Daniel’s Blog

I have worked out today that I want to do so much, but there is so little time for me to do it now (and I don’t have the money to do it now). Here’s a list of the things I would quite like to do/learn:

• Yoga based on the Hatha Yoga Pradpika
• Tibetan Buddhism, Shingon Buddhism and Tantric Theory/Practice
• Tai-Chi / Tai-ji (any style, Chen Style seems interesting)
• Reiki (Traditional Usui, Traditional Takata or Non-traditional Reiki Tummo)
• Ayurveda
• Tankhem may also be interesting to look into

I mean I love computing, and wouldn’t give up my studies/work to do the above… they are just an interest. I believe that life is more than it seems, we can be as rational as we like about the material life but there are some things we just can’t explain and some of the techniques mentioned above are ways to connect to the unexplainable.

I have had interests in these things for a while now, it even led me on to self-studying something called Fuzzy Logic which is sort of an opposing view to standard/binary/Aristotles Logic . Where binary logic is the theory that any one thing can be true or false. Whereas Fuzzy Logic we can have in-between values something can be true or false or somewhere in between, we can represent “almost true” or the “likeliness” of something. Bart Kosko provides an excellent description in his Fuzzy Thinking book, in this book he links Fuzzy Logic to Buddhist thought and explains how the Asian countries are embracing Fuzzy Logic with arms wider open than in the west.

Computing brings in a lot of theory from other subjects, logic is obviously a philosophical thing. Something which I have been studying recently is “ontologies and taxonomies” which have roots in philosophy and biology, its basically the classification and theory of classification of “things”. If we can classify “things” and use them on a computer, then we can work out things which we may not have worked out before (e.g. what relates an apple to a snake? we may get an answer such as an apple is the fruit, and is grown on a tree which is a plant and a snake is a reptile which is an animal).

One theory I have been thinking of recently is applying this to religion, a kind of web of meaning in regards to human belief… so we can work out what are the similarities and differences between (e.g.) Christianity and (e.g.) Buddhism and get even more specific by asking the similarities between (e.g.) Pentecostal Christianity and (e.g.) Shingon Buddhism. It would be a kind of semantic web for religion and belief, with citations to books, articles and sacred texts. I would really like to do this, it would be interesting… especially if we have auto-generation of this semantic structure by use of an online form (for example), so people can put in their thoughts, feelings and beliefs. Maybe I will in the future? who knows?

One last thing that I would like to mention about computing and belief. There is one word which I have been thinking about, which is “Entities”. Entities appear in many beliefs, the word entity tends to be used as a super-set for spirits, ghosts and sometimes gods. Entities in computing tend to be a representation of an object (or class of objects) with their properties and their values. ok, so therefore, a spirit/ghost/god could be represented by a computational entity(?) as a spirit/ghost/god does have properties and relations…. and we could (technically) compute this information… hmm, virtual gods? “I got a message from my virtual spirit yesterday?”

This is all theoretical stuff, some may think its totally a load of codswallop (I should use codswallop more often), if you do agree with what I am talking about then let me know would be good to hear your thoughts.

Anyways, good to get this all out of me.

Daniel.

technorati tags:computing, religion, belief, yoga, future, logic