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Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Sudoku koan

Today's word from dictionary.com is:
koan \KOH-ahn\, noun:
A nonsensical or paradoxical question to a student for which an answer is demanded, the stress of meditation on the question often being illuminating.
Koan is Japanese, ko "public" and -an, "matter for thought." It enters English through Zen Buddhism before achieving a more general sense.
Maybe the only way I'm going to essay my announced analogy between Sudoku and religion is to exploit the stress of just throwing caution to the wind and publicly meditate the question. It'll either be illuminating, or not.
    What would a Sudoku koan be, though? Maybe the following question is nonsensical enough:
What is puzzling about the analogy between Sudoku puzzling and puzzling over religion?
At any rate, after my announcement eight days ago, the idea of an "elaborate analogy" between Sudoku and religion has at times seemed elusive. (Maybe that's why I've been procrastinating.)

The heady feeling that comes from the numbers quickly snapping into place on a Sudoku board resembles the confident, in-control feeling that accompanies one's sense that one has seen to the bottom of religion and there's nothing there.
    But that's just the dessert. The main course of the analogy is that Sukoku puzzling and religion puzzling both involve combinations of strategies of elimination that lead to forced moves.

In Sudoku, the simplest forced move is the gimmes that are usually offered in the easier puzzles. For example, you look across the middle array of three 9-cell squares and see:
   5  |     9|   1
 7   6|      | 9   8
   9  | 8 5  |   2
[Let's stipulate that each of the nine 9-cell squares is a quadrant, in its general sense of "major part," even when there are not four major parts.] Without looking at any other part of the board, you can see that the middle cell in the third quadrant must contain a 5, because each of the three quadrants must contain a 5, but each row can have only one, and there's nowhere else for the 5 to go but in the middle row of the third quadrant:
   5  |     9|   1
 7   6|      | 9 5 8
   9  | 8 5  |   2
    Ticking off the "gimmes" in a puzzle is like being able to immediately dismiss religious statements that are obviously wishful and without substance. "I prayed that we'd land safely." Praying or not praying will have no effect on the landing. "Everything happens according to God's plan." There is no such plan.

But in the case of the 8 in the array:
      |     3|   9
      |   2  | 8
 6 8  |      | 3
Either of two cells (x) could host it:
      | x x 3|   9
      |   2  | 8
 6 8  |      | 3
...until we look at the quadrant immediately below it:
 - - -|     9| - - -
 - - -|      | - - -
 - - -| 8 5  | - - -
The 8 in the first column of that quadrant forces the 8 in the quadrant above into the second column:
      |   8 3|   9
      |   2  | 8
 6 8  |      | 3
    Sudoku strategy must widen itself in that way to account for constraints at all levels.

My "Sudoku breakthrough" reminded me that I had been able to see to the bottom of religion in much the same way I had become able to solve more difficult Sudoku puzzles: by looking at various levels of the religion question in combination:
    Lack of evidence for it. I've seen no objective confirmation that any miracle has occurred. No one has demonstrated that a prayer was answered. Etc.
    Its absurdity. The most absurd belief of religion is probably the one that "sinners" will be subjected to unspeakable torments that will last forever and ever.
    Its irrelevance to morality. Religious people come in all varieties of good and bad, the same as atheists.
    Its logical contradictions. Each of the three Abrahamic religions consider adherents of the other two to be unbelievers, or infidels.
    Naturalistic explanations for it. The belief in a Day of Judgment satisfies the wish that good people will be rewarded and bad people punished. For example. Evolutionary investigations into the roots of religion are fascinating, and I've only begun to familiarize myself with them.
    I may be forgetting a level that I considered at some point over the past years, but the result in any case was that my conclusion about religion was a forced move. What Gertrude Stein said of Oakland applies even more accurately to religion: There's no there there. In a state of religion, people inhabit a vast vacuity of their own (or, more often, someone else's) imagining.

In the scheme of things, though, Sudoku puzzling is like puzzling over religion in that both are really just trivial pastimes, diversions. There are other, productive ways to spend one's time, as I realized the other day, when Sudoku puzzling had made me stale and I reminded myself to get back to reading a good book.

9 comments:

  1. Intriguing comparison...thanks for sharing.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I ponder less than you on the subject because I simply equate religion to the mathematical concept of zero divided by zero. n/0 for n<>0 has no solution if division is defined as "what number multiplied by the denominator equals the numerator?" Or it equals infinity if division is defined as "the number of times the denominator can be subtracted from the numerator before the result goes negative." But 0/0 by either definition equals infinity [or] any number you want it to be.
        So the answer to "What is religion?" is: "It's nothing divided by nothing (or anything you want it to be)." Naturally this leads to contradictions for those who play the game. For example, one person interprets 0/0 to be 6 and another interprets it to be 9. Obviously they both can't be right so each would be an infidel in the other's eyes. Etc., ad infinitum.

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  3. Ha, hopefully, I have been catharticized somewhat on the subject of religion and will ponder it less now myself. My realizing that pondering it is like Sudoku in being a trivial, non-productive pursuit must have helped. But the evolutionary question, What has made humans "be religious"? is still a very interesting one, and I enjoy reading about it. Another friend just recommended to me Daniel C. Dennett's book on the subject, Breaking the Spell. I have a very high regard for Dennett (a professor of philosophy), whose two books, Consciousness Explained and Darwin's Dangerous Idea, are brilliant. So I plan to read Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, "which argues for a scientific analysis of religion in order to predict the future of this phenomenon. Dennett implies that the spell he hopes to break is not religious belief itself, but the conviction that religion is off-limits to scientific inquiry." [Wikipedia]

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  4. I see no analogy at all. A Sudoku is a logic puzzle. Religion is a variety of adaptive behavior, a way in which societies grapple with existential anxiety. To the extent that puzzles provide entertainment, they can be considered a kind of coping. It ends there.

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  5. Because many religions spontaneously and independently appeared, I suspect that religion is a natural phenomenon of any species whose "higher intelligence" evolves. An intelligent species' desire to know why always precedes its ability to figure out why (science). So religion is really pre-science guesses. The reason for organized religion is more involved but perhaps is the outgrowth of those few who early on figure out how to make bullshit pay. Is it cynical to say that the troubles in the world are because so few humans really understand science? I'm with Dennett that religion (and all aspects of life for that matter) should be scrutinized by science. Religion will resist because it will not survive scientific inquiry.

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  6. Jim, I've only begun to read Dennett's book, but it's already clear to me that he (like Ken too, whose comment here intersperses our own) thinks religion a good deal more than "pre-science." Ken states it well: religion is "a variety of adaptive behavior, a way in which societies grapple with existential anxiety."
        Not a good way to grapple with it, perhaps, but a way.

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  7. Ken, I admit that I left my essay a bit ambiguous as to what I was making an anology between. But I think the core of the analogy, between puzzling over religion and puzzling over a Sudoku, is immune from your objection, even though an analogy between Sudoku per se and the practice of religion, say, probably would not be.
        The analogy I drew was a true depiction, I think, of how I go about solving a Sudoku puzzle, and how that approach is very much like the way that I thought about religion for a number of years and concluded that, for me, as a practice, is is empty. For me, it provides no adaptive advantage; it doesn't help me cope with anything.
        I prefer life straight, with no addition of sweet and sour mix or pineapple juice. (Mixed-drink analogies also arose from the Hawaii trip, I had so many opportunities to watch sailors drink Mai Tais and the like at the Kaneohe Yacht Club.)

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  8. Certainly there is much more to religion than its genesis, "pre-science" ruminations. I do not disagree with Ken's observations. He's right on. I believe religion evolved under the same set of natural laws as did (does) biological evolution. Both are the result of a random set of events. With biological evolution, it's survival of the fittest. With religion, it's survival of the one whose "adaptive behavior" most eases "existential anxiety." There are many species and there are many religions. Each is the result of the process of evolution.

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  9. Jim, I think there's even more to the survival of religions (or of religious ideas) than their adaptive advantage of lessening "existential anxiety." It's a fascinating study, and Dennett's book is a start in looking at what might be involved.

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