Toward a Buddhist Philosophy of Science
Jim Kukula
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Science is the cornerstone of the European-American culture that
has transformed the entire globe over the last few centuries.
Buddhism is a deeply rooted religious tradition of Asia, now
emerging as a powerful global voice. Science and Buddhism both
address the nature of human experience, but in quite different ways.
Science elaborates and refines a collection of interconnected
theories, facts, procedures, and equipment, constituting an ever
more powerful tool for working with and in the world. Buddhism
focusses more on the mind and how our way of thinking affects our
experience.
Both science and Buddhism show how everyday
appearances arise from underlying structures. By understanding these
structures one gains new freedom, to choose among alternatives by
working effectively with the cause and effect relations. Science has
given us great power to understand and change the world. But this
power has also let us create new and bigger problems for ourselves.
Without examining how the dynamics of mind underlies our experience,
it might seem that the evolutionary path of science and technology
is a matter beyond our choice or responsibility. But the profound
insights of Buddhism reveal that our perceptions and actions arise
in habitual self-reinforcing cycles, and the methods taught in the
Buddhist tradition enable us to intervene in these cycles.
Science and technology in some form or other,
which is to say some way of thinking about and working with the
world, are a fundamental dimension of human existence. Modern
science has blossomed by driving the refinement of ideas through
public debate grounded in clear evidence. Buddhism shows the
dynamics underlying any such evolving pattern of experience, and
provides tools to open these patterns to boundless freedom and joy.
Here I explore some dimensions of science
where Buddhism might be able to open new possibilities:
1.
What is Buddhism?
2.
What is Science?
3.
Analyzing Experience
a. Impermanence
b. Causation
c. Compositionality
d. Varieties of Experience
4. The Structure of Analysis
a.
Breaking and Fixing
b. Methods and Results
c.
Chaos and Friction in Theory Evolution
5. A Middle Way for Science
6. Acting and Accepting (Sept 2000)
7. Beyond Civilization (Jan
2001)
8. Resources :
- Buddhism
-
Philosophy
- Resources
for Knowledge
- Science
-
Resources for Software Engineering
-
Resources for Mathematics
-
Resources for
History
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What is
Buddhism?
Introductory Sketch of Buddhism
Buddhism got started around 500 BC when Siddhartha Gautama, the sage of
the Sakya clan, got disgusted by his life and circumstances and left home
to devote himself to meditation. Some years later he experienced profound
realization and began teaching, eventually accumulating a substantial
following around the Ganges valley in India. The path he taught consisted
of a code of conduct, a variety of meditation techniques, and doctrines
about the nature of the world and humanity.
This
school plugged along in a small way for a couple hundred years. Then
Emperor Ashoka around 300 BC converted to Buddhism. He worked to promote
Buddhism across his empire, which extended through most of modern day
India and beyond into Pakistan etc. He also sent Buddhist missionaries to
distant places such as Greece. Buddhism continued to grow in India, with
ups and downs, over the next centuries. By 700 AD there were several great
Buddhist universities in India with over 10,000 students each. Buddhism
spread to Sri Lanka, Burma, Cambodia, and Indonesia. Buddhism also spread
to the northwest, into Afghanistan and up into Turkestan, and from there
along the silk route into China. Buddhism reached China perhaps in 200AD.
Buddhism got to Japan around 700AD, and Tibet about the same time.
Buddhism coexisted with other local religions in most places, e.g. Vedic
religion in India, and Taoism and Confucianism in China. There tended to
be a lot of borrowing back and forth across religions over the centuries.
Buddhism even picked up elements of Greek culture from the remains of the
Alexandrian empire around Afghanistan. For example, the typical statues of
Buddhas are based on Greek sculptures of Apollo.
Eventually the spread of Islam from the West in the period 700-1300 AD
wiped out Buddhism in India and the Northwest, but Buddhism continued to
thrive in Ceylon, Burma, Cambodia, China, Japan, Tibet, and Mongolia. With
this temporal and geographic scope, Buddhism is clearly one of the great
world religions. As one might expect, Buddhism has accumulated a very wide
spectrum of philosophical schools. I hope my quick sketch here will not be
too far out on the fringe.
The
core of the Buddha's teaching is that suffering arises from confusion,
from the emotional turmoil caused by this confusion, and from the
unskillful actions driven by that mix. The path taught by the Buddha
attempts to liberate beings from suffering, addressing unskillful action
with a code of conduct, emotional turmoil with meditation, and confusion
with doctrine about the nature of things.
The
doctrines about the nature of things are perhaps most relevant to the
discussions here. Our general widespread confusion is one that takes
objects to behave and exist in ways that they actually don't. We tend to
perceive and conceptualize things as if they existed as stable, enduring,
isolated, and well-defined. But in fact things are constantly changing and
only exist as a parts of patterns, interrelated with other things.
The
Buddha's teachings on the nature of things were memorized and interpreted
and eventually written down in various ways, forming classically 18
different schools. Typically these analyse the objects of everyday life by
reducing them to composite structures built up from elements, variously
categorized by the different schools. Generally the categories fall
coarsely into the five heaps of form, feeling, perception, conception, and
consciousness. The elements in these categories are generally held to
exist only momentarily, continuous existence being an illusion based on
the successive momentary appearance of similar elementary components.
By 100
AD or so the Madhyamika school had emerged, championed by Nagarjuna.
Nagarjuna argued that even these various elementary components do not
exist as distinct isolated well-defined entities, but only exist by virtue
of participating in a pattern of interrelationship.
I hope
this very short explanation serves to reduce confusion and does not create
confusion or emotional turmoil or lead to unskillful action!!!
What is Science?
Philosophy of Science
Science and Society
Science
and its metaphysical foundations are of crucial importance today. The
technological transformation of the world, guided by scientific
principles, is an ongoing process of staggering impact. These principles
are applied not only to blatantly mechanical systems such as automobiles,
but also guide our thinking and acting in social situations. A clearer
understanding of the nature of science can help us with many key
contemporary issues.
· Our actions today are creating problems of ever greater
magnitude for which we do not have clear solutions. Examples include the
accumulation of nuclear wastes, changes in the atmospheric composition due
to industrial by-products, depletion of non-renewable resources such as
petroleum, depeletion of potentially renewable resources such as fresh
water, and extinction of biological species. Our actions that create these
problems are so tightly interwoven with our way of life that to avoid
these actions would require major changes in that way of life. Thus we are
faced with a very high stakes decision. A key factor in that decision is
an estimate of future growth in human knowledge and capability. Is it wise
to choose a course of action that relies on substantial future scientific
and technology progress to avoid catastrophic consequences? Can we rely on
science to come to the rescue?
· Sometimes scientific evidence appears that points out the need
to take unpleasant action in order to avoid some potentially severe
negative result. For example, there is evidence that global carbon dioxide
emissions must be reduced dramatically if negative climatic changes are to
be avoided. How strong must scientific evidence and consensus be in order
to make such difficult choices? Does science ever reach absolute certainty
about cause-effect relationships in the world? Does the need for further
research ever stop? If the scientific debates continue endlessly, how can
science be used to inform decision making?
· Science generates knowledge which enables action through
development of technology. New knowledge can give us new capabilities to
perform destructive actions, or actions with very uncertain consequences.
For example, advances in biotechnology such as genetic engineering give us
the power to introduce new species. We may also be able to genetically
engineer human beings. If we decide we do not want to perform certain
classes of actions, should we avoid generating scientific knowledge that
could enable those actions?
· Once technology has been developed with great destructive
potential, such as nuclear weaponry, is it wise or practical to attempt to
restrict the dissemination of the scientific knowledge that provides the
basis for that technology? Won't independent scientific progress just
regenerate that knowledge? On the other hand, technology can be developed
with great positive potential, such as a new medicine. Is it necessarily
unethical to restrict the use of that technology or to restrict the flow
of its underlying knowledge, e.g. to protect the profits returned to the
investors who funded the development of that technology? Can it ever be
good or right to block the spread of truth?
· The generation of scientific knowledge itself involves
performing a variety of actions. These actions may be expensive or
ethically negative. For example, many scientific experiments involve pain,
sickness, or untimely death for human or animal subjects. Projects such as
interplanetary expeditions involve huge government expenditure. What is a
wise, appropriate price to pay for scientific knowledge?
· Institutional decision making is informed by a variety of
expert opinions. The authority given to these experts is often derived
from their credentials acquired in the scientific community. For example,
scientists give expert testimony in judicial proceedings. How should the
authority of scientific expertise be weighed against other sources of
expertise? How much danger is there of such power corrupting the validity
of scientific credentials? How can we protect ourselves against this
danger?
· Not all knowledge is scientific. Other institutions cultivate
and transmit knowledge, most notably religious institutions. These
different bodies of knowledge are generally not mutually consistent.
Scientific and religious institutions often view each other's knowledge as
being invalid. Can a healthy society support multiple inconsistent bodies
of knowledge, or must such conflicts be resolved in favor of some single
self-consistent body of knowledge? Should invalid knowledge be tolerated?
Should non-scientific knowledge be tolerated?
· Not all institutions that claim to be scientific are in fact
scientific. Indeed, scientific institutions somtimes suffer lapses such as
fraud. How can valid scientific knowledge be distinguished from fraudulent
or false science?
What
is Science?
Science
is a complex human enterprise, involving many activities such as:
· a laboratory technician figuring out what's wrong with a piece
of equipment and how to fix it
· a scientist deciding which data to include in a research paper
and how to interpret it
· a scientific journal editor consulting with referees on
whether or not a submitted paper merits publication
· a faculty committee planning the undergraduate curriculum,
which topics need to be covered and what order will work best.
· corporate managers weighing potential return on investment
from various possible research and development efforts
These
activities leave their marks on the world, from the scientist's immediate
surroundings with journals lining library shelves and laboratories filled
with equipment and materials, to industry with equipment and materials on
a much larger scale, to the world at large with the pervasive presence of
technology and its byproducts. The effects of science are not merely
material - science transforms human experience. Our outlook is not only
changed by the broader range of experience enabled by transportation and
communication technology. We live surrounded by ever more sophisticated
machinery whose behavior constantly trains our perceptions and
expectations. The ideas about the world developed by scientists are widely
taught in schools and popular literature and have become an integral part
of human culture around the world.
Science
and technology have made spectacular progress since the scientific
revolution 300 years ago. Physics outines the detailed structures of atoms
and stars. Biochemistry traces the contruction of proteins from their DNA
blueprint. Technology based on science puts men on the moon and ten
million transistors on a chip. Given this solid track record, what room is
there for questions about the nature of science?
To be
able to do a thing successfully does not imply a thorough understanding of
the processes that participate in that doing. The best scientists in the
world don't understand the complex physiology engaged in a basketball
shot, but that doesn't get in Michael Jordan's way! A key tactic in
science is specialization. A scientist studying the structure of bat's
wings is not liable to be very knowledgeable about stellar evolution.
Disciplines such as psychology and anthropology study human behavior and
social institutions, but have not achieved the level of reliability and
predictability achieved in the physical science, due in part no doubt to
the complexity of the object of study. Science however is a manifestation
of human behavior and social institutions. A thorough scientific
understanding of science is a very tall project! The best psychologists
and anthropologists might have some small inkling of what is going on with
science. Just like Michael Jordan probably knows very little about the
anatomy of the optic nerve despite being a skilled user of that apparatus,
it is unreasonable to expect an expert in aerodynamics to have a
particularly enlightened understanding of how science works. Our great
accomplishments in science do not imply any similar depth of understanding
of the nature of science.
Metaphysical Foundations
My main
focus here will be on relationship between the scientific description of
the world and the world itself. The scientific description includes raw
records of experimental data, theoretical formulations of the general
structure of phenomena, and everything in between. It is embodied in
scientific journals, operating manuals for laboratory equipment,
notebooks, chalkboards, videotapes, and the evanescent vocal performances
of scientists in lecture and dialog. This description is constantly
evolving as scientific activity proceeds. One simple and common notion of
science is that this evolution is progressing or could progress toward
some ultimately ideal description, a description that would be perfectly
satisfactory. Much scientific activity is focussed on finding and fixing
errors in the current scientific description. The ultimate description
would have no errors, so no more fixes would be needed. Is a perfectly
error-free description of the world possible? If not, can a description be
created all of whose errors can be safely and comfortably neglected? If
all descriptions are alike in being erroneous, is there any valid
criterion for selecting a description to guide action in the world?
The
discipline of philosophy of science has developed around various ways to
address these questions. This being a specialized discipline, most people,
even most scientists, are unaware of the variety of positions taken by the
various schools. Occasionally results or controversies will spill out into
the public eye, as with the current "Science War" debates, triggered by
books such as Gross and Levitt's Higher Superstition. Ultimately a
Buddhist philosophy of science could add a new and valuable voice to this
conversation. This will require responses to each of the principal
positions held by the various philosophies of science. What I hope to do
in this essay is merely outline some of the basic difficulties that any
philosophy of science must address, and to indicate how a Buddhist
perspective can contribute positively.
The Relevance of Buddhism
The
Buddhist tradition is over 2500 years old. Certainly when Shakyamuni
Buddha taught, he did not discuss differential equations, quantum fields,
quarks, etc. Nor did he discuss the scientific method, laboratory
procedures, peer review, etc. So it might seem that Buddhism wouldn't have
anything substantial to say about science. But both Buddhism and science
grow out of questioning and examining the nature of the world and our
existence. Buddhist philosophers starting with Shakyamuni Buddha have
closely examined the role our ideas about the world play in the ongoing
evolution of our experence in the world.
Analyzing
Experience
The
world tends to be full of uncomfortable surprises. We humans apply a lot
of effort, trying to protect ourselves from these surprises. Much of this
effort involves rearranging the world, such as growing food, building
houses, etc. We also build up ideas about the world, classifying and
naming objects, and noting the regularities in their behavior. Once we
know how to predict eclipses they are not so surprising or frightening.
While these efforts are successful to a large degree, still rude surprises
continue to intervene. On such occasions we might decide to investigate
things a bit more deeply, to find the hole to be able to patch it. The
world turns out not to be exactly the arrangement of objects that we
thought it was. How is it then? Our investigation might proceed in a
variety of directions.
Impermanence
We work
hard to arrange things in some satisfactory way. At some point we might
actually succeed. But the next day, things have changed. The paint peels,
the fruit rots, the cloth frays. Youth ages, health turns to sickness,
then death. What is the nature of change? How can it be, that what is a
fact on one day is not a fact the next day?
The Paradox
Thinking about the nature of change has a very deep history both in the
scientific tradition going back to Zeno's paradoxes and in the Buddhist
tradition. It is worthwhile to study this matter closely. At one point in
time we can truly say, "X is true", and then some time later we can truly
say, "X is false". This mystery is traditionally illustrated by a variety
of ways to fill in the blank X. Zeno tells the story of Achilles, the
fastest human, chasing a tortoise, a much slower animal. When Achilles
sets off, the tortoise is on the other side of the field, some 100 yards
distant. At that time we would truly say, "Achilles has not caught the
tortoise." Some time later we would expect to be able to say, "Achilles
has caught the tortoise." In Indian philosophy a classical way to fill in
for X is to consider the growth of a seed into a sprout. At first we can
say, "The seed has not sprouted," then later we say, "The seed has
sprouted."
I would
like to continue the discussion in the abstract form of "X" and "not X".
This is a common scientific move from concrete to abstract and
mathematical. Rather than examing science from a Buddhist perspective, do
I not by such a move instead introduce a scientific approach into
Buddhism? But such a move is native to Buddhism. The Buddha was asked
whether his teaching wouldn't be distorted and falsified if translated
into other languages. The Buddha replied, "No," that his teaching, the
holy Dharma, should be translated to be made more easily understood by
whatever audience was at hand. Buddhism for a scientific audience needs to
be translated into a scientific language. Furthermore the great Buddhist
philosopher Nagarjuna acknowledges the validity of using concepts for
discursive purposes without those concepts themselves being granted any
more that provisional validity. So, on with X...
I want
to look more closely at how it could be that at one time X is true and
then at some later time X is false. There must be some last time when X is
true - let's call that A. Similarly there must be some earliest time when
X is false, which we can call B. Now, what is the temporal relation
between A and B? Is A before B? Is A after B? Are A and B actually the
same time? But none of these possibilities makes sense. If A and B are the
same time, or if A is after B, then X is both true and false for at least
an instant of time, which can't happen. But if A is before B, then there
is a time right between these when X is neither true nor false, which
can't happen either!
One
classical resolution of this paradox is to claim that change cannot
actually happen. If X is true at one time, then X is always true. If it
looks like X becomes false, then this appearance of becoming is illusory.
What really exists, exists permanently, changelessly. The rude surprises
of life are in fact illusory. The cure is to free oneself of this
illusion, to train oneself and transform oneself so one's experience is
only that of the eternal realm of unchanging truth.
Mathematical Physics
At the
heart of physics, at the heart of science, lies the differential calculus
of Newton and Leibniz. Since its origin some 300 years ago this calculus
has been elaborated and refined. Careful methods of reasoning now permit
more sophisticated resolutions of the paradox of change.
From a
mathematical physics perspective, the paradox arises from a flaw in
reasoning. It is not valid to claim that, "There must be some last time A
when X is true." Physics models time as real numbers. Real numbers are
built up starting with integers like 1, 2, 3, then adding rationals like
1/2 and 2/3, and finally filling in the infinitesimal spaces between
neighboring rationals with irrationals like pi and the square root of 2.
Not every bounded set of real numbers has a maximal element. For example,
consider the set of all real numbers greater than 0 and less than 2. Pick
any number N in the set. N must be less than 2, because it is in the set.
Pick another number M halfway between N and 2. M is still less than 2, so
it is also in our set. M is greater than N, so N could not have be the
maximal element of our set. Whatever N we might propose to be a maximal
element, we can always construct M in this way so that M is bigger than N
yet still in the set, still less than 2. So this is an example of a
bounded set of real numbers with no maximal element.
Sets of
times, just like sets of numbers, need not have maximal or minimal
elements, even when bounded. Since the paradox of change depended on the
existence of such maximal elements, their nonexistence resolves the
paradox.
Metastability
Real
numbers turn out upon further study to be quite strange objects. As
mathematics continues to develop, families of alternative systems with
subtly different properties have been explored. For example, model theory
opens the door to nonstandard analysis which introduces infinitesimal
quantities. Which number system provides the correct treatment for time?
A
pragmatic approach to this question is to look at the nature of
measurement. To understand better how it is possible for X to be true at
one time and then to be false at some later time, let us consider the
construction of a measurement device that can tell us at what times X is
true and at what times is it false. Whether we are to deal with runners
and reptiles or with seeds and sprouts, the modern way to build a
measurement device is to translate phenomena into voltages. So let us
suppose that we can arrange suitable electrodes and amplifiers so we have
a signal on a wire with positive voltage when X is true, otherwise X is
false. We want to measure the time when X changes from true to false.
The
fundamental problem here is one of converting a continuous quantity to a
digital one. A measurement is recorded as a number, for example "1.95".
After many measurements and an analysis of experimental procedures, an
estimate of experimental error will be added to this measurement when it
is reported, for example "+/- 0.01". But it will be enough if our
measurement process can somehow generate the simple result "1.95". One
approach would be to let some clock run as long as X is true, and turn it
off when X becomes false. So the time when X became false can be reported
by simply reading the clock after it stops. If the clock uses an analog
display, then the experimenter must examine the clock hand position
relative to the dial and decide which mark the hand lies closest to.
It is
somewhat awkward to have a human decision intervene right at the crucial
point where our time measurement is to be performed. This obscures things
right where we are trying to make them clear; it seems to resolve the
paradox with a mystery. To avoid this obscurity, let us use a digital
clock instead. We can just record the digital clock reading directly onto
a computer disk to be incorporated into the experimental report without
any mysterious human decisions involved. Curiously, it turns out to be
impossible to build any such device with complete reliability. Just as a
human experimenter might have trouble deciding how to record the time when
it falls right between two marks, any physical device will have a sticking
point, where things will jam up if X happens to switch from true to false
just as the digital clock is flipping digits. This is a classic problem,
called "metastability", in the design of digital circuits. Actually the
problem is far more widespread than just digital circuit design. Anytime a
continuous set of possibilities has to be cut into discrete parts, there
is always some bit of trouble.
Consider negotiating an intersection controlled by a traffic light. Most
of the time things go smoothly. But every once in a while, the light turns
yellow when one is at an awkward spot, not obviously so far along as to
easily clear the intersection before the red, but not so distant either to
allow for a gentle stop. Indecision arises, to go or to stop? For
different folks this point of indecision will arise at different distances
from the intersection. But between the go zone and the stop zone there is
always difficult boundary. Similarly, when people pass each other moving
in opposite directions, there is always the choice of passing on the right
or the left. Or which person should pass through the door first?
It may
seem peculiar to be using a facet of digital systems design as a means to
illuminate the nature of change. But in fact digital systems such as
computers were actually first envisioned as purely conceptual devices, to
clarify issues in mathematics such as the nature of numbers and methods of
reasoning. The engineering of computer systems provides a mirror for the
general human effort to build a stable, reliable, predictable world. Often
this mirror can show more explicitly and clearly the problems and
paradoxes that arise but obscurely and mysteriously in the general effort.
Metastability is the pragmatic manifestation of the paradox of change. It
is not possible to build a device that can with perfect reliability report
the time at which some feature of the world changes. Rude and awkward
suprises seem to be unavoidable!
Causation
The
sort of description science strives for is not just a catalog of events
but an explanation of those events. We want to understand why things
happen the way they do. To achieve this understanding we start by
observing regular patterns of appearance. For example, every year as the
days get longer in the spring season, the temperatures rise and trees grow
leaves. Noticing this regularity does not yet by itself yield an
understanding of the causative relationship between these events. If we
observe that event C always happens soon after event B, we cannot validly
infer that event B causes event C. There may be some prior event A that
causes both B and C, with no causal relation between B and C.
How can
we investigate to determine what causal relations lie behind the patterns
of correlated events we observe? Scientific experiments are a powerful
procedure for investigating causal relations. To experimentally determine
if event B causes event C, the key requirement is that we be able to
freely generate event B. If event C occurs each time we generate B, but
does not occur when we don't generate B, we can be confident that B indeed
causes C. If instead we observe occurrences of C only after spontaneous
occurrences of B but never after the occurrences of B that we freely
generate, then we can be confident that C is not caused by B, but instead
caused by some prior A that also causes B in a parallel chain.
Note
the complementary relation between free will and causation revealed by
examining the experimental method. Often free will and causation are held
to be in conflict: if events arise due to causation from prior events,
then how can human actors freely perform actions? But now we see that in
fact causation is meaningless without free will; without free will,
causation cannot be distinguished from correlation. And conversely,
without causation free will would also be meaningless; without causation,
free will could not engage the world, the chain of events trigger by free
action would be abruptly terminated and action would be utterly
ineffective.
Curiously the scientific description of the world does not include the
free will of the scientific experimenter, even though that free will is an
essential requirement for the generation of that description. It's a bit
like the blind spot in the visual field caused by the connection of the
optic nerve to the retina. The optic nerve is an essential requirement for
the effective functioning of the retina, yet the retina is blind just at
that point.
Experimental procedures can attempt to avoid relying on free will. There
is indeed a danger that the occurrence or non-occurrence of some event A
will influence the decision of the experimenter to generate event B or
not. If A also in parallel causes C, then the experimenter will observe
that C occurs just when B is generated and so conclude that B causes C.
But this conclusion is fallacious, because the generation of B was not in
fact free, but caused by A through a causal chain of events that include
the experimenter's decision to generate B.
In
order to avoid such errors, experimenters often rely on some sort of
mechanical randomized process to govern the decision of whether to
generate B or not in any particular repetition of the experiment. For
example, a coin toss might determine when a particular patient is given a
new test drug or a placebo. In order to prevent the experimenter's
observations from being distorted by expectations driven by the outcome of
this decision process, the experimenter can be kept ignorant of the
outcome. This is the widely used "double blind" procedure.
While
double blind procedures are doubtless effective at reducing the distortion
of experimental results due to biases of the experimenters, the procedure
still relies on an essential element of free will. The experimental
procedure requires that a link be established between some random process
such as a coin toss, and the generation or non-generation of some event in
the experiment. One could interpret "heads" to mean "give the placebo", or
alternative one could interpret "heads" to mean "give the test drug". For
the experimental results to validly indicate whether casual relations
exist or not, the choice between these interpretations must be freely
made.
Thus we
see that free will is an essential requirement for discovering the causal
relations in the world. But the descriptions that are constructed as a
result of these discoveries do not include free will. Free will is an
inevitable blind spot in any scientific explanation of how the world
works.
Compositionality
The
everyday objects around us are assembled out of various other objects. For
example an automobile is built out of a chassis, an engine, a body, etc.
If we think carefully about this situation, we will run into a variety of
puzzles and paradoxes. What is the value of reflecting on such
difficulties?
Our
habitual way of thinking about the world is to conceive of it as a
collection of various objects, which relate to each other and to
ourselves. We try to arrange the situation with ourselves relating in some
stable way among the various objects. Somehow though problems are
constantly arising, and when we are not somewhat desparately trying to
patch things up to return to some manageable level of stability, we are
worrying about where and when the next outbreak of unwelcome surprises
will come and how can we be prepared to respond.
So it
really does seem counterproductive to go looking for trouble. Life is
difficult enough already without anyone trying to topple over nice cozy
arrangements such as automobiles whose engines are so neatly bolted to
their chassis. Is the object of such an exercise to prod us into yet
another weekend repair chore, hunting down the aisles of hardware stores
looking for yet stronger glue to secure our lives from these latest
assaults? Let's just lay back and drink lemonade instead and forget the
whole exercise.
The
goals of Buddhist practise and of ordinary behavior are not different.
Beings just want to be happy, and perform what seems to them the most
effective actions to become and stay happy. Despite such universal
intentions, the world seems quite filled with suffering. Despite everone's
cultivation of happiness, unhappiness prevails. The Buddhist diagnosis of
this situation is quite simple: the vast majority of beings are confused
about what sorts of actions have what sorts of effects. The actions they
perform, in order to secure happiness, actually generate unhappiness.
The
Buddhist path is a training in methods that truly produce happy results.
Part of this training is to cultivate an understanding of the ways that
common confused approaches lead instead to suffering. One needs to
understand what is confused about confusion. A classic instance of
confused action is rigidly clinging to a conceptualization of the world as
some particular arrangement of objects with various relationships to each
other and oneself. If one can see that any such conceptualization is of
only limited validity, that the more rigidly one clings to such fixed
ideas the more pain results from the inevitable mismatches, then one may
become more able to catch oneself as one's habits again drive one into
such conceptual clinging, and gradually train oneself to develop a mental
pliability that can freely take up and let go of conceptualizations, with
the openness to allow the value and use of each to display themselves.
The
paradoxes considered here are not new. Various versions appear in the
classical philosophical traditions around the world. Any way of thinking
has somehow to make peace with these paradoxes. Whatever solution is
settled upon is inevitably unstable, but various defense mechanisms can be
cultivated to prevent the logical problems from destabilizing the patterns
of thinking that form one of the fundamental subsystems of any culture.
Modern scientific culture has its instabilities and defense mechanisms
like any other. By bringing these to light and recognizing them we may
become more able to weigh their costs and benefits and choose among
alternatives more wisely and compassionately.
So
let's look at some object like an automobile. Perhaps this automobile is
connected to a trailer. Does this combination of automobile and trailer
form some new object, an automobile-plus-trailer? Of course this is just a
game of semantics, of words and their meanings. But if it is just a game
of semantics to ask, "Is that an automobile-plus-trailer," isn't is just
as much a game to ask, "Is that an automobile?" Just like
"automobile-plus-trailer" is just a made-up word one can use to refer to
an arrangement of an automobile connected to a trailer, isn't "automobile"
just a made-up word one can use to refer to an arrangment of a body
mounted on a chassis with an engine bolted in and hooked to the wheels?
Suppose you put an automobile in your garage, and then pull the engine out
and set it alongside. Is there still an automobile in the garage? Is the
engine still part of the automobile or are the automobile and the engine
now separate objects? Suppose you mount the engine in some other
chassis-plus-body and drive that new combination away. Is the
chassis-plus-body still in the garage an automobile? Does is still include
the engine that was driven away? Suppose we mount a new replacement engine
in the chassis-plus-body in the garage. Is there now an automobile in the
garage, and is this new engine a part of it? Is this automobile the same
automobile that we started with in the garage?
In case
this all seems totally absurd, you might consider the problems that arise
with car theives, chop shops, and serial numbers. The black market thrives
on ambiguity and instability!
Here is
another puzzle. Suppose we define a place-setting to be a knife, a fork,
and a spoon. Suppose we have a drawer containing four knives, four forks,
and four spoons. How many place-settings are in the drawer? The easy
answer is four, but wouldn't it be truer to say 64? Label the knives K1,
K2, K3, and K4, the forks F1, F2, etc. Wouldn't it be accurate to say that
place-setting K1+F1+S1 is a different place-setting than K1+F1+S2?
Reductionism
The
more one considers how it happens that some arrangements of smaller
objects somehow form a larger composite object whereas different
arrangements form different larger objects or no larger objects at all,
the more one tries to understand just how those larger objects come into
existence or pass out of existence, the more one is driven to the
conclusion that these larger composite objects are not really existing
things that suddenly spring into being or vanish as the smaller objects
are rearranged. Instead it starts to get clearer that we think about and
talk about these larger objects as a sort of shorthand summary of lots of
details concerning the smaller objects and their arrangement, details that
don't matter much anyway. So if someone asks, "Is there an automobile in
your garage?" the most accurate reply might be something like, "There is
an arrangement of pistons and shock absorbers and metal panels and lots of
other things, arranged in such a way that you can climb in and drive it
around, and it strongly resembles in shape and substance other
arrangements which people generally call 'automobile', so using that
commonplace shorthand way of speaking, yes, there is an automobile in my
garage." Of course such accuracy is mostly a waste of time.
But
such accuracy is not entirely a waste of time. If everyone understands
what is behind a statement like, "Yes, there is an automobile in my
garage," then perhaps no one will be upset when the situation is actually
a little bit over into the grey area, so perhaps the automobile is not is
the best repair, perhaps some not quite essential component is missing, so
when one person's expectations are disappointed there is mutual
understanding that words can never capture reality so such disappointment
is not entirely avoidable and need not be blamed on anyone, so anger and a
cycle of retribution need not be triggered.
If
large composite objects like automobiles "exist" merely as a conventional
shorthand way to summarize in a rough way some arrangement of smaller
objects, what about those smaller objects? Do they also exist in such a
merely conventional fashion? When your sunglasses fall out of your pocket
as you cross the street and somebody's Ford Expedition smashes them into
pieces, maybe that's just a shorthand way of saying 6000 pounds of steel,
but such a real effect surely has some similarly real cause!
The
modern scientific answer to this puzzle is reductionism: while automobiles
and engines and pistons are just conventional names to summarize
arrangments of smaller objects, at some point there is an end to this
process of examining objects to discover how they are composed of smaller
objects. A piston is composed of a huge number of atoms, and the atoms
themelves can be broken down further into elementary particles such as
electrons. An electron is not composed of smaller particles, it just
exists all by itself as just what it is, an electron. The real true
description of the world is that it is some evolving arrangement of
elementary particles. Of course this arrangement involves a mind-boggling
mass of details, so inevitably we have to talk about it with conventional
shorthand terms, but those terms don't refer to actually existing objects,
merely to loosely defined arrangements of elementary particles. This is
the reductionist view of modern science.
This
reductionist view actually started to fall apart just as it appear to
finally have matured. Of Albert Einstein's famous three papers of 1905,
the paper on Brownian motion established the actual existence of atoms,
while the paper on the photoelectric effect gave a powerful boost to the
nascent quantum mechanics that undermined the foundations of that
existence. But the reductionist view runs into problems even before we run
into quantum mechanics.
Suppose
the classical mechanical reductionist view were somehow correct. Suppose
we somehow managed to construct a perfect description of the world. This
description, according to the classical reductionist view, would consist
of a list of particles and their coordinates. Perhaps the description
would even have the complete history of each particle, the sequence of
values of the coordinates as they evolved and will evolve over time. This
description being quite vast, we store it in a sophisticated high-powered
computer database. But there are some tough design problems in the way of
constructing this database. The database will just contain a set of
records, something like
particle identification number time x location y
location z location
151900166 874999.30567 2803486.55483 -73384.59446
1036438658.22953
151900167 874999.30567 -1304857504.583299 205333.6895
142726658304.789433
The
immediate problem is: what measurement units and frame of reference should
be used in the perfect description? If I wanted to see where that Ford
Expedition drove off to, I could just find the coordinate for where your
sunglasses where when they got smashed, find what particle was just above
that point a few inches, then jump ahead a couple of hours and look up
where that particle is now. But how can I find the coordinate where your
sunglasses got smashed? If I knew the label for one of the particles of
your sunglasses, maybe I could look up its location when they got smashed.
Of course, that particle has a very long history, perhaps billions of
years, so there is still the problem of knowing what time they got
smashed.
So
there is the first problem with the reductionist view of the world. A
description that consisted merely of particles and coordinates would be
quite useless. The only reality we know is the conventional reality,
including especially our own self. If one searched our perfect
reductionist database for any configuration of particles fitting the
description of "Ford Expedition smashing sunglasses", there might be
hundreds of matches. Some of these matches might even be on different
planets, on different galaxies, millions of years in the future. I want to
know about the events that are related to me, not to some similar
arrangement of particles very distant. To be useful, the database will
have to somehow include the relationship of the particles or coordinates
to the user's experience in conventional terms. Thus a perfect description
must include conventional terms. These conventional terms are essential to
the description. The reductionist view of the world is incomplete in an
essential way.
The
reductionist view proposes the ultimate absolute existence of elementary
particles and the nonexistence of composite objects. We have seen that
composite objects are essentially required in any adequate description of
the world, so one plank in the reductionist platform is flawed. The
classical Mahayana Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna had already pointed out
the flaw in the other plank, the existence of elementary particles. The
flowering of quantum mechanics in this century has revealed much more
complex phenomena underlying the appearance of elementary particles.
Nagarjuna simply pointed out that if such particles existed they would
have to have occupy some non-zero extent of space if things weren't to
just collapse in on itself, and any such non-zero extent is necessarily
composite, being divisible into smaller non-zero extents. With quantum
mechanics, things not collapsing on themselves is explained by Fermi-Dirac
particle interchange anti-symmetry. But such anti-symmetry undermines the
existence of elementary particles every bit as much as a non-zero extent
would have. What really exists from a quantum theory perspective is
something like a collection of elementary particle fields. The fields are
what exist, the particles are just the appearance of the field.
But
actually things are quite a bit thicker that this. The various particle
fields are interacting. The particles we observe are actually bundles of
interacting particles. If we try to peel apart these bundles, we find that
the peeling apart process never ends. This rude discovery was called the
ultraviolet catastrophe. Renormalization group theory was invented by
Feynman, Schwinger, and Tomonaga to compute appearances despite the
nonexistence of the bare particles.
So
quantum mechanics has really given up on the existence of elementary
particles. The particles we observe can be analysed as excitations of
coupled fields, but those fields only exist as those appearances. The
various modes of excitations of these fields change depending on the
situation. The elementary particles that exist inside crystals are quite
different from those that exist in a vaccuum. For example, sound waves do
not exist in a vaccuum, but do exist in crystals. Sound waves are
excitations of the crystals, and these excitations are quantized, which is
to say appear as collections of elementary particles, known as phonons.
Solid state physicists measure properties of phonons and use them to
predict the behavior of crystals. Thus these particles are quite real in
the sense of having clearly observable impact on human experience. Yet
they exist only in the context of a cystal, not in a vaccuum.
Even
more curiously, phonons and electrons interact. Thus, in a crystal, any
excitation is really a combination of phonon field and electron field in
coupled oscillation. Generally the phonon or the electron aspect
dominates, so the excitation can be labelled "phonon" or "electron". But
at some frequencies there is a sort of mutual resonance, where the phonon
and electron field are working tightly together. In this case the
excitation is called an "exciton". As the frequency shifts, the modes of
excitation of the fields that compose the crystal shift smoothly from
being phonon dominated to a balance and then to electron dominated. The
particles that appear vary smoothly from phonons through excitons to
electrons.
I
certainly don't mean to hold up any particular physics theory as being
correct or incorrect. I bring up the complexities of quantum mechanics
merely to point out that, just as the reductionist view understates the
existence of composite objects, it also overstates the existence of
elementary particles. The conventional view, that objects like automobiles
just simply exist as they appear, very quickly runs into trouble as their
behavior reveals their composite nature. But as we try to pin down just
what objects really do exist, we find the project to be quite difficult.
The closer we look, the more complex the underlying phenomena appear.
Varieties of
Experience
There
is a sense in which ordinary everyday reality is like a dream or an
illusion. The world discovered by science is also like a dream or an
illusion. At first glance these statements seem absurd. There is a world
of difference between dreaming that one falls off a tall building and
actually falling off a tall building! But the claim is that ordinary
experience is like a dream, not that it actually is a dream.
Our
various ordinary experiences are all similar in that they consist of
various objects appearing to us. They are further similar in that if we
investigate the nature of these objects with sufficient diligence, we will
realize that the objects do not exist as solid entities, but actually
arise from the coming together of various causes. They are further similar
in that the objects that appear will withstand some limited modes of
investigation. It is only when we look carefully enough that we will see
the limitations.
It's
like the Wizard of Oz. At first the great face and voice very definitely
appeared, created fear, and inspired obedience. Later, upon further
investigation, it became clear that the face and voice were merely
appearing as the result of various circus tricks and there was no
substance to the appearance. Ordinary experience, scientific experience,
and dream experience are all similar in that they consist of various
objects appearing that will withstand some investigation but not all
investigation. These various types of experience differ in just what modes
of investigation they can withstand and what modes reveal their
limitations. That's why what we experience is called relative or
conventional. In various situations we describe the world relative to some
conventional modes of investigation. Oftentimes confusion arises when in a
discussion two people are working with different conventions.
Experience has far more varieties than just the three of ordinary,
scientific, and dream. These three themselves are just very coarse
groupings. Consider rainbows. Do rainbows really exist? In some ways yes,
in some ways no. Unlike dreams, many people can see the same rainbow at
the same time. You can even take a photograph of a rainbow. One doesn't
wake up from seeing a rainbow to the sound of the alarm clock buzzing,
unless of course it was a dream rainbow! But if you try to grab a rainbow,
you can never find anything to hold on to. Rainbows actually have no
definite location; they have a direction, but no distance.
Lightning is another classical object of experience whose mode of
existence can be contemplated. What is amazing about lightning is the
contrast between the intense presence of its existence with its miniscule
duration. By the time one can even formulate the idea of the existence of
the flash of lightning, the lightning is already gone.
Consider the phenomenon of seeing stars when one is struck in the head.
The stars most certainly do appear. Yet no one else in the room can see
them, at least not right then. But others will likely have seen similar
stars at other times, when they themselves had been struck in the head.
Here is a curious variation on the theme of intersubjective experience!
"Did
you watch the president give his speech last night?" If I watched a
flickering image of the president projected on a phosphor screen by an
scanning electron beam, I will still likely answer, "Yes!" What I saw and
heard was not the actual president, but merely an illusion projected by
electronic circuitry. Many other people saw the same or similar images.
The next day I can talk with my coworkers about the phenomena that
appeared, and we will all have had very similar experiences. Yet if I
shout out a question or an objection or try to tweak the president's nose,
I will certainly discover that there is no person actually present.
Some
experiences we just stumble upon, other experiences we have to work to
achieve. To watch TV, we might have to go out and buy a TV and then plug
it in and turn in on and find a channel that works. Or maybe we have to
get a cable hookup activated.
I am
always amazed to reflect that of the three famous papers Einstein
published in 1905, it was the paper on Brownian motion that won him the
Nobel prize. (The other papers were on the photoelectric effect and on
special relativity.) Still in 1905 it was controversial as to whether or
not atoms and molecules actually existed or were just a convenient fiction
for explaining the regularities of chemical combinations. Einstein used
Brownian motion to measure the size of molecules, thus settling the
controversy in favor of their actual existence. Nowadays we have scanning
tunneling electron microscopes that can generate clear images of
arrangements of individual atoms! We generally take the existence of atoms
for granted, but it took the work of many genius scientists to build up
the equipment required to make atoms clearly appear as existing objects.
Geiger and Rutherford exposed the internal structure of the atom,
revealing electrons and nuclei and the vast empty spaces that constitute
atoms. The history of microphysics in the twentieth century is a
continuing sequence of ever new modes of investigation revealing the
limited nature of the existence of one class of objects by making apparent
how those objects are built up from arrangements and interactions of yet
finer objects.
Each
scientific discipline has its own conventional methods of investigation
and its own objects that appear through the application of those methods.
What appears for a zoologist to be a horse looks for a chemist to be a
system of interlocked chemical reaction processes and for a physicist to
be a configuration of particles coursing along trajectories determined by
fundemental force field equations. An economist might see an investment
with certain anticipated risk and return!
If we
investigate a phenomenon closely enough, then we will discover that the
objects that appeared are really just limited rough approximations to the
real facts, facts that incorporate a whole range of deeper phenomena that
came into focus as the investigation unfolded and that together explained
how the phenomenon came into appearance. Yet at the same time that we can
understand and reflect upon the limited nature of the existence of
whatever objects might appear to us, still when phenomena appear, they do
truly appear. In one sense a rainbow does not really exist but is merely
an appearance generated by light and mist. In another sense, a rainbow
most certainly exists as a circular pattern of brightly colored stripes.
All phenomena have this twofold nature. Ultimately one can always
investigate deeply enough to reveal what is behind an appearance and the
limitations of that appearance. But apart from those investigations and
within those limitations, phenomena do arise and appear.
4.
The Structure of Analysis
Breaking and Fixing
We have
examined a variety of ways to describe the world and discussed the
problems that prevent a precise fit between world and description. Given
the boundless ingenuity and passion of humanity, one can reasonably
anticipate that every problem that arises will eventually be repaired. The
difficulty seems to be that every repair introduces additional complexity
and abstraction into the description, introducing new and even more
difficult problems. It's like the mythological hydra, where seven new
heads grow in place of every head one chops off. Must new problems always
arise, or might there be an end to the process, at which point a perfect
description will have been reached?
It
appears impossible, even absurd, to construct a proof that problems must
always arise for any description. Any such proof would rely on some
description for its terms, axioms, and inferences. The ultimate validity
of the proof would depend on the ultimate validity of the underlying
description. But the proposition to be proved is that no such ultimately
valid description is possible! This is remarkably close to Goedel's
proposition, which he constructed to demonstrate that there are true
propositions of arithmetic that cannot be proved. To the extent that any
correct description of the world must inevitably incorporate arithmetic,
and to the extent that Goedel's incompleteness theorem indicates an
inevitable flaw in any theory of arithmetic, we can construct an argument
that any description of the world can fit only imprecisely. But the
dynamics of problems and patches continues in the contemporary debates on
the philosophy of mathematics and competing interpretations of Goedel's
theorem. It is enough for our purposes to note that in the realm of
mathematics, the debates continue: the descriptions proposed in the last
round had their problems discovered; it seems overly optimistic to suppose
that the current round of patches will finally resolve all problems.
This
dynamic structure of problems and patches seems to be fundamental. One
party insists that truth exists and advocates law and order to respect
that truth. The other party points out the contrived nature of the
proposed law and order and proposes free and creative improvisation in its
place. These are the extreme positions of eternalism and nihilism, of
objectivism and relativism. The objectivist holds that when you push an
investigation far enough, in the end you get down to solid fixed reality,
the ultimate cold hard facts of the matter. The relativist holds that when
you push an investigation far enough, in the end you get to a set of
arbitrary free choices which could just as well have been chosen
otherwise.
Buddhism resolves the dispute with a Middle Way. No matter how far you
push an investigation, you can always push it further. At each stage of
investigation one is confronted with some set of phenomena that are
discovered to underlie more superficial appearances. But these phenomena
themselves can be investigated in turn, uncovering yet deeper structures,
patterns, and interconnections.
Aristotle traced the causal chain back to a starting point, back to the
prime mover. The Christian tradition mapped the prime mover onto God.
Buddhism is atheistic, in contrast. There is no prime mover. The causal
chain can be traced back ever more deeply in beginningless time.
This is
the deep truth of Buddhism, emptiness and interdependence as two ways to
say the same thing. Phenomena are never ultimate, neither in the
eternalist objectivist version of fixed absolute forms, nor in the
nihilist relativist version of freely chosen forms. Whatever phenomena
arise, those phenomena are always subject to further investigation which
would reveal those phenomena to be emergent patterns dependent on a
network of relationships with various other supporting or underlying
phenomena. This is the endless dynamic of the problems and patches of
descriptions. A description records uninvestigated arising phenomena.
Further investigation reveals problems that inevitably plague any such
description. Patches fix the problems by rewriting the description in
terms of deeper, underlying phenomena.
The
Seventeenth Century founders of the modern scientific tradition were
deeply religious Christian thinkers. They viewed their study of nature as
a reading of a second Bible revealed by God, the Book of Nature. Their
faith in the existence of an ultimately valid description was a part of
their faith in God. Modern science, to the extent that it retains this
faith in ultimately valid description, is thus a Christian science, or at
least adheres to the family of the monotheistic Religions of the Book, of
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Given such a religious foundation for
science, the possibility of an alternative science, a science with a
different metaphysical foundation, becomes more clear.
Methods and
Results
The
blossoming of science in the 1600's was rooted in the reawakening of a
skeptical outlook in the 1500's with Agrippa, Rabelais, and Montaigne,
leading to Descartes. This philosophical questioning was mirrored in the
social, religious, and political instabilities of the time. This skeptical
outlook was not new - Pyrrho, Aristotle's nephew, had promulgated similar
views, inspired by his meetings with thinkers in India during his travels
with Alexander's armies. One could even consider science to be a product
of Buddhist influence in Europe!
The
heart of skepticism, which is also cental to Buddhist philosophy, is that
things are not what they seem. We build our lives up based on our beliefs,
what we take to be true. We are often then confronted with unpleasant
surprises. What we took to be true turns out to be false. Our world
collapses when the foundations we have relied upon reveal their
instability.
Uncertainty in our convictions can also arise when we discover that other
people have different beliefs than we do. Before we discover that our own
beliefs are unreliable, we tend to quickly conclude that other people's
conflicting beliefs must simply be wrong. It often seems justified to
apply any means necessary to eliminate such error so truth may prevail.
Heretics are burned, religious wars mounted.
With
sufficient maturity a more skeptical attitude may develop. One learns
through experience that one's own beliefs are not reliable, that just
because one believes a thing does not imply the truth of that belief. Even
if one has tested a belief, further experience may shake that belief, may
reveal some deeper truth, may awaken one to one's illusions. When one
confronts a conflicting belief, one realizes that one's own belief could
actually be the one in error. Instead of just assuming that one's own
beliefs must be the true ones, instead one initiates a process of
investigation, gathering and weighing evidence, engaging in debate and
negotiation. One suspends commitment to one's own beliefs at least
temporarily, attempting to judge impartially between conflicting beliefs
based on the facts rather than the vagaries of historically entrenched
opinion.
With
such an approach one has shifted the ground of one's faith from a
particular set of beliefs to a method of deciding among beliefs. The
scientific method is just this, a commitment to deciding belief though a
process of gathering evidence and weighing it through public discourse. As
science developed in European culture, so did parallel notions of deciding
political issues by democratic processes and economic issues by market
processes. This commitment to investigate beliefs we can call "first-order
skepticism". The facts about the way the world works, or the value of a
commodity, or the social behavior should be regulated, are to be decided
by processes of negotiation and debate rather than by any fixed rule
eternally etched in the stone of traditional authority.
To
question the results of such processes of public negotiation and debate,
to propose an alternative science, might seem like a proposal to return to
some such fixed authority. Indeed such authoritarian alternatives have not
only been proposed but enacted in fundamentalist and totalitarian regimes
where debate and negotiation are ruthlessly suppressed.
But in
fact there are many possible methods of gathering and weighing evidence,
many possible decision procedures. To consider alternatives to one method
is not to reject all methods but to start opening up to this space of
possibility. The traditional forms of debate and negotiation are not the
only forms. Alternative forms can be considered. The advantages and
disadvantages of the various forms can be investigated. We can learn to
apply more effective methods to decide between conflicting beliefs.
This
questioning of method we can call "second-order skepticism". With
first-order skepticism we realized the possible truth of alternative
beliefs. With second-order skepticism we realize the potential value of
alternative methods of investigation, of gathering and weighing evidence,
of debate and negotiation. The traditional methods may not lead to the
best decisions. We recognize the need to investigate the methods
themselves.
This
investigation of alternative methods is already bearing fruit in politics
and economics. The superiority in some political situations of various
voting methods such as approval voting have been demonstrated. Various
forms of bidding have been explored and their improved efficiency
demonstrated in some market situations. But how to investigate methods of
investigation? Doesn't the circularity, the paradoxicality of such a
project doom it, render it fruitless or impossible or meaningless? This
obstacle seems to be rooted in Cartesian dualism, the adherence to a clean
division between the knowing subject and the known object. From such a
dualistic perspective, it cannot be impossible for the process of knowing
to itself be an object of knowing. Second-order skepticism lets go of this
dualism. However we go about investigating methods of investigation, the
way we go about it may become itself an object of investigation. Here
again we may call on our faith in Buddhism to give us courage to devote
ourselves to compassionate action within a vast space without fixed
reference points. It is the clinging to beliefs and institutions as if
they were eternal and absolute, the refusal to recognize their
conventionality, the refusal to investigate their interdependence, that
creates suffering.
Chaos and Friction in
Theory Evolution
Our
theories about the world are a part of the world. The dynamic evolution of
the world includes the dynamic evolution of our theories about the world.
The "standard modern" picture of the pattern of the evolution of theories
is that, at least once the world-system has crossed over into the
scientific attractor basin, that theories gradually and steadily approach
some fixed point. This fixed point can serve as an effective notion of
truth. Perhaps my main theme in this essay is that this picture of the
dynamic evolution of theories is an inadequate picture. As an analogy, in
the past the standard model for thermodynamic systems was an isolated
system gradually approaching equilibrium. Since at least the 1960's,
scientists have been exploring the behavior of open systems and systems
far from equilibrium. It looks now like the isolated system gradually
approaching equilibrium is very much a special case.
What is
the actual pattern of the dynamic evolution of scientific theories? The
question is not exactly historical. It is not a matter of the path that
science actually takes, but of all the various paths it might take. If in
fact all paths eventually settle within some small neighborhood of a
single fixed point, then this fixed point could well serve as truth. But
if the various possible trajectories of theory evolution actually wander
into very diverse regions, then the question of truth gets more
complicated. Perhaps one trajectory indeed settles for a very long time in
one neighborhood, and a different trajectory also settles in a
neighborhood, but the two neighborhoods are very different. The modern
theories of chaotic dynamics have charted out an amazing menagerie of
patterns of trajectories.
What I
propose is that the actual dynamics of theory evolution is chaotic.
Proving this to be true may be very difficult, impossible, or paradoxical.
Wouldn't any purported proof need to hold itself up as some sort of
universal fixed point in a dynamic space of theories about theories, which
as part of the actual evolution of the entire world is coupled into the
dynamics of the first order theory evolution and therefore subject to the
chaos that it intends merely to be about rather than itself subjected to?
Here we
have two competing theories. The standard modern philosophy of science
holds that the dynamic system of theory evolution is non-chaotic, that
essentially the entire space of theories constitutes one big basin of
attraction with a simple fixed point. The alternative proposed here (and
by many others) is that the dynamic system of theory evolution is chaotic,
with the full panorama of attractor types etc. How can we decide which of
these theories is better?
In my
discussions on this subject, one friend proposed that since the standard
modern philosophy of science is the established dominant view, the burden
of proof is on the newcomer chaotic theory. It occurs to me that this
argument puts a very nice wrinkle into the problem. This wrinkle relies on
a feature of general system dynamics. Static friction leads to chaos! When
a system wants to stay where it is and resists movement, that tendency
leads to multiple basins of attraction. This observation doesn't prove
that theory evolution is indeed chaotic, but it does encourage an
examination of the issue based on the merits of the different positions
rather than the history of the power of their various advocates. Arguing
for the standard view on the basis of its standardness undermines that
very view itself!
A Middle
Way for Science
The
alternative science I am proposing is not a replacement of the current
scientific description of the world with some new description. Scientists
are constantly proposing new alternative descriptions, weighing and
debating the merits of the various competing proposals, inventing and
performing experiments to gather evidence to help tilt the balance. That's
what science is about.
I am
proposing a new understanding of what science is, which should lead to a
new way of doing science. Buddhism has cultivated the seed of the basic
truth of emptiness and interdependence, and harvested a rich tradition of
2500 years of international culture. How can the wisdom of Buddhism
transform science?
There
is not likely to be an absolute universal ultimate answer at this level
either, but rather an ongoing process of reflective practise. Some
starting principles could be:
· How we do science matters. There is no inevitable progress to
some unique final result. Every description has limitations, distortions,
and blind spots. These form a sort of hidden historical record of the
unresolved conflicts accumulated in the process of constructing the
description.
· The value of a scientific description is in its ability to
help beings become free from suffering and acheive their highest
potential.
· Scientific descriptions are always embedded in contexts of
people, equipment, materials, etc.
· Science like any human activity has a mythological narrative
dimension. For example, a scientist might consciously or unconsciouly
imagine himself or herself as a knight crusader in shining armor fighting
valiantly to protect truth from the onslaught of the heretics.
Acknowledging and working with this mythological dimension may be a wiser
way to manage its powerful energies than trying to suppress and deny it.
· The mythological narrative of science encompasses a vision of
humanity and its place in the universe, not just the institutions of
science itself. Science fiction was born together with science, in works
such as Francis Bacon's New Atlantis. The direction of evolution of
science and technology seem inevitable largely because of the lack of
consciousness and acknowledgement of this mythological narrative.
Acting and
Accepting
In
conceptualizing our experience we generally classify things in terms of
polar opposites, such as hot versus cold, light versus dark, good versus
bad, etc. Often we line up these opposites in rows under the two master
column headings of good and bad, perhaps something like:
Good |
Bad |
Please |
Pain |
Rich |
Poor |
Sweet |
Bitter |
As we
mature and reflect on our broadening experience, we may begin to question
how we have lined up one or more of these opposites. Perhaps our taste
changes, and instead of savoring sweet desserts, we start to search out
the hottest chilis and curries. Changing food preferences rarely represent
profound life changes - though perhaps if our perspective on thick juicy
steaks changes it might seem relatively profound. A more significant pair
of opposites for living life is the choice between accepting things as
they are versus acting to change them. We might grow up holding one
approach to be superior, then perhaps in mid-life re-evaluate the options
and decide that the other alternative is actually superior, and so we work
to change our habitual approach.
With
more experience and reflection, our attitude about pairs of opposites can
continue to evolve. We can start to see that perhaps neither extreme is
optimal, that in fact some third middle way is the best. We might come to
realize that no fixed approach will always be the best, rather we must
examine each situation and apply the approach that is appropriate to the
particular circumstances. When we reach this stage with the poles of
acting and accepting, we understand Reinhold Niebuhr's famous prayer for
serenity, courage, and wisdom.
Eventually, by looking carefully at the nature of opposites, we might
realize that each pole actually incorporates its opposite, one way or
another, as an essential component. Effective action is only possible when
we accept the way the world is so that we can work with it. Airplanes free
us from the speed limits imposed by older modes of transportation, and in
that sense represent a refusal to accept such limitation. On the other
hand, airplanes only became possible when the Wright brothers built a wind
tunnel to study aerodynamics and understand how the shape of its wings
affect the behavior of an airplane. Without accepting the laws of
aerodynamics, airplanes would be impossible. Similarly, acceptance is not
possible without action. For example, genuine acceptance of new neighbors
into a community might require some action, such as offering a concrete
token of welcome.
The
cartoon images of traditional Buddhism and modern Science seem to line up
with the polar opposites of accepting and acting. Modern European-American
culture has certainly used science and technology to take action on grand
scales in many arenas. My own life is thoroughly enveloped in this
culture, so I don't really have enough first hand experience on which to
base any characterization of traditional Buddhist culture. Certainly the
grand temples of Buddhist Asia give evidence of significant activity. But
still, in traditional cultures around the world, including pre-modern
Europe, it seems there is a greater acceptance of circumstance. The modern
notion of progress seems to generate a boundless optimism which can
support and motivate grand activity, while the traditional notion of
degeneration from an earlier golden age seems to lead to a more
pessimistic and less active approach.
Thinking about this further, maybe the situation is a bit more complex.
Presented with some unpleasant circumstance, a Buddhist might reflect that
it is really a bit over-optimistic to think that any amount of activity
could actually eliminate unpleasant circumstances from the world. But this
doesn't mean that there is nothing to be done. Instead of avoiding the
pain of stepping on thorns and pebbles by paving the entire planet with a
smooth and soft surface, one can instead put on shoes. The space of
activity can be internal instead of external. Changing one's habitual
patterns of thought and emotion is a project requiring as much persistence
and effort as any material engineering project. In contrast, the modern
way is not to question one's desires. The mark of privilege is indulging
one's impulses. We seem to have arrived at a more complex relationship
among these polarities:
traditional Buddhism modern Science
internal external
act
accept
internal external
accept
act
Perhaps we can look yet deeper at the contrast between traditional
Buddhism and modern Science. Just as sustained reflection on the natures
of acting and accepting led to the realization that each pole relies on
its opposite, similarly we might look to see whether or how the
traditional Buddhist approach and the modern Scientific approach are
mutually interdependent.
How
does a traditional Buddhist approach rely on a modern Scientific approach?
The essence of Buddhism is benefitting others. The only way to accomplish
this benefit is by a penetrating understanding of the nature of reality,
together with precise and courageous performance of the actions required.
This is science and technology at its best.
How
does a modern Scientific approach rely on a traditional Buddhist approach?
The essence of Science is communal inquiry. The only way to accomplish
this is to insure that all members of the broadest community have the
maximum opportunity to extend the depth and range of their insights and to
freely share and help each other grow. This is Buddhism at its best!
Beyond
Civilization
I
recently read Thom Hartmann's The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight: Waking
Up To Personal and Global Transformation (Three Rivers, 1999). It's pretty
thorough on the ecological scare tactics front! A related subject I've
been researching a bit lately is solar power. A recent article in Science
talked about generating all the power for the US from 10,000 square miles
of solar collectors in Nevada. Not really a serious proposal, but it
points out a possibility. I found another report on-line, a KPMG study
done for Greenpeace that discussed large scale solar electric power. Right
now electricity from solar panels runs about 10x the cost from the power
company, depending no doubt on where you are. I wonder how the numbers
would work out in say San Diego these days?! The biggest problem seems to
be that the manufacturing capacity isn't there. Everything these days runs
on economies of scale. Well maybe not everything, I guess mini-mills are
big in steel these days. But anyway, the KPMG report talks about a
chicken-and-egg problem, that nobody will build a big enough factory to
get the unit cost down until the demand is there, but the demand won't be
there until the cost comes down.
It's a
very interesting question: if some social structure or pattern of behavior
A is more optimal in some sense than pattern B, will society somehow
inevitably evolve into pattern A before too long, before pattern A becomes
non-optimal because of changes in circumstances? The Whig history approach
is just to say, whatever pattern we have must be optimal just because we
have it, its existence is proof of its optimality, and who anyway can
justify any sort of lofty authority to make any other judgements of
optimality anyway? Well that isn't my approach at all, I think we each of
us have the fundamental responsibility as human beings to take
responsibility and make judgements and act as wisely as possible to
improve things one way or another. I view the general pattern of human
society to be miserably sub-optimal and given all the various feedback
loops that amplify stupidity and desparation, I don't see any very big
opportunities for improvement! But the space of possibilities includes
wonderful and delightful feedback loops of bliss and wisdom, and maybe all
we need is a small opportunity after all with a few of the right nudges in
the right place! Anything is possible!
I
don't really see how we can get solar power in place before oil starts to
collapse. But there's lots of coal, so the real race is with global
warming. Then there's nuclear. It seems like we'll poison ourselves one
way or another before we run out of raw materials. The chain of cause and
effect is so long, how can people become aware of the link between their
behavior and the consequences they experience, or that their grandchildren
will experience?
For me
the weakest part of Hartmann's book is the vision. He seems stuck
proposing a return to tribal life, pre-civilization. I have a different
vision. I don't mind seeing the issue on the table coming out of the
tribal - civilization transition. A real strength of Hartmann's book is
that he shows how big civilized empires emerged out of tribal life at
multiple times in multiple places. At one point he does though paint a
picture of some evil being who poisons things, as if civilization doesn't
emerge as much as get introduced from some sort of outside influence. This
I view as a deeply flawed vision. Hartmann likes to contrast sustainable
tribal culture with unsustainable civilized culture, cataloging the many
collapses of the many great civilizations that have risen and fallen over
the millenia. But this isn't quite right. Tribal culture is not
sustainable either! The collapse of civilized culture is generally due to
some resource limit or plague. Tribal culture reveals its instability when
somehow it evolves into civilization!
So my
grand vision is of some kind of trans-civilization, some kind of culture
that goes past civilization. This echoes all the post-modern blather, but
trumps it. Forget the puny little medieval - modern transition, let's go
deeper, to the tribal - civilized transition! One can look at the history
of civilization as one of bigger and bigger empires forming and
collapsing. Finally now we are entering into the grandest civilization
yet, the global city. No more frontier! And at the same time, we're on the
cusp of the grandest collapse yet. Of course, anybody's guess how all this
plays out. But if we cultivate a vision of the most positive
possibilities, perhaps the right little incalculable nudges will somehow
carry us through the narrowest window of opportunity.
My
notion of trans-civilization is built on Ken Wilber's concept of the
pre-trans fallacy. He's talking about ego, how enlightenment (in the yogic
sense) is not any sort of infantile regression to a pre-egoic state, but a
further evolution to a trans-egoic state, one that must incorporate
elements of ego as it becomes free of the limitations of ego. Similarly, a
trans-civilized culture will have to incorporate elements of civilization
but at the same time recovering some elements of tribal life, just as the
enlightened master recovers some of the innocence and spontaneity of a
child.
_____________________
RESOURCES:
Resources
for Buddhism
Harold G.
Coward
-
Derrida and Indian Philosophy
-
Derrida and Negative Theology
-
Jung and Eastern Thought
-
Pluralism: Challenge to World Religions
-
Sphota Theory of Language: A Philosophical Analysis
His Holiness
The Dalai Lama
-
Beyond Dogma: Dialogues and Discourses,
(North Atlantic 1996)
from p. 206:
I have the feeling, and I may be wrong, that Western
thought has a tendency to move from one extreme to the other. It is as if
according to the classical models of science and technology, a pressing
need was felt in the past to find solid foundations and absolute truths,
whereas this type of research is, nowadays, most often considered to be
futile. There has been a complete reversal, heading off toward another
extreme - relativism, where nothing, ultimately, exists any longer, where
perhaps there is no longer even any reality as such! It seems that the
possibility that gray areas may exist between the two extremes has not
been taken into consideration. This is what I have observed. There is
often talk of the disparity beween our perception of the world and
reality; the very idea of contradiction between the manner in which we see
the world and that in which phenomena exist allows us to infer the
existence of a certain degree of reality.
from p. 222:
If we affirm that all phenomena are nothing but mental
constructs, in the form of simple denominations, this does not imply that
everything the mond can construct becomes reality, for if that were the
case we would lapse into an extreme relativism far removed from Madhyamika
philosophy. Any extreme certifying that everything the mind can construct
has an objective reality must be avoided. Nor should we conclude that the
mind creates nothing. Between the phenomenon and the mind there is a
certain relation, but as the product of mind does not correspond to the
true realtiy of the phenomenon, this generates illusions and false
appearances. The mind, or rather, the consciousness which constructs such
erroneous projections, becomes perverted in turn, for it does not agree
with reality.
from pp. 223-224:
To get back to the book on the table, its existence can
be verified by a conventionally valid subjective criterion, a perception
with cannot be invalidated by either another valid conventional experience
or an ultimate analysis. But if we want to know exactly what this book is
- if it the sum of its pages, if each page is also the book, and so on -
we will eventually come to the conclusion that the very concept of the
book disappears. By breaking the book up into parts, pages, forms, colors,
and so on, right down to its most elementary constituents - atoms and
particles, etc. - the very idea of a solid text no longer exists. We will
have reached a point which, to coin a phrase, might be called the
"unfindableness" of the text as we know it. But what is certain is that
the text does exist. We cannot deny its reality, although the ultimate
analysis of what constitues the true referent hidden behind the word
"text" coms up with nothing, given the total impossibility of localizing
it. The conclusion to be drawn from these comments is that as the text
does exist, even if it proves unfindable as soon as we bgin an ultimate
search for it, its only possible mode of existence is nominal,
conventional, and relative.
Georges B.
J. Dreyfus
-
Recognizing Reality: Dharmakirti's Philosophy and Its
Tibetan Interpretations, (SUNY 1997)
from p. 219:
Like the British empiricists, Dharmakirti emphasizes
that universals are not real and products of the mind. They are elaborated
on the basis of the resemblences we perceive. He also holds a view of
perception, that is, sensation, not unlike that of the empiricists. For
Dharmakirti, perception holds its object and hence provides an undistorted
view of reality. There is, however, a crucial difference, which is that
for Dharmakirti perception does not identify its object but merely holds
the object in its perceptual ken. Hence, perception does not provide any
cognitive content by itself but merely induces conceptual activities
through which content is constructed. This is quite different from
empiricism in the strict sense of the term, which is based on the premise
that knowledge is the internalization of experience. We encounter the
world that impresses on us its content. This is not Dharmakirti's view,
for such a view forgets that the meaningful world in which we live is
constructed. This construction, Dharmakirti insists, is largely
linguistic.
-
The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way: Nagarjuna's
Mulamadhyamakakarika: Translation and Commentary
(Oxford 1995)
Peter D.
Hershock
-
Liberating Intimacy: Enlightenment and Social
Virtuosity in Ch'an Buddhism, SUNY
1996.
-
Reinventing the Wheel: A Buddhist Response to the
Information Age (SUNY 1999)
from pp. xii-xiv
Our prejudice is that while the world we've realized as
a result of technological "progress" might not be perfect, it is certainly
better than what came before. ... But is our faith in this method of
evaluation well placed? If our technological lineage has developed on the
basis of a rigourous application of causal analysis and the experimental
verification of controlled intervention in linear causal processes, do we
not lapse into a blind and vicious circularity? [p] Most fundamentally, if
we are to critically evaluate the claims of technological progress and the
promises of the information age, we must first question the extent to
which our technologies express the prejudices of our critical faculties as
such - the extent to which they not only promote certain values, but
tacitly block out others, effectively excluding truly contrary
perspectives or ways of being human. ... As a way of facilitating this
resituating and re-imagining of ourselves and so opening up the
possibility of critically evaluating our technological lineage,
substantial recourse will be made here to Buddhist concepts and teachings.
... Of particular importance will be the teachings of co-origination and
karma. Together, these teachings prohibit taking the world to
be an objective reality that we can know without altering, but rather as
always our world - a function of our own values and conduct.
Eschewing both realist and idealist metaphysics, these teachings insist on
our seeing relationships as more basic than the 'things' we take as 'being
related', and values as ontologically prior to facts and existence.
Noah Pliny
Jacobson
-
Buddhism & the Contemporary World: Change and
Self-Correction
-
Buddhism: The Religion of Analysis
-
The Heart of Buddhist Philosophy
-
Understanding Buddhism
Steven W.
Laycock
-
Mind as Mirror and the Mirroring of Mind: Buddhist
Reflections on Western Phenomenology,
SUNY 1994
Joanna Macy
-
Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our
Lives, Our World, coauthored by Molly
Young Brown (New Society 1998)
from pp. 21-22:
We awaken to what we once knew: we are alive in a
living Earth, source of all we are and can achieve. Despite our
conditioning by the industrial society of the last two centuries, we want
to name, once again, this world as holy.
These insights and
experiences are absolutely necessary to free us from the grip of the
Industrial Growth Society. They offer us nobler goals and deeper
pleasures. They help us redefine our wealth and our worth. The
reorganization of our perceptions liberates us from illusions about what
we need to own and what our place is in the order of things. Taking us
beyond the tired old notions of competitive individualism, they bring us
home to each other and our mutual belonging in the living body of Earth.
-
Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age,
(New Society 1983)
-
Dharma and Development: Religion as Resource in the
Sarvodaya Self-Help Movement (Kumarian
1983, 1985)
-
Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems
Theory: The Dharma of Natural Systems,
(SUNY 1991)
from pp. 125-126:
In this "total interdependence" our preconceptions not
only shape our interpretations of the world, but impinge on the world
itself. For the feedback loop circles through the environment "out there,"
extending beyond the subjective realm and the selective interpretations of
sensory data. This is so because we rely on this causal loop - the
operation of feedback - to ensure meaning, the maintenance of
intelligibility. The cognitive system finds satisfaction and value in the
distillation of meaning, in extracting message from noise and making sense
of the world. Where it seucceeds in interpreting percepts in terms of
internal codes, it seeks (in negative feedback process) to perpetuate this
match. It acts upon the environment in such a way as to confirm these
interpreted percepts and produce more of them.
In this way the
cognitive system can be said to "project" its codes upon the environmnet
so that it can continue to transform perceptions in their terms. By such
projection the scientist shapes his research and the kind of data it can
render to fit his concepts, and the architect gives body to his dreams. To
perpetuate the match between cognition and perception we impose shapes on
our world which then reflects them back. In excavated gardens or
fortifications we can read something of the character of an ancient city,
for in them its meanings, gestalts, and constructs, took form: notions
incarnate. And when we possess a powerful technology, this incarnational
capacity is fearsome. Our imaginations erect Pentagons and Disneylands,
and even the land itself mirrors back our fantasies, as, gouged and paved
over, it testifies to our search for mastery and our fear of what we
cannot control. In the world we create we encounter ourselves.
-
World as Lover, World as Self,
(Parallax 1991)
Jeffrey
Maitland
-
Spacious Body: Explorations in Somatic Ontology
Guy Newland
-
The Two Truths in the Madhyamika Philosophy of the
Ge-luk-ba Order of Tibetan Buddhism,
(Snow Lion 1992)
-
Appearance and Reality: The Two Truths in the Four
Buddhist Tenet Systems, (Snow Lion
1999)
from p. 65:
Tsong Khapa's interpretation is that emptiness is
found, known, and realized by a mind of ultimate analysis, and therefore
it is an ultimate truth. However, emptiness is not ultimately existent
because it is not found by the ultimate mind analyzing emptiness itself.
For example, when a chair is the basis on analysis, the ultimate mind
finds not the chair bu the emptiness of the chair. When the emptiness of
the chair is the basis of analysis, the ultimae mind finds not the
emptiness of the chair but the emptiness of the emptiness of the chair,
and so forth. In other words, an emptiness is no more able to sustain
ultimate analysis than anything else.
Thinley
Norbu
-
White Sail: Crossing the Waves of Ocean Mind to the
Serene Continent of the Triple Gems,
(Shambhala 1992)
from pp. 17-18:
In general, science is the systematic study of
substance in the material world. This does not mean only the scientific
conceptions of this modern world, because science exists wherever there
are conceptions of substantial elements and their phenomena, and wherever
there is engagement with the material world and its infinite categories of
substance within the elements. From the science of ancient times to the
science of today, only the particular aspect of how substance is used
changes within time and place, including whether it is harmful or
beneficial, depending on the karmic phenomena of sentient beings.
In nonspiritual
science, spiritual ideas are not trusted because they are considered to be
imaginary and unreal, and therefore without any actual benefit. This idea
comes from a strong habit of associating reality with substance, expecting
instant, material answers. It is the result of only believing in obvious,
momentary appearances and not believing in incognizable, spiritual
qualities. In Buddhism, nonspiritual, material ideas are not trusted
because they are considered to be based only on compounded substance.
Since the nature of substance is to deminish and decay, it can have no
actual benefit. It is thought that through being enticed by too much
concern with momentary, substantial phenomena, Buddha nature can become
dormant for many lives, which prevents reaching enlightenment. Therefore,
in general, the points of view of nonspiritual science and Buddhism are
basically different.
Steve Odin
-
Process Metaphysics and Hua-Yen Buddhism: A Critical
Study of Cumulative Penetration vs. Interpenetration
-
The Social Self in Zen and American Pragmatism
, SUNY 1996
Names
in the table of contents: Watsuju Tetsuro, Nishida Kitaro, Doi Takeo,
George Herbert Mead, Tanaka Odo.
Fabio
Rambelli
Buddhism and Semiotics
-
Civilized Shamans: Buddhism in Tibetan Societies,
Smithsonian 1993.
from pp. 570-573:
Tibetan society and Tibetan religion nevertheless
contained a continuum of practices from the 'wildest' and most shamanic to
the 'tamest' and most clerical. At one ('tame') extreme could be found the
process of training in the vast Gelugpa monasteries of central Tibet, with
their heavy emphasis on monastic discipline as the foundation of the path,
and their scholastic curriculum lasting up to twenty years preceding
serious Tantric practice. At the other ('wild') extreme, the wandering
yogi of the Nyingmapa or Kagyudpa traditions might travel from teacher to
teacher or meditate in solitude for many years, following his or her own
path towards Enlightenment with the external guru providing constant
inspiration but only intermittent guidance.
There is little
doubt that secular authority in Tibet as elsewhere has preferred the
'tame' to the 'wild', disciplined and celibate monks to autonomous Tantric
practitioners, but the weakness of secular authority through most of
Tibetan history has meant that the nonmonastic tradition survived and, in
some measure, prospered.
...
Here we can refer
to the work of theorists such as Pierre Clastres, Gilles Deleuze and Felix
Guattari on mechanisms that inhibit or contest the growth of state power.
Buddhism in the Theravadin countries became part of a state ideology,
supportive of the power of the centralized state which in turn provided it
with material support. Karma and merit have some of these associations
within Tibet but the other, 'wilder' aspects of Tibetan value systems may
be taken as reflecting a rejection of such ideology.
It is perhaps not
going too far to assimilate the Tibetan Vajrayana as exemplified by
figures such as Gesar or Tsangnyon to Deleuze and Guattari's concept of a
'nomadic science', outside and intrinsically opposed to the official
knowledge and to the structures of power of the state. Nomadic science, as
Deleuze and Guattari note, is constantly subject to appropriation and
transformation by State science, a process all too familiar in the history
of Buddhism as in that of other religious traditions. Whether because of
the special circumstances of Tibet's political and economic history, or
for some other reason, that appropriation remained far from complete in
Tibet.
Perhaps it would be
more true to say that the nomadic science of the Vajrayana, already
appropriated by state institutions in India by the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, was reclaimed by the 'civilzed shamans' of Tibet as a weapon
against the incipient state. At any rate, the Vajrayana came to present to
the Tibetans a way of being, and a form of social and political activity,
capable of flowing around and beyond any kind of hierarchical structure.
In a world where life in increasingly dominated by bureaucratic control,
that ideal may continue to have an appeal to Tibetans and to other
peoples.
John D.
Caputo
-
Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with
Jacques Derrida, Fordham 1997
This
is probably the only book where I've managed to read more than a page of
Derrida's writing. The first 24 pages are the transcript of a Q&A with
Derrida. The rest is a commentary by Caputo. It sure does seem like there
is some resonance here with Buddhism, which other have also noted. Anyway,
try the following mapping:
-
khora = emptiness
-
differance = interdependence
-
Messiah = Buddha nature
Perhaps a significant difference with Buddhism is that
the Messiah is always projected into the future, whereas Buddha nature is
always already present though obscure.
Fred
Dallmayr
-
Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural
Encounter, (SUNY 1996)
from p. 195:
The conception of democratic staging as an empty place
resonates deeply with the Buddhist notion of sunyata (as outlined above).
As in the case of Buddhism, democratic emptiness does not denote nihilism
or sheer negativity but rather a kind of inner lining or hidden foil
allowing democratic politics to emerge in its suchness. If sunyata is seen
as a core ingredient of Buddhism (at least in its Mahayana version), then
contemporary politics offers the spectacle of a curious East-West
encounter: just at the time when Western-style democracy is experiencing a
worldwide affirmation allowing us to speak of a process of global
democratization, democratic politics discovers in itself a non-actuality
or hidden hollow, a hollow whose understanding can be greatly assisted by
the rich Buddhist legacy of sunyata.
-
The Quest for Certainty: A Study of the Relation of
Knowledge and Action (Putnam 1929)
from pp. 104-105
Only when the older theory of knowledge and
epistemology is retained, is science thought to inform us that nature in
its true reality is but an interplay of masses in motion, without sound,
color, or any quality of enjoyment and use. What science actually does is
to show that any natural object we please may be treated in terms of
relations upon which its occurence depends, or as an event, and that by so
treating it we are enabled to get behind, as it were, the immediate
qualities the object of direct experience presents, and to regulate their
happening, instead of having to wait for conditions beyond our control to
bring it about. Reduction of experienced objects to the form of relations,
which are neutral as respects qualitative traits, is a prerequisite of
ability to regulate the course of change, so that it may terminate in the
occurence of an object having desired qualities.
from p. 215:
Intelligence within nature means liberation and
expansion, as reason outside nature means fixation and restriction.
-
Orientalism and Religion: Postcolonial Theory, India
and 'The Mystic East' (Routledge 1999)
from p. 28:
It has become commonplace in the modern era to consider
mystics, their writings and the phenomenon of mysticism in general as
being in some sense antithetical to rationality. Specifically the
characterization of Indian religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism as
mystical has also tended to support the exclusion of Hindus and Buddhists
from the realm of rationality.
-
The Body's Recollection of Being: Phenomenolgical
Psychology and the Deconstruction of Nihilism,
(Routledge Kegan Paul 1985)
from p. 230:
Our traditional way of teaching morality is, I think,
an inherently mechanizing, technologically willfull way: it attempts to
teach a morality of autonomy, but does so by implicitly heteronomous
means, i.e., by imposing precepts and principles not derived from the
child's own body of morally perceptive feeling, and by addressing moral
education to the child's tool-like nature, rather than to a creative
reserve of sensibility which is not reducible to its being as an
instrument of moral culture, and which may suffer very seriously from the
instrumental strategy. When precepts are imposed and not derived, it is
not only that we betray our own principles by treating the child as a
tool, but that, since we are giving him no understanding of moral
evaluation as a process of articulating a body of implicitly moral
feeling, we are actually encouraging and rewarding a tool-like nature,
rigid, constant, reliable, fixed, docile, and essectially reactive, rather
than thoughtful and responsive. This educational method is therefore
implicitly technological, and tends to reproduce itself in a character
which is easily manipulated, and which knows by example only those kinds
of relationship that involve the manipulation of others. We desparately
need a method of moral education which will avoid the chains of
calculative ratiocination and subvert the technological reduction of human
nature and comportment.
-
The Listening Self: Personal Growth, Social Change
and the Closure of Metaphysics
-
The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern
Situation
David Loy
-
Lack and Transcendence: The Problem of Death and Life
in Psy
-
Nonduality: A Study in Comparative Philosophy
Robert
Magliola
-
Derrida on the Mend,
(1984 Purdue)
from pp. 87-88:
At the very outset of this discussion, however, I wish
to dispel two vitiating suspicions - one suspicion which is rooted in a
covert bigotry but is nonetheless commonplace among Western intellectuals
who are not Orientalists,... The first suspicion would have it that the
principles of Buddhist throught in general are too 'escapist', too 'other
worldly' in the perjerotive sense of the term, too preposterously removed
from the real, to be worthy of attention, and consequently, that any
comparison of Derrida and Nagarjuna can only result in miscarriage; or, in
a variation which is a little more generous, that Buddhist thought is too
alien to Western sensibilities, and on this count well nigh irrecuperable,
so that a putative comparison of these two thinkers is de facto
meaningless. Let me assure such supicious ones that Buddhist thought, and
the Hindu thought which chronologically precedes and accompanies it, are
as spectacularly diverse and profound and rigorous and challenging and
indeed relevant as European thought; that the activity of Greek
pre-Socratic schools found their counterpart in the intense metaphysical
debates of the early and middle Upanishadic periods - that Indian
philosophy divided into materialist, evolutionist, atomistic, idealist,
and other schools; that Aristotelian and scholastic logic were matched by
the elaborate Indian Nyaya and he Chinese "canons of Mo Tzu"; and that the
Western medieval and renaissance periods were also tenures of breathtaking
esthetic, philosophic, and religious activity in the East. What is more,
traditional Oriental thought is experiencing revived and new growth in
contemporary times, especially in the non-Marxist Orient and in large part
through fertile dialogue with Western specialists: Chinese logicians with
Gernman logicians, Indian philosophers with American philosophers,
Buddhist monks with Catholic monks, Japanese poets with Brazilian poets,
and so on.
-
On Deconstructing Life-Worlds: Buddhism,
Christianity, Culture, (Scholars Press
1997)
Mary Midgley
-
Wisdom, Information and Wonder: What is Knowledge
for? (Routledge 1989)
from p. 135
The metaphor of foundations has got quite out of hand
here. It expresses the notion that the items we can know can be arranged
in a single, one-dimensional series in order of their certainty. In this
case, what we would have to do would be to get them piled up in that
order, resting the less certain always upon the more certain to make the
whole set form a pyramid. In order to manage this, we would have first to
find something intrinsically undoubtable to put at the bottom, something
both immovable and large enough to support the whole pyramid. Philosophers
have long noticed that Descartes's Cogito cannot really fill this
place, and no other likely candidate has ever been found. Indeed, it seems
implicit in the gravitational metaphor that none ever can be found, since
there is no end to the progress that is possible downwards.
from pp. 157-158
This mention of how the facts sometimes seem to vary
with the values does not tip us into helpless scepticism. It simply calls
attention to the unity of the moral enterprise, to the web of conceptual
links between all its various facets. The process of change could, of
course, be described just as well the other way round, in the form in
which it often appeared to those who underwent it, as a recognition of the
fats which entailed a rejection of slavery. What was happening was a
single complex process with three conceptually linked aspects: a changing
view of the facts, a change of feeling, and a change in action, arising
out of a changed sense of what action could be decently contemplated. It
has been a real misfortune, not just for philosophy but for our
civilization itself, that philosophers in the tradition we are discussing
have tended to concentrate entirely on separating these factors and
putting them in competition with each other, rather than on investigating
the relations between them.
Barbara
Herrnstein Smith
-
B elief and Resistance: Dynamics of Contemporary
Intellectual Controversy, (Harvard
1997)
from p. 80:
It appears (on the evidence of, among other things,
alternative introspections) that ideas such as "inescapable
presuppositions," "intuitive preunderstanding," and "truth absolute" are
neither universal nor inescapable. On the contrary, it is possible to
believe (as statements in this book testify) that such concepts and the
sense of their inherent meanings and deep interconnectedness are, rather,
the products and effects of rigorous instruction and routine participation
in a particular conceptual tradition and its related idiom. It is also
possible to believe, accordingly, that instruction (more or less rigorous)
in some other conceptual tradition, and familiarity with its idiom, would
yield other conceptions and descriptions of "the fundamental nature" of
"thought itself" and of what is "presupposed" by "the very act of
assertion." Or, one might say (in the alternative idiom of one such
alternative tradition), different personal/professional histories are
likely to make different descriptions and accounts of the operations of
human cognition and communication appear coherent and adequate.
Joan
Stambaugh
-
The Finitude of Being
-
Formless Self
-
Impermanence is Buddha-nature: Dogen's Understanding
of Temp
-
The Real is Not the Rational,
(SUNY 1986)
from p. 98:
Whereas in most Western philosophy, for example, in
Descartes, the point of departure and the method to reach the nature of
reality are clearly defined, i.e., to start with the res cogitans
(thinking thing), prove the existence of God, and finally regain some
certainty about the outside world. Given his philosophical enterprise of
finding a fundamentum inconcussum (unshakeable foundation) for
knowledge, Descartes could not have proceeded any other way than he did.
His method is discursive, step by step, and analytical. In Buddhism, when
there is a fundamental concept, for example, suffering or pain (duhkha),
all the essential concepts relative to it manifest all at once. And if
there is real understanding of the "access" to reality, the reality itself
is present.
Having stated these
difficulties at the outset, let us attempt to see where Buddhism "starts."
Descartes started with methodological doubt, and arrived at himself, at
the thinking thing. Buddhism starts with the Four Noble Truths, which
involve neither a self nor thinking, nor a thing. In the statement that
life is suffering, the first of the Four Noble Truths, we already have the
other two fundamental statements running through any form of Buddhism, be
it Indian, Chinese or Japanese, that all is impermanent and that there is
no self. The fundamentum inconcussum of Buddhism is unshakable,
but, so to speak, unshakable the way an abyss is unshakable. You cannot
"shake" what you cannot take hold of. The "foundation" here is bottomless.
The only thing "foundational" about it is its absolute givenness.
It is, so to speak, a foundation which envelopes us, not something
on which we can reach the stability of a "stand".
Stanley
Tambiah
-
Magic, Science, Religion, and the Scope of
Rationality
Source:
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Atrium/8240/
+++
Jim
Kukula
My
current email address is kukula@synopsysNOSPAM.com (without the NOSPAM!).
I'd appreciate hearing your response to the ideas here, suggestions on how
to develop them further, pointers to resources, etc. Here's a bit of my
background.
Roots
I was
born in 1955, spent my formative years in Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio, then moved
around a bit. For a couple of grade school years I lived in England,
attending school at Stubbington House near Ascot, Berkshire. I started
high school at Lake Forest High School in Lake Forest, Illinois, and
finished at Homestead Jr. Sr. High School in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
Physics
I
studied physics in college, receiving the A.B. degree summa cum laude from
Princeton University and the M.S. degree from the University of
Pennsylvania. My research work was mainly the theoretical study of phase
transitions, renormalization groups, and the topology of defects.
Digital
Systems
My
professional career has been in developing computer systems to help
digital hardware engineers. I have developed interactive schematic
editors, design databases, simulators, state encoding algorithms, and a
variety of Binary Decision Diagram applications such as formal equivalence
checking. I have also developed parallel computer hardware and an
object-oriented operating system to manage applications running on such
hardware. I started my career at IBM and am currently at Synopsys in
Beaverton, Oregon. The ideas expressed on these web pages are my own and
not those of my employer! I also spent a year as a Visiting Scientist at
MIT while working at IBM.
Buddhism
My main
teacher has been Khenpo Karthar Rinpoche, the abbot at Karma Triyana
Dharmachakra in Woodstock, New York. My most intensive involvement was my
participation in the three year retreat led by Khenpo Rinpoche at Karme
Ling. I have also benefitted greatly from the teachings and inspiration of
other great teachers in the Kagyu lineage and the other lineages of
Tibetan Buddhism. The Zen Mountain Monastery in Mount Tremper, New York,
and its abbot John Daido Loori, very kindly gave me an opportunity to
experience and learn from the Zen tradition.
Yoga
My
discovery of the Iyengar school of Yoga originally opened my experience up
to the world beyond the Cartesian mind/body split. My main Yoga teachers
have been Joan White and Patricia Walden.
Miscellany
· Some photos
· Some inventions
· Sri Yantra as a Java applet.
Chris
Argyris
-
Action Science,
coauthored by Robert Putnam and Diana McLain Smith. Jossey-Bass 1985.
-
Knowledge for Action: A Guide to Overcoming Barriers
to Organizational Change, Jossey-Bass
1993.
Gregory
Bateson
-
Steps to an Ecology of Mind,
Chandler 1972.
-
Mind and Nature: A Necessary Unity,
Dutton 1979.
-
Angels Fear: Toward an Epistemology of the Sacred,
coauthored by Mary Catherine Bateson, 1987 Macmillan.
-
A Sacred Unity: Further Steps to an Ecology of Mind,
HarperCollins 1991, edited by Rodney E. Donaldson.
-
A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and
Gregory Bateson, by Peter
Harries-Jones, Toronto 1995.
Alan Combs
-
Radiance of Being: Complexity, Chaos and the
Evolution of Consciousness
-
I Am Right - You Are Wrong: From Rock Logic to Water
Logic (Viking Penguin 1991)
-
Parallel Thinking: From Socratic to de Bono Thinking
(Viking Penguin 1994)
from pp. 2-3
We can take the complacent view that poverty,
pollution, local wars and local chaos are the inevitable result of change
and of human nature. ... If, however, we were to have doubts about this
complacency (doubting complacency is a classic oxymoron) then we might get
around to asking ourselves threes possible questions:
-
Is it possible that some of our troubles are actually caused by
inadequate thinking habits?
-
Is it possible that our difficulty, and sometimes inability, to put
things right is due to inadequate thinking methods?
-
Is it possible that better thinking could make things better?
... The standard traditional Western thinking style was
set by the famous Greek Gang of Three: Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. ...
In this book I intend to examine the adequacy of our hallowed thinking
habits. The purpose is not merely to criticize, which is an easy exercise
of intellect, but to suggest alternatives in those places where the
traditional method seems inadequate.
Kenneth J.
Gergen
-
Realities and Relationships: Soundings in Social
Construction, 1994 Harvard.
Susantha
Goonatilake
-
Evolution of Information: Lineages in Gene, Culture
and Artefact, (Pinter 1991)
from p 126:
The information in a flow line is thus the encoding of
past interactions of the flow line directly or indirectly with the
environment. This information encodes a memory of past responses to the
environment and is thereby a 'congealing of past history'. The information
can also be seen as a partial mapping of the environment on to 'the flow
lines'. The environment's current responses is always potentially ahead of
the already encoded aspects of the environment. The partial coevolution of
flow lines and environment is therefore by necessity potentially out of
step in time. ... If a sub-culture or group has internalized within its
members a wide variety of responses to the environment, this allows, in
the event of changes in the environment, a variety of possible responses.
The historically derived cultural elements of the flow lines are spread
over a wide pool (as the 'common heritage' of the group, as past 'wisdom')
and constitute a reservior of possible responses.
-
Toward a Global Science: Mining Civizational
Knowledge (Indiana 1998)
from p. 8:
If it sounds like I am accepting the "totalizing"
hegemony of modern science, I am. I want to enlarge it if possible, not
destroy it. I want to reach beyond the Enlightenment and the modern
projects and some of their Eurocentric limitations. But the modern
sciences, when taken individually, are not monolithic, ontologically and
epistemologically totalizing projects. There are too many differences and
even contradictions in the approaches of the different disciplines as to
methodology, epistemology, and at times ontology. So science as a
totalizing project is totalizing only to the extent that it is an
organized skeptical attempt to gather valid knowledge. With that pursuit I
am perfectly comfortable. I want only to increase the skepticism, to make
it more valid, and to enlarge the catchment area.
Horst
Hendriks-Jansen
-
Catching Ourselves in the Act: Situated Activity,
Interactive Emergence, Evolution, and Human Thought,
MIT 1996.
Alicia
Juarrero
-
Dynamics in Action: Intentional Behavior as a Complex
System, MIT 1999
from p. 260:
We are enmeshed in a fabric of time and space, which we
unravel at our peril. In part, we are the product of a complex dance
between our innate endowments and an already structured physical and
social environment. We are never passive in this entire process, however.
Even the environment in which we are situated is itself, in part, the
downstream consequence of our own upstream doings, both phylogenetically
and ontogenetically. As such both culturally and individually, we bear a
measure of responsibility for that environment. Once we are mature and
aware, we can self-consciously select the stimuli to which we will respond
and that will affect who we are in the future. At that point we are as
responsible for who we will become as is the environment. And once again,
this is true for each of us both as members of a community and as
individuals.
George
Lakoff
-
Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its
Challenge to Western Thought,
coauthored by Mark Johnson. Basic Books 1999.
Peter M.
Senge
-
The Fifth Discipline : The Art and Practice of the
Learning Organization
-
Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the
Living
-
The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human
Experience
-
Principles of Biological Autonomy
-
Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human
Understanding, (Shambhala 1987),
coauthored by Humberto R. Maturana
from pp. 25-27:
Therefore, underlying everything we shall say is this
constant awareness that the phenomenon of knowing cannot be taken as
though there were "facts" or objects out there that we grasp and store in
our head. The experience of anything out there is validated in a special
way by the human structure, which makes possible "the thing" that arises
in the description.
This circularity,
this connection between action and experience, this inseparability between
a particular way of being and how the world appears to us, tells us that
every act of knowing brings forth a world. ... All doing is
knowing, and all knowing is doing.
... Every
reflection, including one on the foundation of human knowledge, invariably
takes place in language, which is our distinctive way of being human and
being humanly active. For this reason, language is also our starting
point, our cognitive instrument, and our sticking point. ... Everything
said is said by someone. Every reflection brings forth a world. As
such, it is a human action by someone in particular in a particular place.
...
This bringing forth
of knowledge is commonly regarded as a stumbling block, an error or
explanatory residue to be eradicated. This is why, for instance, a colored
shadow is said to be an "optical illusion" and why "in reality" there s no
color. What we are saying is exactly the opposite: this characteristic of
knowledge is the master key to understanding it, not an annoying residue
or obstacle.
-
Ethical Know-How: Action, Wisdom, and Cognition
(Stanford 1999)
Georg von
Krogh
-
Organizational Epistemology,
coauthored by Johan Roos, St. Martins 1995.
Paul
Watzlawick
-
Pragmatics of Human Communication: A Study of
Interactional Patterns, Pathologies, and Paradoxes,
coauthored by Janet Beavin Bavelas and Don D. Jackson, 1967 Norton.
-
How Real is Real: Confusion, Disinformation,
Communication, 1976 Random House.
-
The Language of Change: Elements of Therapeutic
Communication, 1978 Norton.
-
The Situation is Hopeless, But Not Serious: The
Pursuit of Unhappiness, 1983 Norton.
-
The Invented Reality: How Do We Know What We Believe
We Know? (Contributions to Constructivism),
1984 Norton.
A
collection of essays:
-
"An Introduction to Radical Constructivism", Ernst von Glasersfeld.
-
"On Constructing a Reality", Heinz von Foerster.
-
"The Consequences of Causal Thinking", Rupert Riedl.
-
"Self-Fulfilling Prophecies", Paul Watzlawick.
-
"On Being Sane in Insane Places", David L. Rosenhan.
-
"Self-Reflexivity in Literature: The Example of Samuel Beckett's Novel
Trilogy", Rolf Breuer.
-
"Active and Passive Negation: An Essay in Ibanskian Sociology", Jon
Elster.
-
"Components of Ideological 'Realities'", Paul Watzlawick.
-
"Can an Inquiry into the Foundations of Mathematics Tell Us Anything
Interesting about Mind?", Gabriel Stolzenberg.
-
"The Creative Circle: Sketches on the Natural History of Circularity",
Francisco J. Varela.
-
Münchhausen's Pigtail, or: Psychotherapy and
"Reality": Essays and Lectures, 1990
Norton
Etienne
Wenger
-
Communities of Practise: Learning, Meaning, and
Identity, Cambridge 1998.
-
a simpler way,
(Berrett-Koehler 1996), coauthored by Myron Kellner-Rogers
from p. 13:
It is the ability to keep finding solutions that is
important; any one solution is temporary. There are no permanently right
answers. The capacity to keep changing, to find what works now, is what
keeps any organism alive.
from p. 14:
Identity is the filter that every organism or system
uses to make sense of the world. New information, new relationships,
changing environments - all are interpreted through a sense of self. This
tendency toward self-creation is so strong that it creates a seeming
paradox. An organism will change to maintain its identity.
Randall
Whitaker
Sunny Y.
Auyang
-
How is Quantum Field Theory Possible?
(Oxford 1995)
from p. 113:
We have large areas of knowledge that are relatively
thorough so that each area can be regarded as a large content. We can
envision the development of the disciplinary sciences as attaining higher
grounds and gaining wider views. However, no matter how high we climb and
how sweeping the vista is, the view is always bounded by a horizon. The
observed is a formal distinction that signifies the horizon of
knowledge, which can be realized in any way physical theories see fit. As
"I think" accompanies all my experiences, "we think" formally accompanies
all our knowledge. Finitude is a human condition that cannot be
obliterated by science. Perhaps we can broaden our horizon to include the
physical interaction between quantum and classical objects, but we can
never step out of our horizon to attain God's position.
from p. 192:
We have seen in section 27 that individuals must have
relational properties if they are to relate to one another. The
renormalization program demonstrates again that reliability depends on
definite presuppositions. Individuals in isolation are different from
individuals in a community; the former must be enriched with relatability
to become the latter. The free electron is free only within the
electron-electromagnetic field system, in which it is obliged by its own
characteristics to relate causally with other electrons and the
elctromagnetic field. As for the absolutely isolated and unrelatable
electron, it turns out to be a ill-defined fiction.
from pp. 194-195:
Some philosophies assert that knowledge must be founded
upon primitive elements that have no conceptual complexity, for these
elements are given, certain, and free from theories. The role of theories
is merely to organize the given elements for more efficient reckoning. We
have found in our investigation that every notion they deem given is
conceptually analyzable. One common assumption they make is that the world
consists of preindivduated entities that constitute the domain of
discourse, over which the variables of theories range. This assumption is
shown to be dubious in quantum field theory, in which individuation of
events is a major theoretical task that is achieved only with the concepts
of space-time and private state spaces. The result of individuation, not
the givenness of the entities, enables us to comprehend the world as
comprising discrete events. Consequently the concept of individual
entities is complex and incorporates intrinsic spatio-temporal notions.
The concepts of properties and relations are equally analyzable. Even the
basic relations of similarity and difference have important
presuppositions that are tied to the concepts of enduring things and
causality.
Henry H.
Bauer
-
Scientific Literacy and the Myth of the Scientific
Method, (Illinois 1992)
from p. 61:
The myth of the method is not easily discarded, for one
thing, because humankind is reluctant to accept that all knowledge
contains an irreducible, inherent elemnt of uncertainty. Over the last few
centruries, the authority of science came to supersede that of religion
precisely because science seemed to offer more certain knowledge, at least
about the tangible world. If scientific knowledge now turns out to harbor
ineradicable uncertainties, then science is in essence a false god, and,
moreover, is inferior to the God on whom science turned its back. Human
beings, after all, do want to be certain about fundamental things, and
religion offers (or used to offer) such certainty. So there is reluctance
to accept that the method is a myth, reluctance especially on the part of
atheists, secular humanists, Marxists, and other such ideologues - perhaps
the more so because fundamentalists and New Age obscurantists have also
been so eager to topple science from its pedestal of authoritative
certainty.
Jack Cohen
-
The Collapse of Chaos: Discovering Simplicity in a
Complex World, (Penguin 1994)
coauthored by Ian Stewart,
from 428-429:
This bears on a major question, which we asked right at
the start of the book and have not yet fully answered. Are the patterns we
perceive in nature real, or are they figments of our imaginations? In
The Mind's Sky Timothy Ferris uses the hourglass as an image
of matter/mind: The upper half of the glass is the material universe, the
lower half is a human mind, and the sand tricling from one to the other is
information from the material world entering the brain. But, as the story
of Newton's ears shows, that image is far too symmetric; it puts the
mind's view of the universe on an equal footing with the universe's view
of the mind. Now, the sand inside the mind is indeed a model of the
material world, and it is that model that we manipulate when we seek
patterns. The material world is not part of our minds. But our minds
are part of the material world. The lower half of the hourglass is
inside the upper half (but not vice versa). A better image might be
the mathematician's Klein bottle which not only bends the lower half of
the hourglass inside the upper, but does so in such a way that the
combined sureface has only one side. The "mind" half is turned inside out,
so that its contents are not directly identified with any of the contents
of the material half.
This image
emphasizes the fact that mind is a strange loop. "Information" about the
material world can get into our minds by routes that do not pass through
our sense organs. If somebody hits you on the head with a hammer and kills
you, soe rather nasty information about the material world has had a
direct and major effect on your mind, by destroying it. Hallucinogenic
drugs affect the mind through its chemistry but create images that seem to
have come from sense organs. The drugs affect those parts of the brain
machine that process sensory data. The have the same kind of "unexpected"
effect as the "wrong" coin in the ticket machine, mentioned in chapter 1,
which persuaded the machine to disgorge an entire roll of tickets. This
possibility was implicit in the mechanics of the ticket machine but was
not intended to be part of its function. The same goes for drugs and
brains.
The is no hourglass
symmetry between mind and matter. To repeat an image from chapter 1,
reality may perhaps be a figment of our imagination, as some philosophers
argue, but our imagination is definitely a figment of reality.
John
Cornwall
-
Nature's Imagination: The Frontiers of Scientific
Vision, Oxford 1995. Essays from a
September 1992 meeting:
-
"Introduction. The scientist as rebel," Freeman Dyson
-
"Must mathematical physics be reductionist?" Roger Penrose
-
"Randomness in arithmetic and the decline and fall of reductionism in
pure mathematics," Gergory J. Chaitin
-
"Theories of Everything," John D. Barrow
-
"Intertheoretic reduction: a neuroscientists's gield guide," Paul M.
Churchland and Patricia S. Churchland
-
"Neural Darwinism: the brain as a selectional system," Gerald M.
Edelman and Giulio Tononi
-
"A new vistion of the mind," Oliver Sacks
-
"The limitless power of science," P. W. Atkins
-
"Reductive megalomania," Mary Midgley
-
"Artificial intelligence and human dignity," Margaret A. Boden
-
"On 'computabilism' and physicalism: some subproblems," Hao Wang
-
"Knowledge representation and myth," W. F. Clocksin
-
"Memory and the individual soul: against silly reductionism," Gerald
M. Edelman
-
Techgnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of
Information (Harmony 1998)
from p. 38:
"The powerful aura that today's advanced technologies
cast does not derive solely from their novelty or their mystifying
complexity; it also derives from their literal realization of the virtual
projects willed by the wizards and alchemists of an earlier age. Magic is
technology's unconscious, it own arational spell. Our modern technological
world is not nature, but augmented nature, super-nature, and the more
intensely we probe its mutant edge of mind and matter, the more our
disenchanted productions will find themselves wrestling with the rhetoric
of the supernatural."
Mike Fortun
-
Muddling Through: Pursuing Science and Truths in the
21st Century, coauthored by Herbet J.
Bernstein. Counterpoint 1998.
"Muddling
Through is a book about the sciences in the late twentieth century
and about the kind of sciences we need for the twenty-first. It is a book
about how the sciences make sense of the world and provide sense to the
world. Think of Muddling Through as the basic text for a
different kind of science literacy project, a project to reimagine and
then enact the sciences as operations of language and thought and as
attempts, trials, limited experiments involving things, ideas, and
just about everything in between.
"This
is also a book about politics (not policy) and culture - that is, about
how the sciences are made through arduous and diverse political processes.
This book is about how the sciences affect politics not only through
technological inventions but by generating the images and metaphors that
we apply to every situation and phenomenon we encounter, and by providing
the blueprints we use to make and legitimate crucial social decisions. The
connnections between the sciences and democratic pluralism need to be
revitalized, through both new concepts and innovative social forms."
-
The Social Construction of What?
(Harvard, 1999)
from p. 68
... the science wars are founded upon, among other
things of a more political or social nature, profound and ancient
philosophical disputes.
Ralph Gun
Hoy Siu
-
The Tao of Science: An Essay on Western Knowledge and
Eastern Wisdom, (MIT 1957)
from pp. 136-137:
But modern science is beginning to forget the labor of
her birth and Galileo's revolt against the scholastic trammels to
establish "things as are and seen" in preference to "things as abstracted
and conceived." Resplendent in her attainments and power, she is ascending
the very same throne of the intellectual monarch she deposed.
Science now appears
to be dictating the intellectual fashions of the day. If a plan is not
prepared according to the scientific method, it is considered unreliable.
If a question cannot be tested by science, it is considered meaningless.
If traditional institutions are slow to adopt the scientific way, they are
considered backward. If a mode of life is not comprehendible by science,
it is considered old-fashioned. As a result of these intrusions, the
certitude of purpose in the scheme of things begins to waver. Means are
being homogenized with ends.
Many scientists are
on the threshold of emulating theologians of the sixteenth century. Some
are beginning to develop a pugnacity that bespeaks a deep uncertainty of
brittle pride. Others are transgressing beyond their limited compass of
competence. Still others seem not to care a doit that the unitary purpose
of culture is being blunted and that the wholeness of meaning and the very
tradition of a cooperative society are being disintegrated. If encouraged
along the current trends, science may soon reach the point of diminishing
usefulness to humanity. To retain her contributing relevancy is an
important problem of the twentieth century.
from pp. 142-143:
As a result of her abstraction complex, science began
to dissociate her thoughts from the parent reality of mankind from which
she sprang. She wanted to be left alone to play with her artificial
worlds, creating things and systems that often do not harmonize with the
scheme of life and upsetting the equilibrium of the world in most
explosive ways. For these reasons R. Guenon refers to modern science as
the "degenerate vestiges" of the ancient traditional knowledge. Wiser
scientists are beginning to realize that a specialist is but an
abstraction of man, a personality out of context. They are beginning to
appreciate Toynbee's conclusions that "there is no correlation between
progress in technique and progress in civilization." Their souls clamor in
their native humility for a return to the complete man. Yet to be men as
men, they must cease being a particular kind f men. They cannot be men as
scientists. They must shake off their servitude to the chains of
abstracted and rational thought. They must control the scientific
implements, put them in their proper perspective and lose them in the
intimacy of their total experience as men.
Ecologies of
Knowledge
edited
by Susan Leigh Star, SUNY 1995. Contents:
-
"Science, Social Problems, and Progressive Thought: Essays on the
Tyranny of Science", Jennifer Croissant and Sal Restivo
-
"The Politics of Formal Representations: Wizards, Gurus, and
Organizational Complexity", Susan Leigh Star
-
"Computerization Movements and the Mobilization of Support for
Computerization", Rob Kling and C. Suzanne Iacono
-
"Representation, Cognition, and Self: What Hope for an Integration of
Psychology and Sociology?", Steve Woolgar
-
"Research Materials and Reproductive Science in the United States,
1910-1940", Adele E. Clarke
-
Laboratory Space and the Technological complex: An Investigation of
Topical Contextures", Michael Lynch
-
"Mixing Humans and Nonhumans Together: The Sociology of a Door Closer",
Bruno Latour
-
"Engineering and Sociology in a Military Aircraft Project: A Network
Analysis of Technological Change", John Law and Michael Callon
-
"Ecologies of Action: Recombining Genes, Molecularizing Cancer, and
Transforming Biology", Joan H. Fujimura
John Ziman
-
Public Knowledge: The Social Dimension of Science,
(Cambridge 1968)
-
The Force of Knowledge: The Scientific Dimension of
Society, (Cambridge 1976)
-
Reliable Knowledge: An Exploration of the Grounds for
Belief in Science, (Cambridge 1978)
-
Puzzles, Problems and Enigmas: Occasional Pieces on
the Human Aspects of Science,
(Cambridge 1981)
-
Prometheus Bound: Science in a Dynamic Steady State,
(Cambridge 1994)
-
Of One Mind: The Collectivization of Science,
(American Institute of Physics 1995)
from p. 188:
Although we have no reason to doubt the practical
reliability of well-explored and well tested branches of the natural
sciences, we are also aware of the vast extent of our scientific ignorance
on most matters of real human significance. No philosopher now supports a
"scientific method" that can carry all before it in every field of
knowledge. We must always ask to see the credentials of whatever is
offered to us as scientific truth, look at how it is generated and
validated, and make up our own minds whether it is more convincing than
what we might derive from practical experience, common sense, personal
insight, or social tradition.
-
Real Science: What It Is, and What It Means
(Cambridge 2000)
from p. 4:
This new picture of science is somewhat more
complicated that the outmoded stereotype. It is not so sharply defined. It
does not claim total competence. It treats human knowledge as a product of
the natural world. It does not pretend to be impregnable against
thorough-going skepticism or cynicism. It calls for more modesty and
tolerance than scientists have customarily cultivated about themselves and
their calling. But it does provide stout intellectual and moral defence
for science at the level of ordinary human affairs - the level at which
nothing is absolute or eternal, but where we often forget that life is
short, and feel passionately about pasts that we have not personally
experienced, or plan conscientiously for the future welfare of people whom
we shall never know.
Resources
for Software Engineering
Computers bring mathematical logic out into the big world. They got
started in roughly the 1930's with Gödel, Turing, and Church making formal
logic more precise by providing a mechanical model. Now formal logic has
become a major global industry, contacting almost every facet of life, as
the mechanical model has been incarnated as semiconductor circuitry,
miniaturized and replicated through photolithography. The difficulties of
creating a description of the world become more difficult to sweep under
the rug when the mechanical system embodies such formal precision. The
glitches in the description show up as computer systems that work poorly
in practise.
Nathaniel S.
Borenstein
-
Programming As If People Mattered : Friendly
Programs, Software Engineering, and Other Noble Delusions
An exploration of practical ways to manage the
engineering process for more humanly beneficial results.
Software
Development and Reality Construction
Proceedings of a conference held in 1988, published by Springer Verlag in
1992, edited by Christiane Floyd, Heinz Züllighoven, Reinhard Budde, and
Reinhard Keil-Slawik. Contents:
-
"Human Questions in Computer Science", Christiane Floyd
-
"Learning from our Errors", Donald E. Knuth
-
"The Technical and the Human Side of Computer Science", Klaus-Peter Löhr
-
"Hermeneutics and Path", Joseph A. Goguen
-
"Computing: Yet Another Reality Construction", Rodney M. Burstall
-
"How Many Choices Do We Make? How Many Are Difficult?", Kristen Nygaard
-
"From Scientific Practise to Epistemological Discovery", Douglas T. Ross
-
"Self-Organization and Software Development", Heinz von Foerster and
Christiane Floyd
-
"Software Development as Reality Construction", Christiane Floyd
-
"The Idea that Reality is Socially Constructed", Bo Dahlbom
-
"Scientific Expertise as a Social Process", Klaus Amaan
-
"How to Communicate Proofs or Programs", Dirk Siefkes
-
"Making Errors, Making Sense, Making Use", John M. Carroll
-
"Artifacts in Software Design", Reinhard Keil-Slawik
-
"The Denial of Error", Joseph A. Goguen
-
"Toward a New Understanding of Data Modelling", Heinz K. Klein and Kalle
Lyytinen
- "A
Reappraisal of Information Science", Pentti Kerola and Jouni Similä
-
"Perspectives and Metaphors for Human-Computer Interaction", Susanne
Maass and Horst Oberquelle
-
"Sortware Tools in a Programming Workshop", Reinhard Budde and Heinz
Züllighoven
-
""Soft Engines - Mass-Produced Software for Working People?", Wolfgang
Coy
-
"Artificial Intelligence: A Hermeneutic Defense", Thomas F. Gordon
-
"Shared Responsibility: A Field of Tension", Gro Bjerknes
- "A
Subject-Oriented Approach to Information Systems", Markku I. Nurminen
-
"Anticipating Reality Construction", Fanny-Michaela Reisin
- "On
Controllability", Wolfgang Dzida
-
"Work Design for Human Development", Walter Volpert
-
"Truth and Meaning Beyond Formalism", Joseph A. Goguen
-
"Informatics and Hermeneutics", Rafael Capurro
-
"Language and Software, or: Fritzl's Quest", Dafydd Gibbon
-
"Activity Theory as a Foundation for Design", Arne Raeithel
-
"Reflections on the Essence of Information", Klaus Fuchs-Kittowski
From
"The Denial of Error," in Software Development and Reality
Construction , pp 193-202:
This paper claims that the modern world has developed a
kind of arrogance which is damaging the very projects that it seeks to
sustain: in proposing methodoligies to guarantee the absence of error, we
deny the incredible richness of our own experience, in which confusion and
error are often the seeds of creation; in this way, we limit our own
creativity. [p] This arrogance is not an isolated phenomenon that is found
only in computer science. Indeed, I claim that it arises in a natural way
from our preoccupation with and immersion in science and technology, which
are strongly oriented toward control. ... A software development
project is not primarily a formal mathematical entity. Perhaps it is best
seen as a dialogical or linguistic process, an evolving
organization of certain informational structures, continually recreating
itself by building, modifying, and reusing these structures. ... Important
avenues for further progress in Software Engineering seem to be blocked by
our inadequate understanding of the processes involved in developing
software systems. ... Although formal methods can be very powerful when
they are properly applied, they also have definite limitations, and
formal, rationalistic understanding is only one of many approaches to
understanding. Intuition and spiritual understanding are alternatives that
seem more important in certain ways.
-
Data and Reality: Basic Assumptions in Data
Processing Reconsidered. (North-Holland
1978)
from page 9:
We seem to have little difficulty with the concept of
"one person" despite changes in appearance, personality, capabilities,
and, above all, chemical composition. (The proportions and structure -
i.e., the chemical formulas - may not change much, but the individual
atoms and melecules are continually being replaced... again illustrating
an ambiguity between "same kind" and "same instance": how rapidly is the
chemical composition of your body changing?) When we speak of the same
person over a period of time, we certainly are not referring to the same
ensemble of atoms and molecules. What then is the "same person"? We can
only appeal to some vague intuition obout the "continuity" of - something
- through gradual change. The concept of "same person" is so familiar and
obvious that it is absolutely irritating no to be able to define it.
Definitions in terms of "soul" and "spirit" may be the only true and
humanisitic concepts, but, significantly, we don't know how to deal with
them in a computer-based information system. It is only when the notion of
"person" is pushed to some limit do we realize how imprecise the notion
is.
from p. 203:
In an absolute sense, there is no singular objective
reality. But we can share a common enough view of it for most of our
working purposes, so that reality does appear to be objective and stable.
But the chances of
acieving such a shared view become poorer when we try to encompass broader
purposes, and to involve more people. This is precisely why the question
is becoming more relevant today: the thrust of technology is to foster
interaction among greater numbers of people, and to integrate processes
into monoliths serving wider and wider purposes. It is in this environment
that discrepencies in fundamental assumputions will become increasingly
exposed.
-
ONE HALF OF A MANIFESTO
-
"There is nothing more gray, stultifying, or dreary than a life lived
inside the confines of a theory."
Research
Methods in Information Systems
Proceedings of colloquium held in 1984 titled, "Information Systems
Research: a doubtful science?", edited by Enid Mumford, Rudi Hirschheim,
Guy Fitzgerald, and Trevor Wood-Harper, published by Elsevier in 1985.
Contents:
-
"Information Systems Research Methodology: An Introduction to the
Debate", G. Fitzgerald, R. A. Hirschheim, E. Mumford and A. T.
Wood-Harper
-
"Information Systems Epistemology: An Historical Perspective", Rudi
Hirschheim
-
"Acquiring Knowledge of Information Systems - Research in a
Methodological Quagmire", Hans-Erik Nissen
-
"Contextualist Research and the Study of Organizational Change
Processes", Andrew M. Pettigrew
-
"Socio-Technical Design, Trade Union Strategies and Action Research",
Ake Sandberg
-
"Research Methodologies and MIS Research", A. Milton Jenkins
-
"Development, Application and Enrichment of STROBE: Refinement of an
Observational Tool for the Information Analyst", Kenneth Kendall and
Julie Kendall
-
"The Poverty of Scientism in Information Systems", Heinz K. Klein and
Kalle Lyytinen
-
"Research Methods in Information Systems: Using Action Research", Trevor
Wood-Harper
-
"Phenomenology: A Preferred Approach to Research on Information
Systems", Richard J. Boland, Jr.
-
"Selection of a Research Method", Lyn Antill
-
"The Critical Theory of Jurgen Habermas as a Basis for a Theory of
Information Systems", Kalle Lyytinen and Heinz K. Klein
-
""Perception and Deceptions: Issues for Information Systems Research",
Kathy Brittain White
-
"The Need for Longitudinal Designs in the Study of Computing
Environments", Nicholas P. Vitalari
- "In
Search of a Paradigm for Information Systems Research", Robert D.
Galliers
-
"Two Research Methodologies for Studying User Development of Data
Systems", Per Flensburg
-
"Research People Problems: Some Advice to a Student", Enid Mumford
-
On the Origin of Objects,
MIT Press 1996.
from p. vii-viii:
Having spent more than twenty-five years working in the
trenches of practicing computer science, in a long-term effort to develop
an empirically responsible theory of computation, I had never met such a
logically pure entity, never met such a lapidary individual thing.
from p. 3:
This book introduces a new metaphysics - a philosophy
of presence - that aims to steer a path between the Scylla of naive
realism and the Charybdis of pure constructivism. The goal is to develop
an integral account that retains the essential humility underlying each
tradition: a form of epistemic deference to the world that underlies
realism, and a respect for the constitutive human involvement in the world
that underwrites constructivism. The proposal is also intended to be
neutral with respoect to (a late twentieth-century update of) C. P. Snow's
famous two culutres - serving equally as a foundation for the academic,
intellectual, and technological, on the one hand, and for the curious, the
moral, the erotic, the political, the artistic, and the sheerly
obstreperous, on the other.
from pp. 288-289
Objects are not stabilized only through acts of
disconnected focusing, in other words. Nor are they stabilized merely in
virtue of their own integrity or achievement, or even of the two phenomena
together. They are also stabilized by force, through the travails
of those who register them. And not solely through the efforts of
individuals, or even institutions, but with the full complicity of the
surrounding community of practice.
Practical insights into managing systems engineering.
-
Quality Software Management
in four volumes:
-
Systems Thinking
-
First-Order Measurement
-
Congruent Action
-
Anticipating Change
-
Exploring Requirements : Quality Before Design
coauthored by Donald Gause.
-
On the Design of Stable Systems,
(Wiley 1979) coauthored by Daniela Weinberg.
from pp. 67-69:
Now we can see what really "distinguishes [physics and
chemistry] from biology." There is nothing "inherent" or "legitimate" in
their use of statistics - that is, in their use of means or of types. In
nature, we very rarely find a bar of pure gold or a solution of pure
glucose. In fact, we very rarely find "pure" undifferentiated anything,
since purity is one of those observer's fictions. The physicist has to
work very, very hard to get her "pure" gold, and even then she will have a
mixture of isotopes, unless she works very much harder.
The reason we don't
speak of "physical variation" is that the physicist has chosen not to work
with naturally occurring systems, but, rather, with the products of her
laboratory. Most of her time in that laboratory is spent eliminating
the variation and keeping it eliminated. Moreover, she must artificially
ensure the survival of each aggregate, for a lump of pure gold, and
especially a solution of pure glucose, would not survive long without the
active participation of the scientist.
...
The reductionist -
interested in "law" - emphasizes the sameness; the antireductionist -
interested in "life" - emphasizes the difference. If the reductionist goes
to the extreme, his laws are about systems that have zero probability of
being observed; while if the antireductionist goes to his extreme, his
systems also have zero probability of being observed - for if a system is
truly unique, our minds cannot deal with it at all. In the first case the
system does not exist, while in the second we have no way of observing its
existence.
An Introduction to General Systems Thinking
Resources
for Mathematics
-
Situations and Attitudes,
(MIT 1983), coauthored by John Perry.
from p. ix:
In recent years a different perspective, one we
associate with Thomas Reid, has been revitalized by the work of the
psychologist J. J. Gibson and a famous paper by Hilary Putnam, "The
meaning of 'Meaning.'" Gibson, studying the coordinated perception and
action of animals, found much more information in the environment (and so
less work to be done by the animal brain, or mind) than the traditional
view of perception admitted; and Putnam's paper, we think, shows that
there is much more meaning and information in the world and less in the
head than the traditional view of meaning assumed. From these two
complementary movements a new realism has emerged, Ecological Realism, a
view that finds meaning located in the interaction of living things and
their environment. What began for us as an exercise in technical
philosohpy, reworking Frege, undoing his mistake, led us step by
inevitable step to working out the beginnings of a theory of meaning
implicit in this new realism.
-
Vicious Circles: On the Mathematics of
Non-Wellfounded Phenomena, (CSLI 1996),
coauthored with Lawrence Moss.
from p. 5:
In certain circles, it has been thought that there is a
conflict between circular phenomena, on the one hand, and mathematical
rigor, on the other. This belief rests on two assumptions. One is that
anything mathematically rigorous must be reducible to set theory. The
other assumption is that the only coherent conception of set precludes
circularity. As a result of these two assumptions, it is not uncommon to
hear circular analyses of philosophical, linguistic, or comutational
phenomena attacked on the grounds that they conflict with one of the basic
axioms of mathematics. But both assumptions are mistaken and the attack is
groundless.
-
The Logic of Distributed Systems,
(Cambridge 1997), coauthored by Jerry Seligman.
from p. 219:
We have required that our regimentations live in the
field of real numbers. An alternative suggestion would allow them to live
in non-Archimedian fields, like the fields of nonstandard real numbers.
One could then allow the tolerance to be infinitesimal, and sorites
numbers could be infinite. This goes along with the discovery in recent
years that nonstandard analysis often gives an elegant way to model the
differences between the very small and the very large.
-
Understanding the Infinite
(Harvard 1994)
from p. 133:
When combined with Skolem's arguments, those of von
Neumann amount to a devastating criticism of our present-day axiomatic
foundations of mathematics on the basis of set theory: Those foundations
rely on a notion of proof, which requires a notion of finitude for its
definition. But, once we specify the notion of definiteness, our axioms
enable us to show that the definition of finitude they provide is an
iniadequate foundation for the notion of proof. ... The criticism is not
directed at the practice of using proofs, a practice that we can certainly
acquire without having a theory of proofs or an adequate characterization
of finitude. In practice all we need in the way of a theory of finitude is
the recognition that any proof we actually encounter in completed form is
finite, which is very far from a complete characterization of what it is
to be finite. The criticism is directed at a certain kind of attempt to
characterize or define what the practice allows in the way of proofs. The
attempt fails.
Raymond
Smullyan
Smullyan relates the puzzles confronted in mathematical logic to the
broader scope of living.
-
5000 B.C. and Other Philosophical Fantasies
-
Lady or the Tiger? And Other Logic Puzzles Including
a Mathematical Novel That Features Godel's Great Discovery
-
The Tao Is Silent
-
This Book Needs No Title : A Budget of Living
Paradoxes, (Prentice Hall 1980, Simon &
Schuster 1986)
from pp. 97-98:
"Are human beings like mountains and streams?" This is
a profound question, and there seems to be remarkably divergent opinion on
the matter! I think may people would say, "Of course they are different!"
Expecially those brought up in a Jewish or Christian tradition would say:
"Humans are alive. They have souls. They are rational. They have
free will and make choices. They are capable of good and evil; they
have moral responsibility; they are capable of sinning," etc., tec.
On the other hand, there are those ultra-mechanistic types - often in the
computer sciences - who say that human beings are basically like mountains
and streams; they are both causally determined mechanisms. The
human being (they say) may be a more complicated kind of machine but is a
machine nevertheless and subject to exactly the same physical laws which
govern the behavior of mountains and streams. Therefore human beings are
like mountains and streams.
But what a ghastly,
perverted way of looking at it! I don't know which of these two viewpoints
I find more horrible! The first empasizes that aspect of religion I have
always hated. The second is completely inhuman. I also tend to think of
humans - at their best - as being like mountains and streams, but for such
different reasons! In the first place, I don't think of humans as
machines. Second, I don't think of the universe as a mchine; I think of it
as an organism rather than a mechanism. Even if it is perfectly
decribable, using purely mechanical and electromagnetic laws, I still
think of it as an organism rather than a mechanism. And I think of
mountains and streams as part of the organism of the cosmos, and a very
beautiful part of that. And since I like to think of human beings as also
beautiful, I therefore like to think of them - at their best - as being
like mountains and streams.
-
What Is the Name of This Book? : The Riddle of
Dracula and Other Logical Puzzles
Madame
Jeanne Guyon, Francois Fenelon, Jane Lead, Jakob Boehme, William Law, etc.
Hiram Haydn
-
The Counter-Renaissance
(Scribner's, 1950)
from pp. xiii-xiv:
What unites these otherwise dissimilar thinkers of the
sixteenth century is that they share completely an anti-intellectualistic,
anti-moralistic, anti-synthetic, anti-authoritarian bias. The central
premise of the great synthesis which Thomas Aquinas bequeathed to the
later Christian humanists is summarized in Cicero's statement that "True
law is right reason in agreement with nature; it is of universal
application, unchanging and eternal." This was the cement which had held
together a comprehensive and interlocking world order; and it is only when
we understand that Luther and Calvin in theology, Machiavelli in political
theory, Montaigne in his ethical and psychological studies, and the new
empirical scientists in physics and astronomy and anatomy and medicine
were all attacking this one central principle - it is only then that we
can see clearly that what I have called the Counter-Renaissance is on
great ideological revolution, and not the arbitrary uniting of isolated
figures.
from p. 101:
Without prolonged study, it is difficult to distinguish
with exactness in these sixteenth-century works an indebtedness to the
skepticism of the New Academy fromon to that of the Pyrrhonic school. But
by the end of the century, they have all been cited and imitated. In the
anti-intellectual cause, Carneades, Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus are
conscripts along with Solomon, Paul and the patristic writers.
Stephen A.
McKnight
-
Sacralizing the Secular: The Renaissance Origins of
Modernity (Louisiana State, 1989)
-
Science, Pseudo-Science, and Utopianism in Early
Modern Thought (Missouri, 1992)
A
collection of essays edited by McKnight:
-
Allen G. Debus, "Science and History: The Birth of a New Field"
-
Allen G. Debus, "The Scientific Revolution: A Chemist's Reappraisal"
-
Betty Jo Teeter Dobbs, "Alchemical Death and Resurrection: The
Significance of Alchemy in the Age of Newton"
-
Stephen A. McKnight, "Science, the Prisca Theologia, and Modern
Epochal Consciousness"
-
Klaus Vondung, "Millenarianism, Hermeticism, and the Search for a
Universal Science"
-
David Walsh, "A Mythology of Reason: The Persistence of Pseudo-Science
in the Modern World"
-
Wilbur Applebaum, "Epistemological and Political Implications of the
Scientific Revolution"
Ramon G.
Mendoza
-
The Acentric Labyrinth: Giordano Bruno's Prelude to
Contemporary Cosmology (Element, 1995)
Stephen
Toulmin
-
Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity
The
Rosicrucian Enlightenment Revisited
edited
by Ralph White, (Lindisfarne 1999)
-
John Matthews, "The Grail and the Rose"
-
Christopher Bamford, "The Meaning of the Rose Cross"
-
Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke, "The Rosicrucian Prelude: John Dee's Mission
in Central Europe"
-
Joscelyn Godwin, "The Deepest of the Rosicrucians: Michael Maier"
-
Robert Powell, "Tycho Brahe, Johannes Kepler, Rudolf II and the Prague
Hermetic Renaissance"
-
Rafal T. Prinke, "The Twelfth Adept: Michael Sendivogius in Rudolfine
Prague"
-
Clare Goodrick-Clarke, "The Rosicrucian Afterglow: The Life and
Influence of Comenius"
-
Paul Bembridge, "The Rosicrucian Resurgence at the Court of Cromwell"
-
Christopher McIntosh, "The Rosicrucian Legacy"
Frances A.
Yates
-
The Rosicrucian Enlightenment
_________________
Source: http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Atrium/8240/
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Update: 01-07-2003