: weakening makes many problems more tractable. We spend all our time building abstractions and rules to limit what a programmer can express within certain bounds, to enable a compiler to better optimize it. If all we need for an application is boolean logic, then using other logics adds unnecessary power, and power leads to bugs.
- grifpete 12y ago
  I believe in law it is perfectly possible to settle with no admission of guilt. Are you then innocent or guilty?
  - dfc 12y ago
    You could point out that "law" is more than just crim and you can make a bigger point. Civil litigation is much messier than Guilty/Not guilty. If you really want to drive this line of reasoning home comparative vs contributory negligence seems like the way to go.