Armistice Day.

The nascent German Empire and the Ottoman Empire were crushed by the British, (various) European, and Russian Empires with the pointless loss of millions of lives (mostly men). Germany, Britain, and Russia were all ruled by grandchildren of Queen Victoria (i.e., they were first cousins).

The generals on all sides were incompetent inbreds who saw working class men and "colonials" as canon fodder.

Chemical weapons were invented and deployed, causing mass casualties. Mechanised warfare also contributed to mass casualties. Even more men simply died of disease because of unsanitary conditions.

The French and British made a deal with the Arabs to remove the Ottomans and then welched on it, creating a lasting enmity and alienation between Europe and the Muslim world -- and also the conditions for ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

Americans got a taste for war on foreign soil and the vast wealth to be made from supporting it.

Russians decided they'd had enough of the Tsars and revolted, but ended up with Stalin, who was considerably worse.

Finally, harsh reparations were imposed that sowed the seeds for the rise of Fascism in Europe and WWII.

On the plus side, the horrendous, dehumanising, exploitative society that had grown out of the industrial revolution began to break down, which was a good thing. Not sure about the replacement, yet, though.

We will remember them 

(but probably not learn anything from the exercise)

Losing Track

Awareness seems to operate a kind of gestalt, but in addition to foreground and background, there is an underground. Bear with me. Think about meditating on the breath. You breathe away and pay attention to the sensations, maybe you count breaths, and then, suddenly, you find you are thinking about what to have for dinner and you don't remember when you changed tack.

"Not to worry," most meditation teachers will say, "just notice that you lost concentration and go back to the sensations of breathing. The important thing is to notice what is happening." This is good advice, if you are training your mind to concentrate. But consider this: what happened to breathing when you stopped paying attention to it? Your awareness of breathing disappeared and was replaced by dinner. It's not that you stopped breathing, right? Or you'd be dead. But you lost track of breathing. It faded into the underground.

In the Prajñāpāramitā you are seeking to leverage just this ability of the mind to lose track. Except you want to lose track of your self. For your sense of self to just disappear and leave you without a self. You do that by deliberately focussing on something else.

You start by losing track of the gross senses. Focussing allows you to push most things in your awareness into the background and underground. You lose track of the world outside, the room you are seated in, and so on. The initial goal is lose track of sense experience; for sense experience to move to the background and then fade into the underground. The world is there but it does not register because your attention is entirely elsewhere. When this happens it's difficult to orient yourself in space and time. Space feels infinite. There may be a sense of internal unification and it may be blissful This counts as a mystical experience in modern inventories of religious experiences. And it is a milestone in Buddhism, just not a very important one. It is relatively easy to lose track of sense experience.

Then you have to lose track of the remaining cognitive activity. This is more difficult and requires considerable persistence. When cognition itself fades into the underground, it becomes difficult to orient yourself to awareness. Without a sense of self, awareness is no longer self-referential, in any case. Without the usual cognitive activity your mind feels infinite, though you're not really aware of anything in particular. It is difficult to find words for awareness when sense experience and cognition are in the underground.

But you then have to lose track of losing track. At this point you are well and truly lost and cannot orient to any sense of self or world. You are nothing, nowhere, out of time. There's a kind of luminous awareness, but it doesn't have any features - like an infinite blue sky stretching off in all directions.

And beyond this is emptiness. No one is doing or thinking or feeling or experiencing anything anywhere within the sphere of emptiness. Nothing arises, nothing passes away. The experience of emptiness is not tainted with desire or aversion. There is no sense of it growing or shrinking or changing in any way. Emptiness just is. There is no one who experiences emptiness, because in emptiness it never occurs to anyone that they are experiencing anything. Indeed, if something did occur to someone, that would not be emptiness.

This kind of language will be familiar to anyone who has tried to read a Prajñāpāramitā text. Without the context it seems paradoxical, doesn't it? But notice how, when you lead into it and put it in context, that it flows more naturally. Words and concepts are stretched to the limit, but they are not broken. There may, in fact, be no words for being in that (non)experience, but it is not that we cannot understand it or talk about it in retrospect.

By the way, the dissolution of the sense of self can be terrifying. One should not treat it lightly or casually. It ought to be approached in a supportive and emotionally positive atmosphere and under the tutelage of someone who has experience of it. As Michel Foucault reminded us, the Delphic Oracle did not just say "Know thyself" it also said "Take care of thyself". (Technologies of the Self)

 

Invalid Generalisations

I recently read a philosopher arguing for there being two minds in the brain because, in some patients who have their corpus callosum severed (so called split-brain), to treat epilepsy, for example, there appears to be a division of will in which the left and right sides of the body are controlled separately. But this conclusion is aberrant thinking because severing the corpus callosum amounts to major brain damage. The results of major brain damage cannot be normalised and generalised.

It is not apparent that healthy brains experience this kind of duality. Most of the popular myths about the different roles of the different hemispheres of the brain turn out to be untrue. There may be some division of labour, the brain is nothing if not modular, but our minds are a result of the whole brain. The aberrations that occur with brain injury certainly give us insights into the architecture of the brain and then the contributions different areas make to our minds.

However, the routine over-simplification and essentialisation of observations means that most of what we read about the brain in popular media is wrong. It turns out that men are not "from Mars" and women are not "from Venus". Both sides of the brain have a limbic system, and many emotions are correlated with activity in the cerebellum, which is not divided. Blah blah.

People with agendas consume science news in a biased way. This is religious thinking: one comes to a conclusion then amasses evidence to support that conclusion, filtering out evidence that contradicts one's conclusion. Scientific thinking counters this in two ways. Firstly, it tries to make explicit what would constitute a refutation of a view, so that when a refutation comes along it is easily recognised. Secondly, it tries to weigh the evidence before coming to a conclusion, and then to keep looking at new evidence.

Mapping Legacy Epistemic Terms onto a Modern Ontology of Mind

This post started life as a comment on a blogpost on SelfAwarePatterns.

On the distinctions between thoughts, emotions, and feelings, I recall Cordelia Fine having an equation in one of her early popular books:

emotion = arousal + emotional thoughts

Trying to map archaic epistemic terms onto modern ontologies is difficult. Partly because we often don't acknowledge the different modes and levels we are working with.

Pre-modern India had no separate category for "emotion" or "feeling". Sanskrit has names for emotions and often several synonyms or fine distinctions in intensity, but emotions were lumped together with thoughts as "mental" (cetasika) whereas sensations were "physical" (kāyasika). So our European way of dividing up experience is not "natural".

So it just occurs to me that we could think more systematically about this.

The ontological distinctions are whether the stimulus comes from the peripheral nervous system or it originates in the central nervous system; and whether it is accompanied by physiological arousal or not (i.e., whether it also involves the autonomic nervous system).

This gives us

central - arousal
central + arousal
peripheral - arousal
peripheral + arousal

If you want to map the archaic Eurocentric epistemological terms onto this, then I suggest: thought, emotion, sensation, feeling. i.e.

central - arousal ≈ thought
central + arousal ≈ emotion
peripheral - arousal ≈ sensation
peripheral + arousal ≈ feeling

I haven't factored in the parasympathetic side of the autonomic system, i.e., ± relaxation. I suspect we don't see these as separate categories, but as positive experiences fitting into categories, i.e., peaceful thoughts, calm emotions, neutral sensations, contented feelings.

The next step would be an axis for anticipation/reward. But this would include anticipation of positive (↑) and anticipation of negative (↓), since these move us in different directions. Also, there are different reactions if the reward meets or confounds expectations.

The combination would give us a coarse-grained model that would allow us to map most of the archaic legacy epistemic terms onto a modern empirical ontology. So the new equation is:

experience ≈ central/peripheral ± arousal/relaxation ± anticipation/reward

So in this model, happiness, for example, is a centrally initiated experience, accompanied by physiological arousal, and the anticipation of a good outcome that has been rewarded with a good outcome. 

Pain, is peripherally initiated by pain nerves accompanied by physiological arousal and the anticipation of a bad outcome; but it may also become the object for centrally initiated experience accompanied by arousal. With slight pain or discomfort we may anticipate getting better and thus remain relatively calm about it. With intense pain we may anticipate death and this may spin off more centrally initiated experiences.

The idea that a physical experience can spin off many mental experiences is called prapañca in Buddhist Sanskrit. One of the supposed benefits of awakening is that uncontrolled prapañca stops. 

Momentary Madness

The doctrine of momentariness comes about as Buddhists tried to connect actions, especially the cetanā or intention behind actions, and their consequences, i.e., experiences (vedanā) and/or rebirth (punarbhava). It is a result, I argue, of constraints placed on Buddhists by the acceptance of impermanence (anitya) and dependent arising (pratītya-samutpāda).

Momentariness makes a certain kind of sense if you use meditative states as your model of mental activity. In highly concentrated states one can observe thoughts arising and passing away one at a time. They exist briefly and are replaced by another. Buddhists saw meditative mental states, cut off from sensory stimulation, as more real and this one-at-a-timeness became the norm when they thought about the workings of the mind. It was an unhelpful cul de sac philosophically, but they did not foresee this.

Things got even more tricky when budding philosophers in the Sarvāstivāda and Sautrāntika schools concluded that momentariness must also apply to real world phenomena and to macroscopic objects. The first concerted arguments for this conclusion did not occur until a little later in the early Yogācāra literature, but it was still the conclusion of many Buddhists in the classical period.

The trouble is that if a macroscopic object only exists momentarily, then it cannot move in space. The time it would take to get to an adjacent location is less that the time that the object exists. Therefore, movement is not possible. However, we do observe macroscopic objects moving around, so what is going on? Sarvāstivāda and Sautrāntika philosophers argued that the object must be disassembled into its constituent parts and re-assembled in another location. All too fast to see.

Cf. Rospatt, Alexander von. The Buddhist Doctrine of Momentariness: A Survey of the Origins and Early Phase of This Doctrine up to Vasubandhu. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1995, p.67 n.144.

This is what a lot of Buddhist philosophy is like. Bound by axioms that are never questioned, Buddhists plough on regardless of the stupid things that come out. They often worked logically enough from their axioms. The trouble with deductive logic is that one either ends up repeating one's axiom as a conclusion or one falsifies the axiom. If we take the classic Aristotelian syllogism:

Axiom: all swans are white
Observation: Bruce is a swan
Deduction: Bruce is white, because all swans are white.  

Observation: Bruce is an Australian swan and he is black.
Deduction: the axiom "all swans are white" is false. 

But the axiom being false has to be a possible conclusion. Religieux often take the view that certain axioms are true and cannot be disproved. In this case deduction can only be deflected:

Axiom: all swans are white
Observation: Bruce is black
Deduction: Bruce is not a swan, because all swans are white.  

This enables us to satisfy logic and to preserve our axiom. By virtue of being black, we can conclude that, even though Bruce looks exactly like a swan, he is, in fact, not a swan, because we know with certainty that all swans are white. A black swan is a contradiction in terms. The contradictory observation itself is falsified. Those who believe the axiom feel no burden of proof here. They are not interested in what kind of bird Bruce is. They just know that he's not their kind of bird and he is therefore of little or no interest.

Having accepted the axioms, there is a logical, even rational, process of deduction. The problem is not in the process, but in the starting conditions. Most of the attempts at Buddhist philosophy that I have come across do not question axioms. One of the principle axioms is that Buddhist axioms are not to be questioned. So no one who studies Nāgārjuna's use of the tetralemma (not x, not not x, not neither and not both) ever questions Nāgārjuna's axioms.

For example, an unquestioned axiom is that dependent arising applies across the board to phenomena - mental and physical. The mental/physical dichotomy has long been axiomatic in Buddhism as well. In fact, as an epistemic distinction it holds up OK, since we do gain knowledge of the two domains in different ways. But, as an ontology, this duality doesn't hold up. No mind-body duality can explain the behaviour of the world with the degree of accuracy and precision that a monistic approach does.  What's more, mind-body duality leads to silly conclusions.

If we are going to truly make Buddhism fit for the modern world then we have to turn our attentions to the ideas that we are forced to accept as true and ask whether or not they are. Many of them are demonstrably false, and we need to come to terms with this.

Mysticism As Pure Subjectivity

I wrote this as part of my Heart Sutra history and commentary

There is a curious feature of mysticism. According to most understandings of the world, including that of early Buddhists, from the point of view of the individual the world has two poles: 1) the mind; and 2) the objects and processes that make up the world, including other subjects. In Western jargon, these are the subjective and objective poles of the world. Experience is what happens when the mind and objects (including other subjects perceived as objects) come into contact, via the senses. We may say that a subject swims through a world of objects and other subjects, like a fish in water.

Of course, in the bigger picture, mind is also a process within the world, but this is not how we experience it. This may sound like a tautology, but our sense of self is, in fact, a kind of experience in which we ourselves are the object of perception. We must also be careful not to reify the subject. The subject is a mind capable of representing sense data to itself as an experience. That mind is generated by a brain. The first person perspective is a quality of how the mind represents experience to itself and we know that it is not essential to experience, whereas a brain-generated mind is.

Typically, then, experience has this polarised quality. In meditation, we withdraw from sense experience and in the depths of it, we withdraw from experience entirely. The acme of mediation is to experience cessation. Not simply the suppression of thoughts, which results in alienation, but the cessation of experience – including, and especially, the sense of self. With the cessation of the experience of self, mystical experiences become available: for example, as one’s self falls away, one may identify with the whole world as self. This may be accompanied by a sense that space is infinite. This is simply the first of four spheres or rarefied experience called āyatanas. Beyond the āyatanas is the sphere of emptiness in which nothing arises or passes away. There is no experience per se, just awareness and being.

To achieve emptiness one withdraws attention from experience. In other words, one retreats from the objective pole of experience. Ideally, one completely withdraws any and all attention from objects of any kind. To my mind, this would be characterised as a purely subjective state – just the mind, ticking over but not doing anything. And many Buddhist narratives do talk about this state in terms of pure mind and so on. But it is far more common, in English to refer to such states in terms of reality, the nature of reality, or even the nature of ultimate reality. Suzuki and Conze, drawing on the rhetoric of Theosophy, referred to it as “the Absolute” or “the Transcendental”. Other commentators took the idea of an unconditioned dharma; i.e., the state of extinction of experience (nirvāṇa) and reified it into “the Unconditioned”.

In each case, the reified concept becomes an object to be apprehended. But the Prajñāpāramitā texts, speaking from the point of view of cessation attained by practising the yoga of non-apprehension (anupalambhayogena), argue against this way of thinking. Aṣṭasāhasrikā explicitly says that if you are still thinking in terms of “form is emptiness” (rūpam śūnyatā) then that is a thought being apprehended and it is not cessation, not Prajñāpāramitā. In the state of emptiness, there is no sense experience but also no cognitive experience. If one has visions, for example, then these are not emptiness, they are hallucinations being apprehended.

To repeat, mystical states are states of pure subjectivity with no objective component, but they are typically interpreted and presented as the opposite; i.e., states of pure objectivity with no subjective component. This contradiction leads to confusion, which is exploited by mystics as being productive. For most people, the confusion is the end of their religious career because it creates huge barriers to progress.

If we want people from outside religion to take mysticism seriously, we have to stop presenting it in terms that they know to be false. If we simply admit that a state of emptiness is purely subjective and tells us something about subjectivity, then we might find that scientists and philosophers start to take the experiences seriously.

In addition, we might free ourselves from the moronic influence of the so-called "philosophy" of Madhyamaka. When one cannot even adequately distinguish reality and experience, or subjectivity and objectivity, then one is never going to say anything sensible about either. And Nāgārjuna does not.

The Unknown

No one could have foreseen quantum mechanics. It came out of a funny little side project - trying to understand the photoelectric effect (roughly why some frequencies of light can make electricity flow in some materials). Newton had explained the wave-like nature of light. He did so just down the hill from where I currently live!

Einstein, who published four revolutionary papers in 1905, explained that the energy of the light came in packets or "quantum" (i.e., specific amounts). In surfer jargon, light waves always come in sets. And those sets can act as objects. This is what he got the Nobel Prize for.

Understanding that light worked like this led to a series of insights into the nature of the subatomic world that changed everything. Eventually, it resulted in electronics. And electronics has changed our world beyond recognition. Even in my lifetime! (e.g., the integrated circuit was invented after I was born)

In 1905, for a brief period, no one could claim to have a deeper understanding of reality than Einstein. And not even he could have predicted any of this.

When we think about the world a century from now, we have to pause. The likelihood is that something completely unforeseen is going to change things in ways we cannot imagine; that no one can imagine. We cannot factor this into our calculations. We cannot make allowance for it. We cannot even say from which direction or field it will come. It is completely unknown to us. No one knows or can know.

All we know is that throughout human history, and with increasing frequency, new ideas have emerged that have changed everything. Its not always technological. Think of the impact of fascism in the 1930s.