Consciousness and Intelligence: Be Here Now!

So I received an email from someone who had just finished watching Curran's and my GEB video lectures. I'm always glad to hear that OCW is impacting peoples lives in positive ways.

Anyways, in this email I was asked several questions about my thoughts on consciousness and intelligence, the differences between the brilliant and the ordinary, and so on. Since it is the most I've written for a while, I figured I'd share my response below:

First I have to say that I am very flattered by your message -- I've had very few people contact me directly about the lectures and only a few blogs seem to have anything to say about them.

I would also like to thank you for donating to OCW -- It really is a great cause and is based on the belief that knowledge and education should be free to whoever is willing to try to access them. Thanks again for that!

Now I will try to answer some of your questions:

Thoughts on Consciousness & Intelligence and what I'm reading:

This is a big one and I am not even sure how to answer it -- I should first say that there are probably a lot of people who understand both of these subjects better than me. I gave up pursuing some of these questions because I began to doubt I would ever see the answers in my lifetime.

First, I have to admit that I'm not sure if I buy the basic thesis of GEB -- that there is an isomorphism between the physical world and formal systems and that the "I" represents the same sort of twisted-back-on-itself strange loop that we see in Godel's statement G that says of itself "G is not provable".

Funnily enough I think that Hofstadter doesn't believe this either. If you look for his Scientific American column collection -- Metamagical Themas -- he does a great piece on "Who shoves whom around inside the Careenium?" Here he introduces the "symball" view of thought and consciousness, which I believe to be a very good approximation of what is correct. The basic idea is that thought is an emergent process of a lot of small unconscious agents, but more importantly these different levels -- the higher emergent level and the lower physico-mechanical/biological level -- push around each other and interact in strange and beautiful ways on different temporal and spatial scales. I would highly recommend reading that piece.

Also, I have come to the opinion that Hofstadter's new book I am a Strange Loop gets to the point a lot faster and a lot easier than GEB does -- in almost half the number of pages as well! You should check out the new paperback edition on amazon, which appears to have a good review by the washington post.

I would recommend Marvin Minsky's books Society of Mind and The Emotion Machine -- consciousness has this very mystical and apparently point-like quality that resists reduction, but Minsky does an incredible job in analyzing seemingly simple actions, say crossing a street, and unraveling all the routines and sub-routines the mind must employ to accomplish this task. Thinking like a computer scientist offers a lot of powerful inferences into the sort of psychological structures we all have.

2. What separates the brilliant from the ordinary?

Not a lot in terms of hardware, but maybe a good amount in terms of software, but then differences in software are able to affect and change the hardware, adapting it to its needs. The brain's plasticity is a wonderful thing. Put in other words, I think that differences in hardware are not significant for distinguishing genius from the ordinary, but that the environmental conditions in which we are raised dictate a great deal of whether we are "brilliant" or "ordinary".

Also, try to define what what it is meant by these two terms. If you define "brilliant" as "good at math" then you are going to have a very biased view of intelligence. I propose that we abandon these terms all together and focus on what is really important -- self-actualization.

I doubt that classic examples of "genius" -- famous artists, writers, thinkers and so on -- share some common feature in terms of intellectual capacity, whatever that might mean. In terms of psychological well-being, however, they probably all shared some sort of feature of self-actualized/actualizing human beings. (Please explore the writings of Abraham Maslow for more information.)

Basically, once you have secured your physiological, safety, love/belonging, esteem needs, you are then in the position to pursue aspects of morality, creativity, spontaneity and problem-solving. See Abraham Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs.


Of course this begs the question "Well most middle/upper class people have (arguably) secured the bottom levels in the Hierarchy of Needs, so why aren't all of these people geniuses?" The answer is that most of these people probably are pretty bright -- geniuses on a certain coarse scale -- but differences in work-ethic and subjective taste dictate what is commonly perceived as genius. This goes back to the hiking-around-the-world-in-pursuit-of-enlightenment vs. toiling-for-hours-in-a-lab-in-pursuit-of-a-Nobel-Prize view of genius. One or both might make you famous, but how do you evaluate genius without a good definition of its properties?

Suppose you take the best students from all the high-schools in the world and you put them in one place, how do you rate genius among them? There is a scaling effect whenever you restrict your population size that seems to result in a normal distribution with different mean.

I also want to emphasize the role of hard work in the development of genius and excellence. The difference in genius is almost identical to the difference in athletic prowess -- What do you think separates the people trying out at the Olympic time-trials and the general populus? What separates the person who wins the 800m and goes to Beijing and the person who comes in fourth? We will remember one of them, but not the other.

A similar phenomenon is observed at MIT. Coming from a place like MIT, which in many ways represents the cream of the crop in terms of intelligence, the difference between the average student and the best student can seem like miles, yet to the average person in the public, every MIT student seems like they're miles ahead. Whether you "win" of not is a large mix of chance, training and genetics, and chance/training dictates a much larger percentage than innate genetic ability. I don't think "winning" should matter, but maybe just being at that level of performance is important. I would say that two things mark the difference between the best MIT student from the average MIT student or any top performer from the average person in general.

1. There is a catalytic moment that I call the "Ahaa!" moment that is completely personal, emotional, and irrational. This is a sort of "peak experience" as described by Maslow that is often interpreted as spiritual in nature. It can be the sudden or gradual realization of a deep curiosity or desire to pursue a subject of study, a vision, an art, an invention, or what have you.

This provides the impetus and energy to pursue:

2. The commitment of blood, sweat, tears, and other hard labor in developing a skill, art, trade, knowledge or ability to actualize and instantiate the creative vision attained in the first part.

I don't think I was born good at mathematics. I think I did have a seed of curiosity (like many many children) that was remarkably not stamped out by my upbringing. My parents were wise and kind enough to not push me into anything, but rather made available resources for me to exercise my curiosity. I didn't realize that I really loved math and wanted to work hard at it until the end of my sophomore year of high school. I then began the long road of studying and investing time in my new interest. At several times I lost my way, thinking that I was going to pursue other subjects, but then again after my sophomore year in college I realized my love for pure mathematics. I don't think I am really better than anyone, but the way in which I responded to challenge is different from some people. If you respond to challenge with a desire to conquer regardless of how long it takes, then you will eventually overcome, but you should pick your battles carefully. The brain is a plastic organ that can be trained like a muscle -- if you wish to train it through study or meditation than it will become stronger in that regard, but it can also be over-trained, fatigue or injure. Avoid extremes.

Living a balanced life is very important and sometimes brilliant people work too hard for their own good and their intelligence deteriorates along with their emotional well-being. Enjoy every day as if it were your last because you might get run over by a bus today or tomorrow. Work hard only if that gives you pleasure. Don't suffer only for the hope of better things to come.

Be Here Now!

Graduation and the Road Ahead, Behind, Sideways...

Many months have passed since my last blog entry. I apologize for that. My last semester at MIT was an enjoyable one. I got to take Victor Guillemin's course, 18.952 - Theory of Differential Forms, with a friend of mine and I always love chatting about courses with people.

I have put together a Googlepages page summarizing my academic work and projects from the past four years. It can be accessed here:

Justin M. Curry - The Collected Works of a Philosopher-Mathematician

I know it sounds depressing, but I, along with many of those graduating in 2008, have really struggled with "letting go" and leaving my undergraduate career behind and entering the "real world." Granted the real world for the next 5 years will be graduate school at the University of Pennsylvania, working with any of the fine mathematicians there, but still, the idyllic times of college have come to an end. You can see my proof of purchase below:





Sasha and I had a wonderful time decorating our mortarboards - a quirky re-capturing of an otherwise boring ceremony - making it an individualized expression of coming to terms with our frenetic time at MIT. I discovered that one of the best ways to make a three-dimensional "8" is to first make a mobius strip and then pinch the middle together. From the photo you can see that Sasha has spelled "MIT" using Feynman Diagrams and I have contented myself with a knockoff of one of the many variants on the MIT logo.

How did I get here from my last blog post on January 20, 2008? Over 5 months have passed and no letter to my internet home? What gives? I will hope to answer some of these questions in the next couple of posts. Most of these recent posts were written around the end of June and the beginning of July, but I have altered the dates to present them in a given order. This post I'm dating June 6th, 2008 to reflect my graduation date. The one below I've dated April 15th to symbolize the common notification deadline for graduate schools in the U.S. I hope you enjoy my re-telling of these stories!

Grad School Decision: Caltech vs. UPenn

Several months ago, I was making a declaration of survival with my "I'm Alive!" post. Sad to say, the worst had not yet obtained at that point. Graduate admissions results began with an optimistic waitlisting from Caltech and was then followed by embarrassing rejection after rejection. Initially enthusiastic response from Berkeley and Chicago was only later met with personal emails filled with "Sorry to inform you"'s and the like. After several nauseating months were over and the dust settled, I had been accepted to Caltech, UPenn, UCSD, and UMD. The week after visiting England for spring break I spent 3 days each at Caltech and Penn meditating on my graduate school decision.

First Caltech. This is the second time that I have seriously played with the idea of attending Caltech - and both times I've rejected their offer. I hope this doesn't catch up with me come job hunting, because I really admire Caltech as a prestigious research institute that draws an elect undergraduate body definitely rivaling MIT in quality. I love the idea of living in California - although LA seems less exciting to me than SF/Berkeley does - the campus is gorgeous, it has the same sort of quirk that I've grown to love about MIT, but there are two problems:

1. Size.
2. Focus of the (few) faculty members in the math department.

The first problem is the exact same problem I had when I toured as a high school senior - The lack of people makes for a peaceful, meditative atmosphere that can drive you insane. I think on the level of the entire campus I could get used to, and grow to like, the size, but the math department seemed suffocatingly small to me. Here is roughly how my visit went:

On arrival, I checked into the math office and was handed a schedule for my 3-day visit. I have maybe 3 hours filled in. "Hopefully we can fill that in for you" says the secretary. We then try to make appointments with as many of the faculty that I think I will be interested in: Alexei Borodin, Nikolai Makarov, Eric Rains, Barry Simon, Tom Graber and the only geometer on the faculty, Danny Calegari.

Other prospectives - "prospies" - drift in, awkward conversations ensue. There are at most four of us that I meet on the first day and I'm having serious trouble getting along with almost everyone I meet. Later on some seemingly well-adjusted people from Columbia, Chicago, MIT and Toronto show up, but the interaction is short-lived. For the first two days most of my time is spent waiting for meetings to happen. Here is a standard scene. Some details are exaggerated:

[Four Prospies, two graduate students are standing and sitting around in the tea room, desparately trying to execute normal social behavior. A balding, un-identified mathematician is sitting on a couch, muttering to himself]
Grad Student: So What do you think you want to study?
Me: Geometry, Topology, Mathematical Physics. Stuff like that.
Grad Student: [Snickers] Oh -- I see. Can you be more specific.
Other Grad Student: Yeah, why didn't you just say "Math"? [Imagined high-fives going around. I'm the weeny getting towel-whipped in the locker room by T-bone and his goonies.]
Other Prospective: Yeah, I want to study counting and coloring - Combinatorics.
[There are a few forced laughs, and then everyone goes silent. The breaks in conversation become unbearable, so I high-tail it to the tea and without hesitation sling back a styrofoam cup-full of hot, scalding liquid. I scream internally, "Oh Thank God for this searing pain! Please spare me from this agonizing social situation."

I wander back over to my position in the circle. Either there is no conversation, or we squeeze out forced explanations from graduate students their thoughts on Caltech's math department and what sort of research they're doing, or other prospies interject with dick-measuring comments in an effort to discover weaknesses and strengths in the fellow prospies' math backgrounds. This scene is then broken every 10 minutes or so when a Caltech regular enters the tea room, stops in his or her tracks, drops their jaws in an uncontrolled moment of surprise and stammers out "There...There...There are sooo many people in here!" Evidently the presence of four other people in the Sloan Math wing is enough to initiate this sort of response.]

Thankfully, Sasha arrived on the second evening and a physics professor treated us to an amazing dinner in Old Pasadena. A physics grad student comes along, who is pretty sociable and easy to talk to. I get the sense that even the math department is viewed as a slight oddity at Caltech. I am recovering well from my lonely exploits and by Day 3, I am starting to warm-up considerably to Caltech.

By this point, I've met a handful of faculty and have been impressed by everyone. The faculty know there stuff and they exude this almost scary intensity and passion for whatever they are doing. There is only one problem - none of it seems to lie ahead of my current projected path through mathematical space. It is either too analytical, as in the case of Makarov, Simon, and Rains. Or it is too algebraic as in the case of Tom Graber and Danny Calegari. There is also this design to the math department - one faculty person to one niche - there seems to be little collaboration between faculty and almost no interaction. I start to come to terms with all of these concerns as I sit in Tom Graber's class and am easily impressed, but then I have to duck out early to meet Jerrold Marsden.

I wander across the idyllic Caltech campus, smell the flowers carried on the cool California breeze, and eventually find the Control and Dynamical Systems department where Jerry's office is. I knock an open door, and an older man, slouched slightly in an office chair, clicking away with his one-button mouse on his 30 inch Apple Cinema Display, turns to look at me. I introduce myself and he smiles - there is a spark in his eye and a sort of immediate recognition, not of me particularly, but of a wandering soul who has come to seek out advice and answers. He motions for me to come in and sit down.

Within a few minutes our conversation ramps up and takes on speed. He reminds me very much of my own personal hero at MIT: Gerald Jay Sussman. He has this remarkable ability to discover what I'm interested in hearing and then goes ahead and delivers an off-the-cuff speech that pulls on a few central insights made during his life. He tells me about Dirac structures, an invention of Ted Courant's, named by Marsden, conducted work at Berkeley in the late 80s. The basic idea seems to be that in Lagrangian and Hamiltonian systems you have maps from tangent to co-tangent bundles and vice versa, but if you consider the graph of this map as sitting inside T*+T, this gives you in some ways a more fundamental picture than the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian pictures do on their own. Although this stood as beautiful un-applied mathematics for a while, somebody figured out that electrical circuits, which are incompletely characterized by the Lagrangian or Hamiltonian viewpoint is best captured by this Dirac structure picture instead. He gave me a copy of one of his new papers (Reports of Mathematical Physics Vol. 60 2007, No. 3 "Reduction of Dirac Structures and the Hamilton-Pontryagin Principle"), which had some of the most exciting research I encountered all week. Jerry keeps rapping on about the "wild blue wonder of pure mathematics," showing me the latest edition of his Hamiltonian Reduction by Stages book. I'm grooving on all of this, when suddenly Jerrold Marsden shatters my world:

-He doesn't advise pure math students anymore.
-The Pure math job market sucks.
-Ted Courant, a PhD from Berkeley who has whole whopping fields of mathematics named after him, is teaching high school for a living.

Jerry has shifted gears on me, and goes onto lament the woes of pure math research and the government funding today. The "good ol' days at Berkeley" where all Jerry and Alan Weinstein had to do was chat to the Navy once a month to secure funding, has been replaced by "flashy powerpoint presentations, presenting practical solutions to real-world problems." The CDS department at Caltech apparently consists of a whole bunch of converted pure mathematicians who are "not afraid of deep, powerful mathematics" and can "calculate the curvature of the connection on a principal bundle" if needed to, are all preaching the way of using beautiful mathematics to get a handle on applied, engineering and science problems.

For nearly an two hours, my head is spinning - Am I not going to get a job as a pure mathematician? Should I come to Caltech so I can pursue a more applied PhD in the CDS department, working on numerical techniques for symplectic integration? Oh God! What should I do?

I go and see Jerry again. I let him know that he's blown my world apart and he smiles. I try to place the Penn-Caltech decision in perspective, letting him know that if I intend on pursuing pure mathematics for my PhD, Penn is much more suited to my research interests than Caltech is. I ask the more dramatic question, Should I join the choir of the Converted - the ranks of John Doyle, another Berkeley complex analysis PhD who left pure math for control theory, and now works on my past love of complex systems? Jerry smiles and says that I should do whatever makes me happiest, saying that being a pure mathematician is like being a poet, you might be poor at times, but if you truly love what you're doing it won't matter. He then encourages me to see one of his students give a lecture that afternoon on integration techniques, discrete differential forms and the like.

Before the lecture, I go and see Barry Simon. He is friendly and formal. I wait in his secretary's office and eventually I go in. I'm still reeling from my two conversations with Marsden, so I ask realistically, what the job market is like for pure mathematics. Barry goes on to dismiss most of Jerry's concerns, explaining to me that the old generation of space-race faculty hires are all retiring or dying, and the job market has been climbing steadily since it's early 90s slump when people like Ted Courant were looking for a job. He then goes on to compare Caltech and Penn, pulling on US News Rankings and says "If you want to do Analysis, Caltech is the clear choice."

The meeting comes to an end, and then I visit Eric Rains for a little bit. He talks rapidly, connecting random terms that I know here and there with work on orthogonal polynomials and then seems to work on a level which is down and dirty, but also deep. I struggle to follow what he says as he walks me towards the lecture. I am impressed that a professor would do such a thing. We shake hands and say good bye.

Finally, I am in the lecture hall were Jerry and his student are. People filter in and sit down. The talk gets rolling. The speaker is intelligent and has the social graces of a state school graduate. He is talking about discrete differential forms and their application in variational integrators, which is used to simulate physics and respect the geometry by focusing on conserved quantities (symmetries ala Noether's principle). At some point an audience-member asked whether you could balance the tolerance of conserving energy in the integrator with say time or momentum or what have you. The student then replied "Yeah... Well it is actually a theorem that... I think you [pointing towards Jerry] may have proved that..." Jerry sort of nodded sheepishly and everyone laughed. It was at that point that I realized I wanted to be a theorem-prover like Jerry instead of a code-monkey like his student. It was at that moment, that I realized Jerry's pure mathematical work, theorem-proving - "the stuff he does for fun on Sundays" - really was the spark that made both Jerry and I light up with excitement. It was at that moment that I realized and remembered why I fell in love with mathematics in the first place, I wasn't content to be a code monkey, I wanted to be a theorem-prover.

------------------------------------------


Suffice it to say that the Penn Prospective's Weekend went well. As I later wrote to my research advisor, Aliaa Barakat, in an email:

Penn seems to be my clear choice for graduate school. I had lots of fun at the weekend and met many people I would like to work with in addition to Tony and his group. The graduate students have fun and seem very sociable and generally happy... If I were to go [to Caltech] I would be pretty much selling myself on geometric group theory, which may or may not actually interest me. Tom Graber (Caltech, from Berkeley) is also a great algebraic geometer, but I don't know if his work on enumeration will interest me.

One of the things I realized in the past week is that I have not seriously studied algebraic geometry, and it is not clear at this point whether or not it will interest me once I study it. Ron Donagi's class in Complex Algebraic Geometry seemed really interesting but I understood very little this late into the semester. Algebraic Geometry seems to be at the core of Ron Donagi, Tony Pantev, and Antonella Grassi's work. Although, outside of this domain, I had several really great conversations with Wolfgang Ziller and his work on "Exotic Spheres" and other positive curvature examples and counterexamples to some open problems. His arsenal of tools primarily consists of Lie Groups, Spectral Sequences, Chern Characteristic Classes... all things which directly appeal to me given what little surface reading I've done. He also takes his students to Brazil occasionally :-). Christopher Croke is also a really friendly differential geometer doing more negative curvature things. I met Jonathan Block and one of his students, so there is also interesting work there. Alexandre Kirillov is also pretty notable and has his own symplectic form named after him.

Overall the story of my Penn visit is a pretty enjoyable one. There is a much larger math department and both graduate students and faculty were much, much easier to talk to because they seemed genuinely excited about their subject. There is plenty of funding (5 years, two years no teaching duties, 3 paid summers) and lorry-loads of potential advisors doing mathematics that interests me. The graduate students even threw a party for the prospectives that was fun and social, featuring good tunes (Radiohead and an overall well-DJ'ed mix) and I could converse about anything from topoi and differential geometry to traveling and hiking around the world.

After all the visits were said and done, and my choice was seemingly obvious, I still had a hard time letting go of an opportunity to head West and join that Other Institute of Technology. Sasha had lots of trouble too, and making a choice between Berkeley, MIT and Princeton was an emotional roller coaster that I hope neither of us have to relive. Eventually she realized how important our relationship was to her, and she decided to attend Princeton, which is only 45 mins by car away from Philadelphia and the Penn campus. I look forward to the many years ahead of us, and am confident that the Philadelphia, Tri-State area will be a good home for the next couple of years, even though a part of us will always be eager to head out Californey' way to find the American dream.

Structure and Geometry Govern Interaction: Follow Up

In an older post - Structure and Geometry Govern Interaction - I introduced an argument about how Orange County purposely designed its neighborhoods to have a lack of public spaces and opportunities for interaction. Every time I cite this argument, people ask for my references and I always feel bad to come up empty-handed.

Well, Matt has helped me address this grievance once and for all --

Lisa McGirr's "Suburban Warriors: The Origins of the New American Right", published by the Princeton University Press, contains the much sought after reference. Pages 41 through 44 or so are the most condemning with the most powerful passage on page 42:

Convenience, privacy, and decentralization were the keys to the master plan, with few central public spaces except those dominated by consumption. Irvine executives, with a good sense for business, conciously created solidly middle-class neighborhoods. They preferred to forgo federal subsidies that would have required them to open their developments to poorer residents, and they did not incorporate open-housing provisions into their master plan. Their desire to build high-priced homes helped to reinforce an already existing social homogeneity in Orange County. The result of development along these lines, of both the corporate and the free-market models, was spatial isolation and an abscence of community, which, in a complicated way, helped to reinforce a conservative ethos.

Page 41 introduces the company that was responsible for designing the Irvine area and there are plenty of other interesting things said later as well. In particular, I found the "NIMBY" political movement ("Not In My Back Yard") referenced on page 43 to provide another powerful defense of the idea that home ownership, with a focus on cultivating your own private landscape, encouraged a protective attitude towards private property and a dislike of communal spaces.

I must confess that the idea of simply mulching your own flower beds and garden (something my grandmother so enjoyed in her previous large suburban home) on the weekends hardly seems like an act of conservatism, but it does seem like a selfish act compared to donating your time to working on the community play ground or garden, something to be built and enjoyed by many.

Page 42 is not by default part of the limited preview of the relevant section, but if you use google books to search for the phrase "open spaces" in the book, the first result is on page 42, allowing you to view the missing page.

Buddhism and all that Jazz...

Here I am on the edge of academia -- right in the butt crack of the two cheeks of Harvard and MIT: Central Square. To be more accurate, I'm not in the crack -- I wanted to be in the crack, but my planned pilgrimage to 1369 Coffee House ended in despair as I realized that the cliche of having a coffee and blogging on your MacBook already had its quota filled at the Central Square establishment and I would have to take my 21st century technology enhanced middle-class musings elsewhere. So I'm a little left of the crack, grasping at the hairy tendrils of the outer limits of Harvard's campus at a neighboring Au Bon Pain. Thank God they have wireless. I probably would have had a hissy fit and mope over my americano, all the time wallowing in the misery of not sharing my existential crisis with the rest of cyberspace. Fortunately, you're getting the rant now and the dose-response curve of my caffeine absorption is just starting to look up.

It has been over a month since I've graced the presence of my own blog, so what impetus could get me off of my mathematical ass and write for a change? Good question. Aside from it being IAP and not having the normal grind of course work, I suppose I just felt inspired to share some thoughts related to a book I recently read: Buddha for Beginners.

I really got a kick out of this book. Not only is it well-illustrated, but the author, Stephen T. Asma, is a professor of philosophy at Columbia College in Chicago, and really tries to give a no-nonsense summary of Buddha's life, the various principles and schools of Hinduism, how Buddha's original teachings departed from these ideas, and how later sects have found their own inspired path to Enlightenment. The presentation is very clear and has really helped me crystallize my understanding of Buddhism. So surprise! You're going to get a book report and I will use someone else's words as a surrogate for my own.

What is the natural starting point for most religions? God. He (she, it, thing, flying rattapotamus, whatever) is kind of a big deal for most people. Thanks to this abstract label of "God" we have had a simple three letter monosyllabic word for not only all the monstrosity of creation, but also any conceivable reason to do or not do something, including, but not limited to, why touching yourself is "immoral" and pretty much any reason why you should hate or love, kill or help anyone at anytime. It probably is worth repeating: God is kind of a big deal. So, How do our Hindu friends view God?

God, in the Upanishads, is the creative originating principle for the entire cosmos. All of nature is in a relentless state of flux or becoming. Animals grow old and perish, seasons come and go, political empires pass away, solar systems arise and collapse...and bell-bottoms go in and out of fashion. All these things make up the ever-changing world of "Becoming", but these are really only manifestations of the all-encompassing reality. The all-encompassing foundation is Being itself or Brahman, which is the source of all created things. Underlying all the changes of the natural world lies the changeless essential reality of God. (pp. 37-38)

Shit... "creative originating principle"!? I thought God was some dude in robes who sat on a chair with an awesome white beard that looks like it has been conditioned with Pantene Pro-V every morning and evening since the birth of the Universe. He's not a "principle," he's an auto-mechanic, the engineer of the Universe, and he even takes Sundays off to watch football and drink beer. What is this Hindu hogwash?

In the Hindu tradition, however, God is not only the antecendent and transcendent world-maker, Brahman is also the world itself. The natural world around us, that we encounter on a daily basis, is not simply God's created artifact -- it is Brahman itself. The natural world is just a manifestation of God and the two cannot really be separated (p. 40)

Okay, well I've heard my Christian friends say "God is everywhere," but the anthropomorphization of the Birkenstock-wearing big old dude in the clouds still seems to be the mental model many people in the West have of God. Naturally, the Hindu pantheistic viewpoint of God aligns nicely with the derived spirituality of many western thinkers who I admire -- Einstein, Spinoza, et al -- and to people who have really studied physics, I think the "God:=The Universe" is the mental model for many scientists and mathematicians. The question "Do you believe in God?" really seems to be a poisoned apple, if you believe in anything, and the universe seems to be plausible thing to believe in, then it almost seems absurd to say "No." The quicksand starts because no one ever states clearly their definition for God, so agreeing with the question is guaranteed trouble. However, this post isn't about God, and the Hindu conception of Brahman is incorporated in Buddhist thinking as well. The main difference between Hinduism and Buddhism (aside from the caste system, the status of women, etc) is the belief in a soul or Atman:

More important for understanding the Buddha's philosophical revolution is the related Hindu concept of Atman or "soul." Just as there is this permanent essential reality underlying Nature called Being or Brahman, there is also an unchanging dimension of human beings -- namely, Atman. The principal less of the Upanishads is that both the fluctuating cosmos and the ever-changing material human body are only distracting veils (maya) over the important spiritual reality. Tn the case of human beings, there is a changeless soul or "ego" that provides the continuity beneath the fleeting material person. (p. 42)

The last, and perhaps most difficult part of Hindu philosophy for us to understand is the relationship between Brahman and Atman. Brahman is God and Atman is the individual self, but in a deeper sense they are both the same thing. Most properly speaking, there is only one permanent reality and that is God, but the individual selves are manifestations or expressions of God temporarily separated from itself. There is an ideal unity of the soul of the human (Atman) and the soul of the universe (Brahman). Individual selves are related to God like sparks to a fire...or water droplets to the sea - they are not qualitatively different and yet they are temporarily estranged from each other... The transcendent un-manifested Brahman does not need to achieve liberation from ignorance, because it is already completely perfected and free. But the eternally Divine God seeks to express itself through many conscious selves because in this way it is able to rise above ignorance. As the cosmic play unfolds, human egos continue to conquer the challenges of living and realize self-knowledge. With this conquering of ignorance we are reunited with the Universal Consciousness and this saga is one of the infinite expressions that flow from Brahman. The aim of the Cosmic Dance is to celebrate itself. (pp. 47-48)

Wow. Ok. Sounds great. Sign me up. But before I do that we should take a look at the Buddha's view on things. The trouble with the above picture as I see it (and apparently as the Buddha saw it) is this posited "soul" or "ego" or "Atman." Living only hop, skip and a jump away from one of the most active centers for brain research, lends one to question the metaphysical status of the "I." Apparently the most radical difference between Buddhism and Hinduism is "Anatman" or a belief in no-Self!

To argue that there is no immortal self is to pull a very comforting rug out from under religious thinking. The idea that some part of us lives on and on is pleasing and satisfies our craving for immortality. According to the Buddha, however, satisfying cravings is not the path to truth.

Not only is there no evidence for an immortal self, but to believe in its existence, according to the Buddha, will lead to an immoral life. It leads to evil because such a belief is ultimately ego-centered and selfish, and human beings will be unable to free themselves if they are seeking rewards in their future lives. In the Samyutta Nikaya, the Buddha states:

"All formations are transient; all formations are subject to suffering; all things are without a self (anatman). Form is transient, feeling is transient, perception is transient, mental formations are transient, consciousness is transient."

According to the Buddha, realizing and understanding that we have no immortal self or soul is part of the enlightenment process is a feature of our awakening. (pp. 51-53)

Wow! Holy shit! The Buddha was actually more materialistic and rational than one would expect! In one fell swoop we have undermined the basis for most Judeo-Christian-Islamic ethics: Fear of an afterlife. Not only do we reject the notion of a soul that persists after death, but we go as far to argue that acting out of fear of consequences in potentially experienced during the after life can lead to immoral behavior since the desire to avoid pain in the afterlife actually is a selfish endeavor (suicide bombers and crusaders go without further mention).

Okay, so what about the perceived continuity of "my" experiences?

The ego that ties together all of one's perceptions and feelings and thoughts is figmentary, according to the Buddha. Contrary to Descartes, we cannot deduce the existence of an "I" from the act of thinking (cogitating). A person is really only a bundle of perceptions.

There is nothing "substantially" the same in my childhood and adulthood, but the causal process itself gives a kind of continuity between bundles of thoughts and impressions.

The Buddha dispels the myth of the metaphysical self (atman) as an underlying entity through life spans. But he understands that each person feels a sense of themself as a self or ego. This palpable experience of the "I" is not completely illusory, for the Buddha claims that it is produced out of the combinations or conjunctions of feeling (vedana), perception (sanna), disposition (sankhara), consciousness (vinnana) and body (rupa). These are the five aggregates (khanda) or bundles of personhood and though each of these is impermanent and always fluctuating, they combine in the "felt" sense of the personal ego. (pp. 58-59)

What is interesting is that Buddhism does not discard the notion of Karma, but instead recasts it into a perceived quality of cause and effect. Instead of letting materialism devolve into a hedonistic frenzy of drinking, drug-taking and fornicating, the Buddha felt that these were just causes of more suffering (when done in excess) and the goal of Buddhism is to (as pragmatically as possible) reduce suffering. We must reject the afterlife and "the wheel of becoming" if we are ever truly going to become free. At the core of the Four Noble Truths

1. All existence is suffering (dukkha)
2. Suffering is caused by craving or attachment.
3. Suffering can end through non-attachment.
4. The way to end suffering is the Noble Eightfold Path.

is that we become attached to our perceptions and our lives, this in turn causes suffering. As Professor Stephen T. Asma so eloquently explicates:

Suffering flows from clinging attachment which mistakes impermanent things and sensations for lasting and permanent realities. Attachment is a confusion, in the mind and the heart, that tries to capture or solidify that which is forever in flux. (p. 80)

Although I disagree that "All existence is suffering" the core issue that "Suffering is caused by attachment" rings truer every time I hear it. What is interesting is that the Buddha dwells less on metaphysical musing in favor of trying to implement a pragmatic "general life principle" for ending one's own suffering. This "Noble Eightfold Path" outlined in the Samyutta Nikaya text advises:

1. Right Understanding
2. Right Mindedness
3. Right Speech
4. Right Action
5. Right Living
6. Right Effort
7. Right Attentiveness
8. Right Concentration

What I love about Buddhism is the idea that one should use the Noble Eightfold Path to pursue the Middle Way between the two extremes of indulgence and asceticism. It is neither dogmatism nor moral relativism, it is contextual and adaptable to the situation. Coolest of all, is that for Buddhism intellectual rigor is a "virtue" and ignorance is a "sin." As Asma explains the first step on the Noble Eightfold Path, logical thinking is not at odds with Enlightenment.

Right Understanding: Similar to Socrates's famous position that the good life is the "examined" life, the Buddha believes that intellectual and emotional confusion must be grappled with on a daily basis. Right Understanding occurs when one pierces through the veil of naive consciousness (thinking of ourselves as Ego) to arrive at the true nature of things. The Buddha, and Socrates after him, understood that clarity of thought was most difficult regarding issues where the passions had a strong interest. One has to be especially vigilant for the temptations that can arise from the aggregate sensations. (p. 87)

What is more interesting... is that original Buddhism treats intellectual rigor as a virtue and ignorance as a sin. Some later sects of Buddhism have shared similar hostilities with Western Religions towards the intellect, claiming that ignorant faith is more important than logical thought. Right Understanding is the thoughtful discernment that helps a person see past the quick-fix gratifications to long-range karmic implications. Critical thinking, for the Buddha, is part of the moral path to freedom, for it allows one to recognize internal confusion. (p. 89)

Hot Damn! A religion that embraces critical thinking, advocates the use of Aristotle's rule of the Golden Mean (balance between dogmatism and relativism) and is fundamentally pantheistic-borderline-atheistic. Everything else is just rules of thumb and practices to help end suffering. Sounds good to me. Meditation, at the end of the day, is just time to come to center and appreciate a state of freedom from worldly suffering.

I think this one is a winner, yet Buddhism as Professor Asma presents may depart from what most of my fellow Westerners think Buddhism is. To conclude this excessively long post, I offer Asma's own Postscript:

To actually examine the complex debates of early and later Buddhism is an eye-opening experience. For some time now, the West has been stereo-typing the East as a convenient "other" -- a land of intuition and enigma. Philosophical traditions like Buddhism are seen as deeply irrational, inherently mysterious and ultimately inscrutable. Lamentably, this stereotype has been used by those Rationalist Westerners who hope to feel superior to the "backward" Eastern people. But more recently, the same stereotype is being employed by "New Age" Westerners to elevate irrationalism and mysticism -- claiming Eastern intuitionism as the righteous path out of Western exploitation and alienation. One group shots out Buddhism's difference from Western Philosophy with derision in their voices, and the other group shouts out Buddhism's difference with adoration in their voices.

The irony of all this is that when one actually digs beneath the piles of self-improvement styled pop-spiritual dreck to find the original source material of both traditions, an astounding solidarity of common questions and methods emerges. Aristotle and the early Hinayana philosophers, for example, struggle with very similar questions of permanence and change in quite analogous ways. Or compare Gautama's and the Stoic Epictetus's moral philosophy, where a similar self mastery of the passions becomes the highest freedom in a real world of servitude. In short, anybody who thinks that Buddhists are less rational than Westerners, should read their Nagarjuna. And anybody who thinks that Westerners are narrowly logistic, should read their Plato. (p. 143)