Wednesday, January 21, 2009

Ed Schenk Predestination / Karma / Reincarnation


The following text are expressions by the Dutch Mathematical Poet, Ed Schenk

Predestination / karma / reincarnation

Some agnostics define death as:
death = life – life axiom 1)

In many religions the believe is there is something after or above death. This could be written as:
death ≠ 0 axiom 2)

Now if axiom 1 and axiom 2 are simultaneous valid, this leads to the postulate:
life ≠ life

This looks contradictory, however if we introduce the element time, axiom 1 could be written as:
death = life(n+1) – life(n),
where n is the current life. Moving variables yields: life(n+1) = life(n) + death. This could be written as:

next life = this life + death (predestination)

or

this life = next life – death This formula looks a bit strange, however this is due to semantics. If we take into account that time is not necessarily linear we could replace the word ‘next’ by the word ‘another’.

This leads to: this life = another life – death (karma)

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Kaz,

Another way to look at it, suggested by the Peano formulation of arithmetic (at least in the sketchy undergraduate versions i learned in the course of learning about Godel's theorem), you start with life, and death is then the successor operator of life, which produces the next life. I.E. death(life)=life
or death(life_n)=life_n+1
Then we have to figure out how to distinguish from the other successor operator on life, namely sex:
sex(life_m)=life_m+1 + life_m+2 + . . .
until all children are counted. And these children are even called "successors".

endwar

Kaz Maslanka said...

Thanks Endwar, This reminds me of my Axiomatic poem ... check it out in the sidebar.

Thanks!
K

Kaz Maslanka said...

Endwar, you woke me up. Ed's poem is an axiomatic poem! I just didn't see it until now.
Thanks!!!

ed schenk said...

Thanks for your thoughts Endwar. This axiomatic line of thought could (and maybe should) be expanded to include procreation. Your suggestion also springed the thought maybe life is recursively enumerable.

Ed

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