Adi Shankara and His Incomprehensibility Thesis

Real Estate and Intellectual Properties. Unlike these days, in olden days it was unnecessary to say "don't be evil" or "don't kill unborn babies", people were born pious and mostly remained pious. Totally egoless, Shankara never wrote his name in any of his voluminous writings. In his time, owning real estate property was frowned upon and intellectual property right was considered disgraceful. He wrote many hymns which are popular even today. He is the originator of Advaita Philosophy, a sophisticated form of Vedanta.
Shankara's Incomprehensibility Thesis. Stated simply, Shankara's contention is that even metamathematics (or any other form of rational thinking) is not enough for a complete understanding of Reality. An important concept initiated by Shankara is called "Maya", loosely and perhaps wrongly, translated in English as "illusion". I look at it differently and call it Shankara's Incomprehensibility Thesis (SIT): a kind of extension of Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem (GIT). My view is that every formula in any axiomatic theory can be put in one of four categories: theorem, falsehood, introversion, profundity. Introversions arise when we attempt to use the theory to investigate itself, and profundities are the profound concepts which we are not sure to choose or not to choose as axioms. While GIT says that there are introversions in any significant theory, SIT says that there will always be profundities in any branch of knowledge, no matter how much we advance in our understanding. Of course, Shankara did not say this in bland logic, but with religious fervor in the form of hymns.
The following quote from Will Durant gives a rough idea of the line of thinking adopted by Shankara to reach his conclusion:
Sankara establishes the source of his philosophy at a remote and subtle point never quite clearly visioned again until a thousand years later. Immaunel Kant wrote his Critique of Pure Reason. How, he asks, is knowledge possible? Apparently, all our knowledge comes from the senses, and reveals not the external itself, but our sensory adaptation-perhaps transformation of that reality. By sense, then, we can never quite know the "real"; we can know it only in the garb of space, time and cause which may be a web created by our organs of sense and understanding, designed or evolved to catch and hold that fluent and elusive reality whose existence we can surmise, but whose character we never objectively describe; our way of perceiving will forever be inextricable mingled with the thing perceived.
Note that it is only in the twentieth century that quantum physicists grappled with the idea that the observer and the observed cannot be seperated from an observation.
Further reading. To get a gist of Shankara's philosophy, see Will Durant. To know more about Adi Shankara, type "shankara" without quotes
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