I’m not sure how much this answers your question, but:
I actually think Buddhism’s metaphysics is quite well-fleshed-out, and AFAIK has the most fleshed-out metaphysical system out of all the religious traditions. I think it would be sufficient for my goals to find a formalization of Buddhist metaphysics, which I think would be detailed and granular enough to transcend and include the metaphysics of other religious traditions.
I don’t think the mathematical foundations of predictive processing or active inference are very satisfactory yet, and I think there are aspects of Buddhist metaphysics that are not possible to represent in terms of these frameworks yet. Chris Fields (a colleague of Michael Levin and Karl Friston) has some research that I think extends active inference in directions that seem promising for putting active inference on sounder mathematical footing. I haven’t looked too carefully into his work, but I’ve been impressed by him the one time I talked with him, and I think it’s plausible that his research would qualify as small progress toward the goal.
I’ve considered any technical model that illustrates the metaphysical concepts of emptiness and dependent origination (which are essentially the central concepts of Buddhism) to be small progress towards the goal. Some examples of this:
It can be very hard to wrap one’s mind around how the Buddhist concept of emptiness could apply for the natural numbers. I found John Baez’s online dialogue about how “‘the’ standard model [of arithmetic] is a much more nebulous notion than many seem to believe” to be helpful for understanding this.
Non-classical logics that don’t take the law of excluded middle for granted helped me to make sense of the concept of emptiness in the context of truth vaues; the Kochen-Specker theorem helped me make sense of the concept of emptiness in the context of physical properties; and this paper giving a topos perspective on the Kochen-Specker theorem helped me put the two together.
Thanks this was clarifying. I am wondering if you agree with the following (focusing on the predictive processing parts since that’s my background):
There are important insights and claims from religious sources that seem to capture psychological and social truths that aren’t yet fully captured by science. At least some of these phenomenon might be formalizable via a better understanding of how the brain and the mind work, and to that end predictive processing (and other theories of that sort) could be useful to explain the phenomenon in question.
You spoke of wanting formalization but I wonder if the main thing is really the creation of a science, though of course math is a very useful tool to do science with and to create a more complete understanding. At the end of the day we want our formalizations to comport to reality—whatever aspects of reality we are interested in understanding.
There are important insights and claims from religious sources that seem to capture psychological and social truths that aren’t yet fully captured by science. At least some of these phenomenon might be formalizable via a better understanding of how the brain and the mind work, and to that end predictive processing (and other theories of that sort) could be useful to explain the phenomenon in question.
Yes, I agree with this claim.
You spoke of wanting formalization but I wonder if the main thing is really the creation of a science, though of course math is a very useful tool to do science with and to create a more complete understanding. At the end of the day we want our formalizations to comport to reality—whatever aspects of reality we are interested in understanding.
That feels resonant. I think the kind of science I’m hoping for is currently bottlenecked by us not yet having the right formalisms, kind of like how Newtonian physics was bottlenecked by not having the formalism of calculus. (I would certainly want to build things using these formalisms, like an ungameable steel-Arbital.)
I’m not sure how much this answers your question, but:
I actually think Buddhism’s metaphysics is quite well-fleshed-out, and AFAIK has the most fleshed-out metaphysical system out of all the religious traditions. I think it would be sufficient for my goals to find a formalization of Buddhist metaphysics, which I think would be detailed and granular enough to transcend and include the metaphysics of other religious traditions.
I think a lot of Buddhist claims can be described in the predictive processing framework—see e.g. this paper giving a predictive processing account of no-self, and this paper giving a predictive processing account of non-dual awareness in terms of temporal depth. I would consider these papers small progress towards the goal, insofar as they give (relatively) precise computational accounts of some of the principles at play in Buddhism.
I don’t think the mathematical foundations of predictive processing or active inference are very satisfactory yet, and I think there are aspects of Buddhist metaphysics that are not possible to represent in terms of these frameworks yet. Chris Fields (a colleague of Michael Levin and Karl Friston) has some research that I think extends active inference in directions that seem promising for putting active inference on sounder mathematical footing. I haven’t looked too carefully into his work, but I’ve been impressed by him the one time I talked with him, and I think it’s plausible that his research would qualify as small progress toward the goal.
I’ve considered any technical model that illustrates the metaphysical concepts of emptiness and dependent origination (which are essentially the central concepts of Buddhism) to be small progress towards the goal. Some examples of this:
In his popular book Helgoland, Carlo Rovelli directly compares the core ideas of relational quantum mechanics to dependent origination (see also the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy page on RQM).
It can be very hard to wrap one’s mind around how the Buddhist concept of emptiness could apply for the natural numbers. I found John Baez’s online dialogue about how “‘the’ standard model [of arithmetic] is a much more nebulous notion than many seem to believe” to be helpful for understanding this.
Non-classical logics that don’t take the law of excluded middle for granted helped me to make sense of the concept of emptiness in the context of truth vaues; the Kochen-Specker theorem helped me make sense of the concept of emptiness in the context of physical properties; and this paper giving a topos perspective on the Kochen-Specker theorem helped me put the two together.
Thanks this was clarifying. I am wondering if you agree with the following (focusing on the predictive processing parts since that’s my background):
There are important insights and claims from religious sources that seem to capture psychological and social truths that aren’t yet fully captured by science. At least some of these phenomenon might be formalizable via a better understanding of how the brain and the mind work, and to that end predictive processing (and other theories of that sort) could be useful to explain the phenomenon in question.
You spoke of wanting formalization but I wonder if the main thing is really the creation of a science, though of course math is a very useful tool to do science with and to create a more complete understanding. At the end of the day we want our formalizations to comport to reality—whatever aspects of reality we are interested in understanding.
Yes, I agree with this claim.
That feels resonant. I think the kind of science I’m hoping for is currently bottlenecked by us not yet having the right formalisms, kind of like how Newtonian physics was bottlenecked by not having the formalism of calculus. (I would certainly want to build things using these formalisms, like an ungameable steel-Arbital.)