Subject: Buddhist mathematics on Ambedkar jayanti
Date: Mon, 14 Apr 2008 07:57:48 +0000
religious and political considerations have penetrated the content of mathematics and science. I pointed out the cultural dependence of logic—that Buddhist and Jain logics are not 2-valued…What kind of mathematics, science and technology would result from different (and more equitable) cultural premises, such as those of Buddhism?
The 50 volumes of the Project of History of Indian Science, Philosophy and Culture are an important landmark. However, there is nothing happening in Indian universities to carry forward this initiative to the next generation. Nothing at all to address the philosophy of current science and technology, or the related questions of ethics or history.
This is a pity because the current philosophy of science is a deep source of soft power, as demonstrated e.g. by the pope’s infamous speech against Islam. (Pls see my article on “Benedict’s Maledicts” on ZNet, which Dr Asghar Ali Engineer reprinted in the journal from his Centre for Study of Secularism and Society.) My book The Eleven Pictures of Time: The Physics, Philosophy, and Politics of Time Belief , elaborated how the politics of inequity has infiltrated physics through its philosophy. Then there is the indirect effect this philosophy has through the inequitable history of science—whether about calculus or about “Euclid”, as pointed out in my PHISPC volume.
However, to fully bring out how religious and political considerations have influenced the content of present-day science, I have had to get into specifics of, say, the singularity theories of Penrose and Hawking. This is frustrating, since few people (2 or 3 at most, if any, in India) have actually read or understood those theories. Those who understand Hawking’s theories, usually don’t understand Augustine’s theology and politics. Since most people proceed on guesswork or faith, it is hard to make them understand.
Therefore, at the ISSA Congress in Mumbai, in December, I tried a different track to make evident how religious and political considerations have penetrated the content of mathematics and science. I pointed out the cultural dependence of logic—that Buddhist and Jain logics are not 2-valued— as re-emphasized in my PHISPC volume, on Cultural Foundations of Mathematics . Given the actual cultural variation in logic, the mathematics of the theorem-proving kind loses its significance, because theorems will vary with the logic used. Therefore, a mathematical theorem can no longer be regarded as the eternal and universal truth that it was earlier proclaimed to be, but is reduced to a local, cultural artefact. (The review of this book by a mathematician in The Hindu on 12 Feb also does not refute this key argument, which has stood unchallenged for a decade.) To the extent that this culture-dependent mathematics is used by present-day science, that too must be a social construct.
To make this culture-dependence even more manifest I raised the following question. What kind of mathematics, science and technology would result from different (and more equitable) cultural premises, such as those of Buddhism?
By a strange stroke of luck perhaps, the answers to this question are almost ready made, at the present moment.
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As for mathematics, having discarded theorem-proving, the value of mathematics rests on calculation. Now, as argued in my PHISPC volume, the realist Buddhist philosophy of sunyavada is better suited than Platonism or formalism for calculations carried out even with the present-day technology of computing. It was the difficulty with sunyavada, not sunya (or the numeral zero), which made it so hard for Europeans to understand the Indian methods of elementary arithmetic, imported in Europe through algorismus texts, between the 10th and 15th c. CE. This Western confusion over non-representables persists in recent computer languages like Java.
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But where is the space to pursue this? …
This creates the following paradox. Given the norm of specialisation, most people (including most scientists) are unable to judge of their own knowledge the correctness or validity of a scientific theory or claim. So ipso facto the “scientific method” is reduced to this: something is scientifically valid if and only if it is socially approved as such by the West! Therefore, anything radically critical of the West cannot be science by social definition!
I hope our national bodies like UGC, ICPR, NBHM (to all of whom a copy is marked) will wake up to this “Macaulay effect” and recognize their own role in propagating this culture of mimesis, and administratively enforcing dependence on the West . (This dependence creates the conditions for the blatant way in which some ideas from my books were repeatedly plagiarised, one by an iconic Western mathematician.)
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