I subjectively don't find those philosophies interesting, and have a distaste for assigning single ideas to heterogeneous groups like "the west". Your mileage may vary.
For example, I would consider myself western but I don't have any problem imagining systems with true, false, both and neither. You just treat them as anonymous values with particular operations, instead of getting stuck on "but if we were in this other system that we're not in, this would violate an axiom!".
(If I thought this was a flaw in the article, instead of my opinion of it, I would have just said it was terrible instead of saying I didn't enjoy it. Its style just grates me sometimes.)
> I don't have any problem imagining systems with true, false, both and neither. You just treat them as anonymous values with particular operations, instead of getting stuck on "but if we were in this other system that we're not in, this would violate an axiom!".
It's not quite that simple. We've built up entire codes of ethics and law and branches of mathematics with practical applications like computing that rely utterly on these axioms. These are things used in the real world, they don't just live in the realm of ideas. These systems don't tolerate more than two values of truth. Even "Western" religion, from Judaism to Christianity to Islam is intimately concerned with the external world where things are concrete and ambiguity is not to be tolerated. Big-C Catholicism itself considers the Church to be the only institution capable of determining Truth, what it calls dogma. We're very much handcuffed to using two values of truth here in this side of the world.
Buddhism is heavily oriented on the experience of the individual, individuals are free to use whatever sort of logic they want to make decisions. So it can experiment with ideas that are neither true nor false. But you can't build a computer with it, at some level it all is resolved on individual components which are either on or off. We don't even know yet if quantum computers which break the binary hegemony offer any real advantage.
But being able to integrate other kinds of logic might make entirely new approaches to, say, law, possible. It's not enough to be able to imagine an alternative system, it's in making it consistent. I personally am very excited about this.
The law is about as non-binary as it gets. There are two states of the law: proven guilty, and not proven guilty. We say things like "innocent until proven guilty" but we all know and accept that reality does not work that way. There is no law of the excluded middle here.
EDIT: Actually, adding some excluded middle might make our law better and more fair. For example, cases could be dismissed if it is shown that a law is being applied selectively, forcing any "discrimination" to be written into law explicitly. For example, if tax code is more often enforced against the wealthy, or drug law against members of poor neighborhoods, that would have to be explicit, instead of systematically hidden, or else enforcement could be nullified.
As for computing, the reason we use binary logic is simple: weakening makes many problems more tractable. We spend all our time building abstractions and rules to limit what a programmer can express within certain bounds, to enable a compiler to better optimize it. If all we need for an application is boolean logic, then using other logics adds unnecessary power, and power leads to bugs.
You could point out that "law" is more than just crim and you can make a bigger point. Civil litigation is much messier than Guilty/Not guilty. If you really want to drive this line of reasoning home comparative vs contributory negligence seems like the way to go.
Also, it's rather eye-opening to note how other cultures thought. This is best done by examining their religion or some other foundation ideology like Buddhism.
It's interesting, but the problem I have with the presentation is that the modern manifestation of this idea has nothing to do with Buddhism. While we can maybe say that Buddhism came up with some similar-looking stuff, there's no causal link, and the philosophical systems are not working within the same paradigm. Like seeing a human face on the surface of Mars, this is an example of coincidence more than any deep connection.
Well, OK, that's unfair, because Buddhism and formal logic are both human endeavours, and have to deal with the same facts. But this disconnect is even true with parts of Greek philosophy. "Atoms" as we understand them are very different from "atoms" as Aristotle thought of them, even though there is a historical connection. Today's chemists would do badly if they relied on Aristotle for anything other than historical curiosity.
>It's interesting, but the problem I have with the presentation is that the modern manifestation of this idea has nothing to do with Buddhism. While we can maybe say that Buddhism came up with some similar-looking stuff, there's no causal link, and the philosophical systems are not working within the same paradigm. Like seeing a human face on the surface of Mars, this is an example of coincidence more than any deep connection.
Philosophies have been swapping ideas for thousands of years and it shows. Take a look at thinkers like Plotinus for example. He lived in Alexandria back when it was a multicultural metropolis hosting people from across the known world. His philosophy uses ideas and language you would expect to find in eastern traditions. Thanks to his extensive influence you will also find this jargon in western philosophy, christianity, islam, etc... This might not seem relevant to you. But if you know the historical connections between neo-platonism and philosophy of math it might.
Aristotle had nothing to do with the atomic theory, other than being against it. As far as antique atomism goes, the ideas is essentially what it is in modern science---matter consists of indivisible elementary particles. It doesn't matter much that what we call "atoms" do not fit the description (at the time of their modern theoretical (re)discovery it was thought they are elementary). This simple idea, without any further elaboration as to how "atoms" work, just the idea that they exist as such, is far more powerful than it seems at first sight. Feynman thought it was the most important piece of scientific knowledge about the universe, so much so that if all scientific knowledge would to disappear but we could choose one fact to preserve, he would choose the idea of atomic theory.
Indeed any scientist relying on Aristotle would do badly, and one of the reasons was because he was against atomism.
The philosophy of Buddhism that seems strange and illogical to many who are used to Western philosophy and classical logic actually fit into systems of logic that were conceived separately, without knowledge of Buddhist philosophy.
Buddhism serves both as an example of how these systems can be useful (they allow us to subject unusual - to us - systems of philosophy to rigorous logical treatments), and as an example of how philosophical traditions that can seem unusual and "weird" and that we might dismiss as illogical may simply follow different rules to what we are used to.
For my part, without relating the maths to something else - like Buddhist philosophy - the maths would have been quite uninteresting.
May I ask you why? Personally I enjoy reading about the origin of some particular idea/philosophy, even when it's purely anecdotal.