monkey see, monkey do serves as a personal blog and creative outlet for
the neural buddhists
david brooks at the new york times posted an op-ed column recently titled the neural buddhists and it made the rounds quickly in my buddhist circles.
i have a few random thoughts about it, but generally i’m unsure about the characterization of contemplative buddhism as merely psychological and completely logical as it comes to american shores. there is something about it, in my experience, that is about seeing the limitations of logic to model our world and gaining flexibility or rather awareness of that tendency to reduce and then dismiss large parts of our experience. nonetheless, i have some thoughts below the break.
in this editorial, when he talks about materialists and the new atheists, he typifies what my concern is with the selfish gene simplification — that it might justify unethical behavior and attitudes — in how he disqualifies it. he seems to refute not the true meaning but what i’m concerned would become the conventional meaning. the conventional meaning i fear is that our anatomy is inherently competitive, so therefore we must overcome this anatomy to become peaceful and enlightened. but i think that viewpoint has unfortunate side effects, and authors should take care and responsibility for not promoting it.
this is the same problem i see with dawkins and the new atheists. i think dawkins, et al. have a responsibility to understand their readers mis-interpretations as much as convey their viewpoint, in particular as they get more popular and have more responsibility for the welfare of their fellow humans. the mis-interpretation of the biological view of ’selfishness’ is a dangerous thing. it’s similar to the racist justifications of the early 20th century.
as for the article, it felt like one could read into it a dichotomy concerning the soul: that it has to exist or not exist. but i don’t think it needs to be read dichotomous. more i see the point being that being is more complex than we first thought. in the 1950’s, there was a view in cybernetics that mind could be modeled logically. artificial intelligence was around the corner because mind works just like a computer. but that hasn’t been the case.
i’m not sure what he’s getting at about buddhism though. he didn’t expound on that or what that means.
to me it means that our tendency to pin things down, that the causes of mind are this or that, is merely the mind’s desire to logically model in a reduced way something that is significantly more complex but then to disassociate with the complexity and prefer the warm cocoon of it’s conceptual model instead or entirely. the desire to make dichotomies that something exists or does not exist — like the soul — is in itself a kind of mental oversimplification and dismissal. mahayana buddhism would not say that the soul exists or does not exist, but that we cannot truly know. or that the whole point is conceptual and therefore limited in the realm of concept. yet scientific materialists are arguing for it’s definitive non-existence. that might be a form of cocoon too, even just the definiteness of that.
so i think he’s pointing out that the materialists’ early views in the 1950’s — that things must be simple or just dead matter and interconnections — proved to be too simple and untrue. Therefore their premise that such simplified models must prove that a soul does not exist also then has a fundamental flaw. They were wrong before, so then how can their basis continue to disprove the existence of a soul now?
anyway, he doesn’t explain enough for me to guess at his view. i’m just talking out loud here.
buddhism in my experience of it is also is saying that you will be compost in a few years, just that it could be a joyful situation. if we’re upset about the prospect of being compost, we can look more at our viewpoint about ourself and how our thoughts and emotions arise — the ecosystem of our thoughts and emotions perhaps — and figure out why that’s such a sad idea and get familiar with how that mental model creates sadness. then we might notice how the mental model of our “self” as separate is a kind of cocoon we’ve been trapped in.
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10. June 2008 at 8:38 am :
Ohhh.. This is the kind of stuff I’m reading in Wallace, right now. Thanks! Printing and using.
10. June 2008 at 10:11 am :
awesome.
15. June 2008 at 7:08 am :
As far as arguing against competition being biologically ingrained….what do you think is happening among organisms in the woods, sea, or any habitat really? at the prom? stock market? Schools? Racism, sexism, much of our dirty laundry stems from being competitive without the bounds usually provided by empathy/compassion (also things I’d argue are inherent to human nature). I find it strange that its fundamental role in human behavior is even disputable. Acknowledging that competition is hard-wired in humans is not a blessing by Dawkins nor anyone that racism and the like is at all justifiable. To ignore competitiveness and assume it’s purely learned is folly. To reduce human nature to that singular quality and use it as a lame excuse for bad behavior is idiocy (= not what Dawkins is doing in the least. People who would take that extreme viewpoint have more problems than simply being stupid asses. If literate, such folks would likely would never read Dawkins anyhow). So what about empathy? capacity for altruism? tendency for close social bonding as instilled in social mammals such as ourselves? These are all things I’d also consider inherent to the human species, which is clearly not one-dimensional/purely competitive in nature. It’s a complicated mix of checks and balances, no? Is minimizing the competitive tendency not something people try to overcome via meditation?
16. June 2008 at 9:18 am :
I’m hearing a few points in your comment, including:
Am I understanding your points properly?
Firstly, I have to be careful with using the term “inherent”, since I’m knee deep at the moment studying 19th, 9th, 5th, and 2nd century indian and tibetan philosophers and they had very particular ways of discussing the term “inherent”. As a result, when I hear that term now I hear it to mean independent of causes and conditions. And if we were to analyze carefully for that we would find that nothing is independent of causes and conditions. Therefore nothing is inherent whatsoever.
But in terms of biological systems, that’s just saying perhaps that causes and conditions like one’s genetics and environment and what other organisms one encounters all influence what we would interpret to be ‘competition’ or a tendency toward competition. Similarly what we might observe as a tendency toward altruism or empathy.
I’m sure you’ll agree that we may never know what’s really going through the minds of animals, or the impulses of small creatures. But we can observe behavior and describe the situation using common terms like competition or altruism. But we’re describing what we’re observing and then making conjectures about the various causes and conditions. Scientists such as yourself i imagine are careful by what they mean by appropriating such terms, and go to lengths to define them in greater detail in academic contexts.
I have no problem with the conjecture that one’s genetics will influence the observed appearance of competitive or altruistic behavior. That it is part of the causes and conditions. That’s fine for me. But I think it’s very important not to forget what we’re doing, we’re modeling from our point of view and our language for things something that is more complex and we’ll never be able to fully predict or understand the complete totality of the causes and conditions that are leading up to the present moment. And therein is the rub.
For example, what appears as a certain behavior now to us might change completely based on what else we learn later or when the conditions of an organism change. Or its genetics may even slowly shift. So it’s not a permanent thing. I guess the question then is there some higher form or principle, such a competition generally, that somehow rules independent upon the causes and conditions. Plato thought such autonomous principles could be true. I disagree with that. I think they’re inseparable from the causes and conditions and an autonomous principle is merely our own viewpoint raised up and put on a pedestal.
One problem I see is that once we start to forget the part we’re playing in the construction of our mental models, and we start relating to the world through our mental models alone, that we get a little out of sync with what’s going on. The problem is not in being out of sync, it is in forgetting or not knowing that we’re out of sync. It’s fine to have reductive models, they’re incredibly useful as you’ve pointed out. We just must not forget that they’re reductive!
For a specific example, we thought Praying Mantis females would eat their males after sex. And for years that was the popular view. Then we discover just recently that we were just feeding the females the wrong food!! they were practically starving during the early experiments. And the mistaken view lasted so long that it is still urban legend.
Now is the praying mantis an example of an incorrect model or in forgetting that we had a reductive model for their behavior? Both I think. The former is just clarified with more science. The latter is an error in relying too much on the models and forgetting to keep in mind that models are mental constructs inseparable from the point of view of human mental tendencies. Those human mental tendencies even vary over time and era. The kinds of biases from tendencies made a hundred years ago are different than today, so I don’t think we can even say particular characteristics of human bias are “inherent” but just the result of causes and conditions of the time and recent philosophic thoughts, etc.
So in summary, the issue I have is perhaps mostly philosophic: that we forget the part we play in our mental modeling and then we forget that we’re viewing the world through a reduced mental lens and that creates problems.
With respect to racism and other ills, I believe one issue is taking the reduced models of biological systems and then interpreting that in an incorrect way and justifying all kinds of immoral views using it. If that happens, is that the authors fault? Not entirely, it is also the fault of the person reading Dawkins or whomever and misunderstanding. But my point is that scientists like Dawkins take great care in academic contexts to be clear about their terms and what terms mean. When they then go and write popular books, they enter a context where readers do not have that background or understanding nor have the habit of endeavoring to understand the terms and what they mean to that level of care. Therefore, it is the responsibility of folks like Dawkins to understand that new context and take greater care with both the terms and how their readers are introduced to them. In cases where there are social implications of the writing, like with EO Wilson, there is an even greater moral responsibility of the writers that their points are not misunderstood and greater care is required. To ignore that is unethical. I fear some academic writers are failing on that point and their popular non-academic texts are at risk for having negative ethical consequences. They must be more careful with their terms as they move them from an academic context to a popular context. I don’t lay the entire concern on their shoulders, but I do rest a greater responsibility on them.
As an aside, in Mahayana Buddhist language, when I say that things are empty I’m just saying that we need to separate the mental models that we view the world through from the actual experience of the world. The actual world is empty of our mental elaborations about it basically. Those elaborations are not contained within the world independent of us. Our mental elaborations are only our own. So by saying the world is empty it is not a blank emptiness, a flat emptiness. It is a more rich world than the mental reductions, I’m sure you’ll agree.
We may have increasingly developed a habit of relating to the world through those mental models solely - believing that they are the actual world - and we could discuss that point. Being empty means being infinitely more rich because we’ve developed a direct clarity of what is our mental model and what is the actual experience of the world.
So that said, the path of meditation could be used to cultivate specific qualities in oneself like compassion, reduction of stress, relaxation and so forth. But the special means of the Buddhists is to use meditation to cultivate the insight of knowing clearly and with complete confidence what part of our perceptions is the actual experience of the world and what part of our perception are the mental elaborations that we’ve added to the world and never being confused about which is which. It is that confusion that is said to be the source of suffering and indirectly the cause of social ills like war and poverty. It’s the misunderstanding that our own elaborations are the actual world. We forget that our emotions are part of our own experience and we then harm others to make them stop, etc. etc.
14. July 2008 at 5:41 am :
wow.
14. July 2008 at 9:14 am :
Ya, I got carried away a little with this post.
14. July 2008 at 12:52 pm :
I didn’t even finish reading your comment. Don’t you and omphalina ever talk on the phone?
Wow again.
14. July 2008 at 12:57 pm :
it’s possible i had too much coffee that day.
15. July 2008 at 6:44 am :
I love the bullets at the beginning of the comment.
15. July 2008 at 7:20 pm :
i try to live a life inspired by power point. <snicker>
17. July 2008 at 10:09 am :
You could do worse. Reminds me of this.
http://www.davidbyrne.com/art/eeei/index.php
I found yours charming, even if (or maybe because) it was somewhat odd in its formality. A+
18. July 2008 at 5:34 pm :
Wow, someone just mentioned his PowerPoint work to me as recently as last week. Thanks for pointing that out.