SRH and Dharma

Just re-exploring something said before:

SRH, is really just the hypothesis that Godel's Incompleteness Theorems hold even in informal systems like natural language. While proven in formal systems, SRH says that the mechanism has universal scope.

Now the question that has been explored recently is whether Buddhist Dharma can be derived in thinking.

Traditionally meditation is used to examine the pre-thought world to realise that thoughts are limited, and in so doing get a handle on the most problematic thought which is the "self." The thought about our self is not the same as our self:

Now immediately we can use SRH here. If we take the thought about our self as our real self, then who is having that thought? It must be that the thinker and the thought are different. And we can use Godel to show that our thoughts about our self must be incomplete. That means we can never know the knower. Descartes thought he could, that is his mistake.

Another great example is meaning. In most schemas of things that do not have meaning, gain it through context. In Wittgenstein that is the rules surrounding their use. What is interesting is that theories of meaning must base themselves on things that have no meaning. This is SRH again. Meaning itself cannot have a meaning. Obviously the word "meaning" has meaning, in that we all know how to use it. When someone asks "what is the meaning of that?" we know to explain how it fits into a context they understand. But the point is that this schema of meaning cannot found itself. Wittgenstein refers to things like "ostentation" which are not learned. You cannot learn what the meaning of finger pointing is, as finger pointing is used to teach. Likewise the context of rules that we use to know how to use things and give them meaning cannot itself have meaning. The whole point of a theory is that it builds upon a foundation that is different from what is being built.

This Bagpuss episode from UK children's TV covers this brilliantly. 

 But the reason you can't have a Mouse Mill that takes in chocolate biscuits and produces chocolate biscuits is because of SRH. If this was possible chocolate biscuits would be consistent and complete. To make a chocolate biscuit from a chocolate biscuit the system would be closed, it would be complete. And the system would be able to define a chocolate biscuit, and know that it made chocolate biscuits: consistent.

In reality we know no system can make chocolate biscuits in a complete way. They take ingredients like wheat that are bound to the universe in endless ways. There is the growing in fields, but also the evolution of wheat and the DNA going back billions of years to the creation of life, and that based on the creation of the universe, and that.. well we are still exploring. The system is most definitely not complete and we cannot prove it is consistent because we have no limit on it.

Anyone who knows their Buddhism will be seeing the fundamental marks of existence emerging here. Things are dependently arising and have no fixed self. That is to say that nothing is closed. It is fully dependent on other things, open to the universe and in so being not a separate entity unaffected by that universe.

That all thoughts are broken by SRH when they try to promote themselves to fundamental truths is interesting. It means that thought cannot succeed in its program of found the world, or become the source of truth. Thought must accept itself as flawed and dependent. But that is all enlightenment is!

What does base thought then? Well meditation, particularly breathing meditation, is used to see breath as it is. Initially we will see breath and thought combined. But with practice the mind will drop away and we will be left with the breath. That is an important moment because we realise that thoughts are founded. They are not the truth themselves. But this is the same conclusion that SRH gets is to without ever leaving the realm of thought. It seems we can get to the limits of thought by either putting thought down, or by completing the process to think questions like "what is thought?" and realise that we cannot think the answer.