Ivan Illich

I just learned about a fascinating essay, Energy and Equity, written by Ivan Illich in 1973. It's about how we shape ourselves by the way we shape our world. More particularly it focuses on how physical power consumption, kilowatts, is connected to political power. Even more particularly, it focuses on how high speed transportation destroys local communities.

I want to study this essay more, but this short note can at least serve as a public bookmark.

Fragility and Transcendence

Dmitri Orlov posted a great talk on the difficulty of predicting the timing of system failures. The challenge he identifies is that systems are designed and constructed on the basis of a model of the way the world works, the interactions between the system and its environment. As long as reality matches the model tolerably well, accurate predictions are feasible. But it is always possible for reality to diverge from the model, throwing the system into uncharted territory where even the modes of failure are unknown, much less their timing.

As David Loy pointed out in his Buddhist History of the West (SUNY 2002), the character of a culture is largely a matter of a strategy for systematizing experience, a struggle to impose an orderly understanding of and control over phenomena. Our modern industrial culture is yet another such strategy, remarkable for its mechanistic materialism, its vast breadth and lack of depth. Life in general consists of an endless series of attempts to repair the breakdowns of the ever-shifting strategies.

Is it possible to build a model from which reality will never diverge? If instead every possible model has some limited scope beyond which the risk of divergence becomes non-negligible, can a model incorporate an accurate definition of its own scope of validity? Can any sort of higher level meta-model of the models themselves somehow extend or transcend the limits of those models, or is any meta-model really just another model with the same inevitable sorts of limits as any other model? Such fascinating and challenging metaphysical questions have been explored deeply over the millennia. In the Buddhist tradition, these discussions revolve around the topic of emptiness and the two truths (relative and ultimate). In the European tradition these are core philosophical questions in the realms of ontology, epistemology, and philosophy of science.But whatever one's metaphysical approach might lead one to expect, our experience continues to be one of constant surprise and breakdown. Whether or not a universally valid model is possible, no such model is in our grasp.

In Buddhism, one's understanding of the inescapability of constant breakdowns and one's approach to managing the repair process are at the core of its transformative project, liberation from suffering for oneself and those with whom one shares those struggles. Our present struggle itself is, at every moment, a perfect example displaying the true nature of reality, a doorway to understanding and effective engagement.

While every moment brings some such struggle with that kind of precious potential, our present crisis of industrial culture, where the breadth of our social-technical systems is amazingly exceeded by the scope of their breakdowns, from the nuclear meltdowns of Fukushima to the massacres of the Syrian civil war, from the collapse of financial institutions in New York to the collapse of ice shelves in Antarctica, the magnitude of our present crisis perhaps brings an opportunity of parallel magnitude, to see in this crisis the stamp of reality, the nature of samsara, the clear understanding of which and effective engagement with which are its transcendence.

Karma and Technology

Ran Prieur posted an interesting interview with Kevin Kelly. What really caught my attention was a statement by Kelly:

I would say over the long-term that humans cannot really influence the direction of technology and I would say that there are certain inevitabilities in the progression of technologies. What we can influence is the character of the technologies.

This brings out strongly for me the fundamental topic of emptiness and interdependent origination, and perhaps more fundamentally the topic of karma. I expect that Kelly appreciates the superficial absurdity of his statement, that humans cannot direct technology. Modern science has had some spectacular success in accepting some absurdity like this and following its implications to discover some very surprising facets of the world. Einstein's Theory of Special Relativity is probably the paradigmatic instance. Here Kelly follows the idea that technology is not directed by humans to the further notion that technology has become a seventh kingdom of life, alongside Plants, Animals, Fungi, etc. This is certainly a stimulating vision but it can be misleading too.

Clearly modern technology is a massive global collective activity and there is little that any single individual can do to direct its evolution. This, of course, is not unique to technology. Humans are social animals with extraordinarily complex patterns of cooperative behavior. Politics would be another primary example. Can human beings direct their own methods of conflict resolution away from violence and war and toward some more constructive approach? What sense does it make to talk of any group of humans or of humanity as a whole directing anything at all or indeed performing any action at all.?

Kelly asks us to imagine rewinding and rerunning history, like a laboratory experiment. This underscores the connection to the general puzzle of free will. Not only is it problematic to understand what it means to speak of a collective action, it is just a deep a problem to understand the nature of individual action. But look again at how the puzzle arises, where we rewind and rerun history. Here is an action that stands outside the history that is being rewound and rerun. Agency and free will belong properly to the subject, determinacy belongs to the object, or, where there is indeterminacy, that indeterminacy is attributed to chance. When a person keeps shifting perspective, looking ever more deeply within to find their own mind, the root of their agency, the failure to finally isolate subjectivity as an object is not due to the subject somehow being illusory in comparison to the reality of the object, but to the fundamental structure of conceptuality, the duality of subject and object.

There is indeed value to the kind of courage that can follow subtle clues, like the problem of the behavior of light in a moving frame of reference, to surprising conclusions, like the relativity of a relationship as basic as simultaneity. If the subject is not a contingent object but instead the mirror of the object in a duality that gives rise to both, then free will is not mere raw material to be incorporated into some technological system but a perspective that defines technology. Do bees make bee hives or are bees and bee hives together a system to be managed by bee keepers? This is a question of perspective, not one to be answered by accumulating data.

Our identity is so deeply enmeshed within our technology. We are the drivers of our automobiles, we are the readers and writers of our blogs and text messages. To see our technology as impermanent, as arising through causes and conditions, is to see ourselves as impermanent arisings. Not only do we have the power and responsibility to direct our technology, we have that same power and responsibility to create ourselves. To treat technology as inevitable is to deny our potential, a retreat from courage that can hide only temporarily and superficially from the deep currents of impermanence and interdependence. Waking up to the truth of our vastness is not a trivial matter but a process that begins with a choice, the choice to recognize that what we do, what we decide, makes a real and profound difference.

Risk

The recent announcement by JP Morgan that they had lost 2 billion dollars through shoddy hedging trades has brought up again the question of how to regulate banks, to prevent them from gambling with public money. Given the important role of banking in the national and world economy, the trust placed in them by the public, and the government's backing of this trust, it seems clear enough to me that banking regulation is important. On the other hand, life is inherently risky. It is not feasible to demand that banks avoid all risk. Banking operations will inevitably involve risk management rather than risk avoidance. What's the difference between risk management and gambling? Surely regulation ought to constrain the sorts of risk taking that is acceptable by banks. But it doesn't appear to be a simple matter, to draw a clear line with only acceptable strategies on one side and only unacceptable strategies on the other.

The mathematical tool that displays most clearly a risk management strategy is a probability distribution. A bank will take the money it holds and invest it in various ways. It can hold currency, or loan the money to customers, or buy treasury bonds, or any number of other ways to try to make money. At the simplest level, a bank should put money into whatever has the best return. If a loan returns 8% while a treasury bond returns only 2%, it surely makes better sense to loan out money rather than buying treasury bonds. On the other hand, it happens all too often that borrowers default. The expected 8% return can turn into a 30% loss. Perhaps the greater safety of treasury bonds outweighs the lesser return. Of course, with enough loans, probably most of them will be paid back and only a few will default.

Somehow a bank needs to estimate with a reasonable degree of accuracy the probabilities of the various possible returns of the various possible investments. One source of risk is simple ignorance, the unknown unknowns. A bank needs to hire the experts who can make accurate estimates, avoid investments where such expertise is unavailable, and keep a watchful eye that the experts don't shy away from too many good new ideas or become overconfident about too many bad old ideas.

Given an understanding of the probabilities of various outcomes from individual investments, and of correlations among those outcomes, a bank can then evaluate proposed portfolios, can derives the probabilities of outcomes for various combinations of investments. Each potential portfolio will imply a cumulative probability distribution with a shape something like:

Here the greatest likelihood is that of a moderate return. There is a small probability of a loss, and also a small probability of a very high return. This distribution could represent the existing portfolio of a bank. A small shift in the portfolio, moving money into a new type of investment, will change this distribution somehow.

The most attractive sort of shift is a pure win:

The dashed line shows the new distribution. If at every possible level of return the probability of making less money decreases and the probability of making more money increases, the decision becomes very easy. The proposed new investment is too good to pass up!

Generally, of course, one is faced with more difficult decisions. A typical investment might add some potential for losses, but more likely will bring improved returns:

Another type of investment that often, though not always, make good sense is some kind of insurance. Insurance will reduce the probability of large losses, at the price of smaller returns under other circumstances:

A genuine gamble is one that most likely will lose money but for which there is a smaller probability of a large win:

Of course, real proposals will often involve complex shifts in the probability distribution, giving them aspects of both increasing and reducing risk:

To regulate effectively the risk management practices of financial institutions, one must distinguish between the sorts of risks that can be taken:

• Investments can involve significant unknowable risks, e.g. because of possible political or technological shifts.
• Understanding risks, i.e. accurately estimating the probability of a proposed portfolio, can involve considerable expense that the institution might be unwilling or unable to incur.
• Even when accurate probability distributions are available, it is not clear or simple how to distinguish which distributions represent responsible risk and which constitute violations of the public trust.

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.