At the death of dreams

At the death of dreams

I was there at the funeral.
Hope was veiled in black,
Looking not long of this world.
Peace drew wheezy, broken breaths,
And Love sobbed heavy, stinging tears
That stained the ground before Sadness.
Solemnity presided over the ceremony,
Stoic, his upper lip stiff.
The choir sang, led by Grief and Mourning.
But it didn’t look like Morning would ever show.

Posts in the works

I have a number of posts in the works, all of which include varying numbers of -formatted equations. As soon as I figure out how to get them working, they shall be posted. They serve a fairly trivial purpose to the posts, but I still consider them fairly essential to the proceedings.

If anyone’s reading this who can help with inserting limit equations, or can point me to a list of which functions can be used with WordPress’ built-in  capability, then I would be grateful for any assistance.

Why societies collapse

My history is rather bare now, and previously felt rather intellectually monochromatic, so in order to pad my archives by leeching off genuine contributors bring some diversity of thought to the blog, I have decided to start featuring videos that inspire me.

Today, it’s Jared Diamond talking to TED about why societies collapse.

Let’s see if I can’t come up with anything intelligent to say about this in the next few days.

The Doctrine of Mutual Exclusivity

False assumption of mutual exclusivity is a problem which I find both very annoying and very common. Dualistic structures that are either ‘A’ or ‘B’, never neither nor both, can be very blinkering, and potentially very dangerous. Forms of mutual exclusivity underlie a number of irrational and divisive beliefs, including racism, nationalism, sexism, and other ‘us-or-them’ doctrines. The ‘us-or-them’ nature is virtually ubiquitous in societies engaged in wars, or gearing up for war, and perhaps even still recovering from war.

One should be aware of mutual exclusivity and its potential for misdirection, but it is not necessarily always incorrect. Indicative of this is that mutual exclusivity is both a logical law and an informal fallacy – the law of the excluded middle and the fallacy of the excluded middle. So it can be either right or wrong. But which is it?

If we were to apply mutual exclusivity to the problem of whether or not mutual exclusivity is true¹, then only one option would be true. But this would mean that the other would be false, despite evidence to the contrary.

There is a third option: both are right, but contextually².

Theologically, mutual exclusivity has its roots at least in Zoroastrianism, which influenced the later-originating Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, etc). It did not spread eastwards into either Buddhism or Taoism.

Buddhism was rid of mutual exclusivity by an early Buddha³, and now has a number of features to counter mutual exclusivity, including some of the koans, and the “mu!” response to certain theological questions. Taoism has likewise avoided the grip of mutual exclusivity, even despite the central position of the idea of dualism in Taoism. It has done this by directly denying mutual exclusivity, both implicitly and explicitly. This is part of the meaning to the dots in the ‘Yin-Yang symbol’ (the Taijitu): each contains the seed of the other, and the potential to change entirely.

In the West, mutual exclusivity was reified partly due to the theology of Christianity – acts are either good or evil; beloved either to God or to Satan. Mutual exclusivity is therefore necessary to the theological structure, as questioning it would quickly lead to the supposition of dual or empty acts – acts that are either beloved to both God and Satan, or to neither. To acknowledge the former is especially dangerous, as the existence of such acts would call into questions the benevolence of God or the malevolence of Satan; a question whose answer would in either case practically void the entire Christian moral, if not theological, structure.

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Notes

1 – I know that this is begging the question somewhat; the purpose of this is not to be a formal proof, but to act as an illustrative exercise.

2 – I intend to later work on exploring and describing instances where either the law or the fallacy is valid.

3 – His name escapes me (he lived early in the first millenium C.E, if my memory serves me), but he asserted that there are things that can be both ‘A’ and ‘not-A’. I’m pretty sure that he also authored a sutra.

Butterfly

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