On the meeting between mathematics and Buddhism

The seventh axiom of Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory (ZFC, which mathematics rests on today): “The axiom of infinity” (ie, assuming that there is an infinite set), together with “The Axiom of choice”, corresponds to the central Buddhist concept of “Śūnyatā“, meaning emptiness, or rather voidness.

This “thing” (or rather voidness instead of thing) that ZFC and Buddhism assume and point at, respectively, is the core of, the driving force for, and the skeleton that holds up, reality. It is the mystical central part of reality which we have to bypass, like in ZFC, to arrive to a consistent reasoning about reality (ie, to fuse logic and mathematics consistently). It is also called Russell’s paradox.

However, at the same time as intelligent people have tried to come to grips with this “thing” (voidness), there have been a lot of people, called realists (eg, “cladists” and “particle physicists”), simply denying that this “thing” is void, instead asserting that it does indeed contain things (eg, “the tree of life” for cladistics and “Higgs particle” for particle physics). Both these examples are actually still asserting this, although ZFC has fused logic and mathematics (and although quantum mechanics has proven it right). But, not only that, particle physics was also awarded the Nobel Prize last year for finding “the Higgs particle” empirically, although ZFC and quantum mechanics already had falsified such a thing. This finding must simply be wrong, because everything else would falsify all facts we have (also those that the finding rests on). It would actually falsify itself, dragging science with it, and leaving belief as the winner. So, we can just pray to God that neither cladistics nor particle physics can verify their falsification of science, and, luckily, in this prayer we can rest confident, because it is impossible to verify anything.

Mathematics has thus fused with Buddhism in order to find a consistent way to reason about reality. Unfortunately, it leaves us without any comprehensible explanation of what reality is. On the contrary, it denies the mere possibility of finding a comprehensible explanation of what reality is. So, it is time to wave farewell to the notion of “a single truth”.