Thursday 9 July 2015

Apurvata, Antarabhava & Backus Naur Part II

Backus Naur Form (BNF) is a notation for Chomsky's context-free grammars which in turn depend on a distinction between 'I' internal (or intensional) Language in the mind of a 'fluent' speaker and 'E' external or extensional Language.

For BNF to eliminate the need for natural language for purposes of unification it would need a second level of syntactic restrictions. However, this could make it too strong- i.e. Turing complete. Similarly, I-language can't be univocal with E-language otherwise it would face a halting problem.

Thus, contra Homi Bhabha, 'newness enters the world' anytime an imperative character string encounters an intensional receiver. This is the 'apurvata' of the Mimamsika- that novel or unprecedented (we might say high entropy) thing encountered in the text which determines its i-language meaning.

Apurva has another meaning- it is what is unexpended in karma whose seed has not yet come to fruition. It links to antarabhava as 'birth determining jati' and, more especially in Buddhism, with the Gandharvas who act as the efficient cause in karmic transmigration.
This idea is an old one present even in the Avesta's Ram Yasht. As for the antarabhava, it is better known nowadays as the Tibetan 'bardo' or, for Sufis, Ibn Arabi's barzakh.
That last, 'as a limit which unites what it otherwise divides'- or more simply a membrane- at one time, looked a promising method of ridding philosophy of false binaries and sorites type problems and Derrida/Deleuze type diarrhea about 'difference'.
That promise hasn't been kept because 'limits' aren't particularly interesting if they arise out of sequences of already existing but unknowable objects. Overlapping choice sequences, however, can define a co-evolutionary finitary fitness landscape corresponding to approximable reals.
Thus, Hindus are perfectly at liberty to think of antarabhava as not so much a limit, but a membrane, damming up and releasing capacitance diversity according to embedded triggers for which it has a co-evolved receptor. Thus the lyric, Vak's love child by the Gandharvas, can lead us back to the Vedas to discover
So rich and strange it each moment reappears
True Beauty's tribute is ever in arrears!

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

In previous post you mention 'I will argue, in my next post, that overlapping choice sequences naturally describe what is essentially a co-evolutionary fitness landscape and that the concepts of apurvata and antarabhava gains salience in that context'
Kindly clarify at proper length giving links for novel terms used.

Anonymous said...

Otherwise better delete or give different title to these 2 posts. No one can understand what you are saying. Backus-Naur is context free grammar where range is well specified. How it can relate to Mimamsika Apurvata?

windwheel said...

There was no interest in my first post- as judged by Web traffic diagnostics- so I gave the matter a cursory treatment.
Co-evolutionary fitness landscapes are not effectively computable. We can have simulations of specific constrained choice sequences. Nothing more.

windwheel said...

Range is not well specified for BNF unless it is Turning Complete.
Purva Mimamsa 'apurvata' arises because Shruti is not e-language.
Kindly state your objection more clearly quoting paradigmatic examples.
I will be happy to pursue the matter.

Anonymous said...

How is range not well specified? Is you computer malfunctioning? Or is it your brain?
My objection is clear- you are writing nonsense. What paradigmatic example are you asking? You are ignorant and foolish and employ vocabulary of a pimp.
Either justify your statements or remove misleadingly titled posts.