The Ethereal Mind

Science continues to push at its frontiers: out to the remotest galaxies, back to the origins of the universe, down into the most ephemeral fragments of subatomic particles. The genetic code underlying life is read and decoded. Even the profoundest mystery, the nature of the mind, seems to be emerging into visibility. Ever more powerful dynamic probes reveal the detailed behaviors of the brain. At a much more fundamental level, experiments with quantum mechanical systems continue to clarify the role of measurement, how observation of a system inevitably interferes with its evolution.

There is a tantalizing puzzle here. The nature of mind is at the heart of Buddhism. Buddhism uses introspection to investigate this nature, rather than fMRI machines or photomultiplier sensors. Curiously, the general structure of the Buddhist investigation is to attempt to grasp the mind through ever subtler means and to discover the futility of every such attempt. But perhaps that futility was simply a matter of inadequate technology. Now, finally, are we becoming able to reveal in stark contrast what has remained in the shadows for millennia?

It is a bit of an odd question to contemplate. Certainly methods such as fMRI reveal many intriguing regularities in neural behavior, and correlations between these and various cognitive behaviors. What sort of phenomenal pattern might justify our exclamation, "Ah, there it is, the mind!?"

Our experience of our own mind is intimate in unsurpassable degree. Looking at others, it's quite a mystery. People seem to be an unravellable tangle of sparkling insight and blind automatism. Indeed, reflecting on one's own behavior, it is often embarrassingly easy to find instances that trigger one to ask, "What was I thinking?"

At the end of the 19th Century, physicists were homing in on their goal of discovering the nature of the ether, the medium that carries electromagnetic waves such as light. Einstein's breakthrough realization, the Theory of Special Relativity, revealed that the ether was an illusion, that light is not the sort of thing that is carried by any sort of medium. One could say that light is its own medium: the changing electric and magnetic fields of one moment generate the fields of the next moment. The ether was to provide a frame of reference in which the behavior of electric and magnetic fields had a logical structure. In its place, the Theory of Special Relativity outlines the relationships among an infinite family of frames of reference, in every one of which electric and magnetic fields have the same logical structure.

I would like to propose that the scientific discovery of the nature of mind might well turn out to be surprisingly compatible with the teachings of Buddhism. The mind is what perceives and what acts, much as the ether carried electric and magnetic fields. Just as the ether provided a fixed frame of reference from which to understand electromagnetism, the mind is the locus of our confrontation with the world. Just as the realization of the non-existence of any privileged frame of reference paved the way for understanding how to work with multiple frames of reference, so might the realization of the nature of mind open us to vaster perspectives. The locus of confrontation between mind and world is not anything fixed but a frame of reference from which appears a history of experience.

Does our perceptual and active confrontation with the world actually seem to have any such sort of shiftable character?

Quantum measurement provides a first exhibit. Between some quantum phenomenon such as a photon and the ultimate act of observation, there is a whole chain of intermediary physical systems, such as a photomultiplier tube, an impulse counter, an eye, a brain; we are free in our analysis of the system to stop anywhere along this chain, treating as the quantum system as much of the world as we choose, and the remainder as the classical observer. The shiftable character of mind is very clear in this case.

Consider the puzzle of global warming as another very different exhibit. Allow me to stipulate that indeed the continued combustion of fossil fuel at the present scale will lead to ecological catastrophe and thence human catastrophe. What is to be done? The frustrating and intriguing nature of this question is that it depends on just who is the doer under discussion. As the human race, our options are straightforward enough: we must dramatically reduce our net emission of greenhouse gasses. Of course, how such coherent action might emerge out of the tangled mass of planetary humanity… that is a daunting puzzle! But the puzzle is not much less daunting however one shifts the boundary between observer/agent and world. What should the United States of America do as a nation? What should the United State Federal Government do? What should the State Department do? What should the American Association for the Advancement of Science do? What should I as an individual do? Perhaps I need most to steer somehow the thinking of the American public on this issue, and that might require me to increase my consumption of fossil fuels, flying about to various meetings etc.

A similar sort of shiftiness is apparent in the puzzle of diet, as outlined by Gary Taubes in his book Good Calories, Bad Calories. Clearly the simple energetic relationship must hold within rather strict bounds, between dietary consumption of calories, expenditure of calories in physical activity, and storage of excess calories in fat. The difficulties arise in examining consumption and activity. A famished person will stop at little to find and consume food, and if frustrated will succumb to lethargy. To what extent is any individual's behavior a function of clear perception and free choice, and to what extent are we driven by the physiological imperatives of blood sugar, insulin, etc.

There is not merely philosophical value to a clearer understanding of the division of experience into an observer/agent and a world, of how that division is itself not a feature of the world but logically prior to the world, of how our choices of how to make that division give rise to our options for exploring and guiding the unfolding of our experience. For example, in macroeconomics there are many institutions that participate in the economy as they try to understand and guide it. Are their regular patterns of institutional intervention part of the system which those interventions are intended to steer?

Bikesteading

However dazzling the visions science gives us, of cosmology or microbiology etc., of at least equal importance is its practical value in helping us figure out how to live more comfortably, more successfully. Two questions then arise immediately. Is science tied to any particular measure of success? And, compared to what alternatives will science make us more successful?

For generations by now our cultural trajectory has blinded us to these questions. Science has enabled progress: every generation has lived more successfully compared to previous generations. Our success is obvious: just look at our amazing capabilities to build machines, to steer the wealth of the world to our purposes. Slowly though dissatisfaction with this trajectory has been growing. Also growing has been the effect of this trajectory on the world, as our growing human population meets tightening resource constraints. Ideally our thinking could lead the way to more sustainable ways of living, but it looks more and more like resource constraints will be the driving force.

Will our belief resist this change in thinking, our belief that science will put more and more resources at our disposal with every generation? Or can science help open our eyes so that reality can inform out beliefs. We can use science to live more successfully than we will if we cling to our blindness, but that is only a possibility.

The relationship between two discussions on the web highlighted this challenge for me. Dmitri Orlov talked about the ability "to abandon who you have been and to change who you are in favor of what the moment demands," while a thread on Bike Forums puzzled over a fellow who lives on his bicycle. Is Fred a bicycle tourist or a homeless person with a bike?

Orlov talks about seasteading, living on a sailboat. (I gather he walks his talk!) In honor of Fred, I would like to introduce the term "bikesteading".

A bicycle is surely a pinnacle of scientific technology. Bikesteading might not be the perfection of sustainability, but it might be one excellent response to the reality we're facing in the coming decades.

Dazzling Visions

During the question and answer session of last weekend's teachings by Bardor Tulku Rinpoche at Kunzang Palchen Ling, a question came up about theories of physics presented in the Nova series Fabric of the Cosmos and how these theories relate to views expounded in Buddhism. I confess that I haven't watched the Nova episodes yet, but I expect that a general approach to such questions will likely apply. Modern science is filled with dazzling visions of the nature of reality, and certainly the Buddhadharma has similarly dazzling visions. So perhaps these might coincide somehow or perhaps some mutual adjustment is called for; it is surely a ripe field for exploration.

Buddhism and science are both magnificent traditions that present multiple visions of reality, so many visions that in either case one could never realistically expect to master but a small fraction of them. For example, in Buddhism we can see the world as composed of the six classes of beings from those trapped in hell to those soaring in the heavens, or we can see the world as composed of a network of experiential events which can be classed under five headings, from form to consciousness. In science, the notion of the selfish gene underlying Darwinian evolution gives us one grand vision of the unfolding of nature; another point of view comes from a cosmologist like Brian Greene, a view growing out of the shapes of space-time drawn by general relativity combined somehow with quantized interactions of elementary particle theory.

While Buddhism and science are similar in the way they cultivate such surfeits of dazzling visions, they differ in how they propose this surfeit should be understood. This question is not really a scientific one at all, but rather one of the philosophy of science. While science itself can boast of countless extraordinary accomplishments, the philosophical understanding of its practice has a more difficult time making similar boasts. As scientists work to harmonize their various visions, the philosophers of science seem to splinter into ever narrower factions. And this splintering has real consequences: for example, the way that biological evolution or anthropogenetic climate change are sometimes dismissed as mere "theories". If there were some consensual notion of the relationship between scientific theories and scientific facts, perhaps such debates could progress toward reasonable conclusions.

But where philosophy of science is much the down-trodden Cinderella of the scientific world, the analysis of the status of the various views of Buddhism is rather the honored Princess. The various views are understood as being structured by their boundaries, by their limitations. One can move through a progression of views, each succeeding view providing a perspective from which to analyze the limits of the preceding view. But this series of perspectives is unbounded, or rather ends at a realization or wisdom that transcends any structure or view or perspective.

The value of the various views of Buddhism lies in their tendency to lead to this wisdom that transcends views. How do views support or permit or suggest this transcendence of themselves? Might scientific views, at least sometimes, also work in such ways?

One general answer follows a medical analogy. Progress along the Buddhist path is a matter of curing diseases, of eliminating confused habits. Views are medicinal: they can enable us to overcome our various patterns of self-imprisonment. But views themselves can have self-imprisoning side-effects. The best medicines let us simply let go of the treatment once their work is done. Lesser medicines may require further stages of subtler treatment to work through those side-effects. Of course the relationship to medicine is not merely one of analogy. A healthy body certainly can help provide one with better opportunities to progress along the path. At the very least, scientific views are compatible with Buddhism to the extent that they promote health and happiness.

Grand cosmological theories, such as those of Brian Greene, are rather far from application to practical human welfare. Perhaps one valuable use they might have is as a challenge: is every view really limited, or might some such grand cosmological theory really reflect the nature of reality in an unlimited way? Perhaps we need such fresh challenges if we are really to confront that question rather than treating it as an academic exercise.

Alternatively, we might observe that as scientific theories progress to encompass vaster ranges of phenomena, they bring ever more fundamental shifts in perspective. These theories drive us to let go of ever deeper assumptions. If we see that every assumption will similarly fall at one stage or another of such theoretical progress, perhaps we can infer whither this process leads, and simply let go utterly.

Complexity and Power

The world of electronic computing hasn't turned out much like originally envisioned. Thinkers like Leibniz and Hilbert realized that resolving deep questions requires subtle and precise logic. The human mind gets overwhelmed beyond a few layers of abstraction and too easily steps over some crucial gap, missing the details where whole legions of devils often hide. Machines can tirelessly apply inferential rules to logical expressions of daunting complexity. The surprise is that the movement this brings about tends to be horizontal rather than vertical. Indeed, still in the prehistory of computing, Gödel and Turing showed how mechanical application of rules cannot fathom the subtleties of the deepest truths. That lack of depth was the first surprise. But practical mechanical computing brought a second surprise. No one in the 1950s seems to have imagined that computers would become so universal that most folks in the developed world would routinely carry several around in various pockets, chatting with friends and checking on the stock market. Computing has become pervasive.

Parallel to these surprises, the breadth of computing instead of its depth, has come another surprise, the overwhelming complexity of the software that governs computation. The insights of Gödel and Turing in the 1930s already showed the way: code and data are interchangeable. The distinction is one of perspective. Each layer of code interprets data at an outer shell of a system, and itself becomes data to be interpreted by code the next inner shell of the system. The outer layers of the system merge into the vastness of modern life in the information age. Indeed, these layers evolve together, they drive each other's evolution. Computing pushes the complexity of life and life in turn pushes the complexity of computing.

When Leibniz and Hilbert dreamt of computational solutions to profound problems, they dreamt of software with the elegant simplicity and obvious universality of Platonic ideals. The standard formula of Garbage In, Garbage Out is too kind to software. Once software gets tangled enough, it is capable of producing Garbage Out no matter the quality of the input. And the explosion in breadth of computing guarantees that software will be tangled. Indeed, a further surprise is how we are constantly discovering new species, indeed whole new phyla, of tangles: viruses, worms, phish, etc.

This exploding ecology includes more than the two niches of software and user. There is also the software developer. As software complexity has exploded, a dream has lingered that at least the software development process could be managed as a clean methodical process. But slowly the realization has emerged that software and its developer are tightly coupled and evolve together, along with the user community, or not at all. How to manage this co-evolution is not so clear. But it is far more like leading a living community of farmers and artisans and their families than like arranging a flow of subassemblies in a factory. A healthy community is full of surprises, where a well run factory is devoid of them.

A common difficulty in any living community is where some small group gets into a reinforcing feedback loop which accelerates its growth at the expense of the rest of the system. Once this imbalance gets extreme enough, the feedback loop reaches its limits and the bubble collapses. This sort of dynamic happens in the world of software development. Software and its developers can push the complexity of the code and pull the user community along. At first the added complexity brings useful capability so the users incorporate the software more integrally into their business processes. The later levels of complexity serve more to bind the user community to the software ever more tightly, with less and less added utility. The developers can bleed the users to the point where a scary new start, and a shedding of the parasitic developers, happens despite all the efforts to maintain continuity. Often as not a new set of users springs up with the new developers.

In our information age, complex information processing technology is not developed solely by the software industry. Every institution involved in our lives of accelerating complexity is built around such technology. Medicine, automobiles and aerospace, agriculture, and finance all build devices and models of daunting complexity. Each of them are prone to the dynamic of exploiting users by binding them with chains of escalating complexity.

The recent film Inside Job poses the question: how is it that the very architects of the financial crisis of 2008 continue to hold positions of leadership in government and academia? Shouldn't the crisis they engineered disqualify them from those positions?

One good answer to this paradox may be the dynamic of binding users with escalating complexity. The financial system is vastly complex but also pervasively entangled with the rest of the economy. The developers of this system gain their awesome power through this entangled complexity.

Supporting Debate

Democracy, rule by the people, is a challenging goal. It's not practical above the village level to have an entire population gather to discuss a topic. Even at the village level… even at the individual level, gathering and analyzing evidence and tracing out the most likely consequences can push one's resources to the limits. Group dynamics tends to overwhelm any attempt at rational dispassionate consideration. Nowadays on the various internet discussion groups it has become all too obvious how quickly noise can swamp information.

Over the centuries, societies have worked out methods to filter out noise and bring information to the surface, to enable better decision making. Various forms of representative democracy and rules to structure debate yield decisions that surely remain imperfect but still in general vastly superior to mob or dictatorial rule. Representatives can be chosen by popular vote, as is usual for legislatures, or chosen more randomly, as with jury selection. I've read that some ancient Greek cities chose their legislators at random.

What interests me here are the new possibilities opened up by the internet. Certainly the internet already supports group decision making in many ways. Many retail sites give customers the space to offer and read ratings and opinions about products. Political discussion boards are of course filled with debates. The discussion behind Wikipedia articles is also fascinating: somehow that discussion needs to come to a conclusion, at least for the moment. I would like to sketch out here a rough idea for a system to support on-going debate on the internet.

The skeleton of the system is a set of propositions. These propositions should be statements about community affairs that might plausibly be true or false. The propositions themselves should be kept separate from the various arguments for or against them. However, a proposition might assert something about an argument or about a relationship between arguments, or about other propositions. A proposition should not, however, merely assert the truth of another proposition or the validity of some argument: such propositions would be redundant.

The flesh of the system is then the set of arguments. Each argument must support or oppose a proposition. Arguments can refer to various other proposition, some of which might be used as support, while others might be dismissed as invalid or irrelevant.

Users can then vote on propositions, supporting them or opposing them. These votes can be retracted or reversed at any time. Users can also maintain lists of the arguments for and against a proposition that they find most persuasive. A user can maintain such lists even without a current vote on the proposition.

Along with tallying votes, the system can track changes and inconsistencies in the relationship between propositions. For example, a popular argument in support of one proposition might rely on a second proposition as support. If the popularity of that second proposition declines significantly, then users could be alerted to review their support of the first proposition.

Similarly, if a widely accepted proposition asserts a logical relationship amongst the truth values of a set of other propositions, and the voting for those propositions is becoming less consistent with that logical relationship, then users could be alerted to that inconsistency.

The system would also maintain relationships between users. Users might frequently be found on the same side of the same propositions, or on opposite sides. They might find similar arguments convincing, even if they ultimately reach different conclusions on the propositions themselves. These relationships between users can then be used to cluster users along various dimensions, using methods such as principal component analysis.

Once users have been classified, then the voting on various propositions can be analyzed on the basis of that classification. More primitive analysis is also possible; for example, users who vote for this proposition tend also to vote against that proposition, etc.

The group decision making mechanisms supported by the system could also be used to maintain the system. For example, redundant propositions could be combined, complex propositions could be split into simpler components, and frivolous or abusive propositions could be deleted. Each of these operations could be suggested as a proposition which then could be argued. Judgment would generally be required to move from voting results to action: for example, users with a long record of involvement should generally be given more consideration than a flood of new users who have yet to establish trustworthiness. The goal of this system is not to automate judgment, but to support it.

The idea here is to establish a system something like Wikipedia. Wikipedia attempts to present a consensus picture of the way things are. This system, in contrast, has the goal of presenting the best arguments for and against the various alternative descriptions of how things are. The goal here is not to settle debates, but to filter out the noise and to highlight the key issues.

Networks of Correspondence

My friend David sent me this link to a video on the Transition Town movement. How communities can prepare for a radical decline in energy availability is surely a question that deserves great attention. There are many types of communities, though: not all are constrained to a small geographical region.

Advances in communications technology have been at the core of the transformation of community during the industrial revolution, from the telegraph through radio and telephone to the internet. But long distance communication goes back to ancient times: the famous post office motto is a description of ancient Persian letter carriers by the ancient Greek, Herodotus. It is quite conceivable that our modern person-to-person media of telephones and internet could well collapse as the resources required to maintain their infrastructure become increasingly scarce. A worthy challenge and opportunity is to find a way to use our present infrastructure as a scaffold to reconstruct the more robust system where ideas are exchanged via the physical exchange of ink on paper, via the post office, via snail mail.

There are many reasons to exchange letters and many general types of relationships with the people whom one might write to. The primary sort of exchange relationship is with people one knows primarily face to face. Perhaps a family member has moved away, or perhaps one maintains communication with people one has met while traveling. At the other extreme, one might exchange letters with representatives of various widely known institutions such as departments of the national government.

Between these extremes are networks of people with some common interest. e.g. scientific or artistic. Modern science was born with the rise of published printed journals that could broadcast ideas across large international communities. These journals grew out of networks of exchanged letters, which continued to thrive alongside and as a foundation for the printed journals up until the era of email. A beautiful vestige of this practice is the archive of Edsger Dijkstra.

Another recent technology that may well not long survive the resource peak is the photocopier. Nowadays there is a quite smooth spectrum of printing technologies, tailored for print runs of every size. Simple printing technology is good for large numbers of copies where the large set-up time can be effectively amortized, so that may well continue, as it has, for centuries. The real ferment of fresh thinking doesn't happen at that large scale, though. Vital culture can happen on a limited budget, but only with effective structures in place to make the best use of those resources.

Three practices necessary to an effective percolation of ideas through a network of correspondents are: a distributed set of address books, sufficiently cross-linked; a regular practice of letters being forwarded so that a single letter has multiple readers; and a regular practice of copying letters or extensive parts of them.

Keeping track of the locations of people has some challenges. People move from place to place at various time scales and it is not efficient to broadcast each move to every possible correspondent. There are also safety issues with broadcasting addresses too widely. To send a letter will generally involve several steps of forwarding, each step facilitated by a correspondent incrementally more intimate with the addressee. Some system is needed whereby copied and forwarded letters include enough network tracking data so responses can be sent back to the original author.

In the best of worlds, such a network of ideas being exchanged would already be up and running as internet and telephone systems crumple. Bits and pieces of such older systems still exist, e.g. telephone trees as an earlier form of an email distribution list. While our advanced technologies continue to function, these more primitive and resilient systems will have the form of a Creative Anachronism or some similar entertainment. But, like amateur radio or backyard gardening or bicycling, snail mail networks could very well take over as a core cultural practice, and on an almost unforeseeable time table, as resource constraints make it difficult or impossible to recover from the various inevitable failures of the more advanced technologies. Resilient technologies have failures too, but recovery is less expensive.

The Human Factor

I was out on my bike yesterday, out to Boiceville and back, delivering a small package to the high school. On my way back, I was having trouble getting my right foot off my pedal. I use Time ATAC pedals which usually work perfectly. Most often my foot is off the pedal because I am on a hill too steep for me to climb without taking a break or two. So on one of my little breaks, I looked at the bottom of my shoe. These pedals couple to cleats that are bolted to the bottoms of my shoes. There should be two bolts on each shoe, but my right shoe only had one bolt remaining, and the cleat had rotated around that one bolt. I reoriented the cleat and tightened the remaining bolt and managed to get back home - with more trouble from the hills than the pedals! I stopped at my Local Bicycle Shop and sure enough they had a spare bolt of the right size and shape, so that got my shoes back in business. I still have a lot of work to do to get strong enough for our local ups and downs!

The effectiveness of my bicycle really depends on a network of spare parts, maintenance supplies, and people with the expertise to use them. This is true of most any technology. On a much grander scale, this dependence is being made clear in Japan, with the problems at the Fukushima nuclear plant. Indeed, it is an interdependence. The nuclear plant requires some power source to pump cooling water, while the plant is itself a major power source. The plant's functioning is tied to its environment in many ways. Its geological environment was the immediate source of the present catastrophe, so that relationship is all too clear. But the human environment, the social context, is perhaps the most crucial facet upon which a nuclear plant depends.

I must say, I am thinking of the current pared down staff of fifty at the Fukushima plant, and thinking of their families. This staff is putting their own lives at grave risk in order to prevent this crisis from further escalation. These people are true heroes. I am praying that they can maintain clear thinking under such extraordinary stress, and that they get the support they need to succeed in their mission, to cool those reactors down, and the used fuel. I pray also for their families, that they can soon be reunited with their loved ones, with all in good health.

In weighing our options for future use of nuclear power, we need to consider what sort of arrangement could provide the greatest safety, or at least understand clearly and weigh accurately the risks involved. Since the earthquake was the primary cause of the Fukushima catastrophe, it's easy to put as a top priority: don't put nuclear reactors on geological faults. But it is very dangerous to get too focussed on the most recent failures of some technology, becoming blind to other key factors that simply haven't made themselves so obvious so recently.

The human side of nuclear technology is an essential factor to consider when weighing the risks in such systems. How might the society using a reactor fail to manage that reactor safely? War or plague or famine could weaken the society so they just don't have the capability to maintain regular servicing or to respond to some minor emergency. Technology for manufacturing spare parts might have been commonplace when the reactor was built, but could become obsolete and therefore prohibitively expensive. Various types of financial and political collapse could eradicate the engineering and managerial expertise required for such a complex system.

Nuclear Guardianship recognizes that while we have a choice whether to build new reactors, we have already committed ourselves, for many generations to come, to maintain the nuclear materials we have already generated. How can we be sure that future generations will be able to manage the nuclear wastes we leave behind? Some of this waste will remain highly toxic for tens of thousands of years, i.e. longer than recorded human history. This is already a daunting task.

The most likely way that buried waste might resurface is through human intervention. People fail to do good not merely through incapacity. Violence has been part of the human condition as long as there have been humans - that is at least a plausible hypothesis. There is a lot of trouble one can create or threaten with nuclear materials. Part of the challenge with nuclear technology is how to make sure the material and the expertise don't get into the wrong hands, the hands of people that might misuse it. Of course, misuse is a curious concept. One might classify any military use as misuse. Or perhaps military use is proper use if that use is by friendly agents, and only constitutes misuses if it is by enemy agents. Who can actually decide whether and how to use nuclear technology in the future?

Geology is a difficult science - earthquakes and tsunamis are impossible to forecast with any precision. But human behavior is so much more complex and unpredictable. If we don't want to build reactors near geological fault lines, shouldn't we also avoid building them near human fault lines?