Abstraction is the favourite past-time of not only scientists and java programmers but also of philosophers. But then abstraction is built into the human brain. Civilization and probably all human progress can be directly attributed to abstraction.
There is also a dark side to abstraction. Like in the previous post it is also a root for many social problems.
People will use abstraction and extrapolate the constituent's property to the whole.
A muslim terrorist evokes fear and distrust in the common man for the whole community.
A snake-charmer will cause the whole of India to be looked at as an exotic country of oriental magic.
The rest of india will see every south indian as a madrasi and all south indian languages are the same to him, the westerner will call the language the indians speak as indian.
A dumb answer by a Miss USA paegant will give an image of all Americans being stupid.
A rude Israeli tourist causes all Israelis to be adjudged as mean unfriendly people.
Shanghai makes all of China look like the land of gold and oppurtunity.
A chowkidaar at Dzongri will mistake every man not Sikkimese as Bengali:p
okay now for its dual:
If people would see unity in everything there would be peace everywhere.
People clean up their homes, every speck of dust is cleared and every corner wiped crystal, but they throw that garbage right outside their home. Why cant all of the world be their home.
Countries dump their e-waste, nuclear waste and other hazardous wastes in other third world countries.
People say hes Indian I will help him, hes American I dont like him, hes Muslim hes my brother, hes Buddhist hes infidel, he is rich I will envy him, hes poor I will show sympathy, hes evil I hate him, hes boring I will avoid him, hes this and that bla blaa blaa.
Thats a duck, I can eat it, thats a hill let me destroy it and extract aluminium, thats a tree I will cut it and make a sofa. one can go on and on.
There is a spiritual term for this: non-duality.
Duality is ofcourse the existence of 2 extremes/ends, like good and evil. But lets in this context refer to duality as multi-ality(I dont think this is a word but you understand rt)
Abstraction then is the tool with which one slides from one end of duality to the other, non-duality. It depends on how one uses it or applies it, hence it can both alleviate and increase a particular problem.
No matter how much I try to find an absolute, an objective truth I end up with a subjective,middle way path.
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label philosophy. Show all posts
Sunday, December 23, 2007
variable
The root of many problems arises from the following:
People try to define something that cannot be defined, they try to make connections when the connections themselves are either invalid, non-sensible in the first place, or changing(yes analogies are dangerous), they try to bind a value to a variable thinking it is immutable, they live in the misconception that the value is the same as the variable, they cannot distinguish between the two.
Let me give some simple examples, but before that let me explain some of the terminology I have used:
Events(anything that happens) are values and Nouns(anything that is) are variables.
- Help someone, you will be termed a good man
- Steal, you will be called a thief all your life.
The action becomes the actor and vice-versa.
People try to define something that cannot be defined, they try to make connections when the connections themselves are either invalid, non-sensible in the first place, or changing(yes analogies are dangerous), they try to bind a value to a variable thinking it is immutable, they live in the misconception that the value is the same as the variable, they cannot distinguish between the two.
Let me give some simple examples, but before that let me explain some of the terminology I have used:
Events(anything that happens) are values and Nouns(anything that is) are variables.
- Help someone, you will be termed a good man
- Steal, you will be called a thief all your life.
The action becomes the actor and vice-versa.
Sunday, April 08, 2007
a computer geek's analogy.
What is happiness, the word being one of the basic building blocks of the vocabulary/dictionary is a little difficult to explain/define. Lemme assume the foll meaning:
Happiness: State of Non-Conflict.
Left side of the equation: Mind in view of Buddhist/EasternPhil Ideas and the concept of Closure.
[
Meditation: Nothingness(Hindu School), Mindfullness(Buddhist School), supposedly is a state of immense calm and peace.
Closure is a term in psychology which means broadly coming to terms emotionally with tragedy, or rapidly ending the misery caused by grievous loss. People recovering from love affairs also sometimes yearn for closure. If we generalise this, we can say that any incomplete thing in ur life demands closure, its like "completing" an incomplete circle, and this drives human nature(on of the many drivers). So every human seeks closure, and until he finds that he knows no peace.
]
Right side of the equation: Operating System(Linux/Windows) Processes.
[
At any given time in the runtime of a operating-system(Computer) there are numerous processes, some active, some sleeping/waiting, some dead, some runaway(out of control). They do the computation and other work on the user's behalf, for eg: play a movie, retrieve data from archives, chat etc. Processes can spawn other child-processes and so on.
Abbr: OS = Operating System
]
Analogy(the equation):
Our Mind can be compared to a computer, an OS, managing innumerable activities and thoughts. A normal meditative state is one where no active computation is taking place. One can say all the processes are in inactive or sleeping state. The buddhist medidative mindfullness can be compared to a super-active *ps*(a command that lists all active processes) process that watches all the active processes without interfering. The human mind knows no rest and is continuously spawning new processes, each process contributing something to the mental patterns(RAM or hard-disk memory) and to the very thing it is part of. This thing(OS) keeps changing its form unlike the non-changing OS kernel that runs in a computer. New processes are spawned from the interaction of user and computer, that is the interaction between the environment/surroundings and the mind. The environment need not be external, it may also be internal(memory/RAM/hard-disk). Now normally in a computer OS there is a distinct link between the parent process and the child process, and hence its easier to control and make sense of conventional processes than the mental processes which seem intractable. In an OS, a runaway process is one which has gone awry and out-of-control, whose parent has lost it. An active runaway process, will eat away at ur computation cycles(ur mental cycles) and you wont even know it. Now lets go back to the definition of happiness and to the concept of closure. Lets say all ur active and sleeping processes are not malicious and in control, so it is the runaway processes that contribute to the state of mental conflict, bcos the concept of closure dictates that the runaway processes(incomplete) terminate(complete) normally, but u have no way to control them or you are ignorant of their existence. So a happy computer;) wud be one which has no runaway processes - state of non-conflict. Now how to close these processes?
Btw the very awareness or knowledge that there are runaway processes eating away at ur mental peace will pave the way, without which you will never get out of the conflict state.
There are two ways to obtain closure:
1. Hook into the runaway process and allow it to complete/terminate normally. Normal Closure.
2. *kill -9* (an OS command that forcefully terminates processes). Forced Closure.
Both are difficult.
Note: Incomplete, will close the blog some other day, until that day I will know no complete peace;) [EDIT: Actually thats not true, the blog post is of course still incomplete, just like most (non-mathematical) theories are.]
Happiness: State of Non-Conflict.
Left side of the equation: Mind in view of Buddhist/EasternPhil Ideas and the concept of Closure.
[
Meditation: Nothingness(Hindu School), Mindfullness(Buddhist School), supposedly is a state of immense calm and peace.
Closure is a term in psychology which means broadly coming to terms emotionally with tragedy, or rapidly ending the misery caused by grievous loss. People recovering from love affairs also sometimes yearn for closure. If we generalise this, we can say that any incomplete thing in ur life demands closure, its like "completing" an incomplete circle, and this drives human nature(on of the many drivers). So every human seeks closure, and until he finds that he knows no peace.
]
Right side of the equation: Operating System(Linux/Windows) Processes.
[
At any given time in the runtime of a operating-system(Computer) there are numerous processes, some active, some sleeping/waiting, some dead, some runaway(out of control). They do the computation and other work on the user's behalf, for eg: play a movie, retrieve data from archives, chat etc. Processes can spawn other child-processes and so on.
Abbr: OS = Operating System
]
Analogy(the equation):
Our Mind can be compared to a computer, an OS, managing innumerable activities and thoughts. A normal meditative state is one where no active computation is taking place. One can say all the processes are in inactive or sleeping state. The buddhist medidative mindfullness can be compared to a super-active *ps*(a command that lists all active processes) process that watches all the active processes without interfering. The human mind knows no rest and is continuously spawning new processes, each process contributing something to the mental patterns(RAM or hard-disk memory) and to the very thing it is part of. This thing(OS) keeps changing its form unlike the non-changing OS kernel that runs in a computer. New processes are spawned from the interaction of user and computer, that is the interaction between the environment/surroundings and the mind. The environment need not be external, it may also be internal(memory/RAM/hard-disk). Now normally in a computer OS there is a distinct link between the parent process and the child process, and hence its easier to control and make sense of conventional processes than the mental processes which seem intractable. In an OS, a runaway process is one which has gone awry and out-of-control, whose parent has lost it. An active runaway process, will eat away at ur computation cycles(ur mental cycles) and you wont even know it. Now lets go back to the definition of happiness and to the concept of closure. Lets say all ur active and sleeping processes are not malicious and in control, so it is the runaway processes that contribute to the state of mental conflict, bcos the concept of closure dictates that the runaway processes(incomplete) terminate(complete) normally, but u have no way to control them or you are ignorant of their existence. So a happy computer;) wud be one which has no runaway processes - state of non-conflict. Now how to close these processes?
Btw the very awareness or knowledge that there are runaway processes eating away at ur mental peace will pave the way, without which you will never get out of the conflict state.
There are two ways to obtain closure:
1. Hook into the runaway process and allow it to complete/terminate normally. Normal Closure.
2. *kill -9* (an OS command that forcefully terminates processes). Forced Closure.
Both are difficult.
Note: Incomplete, will close the blog some other day, until that day I will know no complete peace;) [EDIT: Actually thats not true, the blog post is of course still incomplete, just like most (non-mathematical) theories are.]
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