This Mathematician Thinks the 4 Axioms of Probability Were the Buddha’s First Teaching!
All you really need are two ideas: oneness and aboutness. From them, four simple equations fall out:
One – concepts = One (subtraction) Silence. Strip away all the “abouts” and the One remains.
One ÷ concepts = concepts (division) Aboutness. To speak of the One is to divide it into parts.
One + concepts = One (addition) Futility. Pile up concepts all you like - they never add beyond the One.
Concepts × One = One (multiplication) Convergence. Many “abouts,” multiplied together, circle back to unity.
Those four lines seem to capture, at once, the Four Noble Truths of Buddhism, the four arithmetic operations, and the four basic rules of probability theory.
It is the claim that these four moves occur:
In Buddhism: where subtraction is dukkha (what remains when everything else is taken away), division is craving (splitting into “more”), addition is cessation (nothing really added), multiplication is the path (many steps converging on unity).
In arithmetic: where they’re the basic functions every schoolchild learns.
In probability: where they reappear as Kolmogorov’s axioms (1933), the very foundations of modern statistics:
The whole space has probability 1 (silence leaves the One unchanged).
Conditional probability is defined by division.
Probabilities of disjoint events add to 1.
Independent probabilities multiply, and Bayes’ rule renormalises them to unity.
Now, about that headline. The “mathematician” in question is me and the picture is AI generated to make me look the way I imagine a smart mathematician might (for better or worse!). In truth I am a mathematician in only in the most charitable sense of the word. By training I’m a philosopher of games, not of mathematics. My maths would barely impress a first-year undergrad. But philosophers sometimes notice structures hiding in plain sight, and this looks like one: that probability theory may simply be the formal shadow of how concepts relate to the ‘One’ (what I take to be the universe, or reality).
So, no: I haven’t secretly unearthed the lost sutras of Kolmogorov. But yes: those four lines are real, and the resonance is there. If probability theory and the Buddha’s first teaching rhyme this closely, perhaps what we’re glimpsing is not coincidence but a grammar of reality itself.