Thomas Wong’s Paper Proposal

THE APPLICATION OF SET THEORY AND FUZZY LOGIC TO ENHANCE THE MENTOR-SUCCESSOR EDUCATION SYSTEM – the succession of Traditional Chinese Medicine, systemic practice and the teaching of Buddha

Education nowadays provides standardization at schools and universities by teaching us fundamental components and relationships for our effective communications among each other. However, the mentor education helps us to transform from schools into society by teaching the experience of cybernetics. The value of experience depends on the gathering, teaching, and learning processes. Gathering information in a systemic way, adjusting the parameters of components and relationship in a cybernetic way, clearly pointing out and recognizing those systemic choices of information and cybernetic adjustment of parameters, would provide the highest value of experience. Actually, what has passed on are the perspectives of the mentor on why, how, what, where, when, whom to choose : awareness of the environment and memory, perspectives for comparison, sensation of importance, and finally the strategy for implementation. Research finds that this cycle of system, awareness, perspective, sensation, and strategy, are described by the five aggregate system theory in the teaching of Buddha.

The most primitive mentor teaching is the situation-strategy expression of experience. High quality experience is naturally passed on systemically and cybernetically. Its effectiveness depends on the natural teaching ability of the mentor, and the learning ability of the successor. Effective mentor-successor education could be achieved by identifying and clearly defining the systemic and cybernetics components and relationships. The learning process itself would be again an interactive, cyclical and cybernetics one, and the same methodology could be applied.

Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) nowadays has adopted the western medicine education instead of mentor-successor education, resulting in better standardization but weaker systemic adaptation and diversification, whereby the invaluable experience of senior age TCM practitioners is facing a loss. Therefore an effective systemic and cybernetic methodology is urgently required to save the knowledge. Since experience is an art in all fields of science and engineering, cybernetics is the solution to “The Art of Science”.

Research has revealed that the key may lie in the main methodology in TCM itself. A TCM mentor employs a differential diagnosis-cure process involving three spectrums, namely, the Superficial-Internal spectrum, the Cold-Hot spectrum and the Deficiency-Excess spectrum, which are believed to have the same origin as set theory.

A set of symptoms are employed to determine the current position in a particular spectrum. Each of the symptoms or behaviour is assigned a fuzzy weighting as not important, a bit important, important, quite important and very important. The summation of the weighting-amplitude multiplication determines, for example, whether the human body state is a bit Hot, Hot, quite Hot or very Hot on the Cold-Hot spectrum. The mentor will then base on the state of the human body and determine the strategy for the maintenance. Again the strategy could have the same fuzzy measure, for example, being a bit Cold, Cold, quite Cold or very Cold.

It follows, therefore, to learn from a mentor is to recognize a set of systemic and cybernetics parameters that characterizes how the mentor identifies the state of the body from a set of symptoms, and determines the strategies cybernetically.

Cybernetic traditions:

  • 3) Experimental epistemology; constructivism; philosophy of science
  • 5) Education and conversation

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