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)

Deep Ecology

Hello and welcome again to Justin's endless effort to procrastinate less interesting work in favor of the quest for insight!

My 21W.775 - Writing about Nature and Environmental Issues, is the first humanities class I've taken at MIT that is NOT a philosophy class. Believe me ladies and gentlemen, that I would have never ventured outside the lofty domains of Course 24 - Philosophy and Linguistics, is it hadn't been for the wretched "HASS-D" requirement of MIT, that requires that I explore at least 3 flavors of the same ice cream: Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences.

What have I done to negotiate this forced exposure to other fields? Crafted the class into my own philosophy course of course! So far I've successfully been able to dictate my own philosophical-personal style of writing and have been received warmly. For an upcoming 10-12 page research paper, we've been asked to investigate some environmental issue of something relating to this area. My chosen topic is the Environmental Ethics of Zen Buddhism. Ha! Take that for forcing me to follow an assignment!

In my search for references, I actually came across a very good book by the name of "Zen Buddhism and Environmental Ethics" by Simon P. James. In my first pass of the book, I ran across this notion of "Deep Ecology" which asserts that our current environmental crisis cannot be solved by the application of more science and technology. Rather it requires a deep shift in western consciousness in how we view our place in nature. Apparently one of the first proponents of this idea was Lynn White a professor in Medieval History who in a 1967 issue of Science, wrote "The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis".

In White's essay I've found a interesting analysis of the psychological foundations for our current relationship with the environment. Upon first reading I became convinced that it was one of the direct influences on Daniel Quinn's amazing book Ishmael.

The underlying idea is that the roots of modern science lie inside a Christian world view, which focuses on Man's quest to dominate, understand and subvert nature. The closing of the class gap has put the need and desire for technology in touch with the higher pursuits of pure science. Like gasoline on a fire, we've exploded in capability and population as a result of this, and even though the concerns of over-population and the environment are relatively new ones, we've been sowing the seeds of our destruction for hundreds of years.


As a beginning we should try to clarify our thinking by looking, in some historical depth, at the presuppositions that underlie modern technology and science. Science was traditionally aristocratic, speculative, intellectual in intent; technology was lower-class, empirical, action-oriented. The quite sudden fusion of these two, towards the middle of the 19th century, is surely related to the slightly prior and contemporary democratic revolutions which, by reducing social barriers, tended to assert a functional unity of brain and hand. Our ecologic crisis is the product of an emerging, entirely novel, democratic culture. The issue is whether a democratized world can survive its own implications. Presumably we cannot unless we rethink our axioms.

One of the things which struck me about this excerpt is the striking resemblance of "brain and hand" with MIT's slogan "Mens et Manus" -- "Mind and Hand."

Especially in its Western form, Christianity is the most anthropocentric religion the world has seen. As early as the 2nd century both Tertullian and Saint Irenaeus of Lyons were insisting that when God shaped Adam he was foreshadowing the image of the incarnate Christ, the Second Adam. Man shares, in great measure, God's transcendence of nature. Christianity, in absolute contrast to ancient paganism and Asia's religions (except, perhaps, Zorastrianism), not only established a dualism of man and nature but also insisted that it is God's will that man exploit nature for his proper ends.

At the level of the common people this worked out in an interesting way. In Antiquity every tree, every spring, every stream, every hill had its own genius loci, its guardian spirit. These spirits were accessible to men, but were very unlike men; centaurs, fauns, and mermaids show their ambivalence. Before one cut a tree, mined a mountain, or dammed a brook, it was important to placate the spirit in charge of that particular situation, and to keep it placated. By destroying pagan animism, Christianity made it possible to exploit nature in a mood of indifference to the feelings of natural objects.

And some people wonder why I'm a pagan.

The Greeks believed that sin was intellectual blindness, and that salvation was found in illumination, orthodoxy--that is, clear thinking. The Latins, on the other hand, felt that sin was moral evil, and that salvation was to be found in right conduct. Eastern theology has been intellectualist. Western theology has been voluntarist. The Greek saint contemplates; the Western saint acts. The implications of Christianity for the conquest of nature would emerge more easily in the Western atmosphere.

I was not aware of this divide even within the church. I suppose it goes to show what an evolving, self-selecting entity religion can be. It also points to why it so hard to say matter-of-factly "I am Christian." What breed of Christian? What time and place of Christianity are you referring to? In many ways, I find the gnostic and early Christian ideas incredibly interesting. I might even say I'd believe in some of their ideas, but it seems frightening to me to then say that I am Christian.

But since God had made nature, nature also must reveal the divine mentality. The religious study of nature for the better understanding of God was known as natural theology. In the early Church, and always in the Greek East, nature was conceived primarily as a symbolic system through which God speaks to men: the ant is a sermon to sluggards; rising flames are the symbol of the soul's aspiration. The view of nature was essentially artistic rather than scientific.

Ditto. Then enters the big bad Latin West --

However, in the Latin West by the early 13th century natural theology was following a very different bent. It was ceasing to be the decoding of the physical symbols of God's communication with man and was becoming the effort to understand God's mind by discovering how his creation operates. The rainbow was no longer simply a symbol of hope first sent to Noah after the Deluge: Robert Grosseteste, Friar Roger Bacon, and Theodoric of Freiberg produced startlingly sophisticated work on the optics of the rainbow, but they did it as a venture in religious understanding. From the 13th century onward, up to and including Leibnitz and Newton, every major scientist, in effect, explained his motivations in religious terms. Indeed, if Galileo had not been so expert an amateur theologian he would have got into far less trouble: the professionals resented his intrusion. And Newton seems to have regarded himself more as a theologian than as a scientist. It was not until the late 18th century that the hypothesis of God became unnecessary to many scientists.

The hypothesis may now be unnecessary, but the view of conquest and understanding remains.

If so, then modern Western science was cast in a matrix of Christian theology.

Professor White, then brings us the bad news:

I personally doubt that disastrous ecologic backlash can be avoided simply by applying to our problems more science and more technology. Our science and technology have grown out of Christian attitudes toward man's relation to nature which are almost universally held not only by Christians and neo-Christians but also by those who fondly regard themselves as post-Christians. Despite Copernicus, all the cosmos rotates around our little globe. Despite Darwin, we are not, in our hearts, part of the natural process. We are superior to nature, contemptuous of it, willing to use it for our slightest whim.

I can only hope that he is wrong, and there are some indications that he is wrong. The environmental movement spurred by essays like this one have reached the shores of scientists and politicians and (some of us) are working fast to correct our poor steering of the past few centuries. The human mind has produced some incredible good and I am optimistic enough to think that we will develop some brilliant inventions to reduce our impact on this world and stabilize our place on this little blue marble.

I have no doubt that life on Earth will survive until our solar system suffers from a cold death in a few billion years, it is only a question of whether or not humans will outlast the next few centuries.

What I envision is a scientific-enlightened citizenry that adopts some of the more buddhist and animist ways of thinking, in an effort to live in harmony with other life on Earth. By wedding mind and hand, we did more than we knew better to do, but our consciousness is catching up with our capabilities and I can only hope that a wedding of mind and spirit will be able right the wrongs of the past.

Emerson and the American Transcedentalist

As part of my coursework in 21W.775 (Writing about Nature and Environmental Issues), we've started reading Ralph Waldo Emerson's first serious work "Nature." Upon reading the first half, I'm completely blown away at the ideas that Emerson was turned onto way back in 1836. I quote:

"Whenever a true theory appears, it will be its own evidence. Its test is, that it will explain all phenomena" (P. 3)

ALL PHENOMENA?!?!?!?

So maybe he's reaching a little bit there, and really can't hope for such lofty goals. Does Emerson tuck his tail between his legs and step down a few layers of transcendental abstraction? Hardly...

"Standing on the bare ground -- my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space -- all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God." (p. 6)

I became a transparent eyeball... At this point of reading the essay, I was expecting Allen Ginsburg and Ram Dass to come skipping over the hillsides to join Emerson, chanting "Hare Krishna, Hare, Hare..." while The Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane are helping Thoreau outfit his cabin with the latest and greatest stroboscopic lights and audio feedback effects.

But seriously, Emerson seems totally turned onto a whole way of thinking, that seems culturally disconnected from him. At times his musings seem almost painfully and obviously Buddhist in nature.

"Who looks upon a river in a meditative hour and is not reminded of the flux of all things?" (p. 14)

The answer, Emerson buddy pal, is pretty much the majority of Western Civilization isn't reminded of the impermanence of all things. At times when reading Emerson, I find it hard to believe that this is a guy in Massachusetts and not some ambitious American monk taking up sanctuary in a Tibetan monastery.

The number of jewels of insight that Emerson packs into this sub 40 page essay truly is remarkable. I leave you with these few morsels, because otherwise I'd be quoting verbatim the entire work. The number of ideas that Emerson and his Transcendental Club seem tuned into a full 130 years before the counter-culture movement of the 1960s is suggestive that there is a rich tradition to be explored here. That sense of longing that so many of us Western spiritual children of the East have by being misplaced physically in this wide world is quelled when we find a great grandfather of American literature spiritually and physically close to home.

Royksopp - "Remind Me"

So this music video has infected my brain.

Sometimes I really hate being the victim of internet memes, but then again our internet has enabled small jewels of high quality to become easily identified and popularized. It makes me wonder how this has impacted business and the ability for the "little guy" just to speak out.

The advent and use of the internet has also enabled things like this blog to actually come to life. I had thought several years ago that it would be nice for there to just be an open online forum for discussion for my family and friends to post on and read each other's thoughts. This could offer glimpses into each of our own personal worlds and thus we can get to know each other in ways that normally wouldn't have been possible. Normal interaction has its pluses: Visual eye contact, body language, tone, mood, etc. Whole worlds of emotions are hidden in the text-based communication of the online world, and often this leads to misunderstanding, i.e. flamewars. However, that degree of impersonality and chance to actually just write for whoever wants to read, in many ways allows your loved ones to observe you externally.

I'd like to dub this the "Relationship-Schrodinger's-Cat-in-a-box" paradox. When we interact with people in a face-to-face manner, we learn to exaggerate certain aspects of our selves and suppress others. We cultivate separate images of ourselves for separate friends and groups of friends. Pretty much everyone does this. When guys are out to a pub with just the guys we can almost become more crude then we'd like to think of ourselves normally. Machismo and all those little bits of our person-hood come rushing to the surface. In new social situations, some of us dry up waiting for someone else to crack the ice, or some of us become the group jester, to help break the awkward silence. The bottom line is that we have these constants, these eigenstates of personality that certain people always observe us in.

The fascination that I have with my blogging experience is that there is this rare opportunity for different people to tune in and look inside this box of personality you've created. Weird things happen. Your parents can see you in a superposition of personalities which are both known and unknown. Certain friends can observe you talking about things which you may have never normally discussed with them. In some ways this may create stress, stress to keep your personal eigenstates separate for separate people, but I welcome the superposition. May it be insightful for everyone!

Structure and Geometry Govern Interaction

After the long awaited reunion with my good friend Matt, I was truly amazed to hear the changes in thinking and creative ideas he's explored in the last year.

The one idea which I want to highlight is how space affects people's interactions and their political, economic, and social tendencies. The main thrust of the argument is that in large city design where there is a high degree of connectivity and interaction between people, the favored way of political thinking is liberal not by self-selection and income bracket, but rather interaction with people makes liberal people. Suburbs and sections of sprawl, where everyone has to drive everywhere, and little or no interaction with other people actually occurs, tends to promote conservative thinking.

The thrust of Matt's argument comes from using Orange County as a case study of intentional urban planning of conservatism. As you may or may not know (wiki it), Orange County is a very conservative section of California that routinely votes Republican. Apparently in the 60s or 70s, there was a pushing front of liberal culture in all the areas surrounding Orange County. In an effort to rebuff their influence, city planners actually designed large sections of Orange County to have classic suburban sprawl as a design, where interconnectivity and the chance for encountering other people is intentionally low. In doing so, the structure of the space of Orange County has created a safe haven and virtual breeding ground for conservative thinking. Although I haven't found specific evidence for this claim, I've heard it said that actual minutes of the meetings of the city planners captures this intention to design cities to be conservative.

This idea I find completely striking. It is not the case of classism, where the rich are more conservative and thus live in large suburban mansions with their personal golf course in the back yard, but rather that well-off people are being conditioned into conservative ideals by their lack of interaction with people. This idea makes sense, as there are tons of wealthy people living in cities (Who else can live in those million dollar brownstones in Boston?) but they happen to be more liberal in tendency.

The Congress for the New Urbanism documents these ideas much better then I'm doing here. Their Charter, makes some interesting points and does a better job of fleshing out the complexity of the issues involved. In addition to the political tendencies that cities engender, by optimizing already developed areas, we can reduce our impact on the environment. This has been already realized by many European cities in the form of Green Belt Policies. I was amazed at how Europe has 10 times the population density of the US and yet there is so much green area. I spread these memes in passing, and turn again to some of my own thoughts.

Matt and I have been considering how this "space affecting interaction affecting people" idea is manifest on even the smaller level of living communities at MIT. In particular it seems striking to me that the reason why East Campus is particularly liberal is not because some how a large group of liberal, progressive, hippy MIT undergrads managed to get lotteried into the dorm and the culture just snowballed, but rather the actual architecture of the dorm has created such an environment. In particular the long connected hallways provides immediate line-of-sight to anyone who might else be out in the hall hanging out. Seeing people milling outside their room provides a nucleation site for interaction and suddenly people are talking and socializing and sharing ideas and expanding each other's minds. This is to be contrasted with Simmons, which has each long floor divided arbitrarily into towers so that in order to get from point A to point B, one has to really do some work in navigating different floors quickly so that one can get inside one's room and hunker down for the night. The only chance for interaction is maybe the elevators, which is often stifling, awkward, non-committal and brief. In fact it is interesting how each of the major MIT dormitories has an architecture which is conducive to the type of people which live there. Granted there is a process of selection on the part of the student, but for formation of these cultures they really are governed by the structure of the space.

This brings me nicely to one of my favorite living groups to visit, tEp. As Matt correctly points out the structure of the spaces for interaction in tEp really are conducive to certain activities and sometimes the disorientation caused by the frequent, bizarre happenings, is just what is needed to stretching ones consciousness and tolerance.

The effect now seems pretty self-evident. Interaction with people on a frequent basis, implies a wider exposure to opinion, culture, beliefs, and backgrounds. The necessity of sharing a common space and living area encourages tolerance in all of these dimensions. Tolerance often is the seed to open-thinking about various subjects and policies and consequently, dis-attachment from dogma, conservative values and general narrow thinking.

Of course an already existent inclination towards liberal thinking, has also promoted the growth of communes, but it is interesting to see the causality go the other way.

Math and Physics, Again....

My Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics class (24.111) is making me think of things again, which I learned to give up thinking about. It's this whole issue of taking as postulates that which we observe and then figuring out the mathematics from that.

I mean, this really bothers me and in a lot of ways, instead of sympathizing with the physicist, I've become more hard-lined as a mathematician. I often find myself asking the question "Why are the eigenvectors and eigenvalues of a certain operator the only possibly observed states?" Often the response from my physicist friends is "That's just a question you don't ask in Quantum Mechanics." So that response, really bothers me. The second someone says "You can't ask that question," when apparently the question is well-formed, that is a quick line to raising my ire.

The other response I often get is "That's the way things have to be so that we can accurately model the observed data." This I suppose is what gets at the heart of the difference of the mathematician and the physicist. One views the sense-data as the starting point for inferential reasoning, the other only starts with well-defined things and checks periodically (or doesn't check at all) if it happens to match sense-data. It really is the ultimate clash between the bottom-up versus top-down approach, and which direction you prefer to go ultimately determines which camp you belong to. For me, sense-data stresses me out. It's confusing. You have to average things, because systems are often so complicated and have so many confounding variables, that you have to ignore the non-linearities of pretty much everything before you can actually say something about the "real world." By then, you're not talking about the real world, you're talking about some idealization of the real world which exists in platonic space and by then you should be doing mathematics and just burn the bridge that supposedly connects you to the real world.

Additionally, I'm a philosopher. I was fed skepticism for breakfast ever since I was a child. I'll never forget auditing my Dad's Philosophy 101 class at James Madison University when I was in middle school and first learning about Descartes and his meditations. The rational skepticism and inability to tell sleeping states from waking states fundamentally shook my faith in sense-data. Sure the electrons always split into "spin-up" and "spin-down" states when past through an inhomogeneous magnetic field, but I could just be dreaming and then what? I think always having that uncertainty that I might devote my life to understanding and explaining sense-data and then wake up into a parallel universe, where I find out my entire life was just some strange dream in some strange universe with strange physics, really undermines the feeling of value and worth in taking that path as a profession.

This brings me to the path which I have taken: the top-down approach. With this approach, at the end of the day, you really don't care too much if the structures you've built match what is "out there" because they're your structures and they are intrinsically beautiful,
independent of their relevance to the "outside world."

However you should do what you enjoy the most. If you are actively squirting dopamine and serotonin by thinking about the path of a charged, spinning particle, passing through an inhomogeneous magnetic field, great. More power to you. When you die or wake up into that alternate universe, and find out that everything is different from what you thought it won't matter, because you enjoyed your life, and that is all that matters. So find out what you like and if its not math or physics, its bound to be something else, and if it is washing dishes so that you can spend your evenings partying like a rockstar, that's cool too. If its raising funds to feed hungry babies in Africa, that's also great. As long as your dopamine levels are high and this very moment you are glad to be experience something rather than nothing, you're living the good life. I realize the logic is backwards, but if I could've convinced myself that physics is worth doing, then I would enjoy doing it and would be happy devoting my life to it even it turned out to be a farce. Instead, my skepticism about the meaning of my activities, has led me to take a different path, but I'm enjoying the path and the sights it has to show me are truly breathtaking.

However the things which really bug me is when our beautiful mathematical structures do find their place in the "real world." It makes you wonder if this is the case because our mathematics shapes the way we can think about things, and thus the bias lies in the observer and not the observed, or it could be there is some weird underlying fabric of reality that is mathematical and does reside in some Platonic world of ideas, and our eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and tongue are just the biological interface for this digital graphing of mathematics into our minds.

So I'm left with a goal: To master all the mathematics in Roger Penrose's The Road to Reality and see if really does lead me there. The journey will certainly take a while, but I'm up for the ride.

Fall 2007 Course Selection

Alright! Enough! Here it is: My Fall Course Selection.

For Credit:
18.101 - Analysis on Manifolds
18.701 - Algebra I
18.904 - Seminar in Topology
24.111 - Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics
21W.775 - Writing about Nature and Environmental Issues

For Listening Fun:
18.102 - Introduction to Functional Analysis
18.905 - Algebraic Topology

Quantum Mechanics and Experience

One of the classes I'll be taking this semester is 24.111 - Philosophy of Quantum Mechanics. Today I just bought the required text, Quantum Mechanics and Experience by David Z. Albert. The book looks pretty good, with a solid layman introduction to the foundational principles of quantum mechanics.

My dance with Quantum Mechanics (QM) has been a really interesting one. Prior to my coursework this past year at Cambridge, I objected to the conclusions of quantum mechanics advertised in popular science books because it ran against my mental model of the universe. My struggles with the conceptual foundations of QM were very much in the same vein as Einstein's critique of the theory. The idea that probability has a real existent status deeply troubled me. Always before, probability was a description of averages and distributions. A coin toss -- the idol of probability -- was still fundamentally governed by Newton's Laws, the forces in the room, the initial configuration of the coin in your hand, the torque, the impulse of your thumb on the coin, the chaotic turbulence of the air molecules in the room, the list goes on but all the initial configurations and momenta could theoretically be specified and then the entire motion could be simulated as the solution of a large system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs) -- Laplace's Demon all over again. But QM is a whole different bag of nuts... Instead of solving specifically for things like position and momentum and energy, you have state vectors, and your eigenfunctions of these operators form the basis of an infinite-dimensional space known as Hilbert space. What's new about all of this is that our description of a particle is described by the time evolution of the coefficients of each of these eigenfunctions. Now we can't perceive this superposition, but rather -- and this is the really crazy bit of the whole theory -- only the eigenfunctions can be measured. So our particle is like a point wandering around in infinite dimensional Hilbert space when no one is looking. It's like Mr. Observer finally shines his flashlight in the car window and asks "Hey!?! What are you kids doing?!?" and our couple is always caught in any one of these (usually an infinite number of) compromising positions, but they're never caught scrambling to put clothes on or in a acrobatic transition or superposition of pages of the Kama Quantum Sutra.

So it will be interesting to see what insights 24.111 will bring, and complemented with 18.102 - Introduction to Functional Analysis, this should be a tantalizing semester spent exploring Hilbert space!

PKD Defines Reality

Part of my inspiration to start blogging was to capture daily whims. Everything from "Song of the Day" to "Quote of the Day" to the more idiosyncratic "Theorem of the Day". So here it goes:

Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away. -- Philip K. Dick

'nuff said.

Anamnesis: PKD and Plato

So today I decided to treat myself to a new book: The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings

I've always enjoyed the thoughts of PKD and this appears to be an excellent compilation of his philosophical corpus. In August 2006, I read A Scanner Darkly and Valis in rapid succession. At times, I found myself getting really wrapped up and carried away with the ideas in Valis. I became intrigued with the idea that there is some sort of secret knowledge to be attained and that the attainment of said knowledge could lead to the transcendence of the current level of reality.

Of course as a rational thinker, when making a coherent mental model of reality I can't completely ignore sense-data. However, as a mathematician I also feel that there are structures that are in some sense more fundamentally real then the things which I perceive with my five senses. When comparing the statements

1. Snow is white.
2. Over the ring of integers, 1+1=2.

one seems to be a directly contingent truth (potentially different in other possible worlds), while the other is tautologically true given the definitions, axioms and rules for inference. Certainly a formal system has a sort of self-contingent truth status that stands upon legs that are summoned seemingly out of nowhere, but mathematicians don't like to just invent symbols and rules of manipulation for shits and giggles, rather there is a genuine attempt to intuit structure that is "out there" and formulate this structure into a rigorous mental model.

Although mathematicians are careful creatures -- when pressed they will fall back into a more conservative outlook on the ontological status of mathematics -- when we are not observed, we tend to really believe in the Platonist outlook -- that there is a realm of fundamental forms that exists on a different level from our material universe and that the interplay between these worlds is as beautiful and intriguing as we could possibly hope for.

This leads me finally to the key word in the title of this post: Anamnesis. Lawrence Sutin describes it as "the recollection of the archetypal realm of Ideas of Plato" and he hits the nail on the head. He uses it to describe what is for PKD ideally the case, with the other option being that people like Plato, Hermes Trismegistus, The Gnostics, PKD and a lot of mathematicians (maybe not all at once) are all totally wacked out bouncing-bananas-in-straight-jackets crazy.