I wrote this for an email list, some here might find it informative:

Hmm, not to get too scholarly here (well OK, it is my job after all), but I think you are talking about "smrti". Having had extensive conversations with John Dunne about this, I think that "meditation" is usually being used as a translation for gom (Tib.) or bhavana (Skt.) which means cultivation, or "to make grow or increase". Meditation on emptiness just means cultivating your awareness of emptiness. Meditation on concentration means cultivating your concentration. Meditation on Vajrasattva means cultivating the qualities of Vajrasattva, confession and forgiveness and purification of obstacles etc. Meditation just means cultivation.

Unfortunately it seems like in the meditation research community, partly thanks to the popularity of MBSR, a lot of people got into the habit of using "mindfulness" and "meditation" nearly interchangeably. (I am not blaming John K-Z for this; I think he has a very good understanding of all this stuff.) John Dunne has a lot to say about "mindfulness", which is usually used as a translation for "smrti". But "smrti" really means something more like "remembering", as in remembering to keep your mind on the object of meditation. Wikipedia entry on mindfulness says:

Although sati/smrti is the primary term that is usually invoked by the word mindfulness in a Buddhist context, it has been asserted "in Buddhist discourse, there are three terms that together map the field of mindfulness . . . [in their Sanskrit variants] smrti (Pali: sati), samprajanya (Pali: ampajañña) and apramada (Pali: appamada). It should be noted that all three terms are sometimes (confusingly) translated as "mindfulness," but they all have specific shades of meaning and the former two might be glossed as "awareness" and "vigilance," respectively.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mindfulness

"Meditation" should be used in a general way to refer to engagement in an activity designed to cultivate a particular set of qualities (presumably qualities of mind; I don't think cultivation of the body is ever really included in that, but I would leave it to someone else to complain if you did feel like using "meditation" in that context.) Note that although it generally implies an intentional activity, Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche (and presumably others too) have made a point of mentioning that we're always meditating on something, whether we are intentional about it or not, so "meditation" does not strictly have to be intentional. "Mindfulness", or any of the three terms mentioned above, should be used more specifically to refer to particular variants of cognitive processes that are essential to any intentional process of cultivation.

I think that smrti, used in a non-technical way, just means "memory" in the ordinary sense. But as a technical term it refers specifically to the mindfulness-like process of remembering the object during meditation. The quote above suggests "awareness" instead of "remembering"; in any case, it has to do with the part of the process that holds on to the current chosen object. So "mindfulness" is a (sub-optimal) translation of the *technical* term smrti, but is NOT a translation of smrti as an ordinary word. The other part, samprajanya, suggested to be translated as "vigilance", has somewhat more to do with the process of identifying straying attention and returning it to the object. JD likes to say that "mindfulness" works well as a term equivalent to smrti plus samprajanya combined.

As an aside, I think the research community's focus on "mindfulness" has been a bit counter-productive (in the dharma sense if not in the academic sense). I think the most important thing is choosing to cultivate positive qualities; that is, the most important thing is the intention. The focus on "mindfulness" has been appealing to reductionism-minded scientists because it involves thinking about the whole thing in terms of some magic essence, the quantity of which is present is the determining factor for whatever result you are interested in. This is sort of true, I mean it's not entirely misleading, but it also distracts from the generality and simplicity of the real value of the intention to cultivate positive qualities....

I just sent the following message to a professor at U Iowa who seems to be teaching a human factors engineering class here in the fall:

Subject: Human Factors Engineering course at Wisconsin?
Date: Tue, 26 May 2009 14:53:26 -0500

Hello, I see a course listed as "Cognitive Engineering Methods and
Models" as Psych 859 here at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. I
am interested in this course and I am trying to find more information
about it. The course is listed as being taught by John Lee but there
is no John Lee here as far as I can tell. I think it might be you,
but I am limited to guessing because neither the timetable nor the
department's course listing provide any information other than the
name. I was wondering, if this is actually your course, if you could
point me to some information about it? Syllabus or topics or anything?

Here is the listing in the timetable that I am referring to:
http://timetable.doit.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/TTW3.navigate.cgi?20101+sects/d490c859A1.html

As an aside, I bet that, as a Human Factors Engineering expert, you
find it amusing that our system makes it virtually impossible for me
to find any information about the courses being offered. :)


--
-dave----------------------------------------------------------------
"Pseudo-colored pictures of a person's brain lighting up are
undoubtedly more persuasive than a pattern of squiggles produced by a
polygraph. That could be a big problem if the goal is to get to the
truth." -Dr. Steven Hyman, Harvard

I was commenting about hand sanitizers killing viruses, and someone said "You can't kill a virus, Dave - they're not alive." I apologized for my sloppy language, but this gets into a profound philosophical discussion of how you choose to draw the lines around the systems that you then ask whether they, as separate from everything outside those lines, are alive. We are used to thinking the lines around ourselves are in the only place they could be; but this is more something about how we are used to thinking than it is something about reality, and indeed in some less individualistic cultures people are used to thinking quite differently. In any case us Western individualists then project this imagined unambiguity of boundary onto everything else we contemplate and then think our answers are pretty smart.

Is one ant alive? Is one cell of my body alive? Is one little element of a Portuguese Man-O-War alive? Is one of my mitochondria alive? Is a fertilized egg alive? Is an unfertilized egg alive? Is a single soil amoeba alive? Is the soil amoeba in its multicellular slug form alive? Try replacing "alive" with "an individual organism" and re-considering all these questions.

THE SOCIAL AMOEBA D. DISCOIDEUM

Dictyostelium discoideum is an organism that has been intriguing biologists for most of this century. Although this organism is often called a "cellular slime mold", it is not a mold and it is not consistently slimy. A better common name for it is a "social amoeba". What is most remarkable about the organism is its life cycle. In one part of it life cycle, the "organism" consists of individual dispersed amoebas living on decaying logs, eating bacteria and reproducing by binary fission like most other protozoans. Then, when the local food supply becomes exhausted, a rather astounding event occurs: tens of thousands of these amoeba join together to form moving streams of cells that converge at a central point, and there they aggregate to produce a slug (grex) 2 to 4 millimeters long. The slug migrates as a single body towards light, and when it reaches an illuminated area, migration ceases, and the slug differentiates into a fruiting body composed of spore cells and a stalk, the stalk rising approximately 1 centimeter high above the plane of the surface on which the slug has migrated. Inside the globular end of the fruiting body, each spore cell is cellulose encapsulated. In the denouement, the stalk cells die and the spore cells are widely dispersed to become new amoeba, each of which will begin a separate new population of cells both individual and social. Thus, in this organism, initially identical cells are differentiated into one of two alternative cell types, spore cells and stalk cells. It is an organism where individual cells come together to form a cohesive structure, aggregating into a single organism, a quite remarkable feat of organization that challenges biologists, chemists, and physicists. Much has been learned about this organism in the past few decades, in particular the apparent important role of release of cyclic adenosine monophosphate (cAMP) in the initial aggregation that produces the slug.

http://scienceweek.com/2003/sw030425-2.htm

"Therefore take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or, Wherewithal shall we be clothed? ...for your heavenly Father knoweth that ye have need of all these things. But seek you first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added to you." -the Bible

"...place your confidence in the Three Jewels... You will be brought into the care of the Three Jewels; nothing undesirable will happen to you in this life and all your wishes will be realized spontaneously." -Patrul Rinpoche

"When a person really desires something, all the universe conspires to help that person to realize his dream." -Paulo Coelho, The Alchemist

And so on. There is a thread throughout many different spiritual teachings that if you just pray, meditate, practice the spiritual path, that your desires will be fulfilled, and in fact my own experience is certainly that I have found more satisfaction through the pursuit of a higher purpose than through the pursuit of material gain. Interestingly, I have even achieved more material gain through the pursuit of higher purpose than I have through the pursuit of material gain, which does also seem to be what the wisdom is teaching. But I have found one thing that causes trouble. When you get to the point where you are following your calling, and living in harmony, then indeed you are happy and content and things are going your way, and you are even getting what you want. But then it's easy to slip back into thinking that you are happy because you are getting what you want. After all, that's mainly how we all start out thinking it works. So then as soon as something goes wrong a little bit, you respond to that by striving to regain what was lost. And it doesn't work, so you try harder, and it distracts you from your higher calling, and before you know it you're in a vicious cycle that pulls you away from your harmonious life. So the secret seems to be to live in harmony, and enjoy the good life, but remember that you are getting what you want because you are happy, and not the other way around.

strivingly,
-dave

Two articles from the New York Times got sent out to the lab today.
Genes Show Limited Value in Predicting Diseases

By NICHOLAS WADE
The era of personal genomic medicine may have to wait. The genetic analysis of common disease is turning out to be a lot more complex than expected.

Since the human genome was decoded in 2003, researchers have been developing a powerful method for comparing the genomes of patients and healthy people, with the hope of pinpointing the DNA changes responsible for common diseases.

This method, called a genomewide association study, has proved technically successful despite many skeptics’ initial doubts. But it has been disappointing in that the kind of genetic variation it detects has turned out to explain surprisingly little of the genetic links to most diseases.

A set of commentaries in this week’s issue of The New England Journal of Medicine appears to be the first public attempt by scientists to make sense of this puzzling result.
...and...

How to Raise Our I.Q.
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: April 15, 2009
Poor people have I.Q.’s significantly lower than those of rich people, and the awkward conventional wisdom has been that this is in large part a function of genetics.

After all, a series of studies seemed to indicate that I.Q. is largely inherited. Identical twins raised apart, for example, have I.Q.’s that are remarkably similar. They are even closer on average than those of fraternal twins who grow up together.

If intelligence were deeply encoded in our genes, that would lead to the depressing conclusion that neither schooling nor antipoverty programs can accomplish much. Yet while this view of I.Q. as overwhelmingly inherited has been widely held, the evidence is growing that it is, at a practical level, profoundly wrong. Richard Nisbett, a professor of psychology at the University of Michigan, has just demolished this view in a superb new book, “Intelligence and How to Get It,” which also offers terrific advice for addressing poverty and inequality in America.

The latter article also contains this quote:

"Another proven intervention is to tell junior-high-school students that I.Q. is expandable, and that their intelligence is something they can help shape."

This inspired me to write the following message to the lab:

I think that a very important point to take home from this is that the conceptual orientation of the research community, possibly even more so than any specific results, can have broad effects on society which could be quite harmful, or quite beneficial. I have always believed that the heavy emphasis on behavioral genetics we have seen in recent years has been harmful to society, not because of the potential accuracy of any specific result, but exactly because it sends a message to society that IQ (and other things) are fixed and out of their control. It certainly should have been clear a long time ago from social and educational psychology that giving people, and children in particular, a message that they can shape their destiny is immeasurably more beneficial than the contrary; given this knowledge, I think it has been irresponsible to shape a large-scale research agenda that sends the contrary message. Especially in retrospect, now that we are starting to see results like this showing that the message was inaccurate all along.

Of course, the reason things turned out that way were simply that the conditions of available technology made it increasingly feasible to generate findings of a particular sort, which naturally led the research community in this direction, so it is hardly anyone's "fault" for making this decision. But I think that we are now in an age where society would benefit if scientists thought in advance about the social consequences of, not just their results, but the conceptual framework within which those results are pursued. It is not terribly hard to make this calculation, but we have a long way to go before this consideration is able to compete with the forces of convenience and ideological conformity.

As Richie has pointed out on various occasions, even within the context of behavioral genetics, this consideration I am describing could have been as simple as reporting results phrased as e.g. "Genetics accounts for only 10 percent of the variance in intelligence, indicating that it is primarily malleable, rather than fixed", rather than the more common, and more short-sightedly appealing, "Intelligence has a significant genetic component". This dis-appeal of this, of course, is that one would probably feel like one was down-playing the findings to phrase it like that, but I think it is important enough to be worth it.

The very, very bright side of all this is that I think this article, and the one Shackman sent out, indicate that times are ripe for a resurgence of psychology as important in its own right, and this is very good for what we do here in Richie's lab. The principle that important causal factors for both mental and physical health could lie in the domain of cognition and behavior is right up our alley, and I think we are at the vanguard of this new conceptual orientation of the research community. Go team!

I wrote this to Lisa, but the ideas are something I want to archive here:

I had dinner with Skef last night and we were talking about my paper on pain research. He objected to the first sentence 'Pain has been defined as “an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience”' which led into a discussion of normative usage of words like "pain" and "unpleasantness" and how the usage changes through a metaphorical process, and how the metaphors that develop in language are related to relationships in the underlying reality being described. He was insisting that emotional pain is a metaphor, which means it's not real pain; but I was saying that emotional pain is real in the dual sense that a) at least some people will explicitly say that their usage of the word "pain" is not metaphorical in that sense, and b) there is a common pattern of neural activation associated with experiences that people seriously use the word "pain" for, namely, the anterior cingulate cortex activation associated with the subjective unpleasantness of the experience, rather than the primary sensory response. So, in response to my hypothesis that unpleasantness or aversiveness is encoded in the ACC, Skef asked, well what about strongly aversive smells? Why don't people use the word "pain", even metaphorically, to refer to that experience? After thinking about it for a while, I realized that phylogenetically and ontogenetically, the touch senses and the chemical senses are each primary, whereas some other experiences are developed as metaphorical branches from the primary sensory experiences. So, social exclusion pain is a category of meaning which is built on the foundation of the primary sensation of physical pain, and moral disgust is a category of meaning which is built on the foundation of the primary sensation of disgusting smell/taste. This suggests that psychogeny recapitulates ontogeny and phylogeny, which is kind of exciting because that's a real pithy one-liner that seems to capture a lot of what you and I have talked about. And indeed, if you google those three words together you get some really interesting looking background that I think you're going to want for your magnum opus! Anyway, this made sense to Skef in a general way, but it led him to point out that it's easy to see how psychogeny could recapitulate phylogeny, in the sense that sensory experiences that are phylogenetically anciently differentiated would be differentiated at a low level of development of concept-space, with finer distinctions in concepts emerging as the physical structures to support those distinctions emerge. But in reality, it seems that what actually happened was that the concept-space grew and developed almost entirely within the last, say, 100,000 years, long after the physical systems were all available to everyone.

So here's the really interesting part. That begs the question of what is the mechanism by which the implicit phylogenetic developmental tree of experiential capacity actually gets mapped on to the ongoing development of an individual's concept-space. At first glance one might try to argue that ontogeny, as it recapitulates phylogeny, re-maps that tree in the individual's concept-space, but that utterly fails to explain how the language itself developed that concept-space over the last 100,000 years or whatever, and in any case it doesn't even intuitively seem to me that it actually makes sense for individuals. In other words, I think the tree of concept-space is represented somehow even in an individual at a particular point of development, rather than only being represented spatio-temporally across development, which means that concept acquisition still follows these patters even at maturity.

Now the really interesting thing about this is that the structure of concept-space itself is simultaneously dependent on:
a) the structure of the nervous system; e.g. we have words for experiences in the senses that we happen to have
b) the structure of the environment that we happen to exist in; e.g. we have primary concepts for landscape features that become the metaphorical basis for more refined concepts
c) the structure of the immutable laws of nature, so e.g. (1) the relationship between force and exertion, or (2) harmonics in music

On that foundation, which is already pretty complex, the concept-space is also elaborated in culture-specific, region-specific, family-specific, individual-specific, etc. ways.

As an aside, it seems that there's a logic to how language relates to concept-space, which we can talk about using images from the fields of machine learning and clustering algorithms, as follows. For simplicity visualize each experience as a point in c-space. Segregate the points into clusters and assign a word to each cluster. Now two interesting things start to happen:

1. When a cluster gets enough points, there starts to be enough density of information there to see divisions within the cluster. Clustering on a finer-grain, within the larger cluster. This leads to many words with fine grains of meaning in areas rich in experience. This can be different for different people, so for example you get technical jargon useful among people who share the density of experience in that area.

2. When there are deserts, areas of c-space with few points, then when a point appears and a word is called for, the natural thing is to use words from nearby clusters in ways that might in some ways seem familiar because it is the best fit, but in other ways seem unfamiliar because of the non-normative aspect of that usage, since the concept is newly being described. This relates to another part of our conversation, when we were talking about normative usage of the word "pain" and Skef invoked a thought question: If you give someone a drug that specifically blocks the unpleasantness part of the neural response to pain, without blocking the actual sensation, people will generally say that they can still feel the pain but they don't mind it. I propose that, rather than this being an indication that *normative* usage of the word "pain" doesn't require unpleasantness, rather it indicates that the extraordinary and novel experience of feeling something that you are familiar with as pain, but without the unpleasantness component, is a point in a desert of c-space which is near the normative-usage-of-"pain" cluster. I suggest that there is no normative word for this experience, because it isn't a normative experience, but the natural thing to do when a word becomes necessary is to take the nearest one, namely, pain. Also, as an aside, I don't think *everyone* would use the word pain for that experience. In reality, opiate painkillers seem to operate in a dual mechanism that involves both modulating the ACC response directly through opiate receptors there, and also modulating the sensory input directly through opiate receptors in the peri-aqueductal gray matter of the midbrain. So actually they don't operate exactly like this hypothetical drug, which makes it hard to test this, but I personally haven't actually had the experience that would be described as "I can still feel the pain but I don't mind it." The closest exact thing seems to be Rainville's famous hypnosis experiments where he explicitly created that situation.

3. Both of these things can be thought of from a different point of view: the grid of c-space expands as it fills with experience points. Or, probably more accurately, c-space is actually *made* of experience. Or is it? It seems like it might make sense to think of it on two levels: the map of all the determining factors that the individual is plunked into (laws of nature, etc.) and then the individual's map, which is made of her/his own experiences. But of course the "external" map is always changing too, and in fact that map also has a grid that expands as it fills with aggregate experience, cultural background, whatever you want to call it. The interesting thing about this, of course, is that if you have one N-dimensional space growing out of another M-dimensional space, really what you have is one N+M-dimensional space, because "a space" is comprised of nothing more or less than how many dimensions you are including in the same conversation. So this is egolessness in yet another world of terminology. But that's not really where I was mainly going with this.

Something I wrote a while ago, just found it and decided to put it here, as usual.

At the meditation meeting with Richie last week he was telling us about how he gets protested by this local animal-rights guy who leads some small group and has a blog. It's obvious that the guy is targeting Richie because he's high profile, disregarding Richie's extremely low level of involvement in animal research. Anyway, that led Andy and I to go look at the guy's blog where he talks shit about the Dalai Lama, essentially for not being as singlemindedly opposed to animal research as he (the blogger) is. He also tells the story of going to visit Geshe Sopa at Deer Park, which Richie had described as "unbelievable" but which was actually a lot more mellow and more reasonable than most of the rest of the blog. Anyway, if you ignore all the vitriol and rhetoric it's clear that there's a very interesting and difficult debate at the center of it about how to handle situations that trade off one harm against another. Even just hypothetically, I think the only truly defensible view is an omniscient utilitarianism: if you knew for certain that harming these 20 monkeys would save the lives of 10000 people in the future, then I think it's a no-brainer that it's morally justified. There are any number of kinds of situations, rare perhaps, where someone has to choose between evils, and it's not that controversial. I think there are two big problems, though. One is that we don't have that certainty, and I think it is very reasonable to raise doubts about the fundamental contribution to relief of suffering of all sentient beings that is being made by a lot of research. The other problem is deeper and harder to deal with, I think. It's encoded in most written ethical guidelines for animal research that the intention of the researchers is important, that they must truly *feel* gratitude and respect for the sacrifice the animals are making for the sake of benefit of future beings. This is an irreducibly spiritual requirement: the bottom line is that you are placing your faith in a Greater Good when you do that; you are making a sacred sacrifice and you *must* treat that with the gravity and humility that it demands. But in practice, where is there room for the sacred in science? If science as an institution demands adherence to the worldview of a universe of mindless matter, then how can we ever get to a place where all scientists respect the sacred sorrow of these sacrifices?

I just realized that the following story, which I have told to several people in person, is packed with a high density of insight about my personality, so I thought I'd write it down here.

About two years ago I bought some mints (or maybe gum) at a Starbucks in an airport somewhere. When the cashier gave me change, I noticed that it made a strange sound when it clinked on the counter. I looked closely and saw that one of the quarters was silver, instead of the current nickel-copper sandwich. Exciting! I looked it up online and saw that this 1964 quarter was the last year they made them out of silver, and was worth about $4 on eBay. Certainly it's not worth selling it for $4, and I'm not really a collector, so I was going to give it to a friend who collects coins, since she would probably appreciate having it much more than I would. A friend from Seattle, who now lives in Japan. So I couldn't exactly give it to her right away. So it lived in my pocket for a few months (!) until I accidentally put it into a parking meter adjacent to the downtown Madison parking garage closest to the Great Dane brew pub. When I realized what I had done, I was really frustrated and angry at myself, and I kept feeling that way whenever I thought about it for almost a year afterwards. I still kind of regret it but I don't feel upset about it anymore.

The insights (warning: spoilers! ha ha) are:

1. I pay close attention to the material properties of things, and I know a lot about them. (I'm not claiming this is particularly useful.)
2. I like to look things up.
3. I don't care much about small amounts of money.
4. I don't care much about owning things that don't serve me any useful purpose.
5. I like to give things to people who will appreciate them.
6. I often procrastinate, especially if it's not immediately obvious how to accomplish something readily.
7. Despite sometimes paying very close attention, I can often be a real space cadet.
8. I get very angry at myself when I feel like I've done something stupid, even if the consequences were trivial.
9. I get over it eventually.

Hopefully this will excuse me from participating directly in the Facebook "25 random whatsis dealies" meme going around lately.

quarterlessly yours,
-dave

I saw Daniel Dennett give a big public talk last night. It was enjoyable, but not entirely profound. It was mostly about some general ideas about evolution vs. creation, which is kind of an old hat debate to me at this point, and also more specifically about cultural evolution and memes, which is also old hat to me, but still something I never seem to tire of.

There was one particularly impressive part, at the closing. He told an anecdote of talking to Murray Gell-Mann at a meeting, who commented on the Darwin-fish pin Dennett likes to wear. They discussed the Christian fish symbol and the Greek acronym that led to it, leading Gell-Mann to ask, "But what is 'Darwin' an acronym for?" Dennett rose to the challenge and came up with the following in Latin (substituting a double U for the W, which doesn't exist in Latin):

Delere	Destroy
Auctorem	the Author
Rerum	of Things
Ut Universum	in order to understand
Infinitum	the Infinite
Noscas	Universe

Another interesting tidbit was that in the last 10,000 years, humans plus our domesticated animals (i.e. those entirely dependent on us for their survival) went from accounting for about 0.1% of terrestrial vertebrate biomass to 98% at the present time. That's pretty amazing.

Overall I thought Dennett did an excellent job of talking about the profound idea of natural selection and evolution, and undermining religious objections. But nevertheless it did have a strong culture-war feel to it; there was definitely a sense of impatience and scorn for people who don't "get it" about evolution, which mainly meant religious people, but also includes some philosophers who deny a physicalist basis for consciousness. This is a connected but somewhat different area of debate which I am extremely interested in, but don't want to get into right now. Mainly I just want to mention that I don't think scientist-types who knowingly stir up acrimony between science and religion are really helping things very much.

Mainly I think there is room for something other than cold, hard science in a consideration of what would it mean to be a good person, and how can you actually accomplish that? Science doesn't tell you what you should do, and it never will. People have been thinking about this from time immemorial, but whatever records of this process exist are, obviously, embedded in the context in which they arose, and so it's easy to miss the gems among the miscellany and dreck. And there certainly are a lot of gems, so it's worth getting over the "religion is bad" attitude that a lot of scientists have.

A lot of people know this, which is why there are so many scientists interested in Buddhism in particular. More on that some other time, not that "Dave's livejournal" is the only place anyone has ever explored that phenomenon! Simply put, many of the gems in Buddhism are readily accessible to scientists because they are not hidden behind hot-button words like "God", and in many cases are even presented in a way which parallels scientific thinking. Observe the following passage from Shantideva's "The Way of the Bodhisattva", from about 1300 years ago:

[Wisdom chapter, 116ff.]
At times direct perception of the world
Perceives that all things have their causes.
The different segments of the lotus flower
Arise from similar diversity of causes.

"But what gives rise," you ask, "to such diversity of causes?"
An ever earlier variety of cause, we say.
"And how," you ask, "do certain fruits derive from certain causes?"
Through the power, we answer, of preceding causes.

If Ishvara [i.e. God] is held to be the cause of beings,
You must now define for us his nature.
If, by this, you simply mean the elements,
No need to tire ourselves disputing names!

Yet earth and other elements are many,
Impermanent, inert, without divinity.
Trampled underfoot, they are impure,
And thus they cannot be a God Omnipotent.

The Deity cannot be Space—inert and lifeless.
He cannot be the Self, for this we have refuted.
He's inconceivable, they say. Then likewise his creatorship.
Is there any point, therefore, to such a claim?

What is it he wishes to create?
Has he made the self and all the elements?
But are not self and elements and he, himself, eternal?
And consciousness, we know, arises from its object;

Pain and pleasure have, from all time, sprung from karma,
So tell us, what has this Divinity produced?
And if Creation's cause is unoriginate,
How can origin be part of the result?

Why are creatures not created constantly,
For Ishvara relies on nothing but himself?
And if there's nothing that he has not made,
What remains on which he might depend?

If Ishvara depends, the cause of all
Is prior circumstances, and no longer he.
When these obtain, he cannot but create;
When these are absent, he is powerless to make.

If Almighty God does not intend,
But yet creates, another thing has forced him.
If he wishes to create, he's swayed by his desire.
Even though Creator, then, what comes of his Omnipotence?

So you see that even in the context of what we would blithely label "religion", namely, Buddhism, the debate about creation versus evolution has been raging at least since the eighth century...

I think educated, well-meaning and thoughtful Westerners in particular are rather touchy about religion and secularism, because of the "culture war" phenomenon that is so prevalent and annoying right now. People lose track of the question of what works and what doesn't work, and they forget that just like all information is physical, it is also embedded in culture. This means both that you have to be careful with how the limitations of the embedding (whether physical or cultural) interfere with the value of the information (decay or loss of precious texts; confusion arising because of obsolescence of explanatory metaphors), which seems to be primarily a problem of anticipation and planning ahead, and also that you have to be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater, that is, to give up on the meaning of something without first trying to clarify it hermeneutically, which seems to be primarily a retrospective problem.


Rolf Landauer, the chief scientist at the IBM Watson laboratory in New York, insisted in several seminal papers that all information is physical. In his words, "Information is not a disembodied abstract entity; it is always tied to a physical representation. It is represented by engraving on a stone tablet, a spin, a charge, a hole in a punched card, a mark on paper, or some other equivalent. This ties the handling of information to all the possibilities and restrictions of our real physical world, its laws of physics, and its storehouse of available parts." (Physics Letters A 217, 1996, p. 188.)

embeddedly yours,
-dave

It seems like it's the season for me to be applying to floofy things. I just noticed a recently expired email from the Admissions office here at the UW which is looking for students to profile for admissions materials, and thought heck why not. So here is my application to that, which borrows heavily from the other thing, but also includes more general information. I'm putting it here because I have this strange idea that maybe some of the old old friends I haven't seen in decades, who just found me via Facebook in the last few months, might want to know what I've been up to... of course this is kind of lazy to do it this way... but ok, I admit I'm lazy.

Admissions,

I am writing to apply to participate in the profiling of students for admissions materials. I am a second-year grad student in the Independent Graduate Major program of the Psychology department, working on functional brain imaging research on meditation with Dr. Richard Davidson. Before moving to Madison two and a half years ago, I had been working as a Macintosh networking consultant at an environmental law firm in Seattle for ten years or so. My undergraduate degree is in physics; I have also extensively studied chemistry, statistics, computer programming, and philosophy of mind. My interest in philosophy of mind relates to my current involvement in the neuroscience of the mind and experience, and the plasticity of both neural structures and subjective experience under conditions of intensive training. I have also been practicing yoga and meditation intensively for seven or eight years, and before I moved to Madison to start grad school I had just started teaching Yoga in Seattle. I hope to start teaching a class regularly when my course load lightens a bit, but in the meanwhile I substitute teach occasionally. I have been quite busy since starting school again, but I have also started playing Ultimate Frisbee regularly since I've been here, which has been a dream ever since I had a teacher in junior high school who was a world champion. (Not that I will ever be that good!) I play with a pick-up group that plays year round, rain or shine or snow or ice, which has been an interesting way to get to know the Wisconsin winter intimately!

Since starting here, I have taken course work with a focus on statistical methodology, functional neuroimaging, model-based psychology including neuroeconomics and behavioral game theory, and clinical psychology, particularly depression. My research work has focused on an in-depth development of fMRI methodology skills, and execution and analysis of fMRI experiments relating to cognitive modulation of pain perception in normal participants as well as in long-term meditation practitioners. I am currently developing the outline of my dissertation research program, which will involve studying relations between affective chronometry/affective hysteresis, cognitive models of depression, and cognitive modulation of pain perception. I will be studying the central constructs of self-focused attention, and emotional regulation/reactivity, attempting to use these constructs to tie together the various measures. In the bigger picture, I am interested in how techniques such as meditation and fMRI neurofeedback could be used to generate improvements in the functioning of these systems. I have been involved in the design of studies of meditation, as well as piloting fMRI neurofeedback on our scanner. I am also interested in using advanced PET tracers to look at the involvement of modulatory neurotransmitters, particularly dopamine, in these potential improvements.

In the course of my involvement in Dr. Davidson's program of research on long-term meditation practitioners, I have worked closely with several Tibetan buddhist monks, and traveled to India three times for a research project attempting to study more advanced practices only found among the serious yogis living in monasteries or caves in the mountains. Most recently, I was there this most recent December, re-training a team of collaborators at the Tibetan medical institute and hospital in Dharamsala to collect data with a package of equipment I assembled. The original training was my second trip, in December 2007. My first trip was April 2007, when I attended the Mind and Life conference, held at the residence of His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. That was an amazing and inspiring experience, one for which I am forever grateful to Richie for facilitating! I had not had the opportunity to travel abroad before these work trips came up, so that alone made it a thrilling opportunity. I have been quite busy with the experimental work while out there, but was able to take a few days to hike in the Himalayas and visit some sacred sites. I hope to have more chances to visit, and to be able to take a longer time to travel and really experience India.

Grad school at the UW Madison has been very good to me, and I would be happy if I were able to give back to the University by offering my experiences to the Admissions office for this purpose. Thanks very much for this program!