Most people at present assume that religion is independent of logic. They insist that claims of religion must be “logical”—i.e., follow the principles of identity, non-contradiction, and excluded middle. This attitude is predominantly Western because alternative logical systems have either been formalized (e.g., in Buddhism and Jainism) or used informally (e.g., in Zen and Taoism) in Eastern philosophy. Nyāya, as one...
Since the advent of computers, it has been widely believed that the human mind is just like a computer. I have previously described why this is a false analogy due to two problems: (1) the problem of meaning, and (2) the problem of choice. I have also discussed the problem of meaning in computing theory in the book Gödel’s Mistake. However,...
While writing mathematical equalities, we assume that if A = B, then B = A. But this principle doesn’t hold in logic when we employ two concepts, one of which is more general than the other. For example, “cat is a mammal” doesn’t imply that “mammal is a cat” because even dogs are mammals. Logic tries to solve this problem using...
