On Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 4:26 PM, Jeff Zeitlin <icehouse@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > On Mon, 01 Aug 2011 08:53:46 -0400, "Ryan Hackel" <deeplogic@xxxxxxxxxx> >>Bottom Line: Does a rule that involves spelling or language violate the >>Spock Rule? > > I hold that it does, because the language that the colors of the > pyramids are named in is not inherent to the pyramids, their > relationship to each other, or to the surface. You and I speak English, > but what if Spock were to transport that koan to a table in (say) > Helsinki, where the colors are named in Finnish? Given that Finns play > Scrabble in their own language, does the koan still have the > Buddha-nature? No, it does not violate the Spock Rule. Remember this - when a student makes a guess at a rule and that guess is consistent with the koans on the table, it either matches the master's rule, or it does not. If it does not, the master is required to create a new koan consistent with their own rule, but demonstrates that the students rule-guess in incorrect. If the master is unable to create such a koan, then the rule that the student guessed is in fact the rule, and the student has gained enlightenment. In that case, the student's guess and the master's rule are functionally equivalent. Now, in the case of using language, as described, the rule can *succinctly* be described using the phrase "the first letters of pyramids in a stack form a valid scrabble word", the rule can *also* be described by completely enumerating all koans that match the master's rule. If a student were to list all those koans out, he would gain enlightenment, because the master would be unable to produce a koan that did not match the student's rule. Another example. If I am playing standard Zendo (4 stashes of 4 colours) and I have a rule which is "the sum of the pips is even", and the student guesses "The sum of the pips must be 2, or 4, or 6, or 8, or 10 ...[ here the student keeps enumerating ]... or 114, or 116, or 118, or 120" then the student has gained enlightenment. He has enumerated all possible circumstances in the game. I am unable to show him a koan which does not match (as I cannot show him a koan with 122 pips, because I do not have enough pieces). Although we know that in the real world, what the student says is not the same as "even", it is in Zendo-space because we cannot create an even number of pips greater than 120. (Computer programmers ought to be aware of this type of issue when dealing with computer integers, which are different than mathematical integers, because they have limits based on the number of bits available to represent them). Timothy