Love Your Life!

Latest exposition on emptiness

Fri, 04 Dec 2009 21:55:08 GMT

Well this just happened to spring forth from the usual email-list-helping-me-procrastinate.

On Dec 4, 2009, at 1:44 PM, someone wrote:

This is essentially saying that the system dynamically evolves. That I
understand. My original question was rooted more in a historical observation
that there were a group of people a long time ago that thought there was no
physical universe, but there was a universe of consciousness called the
alaya. Somehow this concept seems to be used by modern-day Madayamakas even
though they have explicitly refuted this "mind-only" interpretation. It is a
little suspicious the Madayamaka have not labeled themselves the
"matter-only" school. I know they love subtly, so I am sure I am missing the
point, but I intuit an implicit belief that there are two kinds of stuff in
the universe.

No no no, there are no kinds of stuff in the universe.

OK that's all zen-funny and shit but I'll be more specific. Specifically, there are no {entities} that can be established to exist absolutely (sometimes the word "attested" is used). Here I'm writing {entities} as a meta-variable to represent any class of things, whether beings, or matter, or concepts, or whatever. So, there are no atoms that exit; there are no minds that exist; there are no sentient beings that exist; etc. I'm using the metavariable to represent all such statements collectively.

"Established to exist absolutely" means that one would be able to establish that the "qualities" of the thing have certain values, entirely independent of some choice or agreement among the people (or animals or deities or whoever, for that matter) who are the ones engaged in this endeavor of establishment.

(Clearly even the strictest materialist absolutist would have to agree, if pressed, that whatever list purely objective properties any object might have would not include things such as "established proof". Even if we accept a worldview which allows such statements as "object A is twice as wide as object B" to be absolute, even in that worldview the statement "object C is proven to exist absolutely" is a statement about someone's thoughts about C, not about C itself. In fact no such worldview can be free of internal contradictions, nor exhaustive in its list of properties, but that is not a necessary point to my current exposition.)

"Qualities" refers to anything that you might think it would mean; it is not meant to be technically restrictive. So, you could say that A is blue, or that it is 100 cm long, or that it is happy, or that it came into existence on 2009 December 4 at 0600:00.000000... or etc.

"Have certain values" means precisely what it sounds like. This principle that I am describing does not rule out the possibility that the qualities might have approximate values, or even values that are good enough for all intents and purposes; however, it must be acknowledged that a value which is "very precise" is only "very precise" from someone's point of view. From a different point of view the same variance might seem quite large. The objection might be raised that only certain points of view are actually in use, and so the hypothetical existence of points of view which would render the object nebulous is irrelevant. However, this objection itself can only be semantically parsed in a framework where questions of points of view are relevant to material ontology, and so it is self-defeating.

Consideration of a certain intuitively engaging subset of "qualities" is traditional and particularly illuminating. Namely, for any material object, even for objects of the most dead and seemingly ontologically uncontroversial nature (like a brick) one could ask where are its boundaries in space and time? That is, where are its edges, when did it come into existence, and when did its existence end? I think that I don't need to go into a detailed explanation of how even such a basic description can't be made without resort to some assumptions about the specific measuring process to be used; in other words, the question can be answered operationally, but not essentially.

Note that none of this requires anything cosmic or quantum-mechanical or spiritual or anything. I'm just talking about the basic practicalities involved in actually trying to specify anything. In practice, the actual process of specifying anything involves a bunch of assumptions and compromises, many of which are so widely accepted as to be difficult to recognize as such. Because of this, nothing can be established to exist absolutely.

The thing that is so unsettling about the buddhadharma is that nothing more dramatic than the wholehearted and integral understanding of this practicality is infinitely more transformative than any seemingly profound spiritual mysteries or miracles.

unattestedly yours,
-dave

maps on MAPS: the map is not the territory, refined.

Fri, 13 Nov 2009 05:01:35 GMT

Again, something I wrote to a list a while ago. Sorry, I usually like to edit these down to be more stand-alone appropriate, but I think the point comes across here anyway.

>2009/8/31 Lee Bonnifield <leemaps@localnet.com>:
>>the bricoleur wrote:
>>
>>>Your belief that "reality does NOT exist objectively" is a model -
>>>just like the belief that there is an objective reality.
>>
>>Right. Non-objective reality is a model of what? A model of self, and a
>>model of not-self, and a model of how I distinguish self from wholeness.
>>Besides being a model (and unlike the belief that there is an objective
>>reality) non-objective reality is unitive experience, without the separation
>>models have from what they model.
>
>So your map is not a map, it is the territory.
>
>OK, you keep telling yourself that ...
>
>You model is looking increasingly like a middle-eastern religion the
>more you describe it.

In case it is helpful, I would like to describe the current state of my thinking on this question.

As the bricoleur says, a discussion of "non-objective reality" is a map, not the territory. Same for "objective reality", or any other philosophical position. One might (and most do) choose a map and believe it is the "right" one, or even that it is the actual territory, and defend this belief against others. However, it should be clear that belief is a choice, not an obligation. Although for some people it is so natural as to seem almost obligatory to be in possession of the set of enduring thought processes that constitute a "belief", it is not in fact obligatory.

There are clearly two extremes that can be seen to be set up for trouble. One, of course, would be to be utterly lacking in maps. For such a person all territories would be equally un-navigable and threatening. The other would be to be in possession of one map, which one has decided is the only one that matters (whether because one believes it is actually the territory, or because one believes that the maintenance of one set of beliefs in opposition to other options is demanded theologically, or because one believes it is more advanced than the others) and therefore to be quite at home in some territories, but entirely lost in others. Indeed sometimes this latter person might be even worse off than the mapless when he is outside of his home territory, because the mapless might develop some skill in navigating the landscape itself, while the person attached to one map at the expense of others might well believe that not only is only one map the "right" one, but only one *territory* is the right one, and thus the others might not be navigable on principle.

Now, of course, there's a bit of a slippery argument in that last sentence. If someone develops skill in navigating the cues of the landscape itself, then isn't he just mapping as he goes along? Yes, of course this is true. And if this person were truly mapless as a matter of principle, then *he* would be obligated to forget as he goes, and would really be pretty hopeless. So, then, what is the difference I am trying to describe? I would argue that the optimal approach is simply to accept that there are a potentially unlimited number of territories, and a potentially unlimited number of maps that could be useful in any moment.

The ability to move fluidly from one map to another based on the cues of one's actual observed environment is a skill, not a belief. I do think it is a particular flaw of the Western mentality that we have come to think of "knowledge" as declarative, at the expense of procedural, which seems to often lead to philosophical debates where it seems to be lost that the matter in question is not a belief at all, but rather some type of mental skill. Flexibility, in particular, the ability to shift mental frames fluidly in response to continuously arising contingency, might be the essence of what we are discussing here. Incidentally, this is the underlying reason why both a classical Western education and the still-extant Tibetan buddhist educational system include an emphasis on rhetoric, and particularly the exercise of expecting students to be ready to argue *any* philosophical position at a moment's notice. Students are then graded on how well they embody and promote the assigned position; not on how well they adhere to one "right" position.

The need to adapt to continuously arising contingency brings me to my next issue with this thread:

On Aug 31, 2009, at 2:47 AM, the bricoleur wrote:

>The scientific method being:
>
>1 Pose a question about reality.
>2 Collect the pertinent, observable evidence.
>3 Formulate an explanatory hypothesis, defining relevant assumptions.
>4 Deduce its implications.
>5 Test all of the implications experimentally.
>6 Accept, reject, or modify the hypothesis based upon the experimental results.
>7 Define its range of applicability.
>8 Peer review
>9 Publish (including methodology, data and analysis)
>10 Evaluation and peers continue to test, extend and challenge the hypothesis.

This definition of the scientific method is exactly the problem. The greatest scientists are, without exception, those with the most skill and devotion at the omitted step 0: OBSERVE. Without that the rest is often just a meaningless exercise in grant acquisition. Yes, I feel strongly about this. :)

One of my favorite scientific portraits:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/63535639@N00/3900637086/
OBSERVE.

Observe EVERYTHING.
...

Of course I readily admit that now that I've written it down, this, too, is a map. If by some bizarre happenstance someone interpreted this as wisdom and started a religion around it, then inevitably some day people would be killing for the idea that you need to be flexible. History is full of examples of people killing for weirder ideas. But it must be recognized that one's experience and one's approach to experience do not consist entirely of philosophical positions. A philosophical position can shape and direct one's development, but the text of the philosophy itself is not the same as the changes in the individual that might result.

Sometimes there's even a good reason to *believe* something for real for a while, because it serves your development, and then believe something else later...

maply yours,
-dave

A higher cause?

Tue, 25 Aug 2009 11:40:31 GMT

In a recent discussion, other people were talking about the importance of living for something larger than yourself, devoting yourself to a higher cause. A counterpoint was raised by a divorcee, who pointed out that sometimes things fall apart exactly because you aren't living for yourself enough: "when you lose that loved one, you really have to want to live for yourself or you will lose it." Which is clearly true! Here is what I wrote:

On Aug 21, 2009, at 3:20 PM, someone wrote:

I think we all need something to live for... That something to live for could be a hobby, or a loved one, or a passion for learning. I think it is strongest and most impactful when it is something outside the self or selfish pleasure, and ideally something much larger than the self.

My response:
The important thing is not where the boundaries are, although that does make some difference. The important thing is, is it "self-like" or does it transcend that? In other words, there may sometimes be some temporary advantage to dedicating yourself to MY COUNTRY (versus the rest of the world) instead of JUST ME (versus the rest of the world). But in the end, it's just a larger number of people included in your absolute selfishness.

I think the secret here is that, contrary to much popular rhetoric, the benefit does *not* come from "dedicating yourself to a higher cause" or "total abandonment of self-interest". I think the real thing that's going on is that having an us-versus-them attitude living somewhere in the back of your mind, no matter how subtle, will cause problems for you.

If you eliminate that attitude, the result has nothing to do with self-abnegation. Rather, it is merely a recognition that benefit is common. There is not a conflict between altruism and self-interest; there is not even a sense of "enlightened self-interest" (that phrase is my absolute biggest pet peeve). It's merely that the concepts that led you to believe there were separate categories (i.e. "self" and "other") were misunderstood in the first place, and as a result of that, the real situation is not one where there is a framework for a conflict. Beneficial actions are beneficial; harmful actions are harmful; and that determination is not at all based on the classification of the object of the action as "self" or "other". Of course, there are still a lot of very complicated factors that determine whether actions are beneficial or harmful, including things relating to both the intention and the result, and that certainly takes some wisdom and insight and patience to navigate, and that is beyond anything I have to offer right now.

But I think it is very important to get over the idea that the quality of actions depends on the dimension of self-other. This saves you from either extreme (i.e. either ordinary selfishness, or harmful self-abnegation).

selfish/lessly yours,
-dave

ISP stupidity

Sat, 15 Aug 2009 17:05:38 GMT

OK, get this. My wireless printer stopped working a little while ago. After talking to the wireless ISP for my building, Restech Internet Services, it turns out they have it set up so their access point randomly puts each device on one of several different subnets. (Mind you, this building has only 5 units.) They don't route between subnets. So, if you have their service, and you have more than one device, you randomly may or may not be able to communicate between your various computers etc. depending on the luck of the draw of their DHCP server.

This was working fine for a couple of years, because my little building used to be on only one subnet, which makes a lot of sense to me. They added the extra subnets recently for reasons that they haven't yet explained to me, so it stopped working.

The only options they offered me were 1) buy my own access point or 2) buy all static IP addresses. The options I offered them were that they can figure out how to make it work again, within a few days, or else I'm switching my service to cable.

If they want to do it this way, they need to put it in their advertising fine print that if you have more than one thing on the wireless they won't be allowed to talk to each other! That would turn a lot of people off, but they're keeping it a secret.

isolatedly yours,
-dave

Primordial Experience

Tue, 11 Aug 2009 04:46:17 GMT

I'm reading Primordial Experience by Manjushrimitra, translated by Chogyal Namkhai Norbu and Kennard Lipman. Yes it's a Tibetan buddhist thing. Just wanted to type in part of it. I'm transliterating some of the Tibetan to make it easier to read, but some of it is hopeless so I've left those parts alone. This is actually from the contemporary introductory material, not the classical text that makes up the core of the book. The tone is obviously and somewhat obnoxiously scholarly, but nevertheless it is a concise framing and response to the question that really haunts me. Here it is:

As regards meditation in Dzogchen, the crucial question one has to ask is: how does one actually practice nonaction? Is this not a contradiction in terms? Now, we know that using the (activity of the) mind to go beyond the mind is a traditional theme in Buddhism. "Not-doing" is a fundamental concept of Taoism resonant with Chinese Ch'an (Zen) Buddhism: the Sage "acts without acting." But how is this made a reality? Or, to put it another way, in terms of the two major misunderstandings of nonaction: how is it to be prevented from degenerating into either remaining passive and indifferent (in fact, avoiding activity), on the one hand; or into doing whatever comes to mind under the guise of a doctrine of spontaneity (which does not, in fact, deal with the basic problem of one's deep-seated conditions, all one's habits and passions), on the other? Nonaction is basically the discovery of freedom as something inseparable from our being; it cannot be created. In this respect, freedom is not the opposite of determinism but of compulsion, of having to act. Both of the above mentioned extremes remain tied to a concept: one holds to the idea of being calm, of being in a state of meditation; while the other holds to the idea of being free from all limitations by waging war against one's limits.

First of all, it should be understood that nonaction has two aspects, as discussed in our text: as "meditation" (gompa, bhavana) and as "behavior" (spyod pa, carya), these two being based on the first of this traditional triad—lta ba, drsti, "philosophical outlook", "self-observation". That is, based on the outlook or point of view of a teaching, a practice of meditation can be set up, and this wil also lead ot a certain way of acting in the world. Here a spontaneous, unpremeditated way of acting, in which one does not have to avoid any situation as negative, for example, is only possible having had some experience of "nondoing" as meditation. This meditation is a profound grasp of the "natural condition" of the mind, usually termed rig pa. Only in this natural condition can there be "nondoing". Now, in addition to "nonaction," natural is another much abused term which seems to have lost any real meaning. But here "natural" is re-endowed with meaning because it is based on a precise experience. We can point to this experience by words such as "inalienable" and "uncontrived." "Natural" refers to the "ultimate content" (chos nyid, dharmata) of what we call our "mind". In this condition, or rather noncondition, there is nothing to correct or adjust, accept or reject; there is no meditation to enter into or come out of. Thus one can speak of "self-liberation" (rangdrol) in Dzogchen: as said before, nothing need be done to experience freedom. "Freedom" means that there is no possibility for positive or negative thoughts or actions to condition the individual (that is, set up the habituating tendencies discussed in the previous section), who "rests in" his/her own inalienable "nature".

In this man ngag, or oral instruction, as in all the Sems de teachings, much emphasis is laid on finding a state of "relaxation" in which one is not disturbed by whatever thoughts may arise, or in which there is an actual absence of thoughts. This is technically termed gnas pa'i rnal 'byor, the first of the four "yogas" (rnal 'byor, naljor) which characterize the Sems de teaching, and is very similar to the well-known practice of zhi gnas, (shiné), samatha, "state of calm".

In sutric Buddhism, however, zhi gnas is genreally regarded as a kind of prerequisite for entering into the practice of lhag mthong, vipasyana, "insight," which is itself regarded as a kind of analytical meditation, like shining a searchlight on objects, one by one, in a dark room. But Dzogchen is not a "gradual," but a "direct" path, i.e., the fundamental conception is not one of a graded series of steps towards the goal, although the "four yogas" of Sems sde are presented in a quasi-gradual manner, so that the Sems de seems like a gradual path in relation to the other two series of Dzogchen teachings, the klong sde (longde) and the man ngag sde (mennagde). In this case, zhi gnas means to enter, if one has the capacity, not merely a state of calm that makes possible further, more refined, mental "work", but the primordial state of relaxation spoken of earlier, the "resting in" (gnas pa) one's inalienable nature. As the man ngag states:

"Relaxation" (lhug pa) means, in this regard, that one doesn't necessarily sit cross-legged, etc.; that there is neither distraction nor stupefaction of the senses; and that in whatever situation one is in (there is) the intrinsic clarity of the state of pure and total presence, without entering into an attitude of correcting the condition of the body and the senses.

This practice is stabilized by doing one's "sessions of meditation" (thun) in an unforced manner, by unfolding one's relaxation, as it were, through giving oneself space to relax. Hence the length of a session is never fixed, and emphasis is placed on self-regulation. If one's sessions are forced, one suffocates oneself, and thus can never find an uncontrived state.

Another important topic in this oral instruction on meditation is what is termed nyams, or the experiential signs of the development of practice. These signs arise as the process of relaxation takes place. Relaxation has not been possible before because the individual has constantly charged himself up, so that the three levels of his existence—body, speech and mind—have become extremely sensitive and reactive to one another. The signs are usually grouped according to the three types of experiences much utilized in Tantrism: that of pleasurable sensation (bde ba), clarity (gsal ba), and absence of disturbing thoughts (mi rtog pa). In Dzogchen it is fundamental to recognize the difference between the nyams and rig pa, whis is the state of pure and total presence in which these various experiences are reflected, as in a mirror. As the text states:

A manifestation of clarity should not be taken to be the ultimate content of what is. Therefore, one relaxes without attachment to the ultimate content of what is, or to delight in the experience of absence of body, speech and mind.

The state of calm is itself a nyams, an experience characterized by the absence of disturbing thoughts (mi rtog pa), and is thus only a means to enter rig pa, our primordial, inalienable, natural state (which is both "being" and "knowing" inseparably united). Then, in this state one can understand how it is possible to behave in such a manner as to act without acting, where one does not have to avoid anything nor have to dwell on anything. Otherwise, as mentioned above, if one imagines one is being spontaneous by following whatever comes into one's head, one is just trying to be free. The essential point is total relaxation in which there is no compulsion to accept (give in to) or reject one's deep-seated conditioning. Thus one finds the ongoing reality of "self-liberation," the natural state.

Mammatus clouds at sunset

Wed, 29 Jul 2009 02:44:59 GMT

Last night I was in my living room. Dr. Schroedinger was sitting in the front windowsill and I noticed her staring up at the sky so I went to look. Amazing sunset light on strange mammatus clouds! It was spectacular. My real camera is loaned out but I took a picture with my iPhone, which is not bad at all for a phone camera:

It is interesting to me that my cat was so intrigued by this sky.

cumulusly yours,
-dave

Addicted to marketing: emptiness of self

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:33:09 GMT

There was a response to that message, which prompted this next essay. Sorry for not including the reply but it's not mine, and I think this is straightforward enough even without knowing what it was a response to:

But see you're missing the point. It doesn't matter if it has any influence on any specific person or whether there is indisputable coercion. It matters if it has influence *in bulk*, and if that creates a runaway positive feedback loop. And it most definitely does.

Arguing ontology is also missing the point. Sure individuals "exist" in any ordinary sense. But the problem is that depending on what phenomenon you are trying to understand, effective understanding might arise from thinking about individuals, or about collections of competing mental processes within an individual, or groups of individuals competing with each other, or groups of ideas competing with each other, or any of infinite fine shades of division of those things. To think that the "existence" of "individuals" is important is nothing more than a blockage of your ability to categorize phenomena at whatever grain is relevant to the question at hand.

Personally I would argue that a classification system that prevents understanding (i.e. "individuals are the fundamental unit") is "wrong" in any meaningful sense of "wrong". Yes, I will also admit that "individuals don't exist" is "wrong" in any meaningful sense of "wrong". The point is not to argue one theory against another; that's the travesty of academia, forget about that. The point is that it inhibits your ability to relate your own mind to your own experience (i.e. in this case, it inhibits your ability to understand the phenomena of psychologically-driven corporate consumer marketing at the societal level) if you identify or reify one specific way of imposing order on your sensory experience at the expense of others (i.e. thinking that "individuals" are more real than some other level of discussion, as you say in the last paragraph).

To take one specific example from your message:

But is some nefarious locus really to blame, or was
the war an inevitable outgrowth of the nation's history, needs, and
position relative to its neighbors?

That's exactly like arguing about whether the damage was caused by Hurricane Katrina, or maybe it was really just a lot of really strong wind and rain. Both are equally true; the label ("hurricane", "locus of intentionality") is just something that we use to make it easy to talk about systems where groups of processes that have something in common tend to have some aspect that is co-located in some space for some time. Certainly it would be stupid to forget that "hurricane" really just means there's a lot of wind and rain in a certain area for a while; there's no essence or soul or homunculus to the hurricane above and beyond all that wind and rain. Likewise it would be equally stupid to refuse to acknowledge the usefulness of having a label to use as a handle to talk about it.

How our society is addicted to marketing

Fri, 10 Jul 2009 02:49:25 GMT

This came up in an email discussion about the documentary about Edward Bernays, consumerism and marketing, The Century of the Self:

On Jul 9, 2009, at 4:37 PM, [the other person] wrote:

If I air a nationwide commercial about a website, I'm sure I'll have a
rush of hits simply because of all the people who didn't know about it
and now do, and some percentage of them will go check it out. But it
sure sounds a lot more sinister when you say I am manipulating and
controlling the masses.

I don't really buy it. I mean I buy it, sure: advertisement and mass
media have statistically significant impacts on people's behavior.
But so does everything else.

Well, I will tell you why *I* buy it. It's exactly the difference between having a doctor prescribe morphine for you, and having access to it yourself "ad libitem" (now there's an interesting Latin phrase, but that's another story.)

When an organism has access to something that directly activates the behavioral reinforcement systems of the brain, if that thing is potent enough to activate the systems to a greater extent than other stimuli available to the organism, then a feedback loop is created where action -> increased reinforcement of behavioral tendency -> increasing frequency of action -> increasing amount of reinforcement. In practice, this behavioral/environmental/neural runaway positive feedback loop frequently, or even usually, results in the death of the organism, barring outside intervention. (It is a separate discussion what constitutes "outside intervention", we can talk about that too if necessary.)

On the other hand, the same potent thing will *not* lead to the death of the organism if the system in which it is being administered does not create a behavioral/environmental/neural runaway positive feedback loop. If the thing is administered on a schedule which is not under the control of the organism, then there may or may not be some kind of unhealthy effects but there is not a positive feedback loop.

A similar thing has happened with consumerism and marketing. Here it is not so much an "individual organism" that we are interested in (although if you remember my thing about the amoebas, then you know I don't think the idea of an "individual organism" is very meaningful).

Think of it this way: the organism of "American society" is engaged in a runaway positive feedback loop of increasing corporate sophistication -> increasing sophistication of marketing -> increasing consumer demand -> increasing corporate profit -> increasing corporate sophistication. The same locus of intentionality (i.e. the corporate profit motive) that is being reinforced (i.e. profiting) is in control of the decisions about how to administer the reinforcing thing (i.e. Bernaysian propaganda marketing). So we have a runaway positive feedback loop. (Well, we have a whole bunch of them probably.)

If there were merely a bunch of random, causally disparate acts of reinforcement, which is the scenario you are implicitly evoking, then there would be no runaway feedback.

It is true that "you are manipulating and controlling the masses" puts a sinister, mustachioed silent-movie-villain gloss on it which is misleading, although that gloss might serve a valuable marketing function for the contingent arguing against marketing, ironically. The important question is NEVER whether there "really is" a "real" "conspiracy" (yes those are all scarequotes). The question is whether there is a common interest that creates a locus of intentionality that has the facility to work to its advantage.

Of course these "loci of intentionality" that I am invoking are very nebulous, and can never really be pinned down or in any sense demonstrated conclusively to exist. But the same can be said for you, of course. That's the whole point. There's no difference.

propagandaly yours,
-dave

Kitty!

Thu, 09 Jul 2009 14:28:52 GMT

In June I went to the Mind and Life Summer Institute, which was really enjoyable, as always. I left my car with Skef while I was out of town. When I got back and picked it up, we went for a drive in the countryside. We ended up near the Humane Society of Dane County, where Skef got his kittens, so we stopped in because he had some questions to ask. I went to look at the cats available for adoption and was overwhelmed with sweetness! I saw one, a female calico named Dr. Scroedinger, and just started crying!

After that, I was in town briefly but then out of town again, five days or so in Seattle then down to Breitenbush, where I did my own meditation practice and took some yoga classes. My last day was the first day of my usual yoga retreat with Shannon McCall, so I got to see all my dear friends from that group. After that, a quick drive up to Seattle and a hectic flight back to Madison, which was delayed and turned into an all-nighter. I got home just in time to start the 5-day summer dzogchen meditation retreat with Khachab Rinpoche here in Madison. When that was over, on Monday, I checked at the humane society, and Dr. Schroedinger was still there. I went out there with Skef and Janis, both of whom adopted cats recently (I wanted some experienced help to kick the tires and make sure she was firing on all cylinders), and adopted her and went shopping for various new-cat supplies.

Click here for a photo album.

She is four years old, a little skittish still but very, very affectionate and meows like a kitten. I have been brushing her a lot so, so far I have avoided having cat hair everywhere. She still doesn't have much of an appetite, or maybe I just haven't figured out what kind of food she likes, but she is already overweight so I'm not too worried yet.

One night she sniffed at the window from my bed, but realized that the window screen prevented escape. But she saw the other "window" to the left and decided that was her best hope. She hunkered down and jumped right into the mirror. Splat!

So that's my new roommate. Now as far as I can tell, every unit in my building has a cat. I was the last holdout...

catly,
-dave

Mindfulness and meditation definitions

Fri, 29 May 2009 22:39:44 GMT

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....

Human Factors Engineering

Tue, 26 May 2009 19:57:41 GMT

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

Boundaries of life

Fri, 15 May 2009 17:04:33 GMT

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

Staying on track

Thu, 23 Apr 2009 02:08:35 GMT

"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

Conceptual orientation of scientific community

Thu, 16 Apr 2009 13:16:03 GMT

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!

Concept space

Sun, 29 Mar 2009 15:45:58 GMT

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.

Animal research

Tue, 10 Mar 2009 15:05:07 GMT

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?

Quarter gone

Mon, 09 Mar 2009 01:56:24 GMT

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

Dennett lecture

Tue, 03 Mar 2009 17:16:04 GMT

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

Another application

Thu, 19 Feb 2009 05:00:04 GMT

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!

An application

Wed, 18 Feb 2009 20:04:22 GMT

I just wrote the following for my application to the Mind and Life Summer Institute and it seems like the kind of thing that would make sense to go in a journal, too:

I am currently a grad student in psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, working on functional neuroimaging with Dr. Richard Davidson. My original background is in physics, with followup in statistics and computer programming. 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.

How the summer institute will foster my research and career goals:

I have been closely involved in research related to the Mind and Life mission since starting in Dr. Richard Davidson's lab in 2006, working on several different studies of long-term meditation practitioners. I have attended the last three summer institutes, as well as several of the Mind and Life conferences, including Dharamsala in 2007. My personal goals are quite closely aligned to the stated vision and mission of the Mind and Life institute, and I consider this community to be my home territory. These events, especially the summer institute, are my most valuable opportunity to see the most current research taking place in my core interests, and to meet and network with other aspiring researchers like myself. I have found my experience with the SRI to be developing an exciting, but inchoate, vision of a new generation of cross-disciplinary researchers with, possibly, and entirely new conception of how science, particularly the sciences of the mind, can relate to human beings' actual experience of inner and outer reality, and I am very interested in continuing to develop this community.

Publications that have particularly influenced me: _Consciousness Explained_ by Daniel Dennett; _Godel, Escher, Bach_ by Douglas Hofstadter; _Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism_ by Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche; _Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging_ (textbook) by Huettel, Song, and McCarthy; _Unto Others_ by Eliot Sober and David Wilson; _Cosmic Trigger_ by Robert Anton Wilson; _The Design of Everyday Things_ by Donald Norman, _Wanted_ by Mark Millar and J.G. Jones; _The Tao of Physics_ by Frtjof Capra, and volumes 1-21 of _The Year's Best Science Fiction_ edited by Gardner Dozois (I know that's more than ten, but I'm relying on RLE to get the last one in under the limit. Bonus points to anyone who gets that joke.)

Count nouns and mass nouns

Tue, 17 Feb 2009 14:31:27 GMT

I just wrote the following to my co-authors on what will be my first publication (I am only contributing re-writing and editing, but it is pretty extensive). The context, of course, is brain systems, in particular systems relating to social functions such as empathy. I confirmed this with a friend who is a linguist and an editor.

Minor grammatical note: "Circuit" is a count noun, but "circuitry" is a mass noun. This means that you can have any integer number of "circuits" if you are using the plural form, but "circuitry" is just something that you could have any amount of. You could have a bucket full of circuitry. Generally a plural of a mass noun implies that there are multiple classes of it present (for example, "many foods") (or else it is a purely poetic construction, like "the sands of time"). So, in the present context, "circuit" would refer to a particular (posited, not necessarily proven) system that serves a particular function. "Circuitry" would refer to some interconnected brain regions in general, with less of an implication of delineation. The main difference in usage (in my opinion) would be that "circuitry" would imply less certainty (or less caring) about the exact boundaries of the system being discussed. However, the plural form "circuitries" is just kind of non-standard, and it's not clear to me what that would really mean. Why would you intentionally refer to different *types* of circuitry in the brain, rather than referring to different *circuits*? So my advice would be, say "circuit" for one functional network, and say "circuits" for multiple separate networks, and say "circuitry" if you're intentionally being a bit vague, but never say "circuitries".

I admit that 99.9% of people reading this would not even remotely know what I'm talking about in the previous paragraph, but nonetheless I think it makes it read more smoothly to adhere to normative usage.

Why I hate Microsoft

Fri, 06 Feb 2009 20:17:57 GMT

What they've done to people's minds... I just got email from the psych department with this in it:

Begin forwarded message:

As many of you know, I have powerpoint projectors stored in a cabinet in my office ready to be picked up for use in classes and meetings. This email concerns the heightened security of this equipment.

For God's sake, there's no such thing as a "powerpoint" projector! Powerpoint presentations are just one of an infinite number of things that could be displayed on a video projector. You might as well call it an "excel" projector, or a "grand theft auto" projector.

This is sort of what it's like for Jews at Christmastime. I think I'll go drown my sorrows in some Chinese food.

My apologies if this message makes no sense to you at all.

interoperably yours,
-dave

On the need for a pedagogical heart of religion

Sat, 10 Jan 2009 18:39:00 GMT

I have recently been having an online conversation with a few people about religion and society. It started when one friend wrote that the risks of believing in God outweigh the benefits; he presents a humanistic inversion of Pascal's Wager based on societal and ecological consequences:

As technology enables small groups and individuals to protect the life sustaining balance on the planet --and also to destroy it-- the risk of belief in after-life moves to exceed the benefit. We should empower ourselves with our potential, and protect ourselves from the dillusion of a god that protects, guides, or saves us, or of an after-life to provide false comfort.

In the ensuing discussion, one person wrote:

On humility: it is not something that can be taught, only accepted. It is our hope, not in that we can cultivate it in ourselves, but in that true humilty comes only when we view ourselves in light of God, and see that we are nothing.
On our beliefs being shaped by our fancies: this does not indicate that there is a lack of objective truth, merely that we are content to deny that truth for the sake of preserving the beliefs (or disbeliefs) we find more palatable.
And I can't agree that the risks of believing in God could outweigh the benefits. I think you're mistaking religion for God. Religion is a risky business, I'll give you that. It is, perhaps, the most destructive human invention, not only to human life on earth, but to human life after death. But God is no invention of man, and the only risk I have found in believing is that living for something other than myself and my perverted, selfish desires seems at first a difficult thing.

This prompted several threads of my own long-winded response, the (hopefully) final installment of which I reproduce here:

You say that humility can't be taught, but when you say "true humility comes only when..." then what you are saying is exactly the beginning of a teaching on humility! Why not just accept that there is a huge potential for actual spiritual teachings, specific guidance for *how* to, for example, "view ourselves in light of God, and see that we are nothing"? That sounds to me like an instruction that could really use a great deal of elaboration. And that is what teaching is.

In my perception, it is an (inevitable?) failure of theistic dogma that it leads to exactly this kind of avoidance of responsibility for change, which is all the more ironic because it's based on a claim that is manifestly contradictory: guidance is always short-circuited with a caveat that "it can't be taught, you have to rely on God" even though teaching is exactly what that guidance is!

Think how much progress the human race could make if our religions all broke out of this trap and devoted their resources to learning how to teach their followers to "view ourselves in light of God, and see that we are nothing". At that point, does philosophy and theology matter anymore? When you see that you are nothing, could you possibly care to argue about the existence of God either way? I highly doubt it. To push either the existence or the non-existence of God is arrogant and egotistical. To guide someone on the path to seeing that they are nothing, is saintly. This is teaching, and it certainly is possible.

As for the lack of objective truth regarding God's existence: I will not claim that I have access to an objective truth of God's non-existence, but I am quite confident that you also do not have access to an objective truth of God's existence. Whatever you might think about God, whether it relate to existence, or to any other qualities, intrinsic or extrinsic, is your perception of God, not "objective reality". The problem with theistic religion (i.e. any system based on "belief in God") is that *everything* depends on convincing yourself that you have access to at least one objective, incontrovertible truth. But in actuality you do not, no matter how successful you are in convincing yourself.

As I said, I certainly don't intend to boldly claim that I know an objective truth of non-existence of God. But I think the important thing was summed up by Wittgenstein: "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." I would say as a corollary that this principle is much easier to follow if your entire worldview isn't based on convincing yourself of an absolute. Either way, though, whatever absolute you might be holding in your heart is not something that is expressed when you try to speak about it. Poetry and other forms of artistic expression might be a kind of exception to this; because they do not come from logic, they have the flexibility and the fluidity to avoid being trapped by pretensions of absoluteness. But that's a whole other story.

Finally, you say your own desires are "perverted and selfish". Where did you learn to be so hard on yourself? That sounds like the kind of thing that organized religions teach people to make them dependent on an external source, which is mediated through the organized religion entity itself. Ironically, even the Catholic Church, which is the number one example of an entity which has thrived by teaching inadequacy and dependence to its followers and feeding off them, officially eliminated the idea of original sin. It seems they recognized the abomination of pushing this concept into so many people's minds, despite how useful it had been to them through the centuries.

In any case, I agree that left entirely to their own devices, most people most of the time develop mostly rather unenlightened desires. But imagine seeing that through the lens of a mere failure of education, rather than a failure of essence. Doesn't that create a much more optimistic view of the world, with much more potential for improvement? That potential is lost to those who believe, as you said, that it "can't be taught".

In summary, to "view yourself in the light of God, and see that you are nothing" IS a process of cultivation. To say that it is not serves certain dogmatic purposes, but is a very destructive way of looking at it. To accept that it is opens the potential for improvement.

Dharma quote

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 01:51:57 GMT

Andy was telling me about some of this stuff, then I read this near the end of the book I got in Dharamsala, _Looking Directly at Mind: The Moonlight of Mahamudra_. In a section on "Six Practices of Bringing Obstacles to the Path", the sixth says:

The sixth practice is to bring death to the path. We are usually very afraid of death; our mind is very shaky when it comes to the matter of death and to the fact of death. Here one looks at death itself and discovers that it is nothing other than dharmata, nothing other than reality itself, and that in that reality there is no change. There is nothing that exists in and of its own nature, and therefore there is nothing that could serve as a basis for pain. From this viewpoint one overcomes one's fear.

This last practice includes bringing the intermediate state, or bardo in Tibetan, to the path. Bardo (pronounced "pardo") means "an in-between state". There are many intermediate states but here we are talking about the intermediate state of dharmata which is the intermediate state between death and rebirth. In both in sutras and tantras, this intermediate state is said to last seven days or sometimes up to forty-nine days. It is the time between leaving the old body and taking up a new body, and during this time all sorts of confusion and false appearances occur. What we mean by bringing the bardo to the path is that we must recognize various sorts of appearances in the intermediate state as dharmata's own light and dharmata's own sound. The practice is to begin to familiarize ourselves with dharmata's own light so that when we enter into this intermediate state, we will be able to practice. To illustrate this light, close your eyes very tightly and press slightly on the side. At first it is completely black because you have your eyes closed very tightly, but then a bit of light begins to dawn, even though your eyes are still closed. In that light will be various forms and many different colors. Then many different little drops may also appear. This is actually dharmata's own light. Similarly, if you put your teeth together, grind them a little, and then stop, there is a silence; and then there is a sound that is like a purring sound, like "drrrrr". After a while it becomes very loud, but there is no source from which it is emanating. This is the sound of dharmata. Experiences of light and sound such as these come about in the intermediate state. At this time we must look right at the very nature of them and if we do so, they will decrease. The important point is to familiarize ourself with this light and sound now, so that when we die we will be able to do this practice in the bardo, bringing this intermediate state to the path.

Last night at Kashmir Cottage

Tue, 23 Dec 2008 15:50:21 GMT

We just came down from a nice dinner at the owner's house. I wrote this before, but we are staying at Kashmir Cottage, which is a very nice guest house run by Tenzin Choegyal, aka Ngari Rinpoche, aka the Dalai Lama's younger brother, who is a real comedian. It was me and Andy and Dr. Barry, an American doctor who became a monk six years ago, and Adam Engle, the main director of Mind and Life. So it was a super fun evening. Actually it was mostly Andy and TC sharp-shooting back and forth with erudite dharma banter, which was pretty entertaining to experience. I mostly kept my mouth shut, which is usually how it is when I'm here with Andy. Kind of a strange dynamic, actually, since normally I talk too much.

The project is all wrapped up and things are in the capable hands of Dr. Yangzom, who you can see in some of the more recent pictures Andy put up (see previous post for the link to his facebook page; I will put up pix on flickr once I get home, which will make them more accessible). In the morning we will take a car to Tso Pema for a brief visit. Tso Pema is "lotus lake", it's a lake about four hours from here with floating islands of lotuses, where Padmasambhava stayed before going to Tibet to introduce Buddhism. Or something to that effect. In any case it's a revered place in Tibetan Buddhism. There are caves there where supposedly he meditated and there are supposedly handprints in the walls of the cave. I am interested in seeing this. There are also supposedly footprints in the walls of the cave. Footprints? High up on the walls? What the heck was he doing in there? Anyway.

I probably won't have any more internet access until I get home, but I'll put up pictures afterwards.

goodnight...
-dave