Sunday, December 10, 2006
High-energy metaphysics
There used to be a door at MIT labeled Department of Alchemy. Maybe it's still there. It was (I think) a joke, but Stanford has an apparently real Metaphysics Research Lab. It appears to have something to do with automated theorem proving and the existence of abstract objects, something I've speculated about in the past in the context of religion. I seriously doubt whether formal logic techniques can have anything interesting to say about metaphysics, but I also have to acknowledge that I may just be too ignorant to appreciate the depth of ideas here.
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3 comments:
"I seriously doubt whether formal logic techniques can have anything interesting to say about metaphysics..."
Some of the conversations between the Dalai Lama and a panel of scientists which take place during a yearly meeting are pretty interesting. "Formal Logic Techniques" may have a place in Mahayan Buddhism, as a method of rigorous dialectical reasoning... but I don't think the traditional systems formal logic or mathmatical proofs are part of that belief system, lol...
There are conceptual parrallels between some aspects of quantum theory and M-Theory with parts of Buddhism (as a psycholgy or philosophy of conscioussness/mind/perception/reality)...
Here's an 2004 news article that talks a bit about it: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/04/11/RVGR15V5J61.DTL
The Dalai Lama has been meeting with the "Mind Life Institute" to discuss such phenomena and they've put out a few books...
http://www.mindandlife.org/
I don't have any affiliation with them...
http://www.mindandlife.org/
No mention of the Center for High Energy Metaphysics at Harvard, aka the Dudley Co-op?
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