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.

Everything happens for a reason

Or does it? Sean Carroll (physicist) discusses the question of why there is something rather than nothing and the kinds of answers that people have come up with. It turns out that thinking that "things always happen for a reason" (or not) is central of what makes any given answer satisfying or unsatisfying.

Sean Carroll's Mindscape Podcast. Episode 9: Solo — Why Is There Something Rather than Nothing?

Carroll's take on "why?", "something", and "nothing" is very interesting.

The way I would put his argument about the first part is this. Arguably "reasons" are how humans account for their own behaviour and they don't apply outside this domain. In particular the universe simply evolves in patterned ways that don't correspond to the motivations of human beings. Motivation (reasons for acting) is a feature of sentience. We can sensibly ask a person why they did something and expect an answer. If we ask the planet why it orbits the sun, we can't expect an answer. We can say that it does, and how it does. But it doesn't do so for a reason.

As Dan sperber has said

"So reasoning on this view has argumentation aimed at persuasion as its main function. From the point of view of the communicator, it’s a way to convince people who would not accept what you say on trust. From the point of view of the audience, it’s a way to evaluate the arguments, the reasons that people give to you. Reasoning so understood is first and foremost a tool for communication."

So a question like "Why does the universe exist?" is making some unhelpful assumptions - it assumes the universe is an agent and existence is a choice that the universe made, and that by observing the universe we could infer its motivations. This is how we relate to people and their behaviour. But as a model for dealing with inanimate objects, this doesn't work.

Breathing in Pāli

I've been participating in a serious Pāli forum recently. I haven't read much Pāli for a few years so its nice to reconnect. The subject of how to translate the verbs assasati and passasati came up. And I did a quick bit of research and a write up which I reproduce here. If I get any useful comments I'll update this post accordingly.

assasati/passasati

Assasati is from Sanskrit ā + √śvas, where the verbal root śvas means "blow, breathe". In Pāli, the long ā has been irregularly shortened and śv regularly becomes ss. Similarly, passasati is from Skt. pra + √śvas. The initial pra is regularly simplified to pa.

Under assasati, the PTSD refers to ā (1.3). This entry notes the use of the pair of prefixes ā and pa

Contrast -- combns. with other pref. in a double cpd. of noun, adj. or verb (cp. above 2) in meaning of "up & down, in & out, to & fro"... ā + pa: assasati-passasati (where both terms are semantically alike; in exegesis however they have been differentiated in a way which looks like a distortion of the original meaning, viz. assasati is taken as "breathing out", passasati as "breathing in": see Vism 271)

What I take this to mean is that ā and pa, when used as a pair, mean "in" and "out", respectively. But the Pāli commentarial tradition read them the other way around.

However, PTSD confusingly gives "breath out" in its definition of assasati and assāsa.

This error and the correct reading are noted in Edgerton's Buddhist Hybrid Sanskrit Dictionary sv. āśvāsa-praśvāsa. By comparing various Sanskrit texts and their Tibetan translations, he makes it clear that assāsa (āśvāsa) means "in-breath" and passāsa (praśvāsa) means "out-breath".

And this makes sense in etymological terms also. If we look at the prefix pa (Skt pra), it can add several senses to a verb: onward, forward, forth, beginning. E.g., gacchati "go", pagacchati "go forth". It may also be used for emphasis. It would be quite unlikely to add this prefix to a word and have it mean "in-breath". Passasati must be something like "breathe-forth" or "exhaling".

By contrast, the prefix ā can have an indeterminate effect. But a lot of the time it adds a sense of "to, towards" or with directional verbs it reverses the direction. E.g., gacchati "go", āgacchati "come, return, arrive".

Thus, assasati "breathes in" and passasati "breathes out" are the expected readings. Although it's not so much "breathe in and out" as "the breath goes forth and returns". And this seems to be confirmed in later literature. The PTSD has been confused by the commentarial tradition. Which goes to show that the PTSD is a good dictionary but not perfect, and one should use judgement when consulting it.

One of the big problems that we have with translating is that some of our cognitive metaphors are different from ancient India. We think of breathing in, then breathing out. And we think that the breath is a movement of air caused by our physical movements. The air belongs outside of us and brings life-giving oxygen in.

What this analysis suggests is that in India they thought they breathed out, and then in. Breath goes forth and then returns. The breath belongs inside of us - like many ancient cultures, breath was life itself: words like spirit, anima, psyche, and soul all come from words meaning "breath or breathe". Possibly ātman does as well, though this is disputed.

The movement of our body and the sensations of breathing were caused by the wind element (vāyu) of which breathing was one obvious manifestation. There's not really a word for air as a separate stuff. Arguably, in ānāpāna-sati, you are not paying attention to air or body movements, you are paying attention to the sensations caused by vāyu circulating. Which is why you can become un-aware of gross physical sensations and still be focussed on vāyu. In this view, it is part of our being.

Pāli is a window into the past. But the past really is a different country.

My Heart Sutra Dilemma

In early medieval China, texts made up of quotes of other texts, in Chinese, were common - I call them "digest texts" based on the traditional Chinese term. Hundreds of them were in circulation (giving librarians a headache, but otherwise very popular).

The Heart Sutra is clearly one of these digest texts. And we know to within 16 years when it was made (645-661).

But I have now shown that the Sanskrit version of the Heart Sutra is a forgery. It was made and presented to make a Chinese digest text look like an authentic Indian Buddhist text, when it really wasn't.

It may be the only time such a caper was pulled off. Whoever did it was a clever and sneaky person (so I kind of admire them). But they were not very good at Sanskrit, so even with modern critical methods of restoring the "original", the basic text is full of mistakes.

This also more or less proves that the author or redactor was not the one who translated it into Sanskrit (unless they could not read their own writing).

But a lot of my work to date has been on how to fix the mistakes in the Sanskrit text. Modern mistakes are still obviously in need of correction, but what about the ancient mistakes?

Should I continue to restore a forgery? In particular, should I be bothering to show how they could have done a much better job of it? Or should I just call "bullshit" and leave it at that?

Not forgetting that millions of people around the world worship this text. So far, the millions seem quite unhappy about the effort to show that their worship is based on false pretenses. They are like, "Just piss off, we hate you". Making sure that all the evidence is presented seems like a good thing in the face of this attitude.

The so-called Hard Problem

Philosophers make a big deal of the Hard Problem of Consciousness. This is the problem of what it is like to be a conscious person from a point of view other than our own. We know our own minds, but we cannot know other minds.

But note that this is a problem of what can be known. In the jargon it is an epistemic problem. If we try to explain this in terms of what exists (or ontology) without reference to what can be known, then we usually say stupid things.

For example, David Chalmers, the young philosopher who in 1995 outlined the Hard Problem for the first time, in 1996 proposed a subtle form of mind-body dualism as a "solution". And since then has dabbled in all kinds of ontologies that don't solve the problem.

Consider that bees can see ultraviolet light and humans cannot. We will never know what it is like to see ultraviolet light. Even though we have cameras that sense ultraviolet light and feed it back to us a visible light. In the end our eyes only physically sense visible light and our brains are only equipped to process nerve impulses from our eyes.

So there is a Hard Problem here also. We simply lack the apparatus to ever know what it is like to see ultraviolet light. We will never know.

But the solution to this problem is not to propose that ultraviolet light is a different kind of stuff. We know that radiation comes in wavelengths from sub-millimetre to kilometers. Ultraviolet light is clearly part of a spectrum of electromagnetic radiation and differs only in wavelength.

We don't need to redesign the entire universe in order to account for not being able to see UV light. Our eyes are not sensitive to it. And that is the end of the story until someone engineers an eye that is responsive to those frequencies and a brain that can make sense of nerve impulses from such eyes.

Epistemology, what can be known, is always limited. In this sense it is a domain to be described rather than a problem to be solved. Some things will always be beyond our knowledge or understanding. There is the universe and then the observable universe: the former may be infinitely bigger than the latter, but we'll never know.

So the question is not how do we solve the Hard Problem. There are stupid questions and this is one of them. It is a stupid question because it elicits stupid answers, mainly in the realm of ontology.

A non-stupid question is, "What can we know about other minds?" Or better, "How do we know about other minds?" We know by observation and inference - the same way we know anything at all about the world beyond ourselves. And, very importantly, we compare notes. What we can know is the dispositions of others.

Of course the validity of inferred knowledge is always a bit doubtful. We often make mistakes due to cognitive biases and logical fallacies. But most of the time we get a pretty good understanding of other people - some of us better than others. And this is partly because we evolved in groups and we have the cognitive apparatus for sussing out the dispositions and relationships of our group. We know because we evolved to know, to some extent.

So the Hard Problem is just a specific case of the general rule that there are limits to what we can know. Don't panic.

Bullshit

I highly recommend Harry Frankfurt's essay On Bullshit - Princeton University Press published it as a little book. It is a serious look at the prevalent phenomenon of bullshit and bullshitters, providing a working definition, and some commentary.

Bullshit can be distinguished from a lie, in terms of the different goals of the bullshitter and the liar: "Bullshit is rhetoric without regard for truth. The liar cares about the truth and attempts to hide it; the bullshitter doesn't care if what they say is true or false; only whether or not their listener is persuaded."

The whole of the media, most advertising, all politicians, most business people, and many religious leaders are trying to persuade us of something without regard for the truth. Persuasion has become a industry all of its own: think tanks, lobbyists, public relations, spokespeople, community leaders, etc.

And this is why the issue of objective reality is important - it is both why I do philosophy and hate it at the same time. Without reality, truth is a mere convention. Without a clear notion that there is a true state of affairs, a way that things really are that is independent of our minds, then everything is bullshit and everyone a bullshitter.

Or worse, if truth becomes relative then all we have is individual truths. In this (Romantic) view, since there is no objective truth, one can only be true to one's self, to one's nature. Truth is replaced by sincerity. But, and this is important, sincerity in this scenario is someone trying to persuade you that they are a certain kind of person. In other words, sincerity is bullshit.

As with astronomy the difficulty of recognizing the motion of the earth lay in abandoning the immediate sensation of the earth's fixity and of the motion of the planets, so in history the difficulty of recognizing the subjection of personality to the laws of space, time, and cause lies in renouncing the direct feeling of the independence of one's own personality. But as in astronomy the new view said: "It is true that we do not feel the movement of the earth, but by admitting its immobility we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting its motion (which we do not feel) we arrive at laws," so also in history the new view says: "It is true that we are not conscious of our dependence, but by admitting our free will we arrive at absurdity, while by admitting our dependence on the external world, on time, and on cause, we arrive at laws."

In the first case it was necessary to renounce the consciousness of an unreal immobility in space and to recognize a motion we did not feel; in the present case it is similarly necessary to renounce a freedom that does not exist, and to recognize a dependence of which we are not conscious.

- The last words from War & Peace, by Leo Tolstoy (Chapter 12)

This is great (though I probably still won't read the book). Compare my comments on the sunset illusion.