Category Archives: Philosophy
The Book
Reply
The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are (1966). I like the way Alan Watts writes. Some of the sixties jargon sounds a little quaint but, hey, that’s the way we talked back then. If you haven’t read this book (and don’t intend to), you can skip this post. Won’t make any sense at all out of context. Admittedly, some of the ideas are hard to grasp within context. Posts like this one (excerpts from a book) are archival. A place for me to come back and locate an idea I could never find by flipping through the book.
He pretends that he is you and I and all the people in the world, all the animals, all the plants, all the rocks, and all the stars. In this way he has strange and wonderful adventures, some of which are terrible and frightening. But these are just like bad dreams, for when he wakes up they will disappear. […] It takes him a long time to remember where and how he hid himself. […] We are God in disguise, pretending not to be himself.
God is the Self of the world, but you can’t see God for the same reason that, without a mirror, you can’t see your own eyes.
He isn’t really doing this to anyone but himself. […] In the Vedanta philosophy, nothing exists except God. […] But Vedanta is much more than the idea or the belief that this is so. It is centrally and above all the experience, the immediate knowledge of its being so.
You don’t die because you were never born. You had just forgotten who you are.
All information will come in by super-realistic television and other electronic devices as yet in the planning stage or barely imagined. In one way this will enable the individual to extend himself anywhere without moving his body— even to distant regions of space. But this will be a new kind of individual— an individual with a colossal external nervous system reaching out and out into infinity. And this electronic nervous system will be so interconnected that all individuals plugged in will tend to share the same thoughts, the same feelings, and the same experiences. […] If all this ends with the human race leaving no more trace of itself in the universe than a system of electronic patterns, why should that trouble us? For that is exactly what we are now!
No one thing or feature of this universe is separable from the whole, the only real You, or Self, is the whole.
Most people think of themselves as separate from their thoughts and experiences.
Memory is an enduring pattern of motion, like the whirlpool, rather than an enduring substance, like a mirror, a wax tablet, or a sheet of paper.
Society is our extended mind and body.
(You are) one particular focal point at which the whole universe expresses itself. […] Every individual is a unique manifestation of the Whole,
The death of the individual is not disconnection but simply withdrawal. The corpse is like a footprint or an echo— the dissolving trace of something which the Self has ceased to do.
The only real “I” is the whole endless process.
Every organism is a process: thus the organism is not other than its actions. To put it clumsily: it is what it does. More precisely, the organism, including its behavior, is a process which is to be understood only in relation to the larger and longer process of its environment. […] The whole is a pattern, a complex wiggliness, which has no separate parts. Parts are fictions of language.
Apart from your brain, or some brain, the world is devoid of light, heat, weight, solidity, motion, space, time, or any other imaginable feature.
This little germ with its fabulous brain is evoking the whole thing, including the nebulae millions of light-years away. […] A structure of such fabulous ingenuity that it calls the whole universe into being.
No valid plans for the future can be made by those who have no capacity for living now.
Making an effort to be ego-less is like “beating a drum in search of a fugitive.”
You are nothing at all apart from everything else. […] Each organism is the universe experiencing itself in endless variety.
Don’t try to get rid of the ego-sensation. Take it, so long as it lasts, as a feature or play of the total process — like a cloud or wave, or like feeling warm or cold, or anything else that happens of itself. Getting rid of one’s ego is the last resort of invincible egoism! It simply confirms and strengthens the reality of the feeling. But when this feeling of separateness is approached and accepted like any other sensation, it evaporates like the mirage that it is.
Meditate just to meditate.
When this new sensation of self arises, it is at once exhilarating and a little disconcerting. It is like the moment when you first got the knack of swimming or riding a bicycle. There is the feeling that you are not doing it yourself, but that it is somehow happening on its own, and you wonder whether you will lose it— as indeed you may if you try forcibly to hold on to it. In immediate contrast to the old feeling, there is indeed a certain passivity to the sensation, as if you were a leaf blown along by the wind, until you realize that you are both the leaf and the wind. The world outside your skin is just as much you as the world inside: they move together inseparably, and at first you feel a little out of control because the world outside is so much vaster than the world inside. Yet you soon discover that you are able to go ahead with ordinary activities— to work and make decisions as ever, though somehow this is less of a drag. Your body is no longer a corpse which the ego has to animate and lug around. There is a feeling of the ground holding you up, and of hills lifting you when you climb them. Air breathes itself in and out of your lungs, and instead of looking and listening, light and sound come to you on their own. Eyes see and ears hear as wind blows and water flows. All space becomes your mind. Time carries you along like a river, but never flows out of the present: the more it goes, the more it stays, and you no longer have to fight or kill it.
The universe is at root a magical illusion and a fabulous game, and that there is no separate “you” to get something out of it, as if life were a bank to be robbed. The only real “you” is the one that comes and goes, manifests and withdraws itself eternally in and as every conscious being. For “you” is the universe looking at itself from billions of points of view, points that come and go so that the vision is forever new. What we see as death, empty space, or nothingness is only the trough between the crests of this endlessly waving ocean.
The Self is playing its most far-out and daring game— the game of having lost Itself completely and of being in danger of some total and irremediable disaster.
We are merely bolting our lives— gulping down undigested experiences as fast as we can stuff them in— because awareness of our own existence is so superficial and so narrow that nothing seems to us more boring than simple being.
How is it possible that a being with such sensitive jewels as the eyes, such enchanted musical instruments as the ears, and such a fabulous arabesque of nerves as the brain can experience itself as anything less than a god?
It seems to be the special peculiarity of human beings that they reflect: they think about thinking and know that they know.
For so long as I am trying to grasp IT, I am implying that IT is not really myself.
I return in every baby born. […] It matters not whether the interval be ten seconds or billions of years. In unconsciousness all times are the same brief instant.
In looking out upon the world, we forget that the world is looking at itself— through our eyes and IT’s.
Plumber explains Big Mystery
Why Does the World Exist?
I’m not losing any sleep over this question, unless you count some late nights reading books like Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist? Holt is an American philosopher, author and essayist. Mr. Holt tells his “existential detective story” by talking with “philosophers, theologians, particle physicists, cosmologists, mystics and one very great American novelist.”
This is one of those books I found myself rewinding every few pages in an effort to simply understand the words, the sentences. So I can’t review it but here’s what the NYT had to say.
I do manage to come away with something from books like this. First, an appreciation for how long really smart people have been thinking about questions like why-something-not-nothing. Second, how little I really know and understand about… everything. Okay, here’s a third thing: nothing that happens in our (humans) blink-of-an-eye existence is of much consequence when viewed against the backdrop of a 14 billion year old universe. Global warming; Rush Limbaugh; a nuclear Iran. Specs of dust. A few excerpts:
“For the vast majority of Americans there is no such thing as the “mystery of existence.” If you ask them why the universe exists, they’ll say it exists because God made it. If you then ask them why God exists, the answer you get will depend on how technologically sophisticated they are. They might say that God is self-caused, that He is the ground of His own being, that His existence is contained in His essence. Or they might tell you that people who ask such impious questions will burn in hell.”
The life of the universe, like each of our lives, may be a mere interlude between two nothings.
Perhaps we see too little of reality to be aware of the reason behind it, or because any such reason must lie beyond the intellectual limits of humans.
Nothing is popularly held to be better than a dry martini, but worse than sand in the bedsheets. A poor man has it, a rich man needs it, and if you it for a long time, it’ll kill you. On occasion, nothing could be further from the truth, but it is not clear how much further.
Nothingness – A possibility reality, a conceivable state of affairs: that in which nothing exists.
In the thirteenth century, the Catholic Church declared it to be an article of faith that the world had a beginning in time.
The entities making up the physical world are like the pieces in a game of chess: what counts is the role defined for each piece by a system of rules that say how it can move, not the stuff the piece is made of.
“Words like ‘theism’ and ‘atheism’ and ‘God,’ they’ve moved around so much that they’re practically meaningless. Who really cares? I do consider myself a Spinozist, however, for two reasons. First, I think Spinoza was right that we’re all tiny regions in an infinite mind. And I agree with him that the material world, the world described by science, is pattern of divine thought.” — Cosmologist John Leslie
Stop Paddling
I’ve been thinking of life as a float trip. The kind where everybody has a big tractor tire inner tube. Sometimes people lash several together but most folks drift along in their own tube, paddling with their hands if they want to change direction.
Friends and family might float nearby for a while, where we can see them and talk to them. Then someone gets a job in Boise or files for divorce and we don’t see them again. And some leave the river altogether. Correction, everyone leaves the river eventually.
When I reflect on my time on the river, I realize how much time I spent paddling. Paddling toward some people, away from others. Paddling toward the calm parts of the river… and frantically away from the rapids. When I found a “good” spot, I paddled hard to stay there. Continue reading
Buddhism Without Beliefs by Stephen Batchelor
I’m not really sure what Stephen Batchelor is trying to say in Buddhism Without Beliefs. I think his main idea is there in the title. Excerpts below got some highlighter… real reviews at Amazon. This wasn’t one of my favorite books on the topic.
Awakening is no longer seen as something to attain in the distant future, for it is not a thing but a process — and this process is the path itself. […] It is an authentic way of being in the world.
The dharma is not something to believe in but something to do. [ Wikipedia: In Buddhism dharma means “cosmic law and order”, but is also applied to the teachings of the Buddha.]
An agnostic Buddhist is not a “believer” with claims to revealed information about supernatural or paranormal phenomena, and in this sense is not “religious.” […] The dharma is not a belief by which you will be miraculously saved. It is a method to be investigated and tried out. […] An agnostic Buddhist eschews atheism as much as theism, and is as reluctant to regard the universe as devoid of meaning as endowed with meaning.
Buddhism could be described as “the culture of awakening.”
Religions are united not be belief in God but by belief in life after death.
Regardless of what we believe, our actions will reverberate beyond our deaths. Irrespective of our personal survival, the legacy of our thoughts, words, and deeds will continue through the impressions we leave behind in the lives of those we have influenced or touched in any way.
Life is neither meaningful nor meaningless. Meaning and its absence are given to life by language and imagination.
Anguish emerges from craving for life to be other than it is.
Dharma practice is founded on resolve. […] An ongoing, heartfelt reflection on priorities, values and purpose. […] Dharma practice is the process of awakening itself: the thoughts, words, and deeds that weave the unfolding fabric of experience into a coherent whole.
The process of awakening is like walking on a footpath. When we find such a path after hours of struggling through undergrowth, we know at last that we are heading somewhere. Moreover, we suddenly find that we can move freely without obstruction. We settle into a rhythmic and easy pace. […] What counts is not so much the destination but the resolve to take the next step.
Focused awareness is difficult not because we are inept at some spiritual technology but because it threatens our sense of who we are.
The stiller the mind, the more palpable the dazzling torrent of life becomes.
The world is so saturated with the meanings given to it that those meanings seem to reside in the things themselves.
At every moment we are either inclining toward or engaged in an act: a physical movement, an utterance, a thought. Even when you decide not to act, you are still doing something: refraining.
As you sit in meditation, notice how what you are doing is the enactment of an earlier resolve. By attending to the details of this present moment, by choosing not to recollect the past or plan for the future, you are engaged in a process of creating yourself in a specific and deliberate way.
What are we but the story we keep repeating, editing, censoring, and embellishing in our heads? [I am] an unfolding narrative.
We cannot attain awakening for ourselves: we can only participate in the awakening of life.
When belief and opinion are suspended, the mind has nowhere to rest.
Why something instead of nothing?
John Updike takes a stab at The Big Question:
It’s beyond our intellectual limits as a species. Put yourself into the position of a dog. A dog is responsive, shows intuition, looks at us with eyes behind which there is intelligence of a sort, and yet a dog must not understand most of the things it sees people doing. It must have no idea how they invented, say, the internal-combustion engine. So maybe what we need to do is imagine that we’re dogs and that there are realms that go beyond our understanding. I’m not sure I buy that view, but it is a way of saying that the mystery of being is a permanent mystery, at least given the present state of the human brain.
Found this (and more) in a post by Maria Popova (Brain Pickings) about a book by Jim Holt titled Why Does the World Exist? (On the way).
I think the next big evolutionary leap for humans will some form of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). When the AGI is as intelligent as we (or it) needs or wants to be, I’m going to ask it to take a good, long look at Reality and once it has a good grasp, to explain/show it to me in a way I can understand. And it will look exactly like the Reality 1.0 I’m currently running. Until, of course, we reach the point where the AGI can modify my wetware sufficiently for me to glimpse the Source Code in all its magnificence.
Steve Cutts: In the Fall
Consciousness and the Social Brain
Amazon: “What is consciousness and how can a brain, a mere collection of neurons, create it? In Consciousness and the Social Brain, Princeton neuroscientist Michael Graziano lays out an audacious new theory to account for the deepest mystery of them all. The human brain has evolved a complex circuitry that allows it to be socially intelligent. This social machinery has only just begun to be studied in detail. One function of this circuitry is to attribute awareness to others: to compute that person Y is aware of thing X. In Graziano’s theory, the machinery that attributes awareness to others also attributes it to oneself. Damage that machinery and you disrupt your own awareness. Graziano discusses the science, the evidence, the philosophy, and the surprising implications of this new theory.”
The (attention schema) theory explains why a brain attributes the property of consciousness to itself, and why we humans are so prone to attribute consciousness to the people and objects around us.
Consciousness is the window through which we understand.
Attention is a data-handling trick for deeply processing some information at the expense of most information. Awareness is the brain’s simplified, schematic model of the complicated, data-handling process of attention.
People have personal, quirky definitions of the term consciousness, whereas everyone more or less agrees on the meaning of the term awareness.
Not all information in the brain has awareness attached to it.
Consciousness refers both to the information about which I am aware and the process of being aware of it. Consciousness encompasses the whole of personal experience at any moment, whereas awareness applies only to one part, the act of experiencing.
Self-knowledge is merely another category of knowledge. How knowledge can be encoded in the brain is not fundamentally mysterious, but how we become aware of the information is. The awareness itself if the mystery.
Whatever awareness is, it musts be able to physically impact neuronal signals. Otherwise we would be unable to say that we have it.
Awareness is a description of attention. […] Attention is not data encoded in the brain; it is a data-handling method. It is an act. It is something the brain does, a procedure, an emergent process. […] In addition to doing attention, the brain also constructs a description of attention and awareness is that description. […] Awareness allows the brain to understand attention, its dynamics, and its consequences.
Awareness is the brain’s cartoon of attention.
The same machinery used to model another person’s attentional state in a social situation is also used to model one’s own attentional state. The benefit is the same: understanding and prediction one’s own behavior.
Attention is an active process, a data-handling style that boosts this or that chunk of information in the brain. In contrast, awareness is a description, a chunk of information, a reflection of the ongoing state of attention.
The unconscious machinery of the brain is so vast that it is like an elephant. Perhaps consciousness is a little boy sitting on the elephant’s head. The boy naively imagines that he is in control of the elephant, but he merely watches what the elephant chooses to do.
Your decision machinery does not have direct access to the real object, only to the information about the object that is encoded in the visual system. A perceptual representation is always inaccurate because it is a simplification.
The brain does attention but knows awareness.
(There is a ) distinction between being aware of something and knowing that you are aware of it.
Awareness is a schematized, descriptive model of attention. […] The purpose of (the) model in the brain is to be useful in interacting with the world, not to be accurate.
My awareness is located inside me. In a sense it is me. It is my mind apprehending something.
Your own private awareness and your ability to attribute awareness to someone else are products of the same machinery in your brain. That machinery computes the property of awareness and can attribute it to others.
Is it necessary to be aware of any specific information in order to be aware? Can you be aware, simply aware, without any target of the awareness? Can I be aware of being?
Consciousness (is) essentially a tale that the brain tells itself to explain what it is doing and why it is doing it. Consciousness is after-the-fact. We know about our mental states using the same tricks and inferences that we use to reconstruct the mental states of other people. We tell ourselves a story about ourselves. As a consequence, we routinely and confidently make up incorrect reasons for our own behavior.
Awareness is a model of the act of attention. […] Attention is not itself information. It is something that happens to information.
The only objective, physically measurable truth we have about consciousness is that we can, at least sometimes, report that we have it.
Consciousness is information that describes the process of attending to something.
Awareness is not knowledge about yourself as a person, or knowledge about your emotions, or knowledge about your thoughts; it is not remembering your past, or introspecting about your mood, or any other part of self-reflection. Awareness is equally present whether you are reflecting on yourself or looking out at the external world. It is present whether you are focused on your innermost feelings or on the grass and sky in the park on a nice day.
(One view of consciousness) Consciousness does not directly cause most of our actions but instead rationalizes them. In (this) view, free will plays a minor role, if any.
All consciousness is a “mere” computed model attributed to an object. One’s brain can attribute it to oneself or to something else. Consciousness is an attribution. (Consciousness) is not something a person has, floating inside. It is an attribution. […] To say that I myself am conscious is to stay, “My own brain has constructed an informational model of awareness and attributed it to my body.”
The most reasonable approach to spirituality is to accept two simultaneous truths. One, literally and objectively, there is no spirit world. Minds do not float independently of bodies and brains. Two, perceptually, there is a spirit world. We live in a perceptual world, a world simulated by the brain, in which consciousness inhabits many things around us, including sometimes empty space.
We will build computers that can construct their own awareness in the same way that the human brain does.
If I spend enough time (with him) and my friend gets to know me well, then he will construct a model in his own brain, an informational model of a mind filled with the quirks and idiosyncrasies that reflect me. His model of my mind will be the same general type of data run in the same general manner on the same general hardware architecture as my own conscious mind. It will be a copy, at low resolution, of my consciousness. In effect, I will have been copied over from one computer to another. […] Fuzzy copies of our conscious minds exist in all the people who knew us.
I consider it a technological inevitability that information will, some day, be scannable directly from the brain and transferrable directly to computers. As embarrassingly sci-fi as that sounds, no theoretical reason stands against it. If the attention schema theory is correct, then human consciousness is information processed in a specific manner. Don’t want to die? Download your consciousness onto a central server and live in a simulated world with all the other downloaded souls. When your body dies, the copy of your mind will persist. You need not know the difference. If the simulation is good, you should feel as though you are in a realistic universe. You can possess what seems to be a human body and can walk and live and eat and sleep on the familiar Earth, all simulated, all in the form of information manipulated on computer hardware. At the rate technology is advancing, give it a few centuries.
It has been said that people invented God. People will invent the afterlife too.
Across all cultures and all religions, universally, people consider God to be a conscious mind. God is aware. God consciously chooses to make things happen. […] The critical question is whether consciousness lies behind the events of the universe. If so, then God exists. If not, then God does not exist. […] The universe is conscious in the same sense that it is beautiful. It is conscious because brains attribute consciousness to it, and that is the only way that anything is ever conscious.
Invisible costs
I find great wisdom and insight in the writing of David Cain. He has quit his “day job” to pursue writing full time and shares what that transition feels like. Looking back to my final days, I recognize some of what he describes. Following ‘graphs are part of a longer post I hope you’ll read.
“A weight that had been resting on my mind for long enough for me to forget that it was possible to remove it. For the first time in a long time I didn’t have to answer to anyone. I knew my company-issue Blackberry wasn’t going to ring, I knew nobody was going to ask anything of me. It was like walking up to a glass barrier that had always been there and realizing it was only air.”
“Our lifestyles come with costs, many of which are invisible, or at least become invisible to us once we’re used to paying them. At all times these enormous invisible forces are acting on your life, shaping what it feels like to be you. They only become visible — and only momentarily — when they change.”
“Because we’re so immersed in our lifestyles, it’s hard to see what individual parts of them are pushing and pulling on our minds. Imagine trying to describe what a building looks like when you’ve only ever been inside it. Moving parts of our lifestyles around gives us the necessary angles to know what it is we’ve actually built with our decisions about career, relationships and living situation. If they never change we never know what they’re doing to us.”