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PART 1

LANGUAGE OF THE
PROBABILISTIC VISION
OF THE WORLD

On the Threshold of Part I

All the chapters of Part I are devoted to the language of a probabilistic

vision which I believe can lead to a new and deeper interaction with the
reality o f the world. The "non-real" may become real i f the limitations
set by Western culture on our perception o f the world are removed.
These limitations have enabled the development of Western culture in all
its richness and splendor. However, richness always conceals poverty
within itself. A radical change in the language always signifies a radical
change in the culture. This idea is attractive, but i t is also fraught with
certain difficulties, which may prove to be insurmountable, and with
dangers lurking in unforeseen consequences. However, whether or not
we wish it, the process of cardinal changes has started. The search for
new languages is also going on: the language of contemporary physics
cannot be compared with that of classical physics; and the response to
the papers by Zadeh, devoted to fuzzy sets, would hardly have been pos-
sible even in the recent past. I have also started o n this road.
The first chapter, written in an extremely laconic form, attempts to
show the potentially existing universality of the language of probabilistic
vision. This chapter opens up broad vistas of the probabilistic perception
of the world. The second and third chapters give a detailed account of
two instances o f using this language to solve problems that were unsolv-
able in a familiar language. In the fourth chapter a n attempt is made to
show that the language of a probabilistic vision is a continuation o f the
trend in our culture which used to perceive manifoldness, made fuzzy by
2 Language of /he Probabilisfic Vision

number, as uniqueness. This had been done by Plotinus, who seemed to

follow the tradition coming from Pythagoras. Finally, the fifth chapter
emphasizes the highly metaphorical character of our use o f probabilistic
concepts. Randomness is regarded as a synonym for the "fuzziness"
treated by Zadeh.

To Chapter 1