My mathematics teacher at TIME coaching classes was explaining about ancient Indians and their knowledge and skill. He extolled about the Hindus, Jains and Buddhists, about their researches, philosophies and their knowledge about the meaning of life.
Consider the following statements:
X exists.
X does not exist.
There are two states for X. Existence and non-existence. Now, the question is,
Is there an excluded middle between the two states, i.e., is there an intermediate state ? Like, X exists but does not exist ???
Well, the research goes thus:
Consider you are sleeping.
In your dreams, you are chased by a tiger. You fear for life. You start running in order to escape.
Suddenly, you wake up from your sleep. You see no tiger. You are not running. You dont have any fear for life.
Now, we see that the tiger existed in dreams, but not in the awake state. It was real in dreams but unreal in reality. X (tiger) exists, but does not exist…
Why so much complexity ? Concept is very simple…
While we wake up every morning, we have a buffer time when we are awake, yet we are sleeping. We tend to live partly in our dreams.
One day, I experienced this. I had a nice dream. Suddenly, I woke up in order to go to class. I locked the room and went out. Apparently, my roommate was still sleeping inside the room. Conclusion : He did not feature in my dream, and I was dreaming when I was locking him inside. So, he did not exist, though he existed…
