Twelve Links

Evolutionary quality

2006-08-30T10:30:00.000+01:00

Some more thoughts about "values" as providing a descriptive basis of a workable paradigm. In retrospective terms, we could say that evolution is the creation of valuable information through selective replication and innovation. That is, information - and its phenotypic extension - that survives environmental pressures becomes valuable by virtue of its being successfully propagated.

On this subject I found this short article at http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/EVOLVAL.html which pursues this same naturalisation of values:

While primary values cannot be derived from nature, they must be consistent with evolution and natural selection, the primary mechanism that has generated all of nature. This mechanism has an implicit value, as selection entails a preference for certain states of affairs over others. Natural selection can be seen to strive to maximize survival or fitness. Thus we take survival, in the most general sense, as the primary value. If we also take into account reproduction, the more general evolutionary value is fitness: maximizing the probability that our genes (or memes) will still be around in future generations. Because of the "Red Queen Principle" the seemingly conservative value of survival necessarily entails continuing progress, development, or growth: if you do not innovate by constantly trying out new variations, you will sooner or later lose the competition with those that do innovate. Thus we can from there derive the ultimate good as the continuation of the process of evolution itself, in the negative sense of avoiding evolutionary "dead ends" and general extinction, in the positive sense of constantly increasing our fitness, and thus our intelligence, degree of organization and general mastery over the universe.

Pirsig's MOQ takes the same two basic aspects of value, or quality, described here - survival and progression - and builds everything else from them. They are described as static quality and dynamic quality respectively. "Dynamic" is usually capitalised to signify its priority, both epistemological and ontological, but I don't want to get into that here other than to say that if natural selection is the mechanism that creates everything through replication and innovation, then some kind of innovation has to have come first. Anyway, Pirsig puts the "priority" of innovation like this:

The decisions that directed the progress of evolution are, in fact, Dynamic Quality itself.....Naturally there is no mechanism toward which life is heading. Mechanisms are the enemy of life. The more static and unyielding the mechanisms are, the more life works to evade them or overcome them.

(Pirsig, Lila, Ch11)

(Note: So Dynamic Quality has to cover all aspects of variation such as replication errors and mutations and the "spur of the moment" selection of parental genes that are spliced to create the DNA of their offspring as well.)

As is an ever more popular thesis, Pirsig then applies evolutionary principles to everything, using his own static-Dynamic vocabulary to give us a rich description of the process:

The division of all biological evolutionary patterns into a Dynamic function and a static function continues on up through higher levels of evolution. The formation of semipermeable cell walls to let food in and keep poisons out is a static latch. So are bones, shells, hide, fur, burrows, clothes, houses, villages, castles, rituals, symbols, laws and libraries. All of these prevent evolutionary degeneration. On the other hand, the shift in cell reproduction from mitosis to meiosis to permit sexual choice and allow huge DNA diversification is a Dynamic advance. So is the collective organization of cells into metazoan societies called plants and animals. So are sexual choice, symbiosis, death and regeneration, communality, communication, speculative thought, curiosity and art. Most of these, when viewed in a substance-centered evolutionary way, are thought of as mere incidental properties of the molecular machine. But in a value-centered explanation of evolution they are close to the Dynamic process itself, pulling the pattern of life forward to greater levels of versatility and freedom.

Sometimes a Dynamic increment goes forward but can find no latching mechanism and so fails and slips back to a previous latched position. Whole species and cultures get lost this way. Sometimes a static pattern becomes so powerful it prohibits any Dynamic moves forward. In both cases the evolutionary process is halted for a while. But when it's not halted the result has been an increase in power to control hostile forces or an increase in versatility or both. The increase in versatility is directed toward Dynamic Quality. The increase in power to control hostile forces is directed toward static quality. Without Dynamic Quality the organism cannot grow. Without static quality the organism cannot last. Both are needed.

(ibid. Ch11)

The questions I have at the moment are:

Is anything added to the theory of evolution by all this talk of values?
Does our understanding of values benefit from their linking to evolution?
Are values implicit in evolutionary theory?

With respect to the last question, if value are implicit in evolutionary theory and evolutionary theory can be applied to everything then values can be applied to everything.

Enformy?

2006-08-29T20:30:00.000+01:00

I've been thinking lately about the metaphor that all things are systems completely embedded in an environment which also comprises a system and so on. I read this article which proposes a universal principle which amounts to the opposite of entropy - enformy -:

http://www.enformy.com/$wsr02.html

..and found some interesting ideas which I'll come back to. Here is a snippet:

TES [Theory of Enformed Systems] explains the origin, fundamental properties, and behaviors of holistic systems at all ontological levels. TES does not displace the current scientific paradigms; instead, it forms their foundation. Four statements place TES in the context of the current disciplines: (a) A general theory of systems is necessarily a theory of organization; (b) because TES is a general theory of organization, it belongs to systemics—the science of holistic systems; (c) because organization per se is fundamental to all observable phenomena, systemics is the most basic branch of science; and (d) because TES is foundational to the prevailing paradigms of science, it is outside the prevailing Weltanschauung; i.e., it cannot be understood or interpreted in terms of the prevailing paradigms.
The prevailing paradigms address systems that are already organized, whereas TES addresses organization per se—its origin, elaboration, and maintenance. Organization per se is traditionally assumed to be a necessary precondition for scientific study, and not itself a subject of study. For instance, the standard model of the cosmos holds that the universe consists of (a) matter, comprising fundamental particles such as quarks, electrons, photons, etc.; (b) the properties of these particles, including charge, polarization, spin, etc.; and (c) mass and energy—two fundamental, conserved principles that determine the behaviors of matter. The work of science has been to discover and describe patterns of these behaviors. In physics, this work entails applying the organization inherent in mathematics to map the organization inherent in matter. As a result, the worldview of mathematical physics is blind to organization per se because organization is intrinsic to mathematics.
Systemics radicalizes this. It allows scientists to turn their attention to the question, "What is the origin of organization per se?"

Quantum Darwinism

2006-08-24T15:42:00.000+01:00

If one major thesis running through this blog is panrelationalism then another is the applicability of the basic premises of the Darwinian theory of evolution to almost any area of inquiry. Below is an article published in nature.com in 2004 describing how Wojciech Zurek and colleagues have attempted to show how a Darwin-like process of selective propagation of information can be used to describe the transition from quantum to "preferred" classical states:

If, as quantum mechanics says, observing the world tends to change it, how is it that we can agree on anything at all? Why doesn't each person leave a slightly different version of the world for the next person to find? Because, say the researchers, certain special states of a system are promoted above others by a quantum form of natural selection, which they call quantum darwinism. Information about these states proliferates and gets imprinted on the environment. So observers coming along and looking at the environment in order to get a picture of the world tend to see the same 'preferred' states.

If it wasn't for quantum darwinism, the researchers suggest in Physical Review Letters, the world would be very unpredictable: different people might see very different versions of it. Life itself would then be hard to conduct, because we would not be able to obtain reliable information about our surroundings... it would typically conflict with what others were experiencing.

The difficulty arises because directly finding out something about a quantum system by making ameasurement inevitably disturbs it. "After a measurement," say Wojciech Zurek at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico and his colleagues, "the state will be what the observer finds out it is, but not, in general, what it was before."

Because, as Zurek says, "the Universe is quantum to the core," this property seems to undermine the notion of an objective reality. In this type of situation, every tourist who gazed at Buckingham Palace would change the arrangement of the building's windows, say, merely by the act of looking, so that subsequent tourists would see something slightly different. Yet that clearly isn't what happens. This sensitivity to observation at the quantum level (which Albert Einstein famously compared to God constructing the quantum world by throwing dice to decide its state) seems to go away at the everyday, macroscopic level. "God plays dice on a quantum level quite willingly," says Zurek, "but, somehow, when the bets become macroscopic he is more reluctant to gamble." How does that happen?

The Los Alamos team define a property of a system as 'objective', if that property is simultaneously evident to many observers who can find out about it without knowing exactly what they are looking for and without agreeing in advance how they'll look for it. Physicists agree that the macroscopic or classical world (which seems to have a single, 'objective' state) emerges from the quantum world of many possible states through a phenomenon called decoherence, according to which interactions between the quantum states of the system of interest and its environment serve to 'collapse' those states into a single outcome. But this process of decoherence still isn't fully understood.

"Decoherence selects out of the quantum 'mush' states that are stable, that can withstand the scrutiny of the environment without getting perturbed," says Zurek. These special states are called 'pointer states', and although they are still quantum states, they turn out to look like classical ones. For example, objects in pointer states seem to occupy a well-defined position, rather than being smeared out in space.
The traditional approach to decoherence, says Zurek, was based on the idea that the perturbation of a quantum system by the environment eliminates all but the stable pointer states, which an observer can then probe directly. But he and his colleagues point out that we typically find out about a system indirectly, that is, we look at the system's effect on some small part of its environment. For example, when we look at a tree, in effect we measure the effect of the leaves and branches on the visible sunlight that is bouncing off them. But it was not obvious that this kind of indirect measurement would reveal the robust, decoherence-resistant pointer states. If it does not, the robustness of these states won't help you to construct an objective reality.
Now, Zurek and colleagues have proved a mathematical theorem that shows the pointer states do actually coincide with the states probed by indirect measurements of a system's environment. "The environment is modified so that it contains an imprint of the pointer state," he says.

Yet this process alone, which the researchers call 'environment-induced superselection' or einselection, isn't enough to guarantee an objective reality. It is not sufficient for a pointer state merely to make its imprint on the environment: there must be many such imprints, so that many different observers can see the same thing.

Happily, this tends to happen automatically, because each individual's observation is based on only a tiny part of the environmental imprint. For example, we're never in danger of 'using up' all the photons bouncing off a tree, no matter how many people we assemble to look at it.

This multiplicity of imprints of the pointer states happens precisely because those states are robust: making one imprint does not preclude making another. This is a Darwin-like selection process. "One might say that pointer states are most 'fit'," says Zurek. "They survive monitoring by the environment to leave 'descendants' that inherit their properties." "Our work shows that the environment is not just finding out the state of the system and keeping it to itself", he adds. "Rather, it is advertising it throughout the environment, so that many observers can find it out simultaneously and independently."

Preferata! Good or bad poetic science?

2006-08-23T15:42:00.000+01:00

While reading Dawkins' Unweaving The Rainbow I've been thinking about the distinction between literal and metaphorical description with respect to philosophy and science. The dictionary definitions of the words basically state that literal description gets at the "essential or genuine character of something" whereas metaphorical description is where "a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another." It seems to me that the way science sometimes claims to be providing literal descriptions is by inventing new words - by spinning out something from a more familiar term for similar observed or hypothetical phenomena (e.g. gluon* for the force that sticks quarks together), often by taking or amending a (sometimes quasi-) latin synonym (e.g. gravitas, latin for heavy) for what they are describing - thus avoiding the charge of metaphor.

So perhaps I could do the same and invent a word for describing how subatomic particles, chemicals, cells, animals, people, institutions, and everything else we can think of appear to express preferences in their observable behaviour and are in fact definable by the range of preferences they can express and the probability of them expressing them. I could call the smallest unit of anything a preferatum (plural: preferata) and explain their existence and behaviour as being a particular mode of preferation. So, for example, with a sufficiently serious look on my face I could say that it is not that there are electrons which can be said to express preferences but that electrons are in fact a species of inorganic preferata and that experimental data are in fact a record of the preferation from which the existence of electrons is inferred.

*glu·on
n.

A hypothetical massless, neutral elementary particle believed to mediate the strong interaction that binds quarks together.

[glu(e) + -on¹.]

Source: The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition
Copyright © 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Company.
Published by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved.

12 Threats to Global Security...

2006-08-21T16:46:00.000+01:00

...according to Robert Harvey in his Global Disorder. Just wanted to spread the good news and also remind myself to learn a bit more and maybe write a bit more about each of them here.

1. Terrorism
2. Islamic Fundamentalism
3. Oil
4. Nationalism
5. Nuclear proliferation
6. The Rogue State
7. The Disintegrationist State
8. Poverty
9. Overpopulation
10. The environment
11. Crime
12. The Globalisation of Human Rights

Latest stats on the Evolution vs Creation debate in the U.S.

2006-08-17T21:43:00.000+01:00

From New Scientist today - "Why doesn't America believe in evolution?" by Jeff Hecht. (Not sure how Intelligent Design figures in these stats):

Human beings, as we know them, developed from earlier species of animals: true or false? This simple question is splitting America apart, with a growing proportion thinking that we did not descend from an ancestral ape. A survey of 32 European countries, the US and Japan has revealed that only Turkey is less willing than the US to accept evolution as fact.
Religious fundamentalism, bitter partisan politics and poor science education have all contributed to this denial of evolution in the US, says Jon Miller of Michigan State University in East Lansing, who conducted the survey with his colleagues. "The US is the only country in which [the teaching of evolution] has been politicised," he says. "Republicans have clearly adopted this as one of their wedge issues. In most of the world, this is a non-issue."
Miller's report makes for grim reading for adherents of evolutionary theory. Even though the average American has more years of education than when Miller began his surveys 20 years ago, the percentage of people in the country who accept the idea of evolution has declined from 45 in 1985 to 40 in 2005 (Science, vol 313, p 765). That's despite a series of widely publicised advances in genetics, including genetic sequencing, which shows strong overlap of the human genome with those of chimpanzees and mice. "We don't seem to be going in the right direction," Miller says.
There is some cause for hope. Team member Eugenie Scott of the National Center for Science Education in Oakland, California, finds solace in the finding that the percentage of adults overtly rejecting evolution has dropped from 48 to 39 in the same time. Meanwhile the fraction of Americans unsure about evolution has soared, from 7 per cent in 1985 to 21 per cent last year. "That is a group of people that can be reached," says Scott.
The main opposition to evolution comes from fundamentalist Christians, who are much more abundant in the US than in Europe. While Catholics, European Protestants and so-called mainstream US Protestants consider the biblical account of creation as a metaphor, fundamentalists take the Bible literally, leading them to believe that the Earth and humans were created only 6000 years ago.
Ironically, the separation of church and state laid down in the US constitution contributes to the tension. In Catholic schools, both evolution and the strict biblical version of human beginnings can be taught. A court ban on teaching creationism in public schools, however, means pupils can only be taught evolution, which angers fundamentalists, and triggers local battles over evolution.
These battles can take place because the US lacks a national curriculum of the sort common in European countries. However, the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind act is instituting standards for science teaching, and the battles of what they should be has now spread to the state level.
Miller thinks more genetics should be on the syllabus to reinforce the idea of evolution. American adults may be harder to reach: nearly two-thirds don't agree that more than half of human genes are common to chimpanzees. How would these people respond when told that humans and chimps share 99 per cent of their genes?

Suffering succotash

2006-08-14T13:18:00.000+01:00

Further thoughts on karma, suffering and evolution. I have linked the constraining aspect of karma with suffering by virtue of the replication element of evolution (biological and cultural). The flip-side of this condition of suffering is the clinging to patterns in the face of the variation and selection needed by evolution.

Thus we have the twin barbs of suffering:

Wanting things to change when they are constrained to stay the same.

Wanting things to stay the same when they are driven to change.

Inorganic patterns of value (#2)

2006-08-14T10:44:00.000+01:00

I would think it is largely uncontroversial to use values to describe and understand cultural phenomena but Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality attempts to argue that all phenomena can and should be described and understood in terms of values, including physical phenomena. In the last post I summarised what I consider to be Pirsig's arguments for using the term "inorganic patterns of value" over the more traditional "substance" as:

- the existence of substance is not empirically supported
- a scientific choice between the two theoretical terms is underdetermined by the data
- a philosophic choice favours the use of "value"
- in wider terms the use of "value" provides a more parsimonious and inclusive paradigm of systematic inquiry

Here are some objections which spring to mind:

- One could object to the use of empiricism by pointing out that, since the "linguistic turn" in philosophy, the primacy of experience on which empiricism is based is untenable.

- One could extend the argument of underdetermination from science to philosophy and ask how "value" could be philosophically preferrable.

- One could object to talking of particles expressing preferences as gratuitously bestowing intentionality upon such phenomena.

- One could argue that paradigmatic parsimony is but the positive face of reductionism.

- One could simply say - why bother?

I have some initial thoughts on these objections.

Although I'm not wholly convinced by the "linguistic turn," I wouldn't argue against it, preferring, instead, to claim that the validity of the replacement of the term "substance" with "value" is not really dependent on the empiricist principle invoked by Pirsig. Particularly as the same principle would apply to the term "inorganic patterns of value." So I consider this objection as superfluous as the argument to which it objects.

As to the philosophical underdetermination of theory, for Kuhnian reasons I would be tempted to agree that data alone cannot be depended upon to choose between two philosophies and to instead draw on an evolutionary epistemology which "favours" theories and contexts through a cultural version of natural selection. I could argue that the essentialist and deterministic context in which "substance" has survived has largely "died out" with respect to subatomic physics and "value" is a variation which may or may not prosper as a new context.

The objection about misplaced intentionality could be treated in a couple of ways. First, one could follow the likes of Nietzsche and Davidson and argue that the hard distinction between literal and metaphorical is untenable such that whether electrons literally or only metaphorically express preferences is moot. Second, one could point out that science is littered with similarly anthropomorphic terms and phrases such as in chemical "attraction" whereby atoms have an "affinity" with other atoms or perhaps the increasingly popular references to "self-organisation" in atomical and molecular systems. In fact I recently read something by string theorist Brian Greene saying that cosmic strings "prefer" to resonate at certain frequencies.

The objection that an attempt to explain everything in terms of value is an attempt to reduce everything to value stands up with reference only to the theory as presented so far. However, Pirsig goes on to categorise value such that everything is not reduced to one type of value, thereby, I think, avoiding the negative aspects of ontological and explanatory reductionism.

The objection that this redescription is simply unnecessary is one that may be addressed as this blog progresses. It is also partially addressed by the claim that, insofar as it is desirable, a more inclusive paradigm is created by the redescription. Finally, it is perhaps addressed by thinking of all of the things that, at first glance, evoked the response of, "Why bother?" which turned out to be worth a lot of bother. In fact, this doing-of-new-things-anyway* is built right into the principle of evolution.

So, a rather brief treatment of a topic which could certainly expand, probably until it branched out into all of the usual arguments of epistemology and metaphysics. My basic answer to all of the other arguments would probably be the evolutionary argument used above - consider the redescription of the physical world in terms of values to be a variation in a pattern of knowledge which is subject to the same opportunities and pressures of selection as any other. Obviously objections, arguments and counter-arguments are among those pressures but I don't intend to be wholly absorbed into each one of them here.

*The MOQ attributes this to Dynamic Quality

Inorganic patterns of value

2006-08-10T10:23:00.000+01:00

In Lila: An Inquiry into Morals Pirsig claims that:

[The] problem of trying to describe value in terms of substance has been the problem of a smaller container trying to contain a larger one. Value is not a subspecies of substance. Substance is a subspecies of value. When you reverse the containment process and define substance in terms of value the mystery disappears: substance is a "stable pattern of inorganic values." The problem then disappears. The world of objects and the world of values is unified.

(Pirsig, Lila, Ch.8)

Pirsig goes about this "reversal" by attacking the concept of substance using a principle of empiricism - that all knowledge must come from experience - and also a kind of underdetermination argument.

“Substance” is a derived concept, not anything that is directly experienced. No one has ever seen substance and no one ever will. All people ever see is data. It is assumed that what makes the data hang together in consistent patterns is that they inhere in this “substance.”

[...]

But if there is no substance, it must be asked, then why isn't everything chaotic? Why do our experiences act as if they inhere in something? If you pick up a glass of water why don't the properties of that glass go flying off in different directions? What is it that keeps these properties uniform if it is not something called substance? That is the question that created the concept of substance in the first place.

The answer provided by the Metaphysics of Quality is....to strike out the word “substance” wherever it appears and substitute the expression “stable inorganic patterns of value.” Again the difference is linguistic. It doesn't make a whit of difference in the laboratory which term is used. No dials change their readings. The observed laboratory data are exactly the same.

(ibid, Ch.8)

The empiricist argument points out that we have no knowledge of "substance", nor a basis to say that it even exists, because it is directly unobservable. The underdetermination argument points out that there is no scientific basis to prefer the use of "substance" over "inorganic patterns of value." It is a philosophic question. The question remains then, Is there a philosophic reason to prefer one over the other?

Pirsig thinks so. He claims that the data of quantum physics have undermined the descriptive adequacy of the philosophic concept of substance to the "nature" of the subatomic level:

The data of quantum physics indicate that what are called “subatomic particles” cannot possibly fill the definition of a substance. The properties exist, then disappear, then exist, and then disappear again in little bundles called “quanta.” These bundles are not continuous in time, yet an essential, defined characteristic of “substance” is that it is continuous in time. Since the quantum bundles are not substance and since it is a usual scientific assumption that these sub-atomic particles compose everything there is, then it follows that there is no substance anywhere in the world nor has there ever been.
(ibid, Ch.8)

He states that, in terms of the behaviour of subatomic particles, "patterns of preferences" - patterns of values - is the more philosophically appropriate term:

[I]n modern quantum physics....particles "prefer" to do what they do. An individual particle is not absolutely committed to one predictable behaviour. What appears to be an absolute cause is just a very consistent pattern of preferences.

(ibid, Ch.8)

He thinks that there is a further reason to prefer the term "values" over "substance":

The greatest benefit of this substitution of "value" for..."substance" is that it allows an integration of physical sciences with other areas of experience that have been traditionally considered outside the scope of scientific thought. [...] The "value" which directed subatomic particles is not identical with the "value" a human being gives to a painting. But...the two are cousins, and...the exact relationship between them can be defined with great precision. Once this definition is complete a huge integration of the humanities and sciences appears[.]

(ibid, Ch.8)

The "benefit" of integration seems to be based around the virtue of paradigmatic parsimony and a broadening of the scope of science.

So, in summary, I think Pirsig replaces "substance" with "value" as a term for describing inorganic phenomena on the basis that:

- the existence of substance is not empirically supported (presumably we are to assume that this applies to inorganic values too)
- a scientific choice between the two theoretical terms is underdetermined by the data
- a philosophic choice favours the use of "value"
- in wider terms the use of "value" provides a more parsimonious and inclusive paradigm of systematic inquiry

I want to consider some possible objections to these arguments next.

Values and matter

2006-08-08T16:12:00.000+01:00

In Lila: An Inquiry into Morals Pirsig tells us that he was drawn into the metaphysics of values via a failed attempt to contribute something to the field of anthropology in the form of a study of Native American culture and its influence on contemporary North America. He writes:

You can't get anywhere because you are forced to resolve arguments every step of the way about the basic terms you are using. It's hard enough to talk about Indians alone without having to resolve a metaphysical dispute at the end of every sentence. This should have been done before anthropology was set up, not afterward.

That was the problem. The whole field of cultural anthropology is a house built on intellectual quicksand. As soon as you try to build the data into anything of theoretical weight it sinks and collapses. The field that one might have expected to be one of the most useful and productive of the sciences had gone under, not because the people in it were no good, or the subject was unimportant, but because the structure of scientific principles that it tries to rest on is inadequate to support it.

(Pirsig, Lila, Ch.5)

The problem with trying to use "scientific principles" to build anthropological theory, Pirsig states, is that:

Patterns of culture do not operate in accordance with the laws of physics. How are you going to prove in terms of the laws of physics that an attitude exists within a culture? What is an attitude in terms of the laws of molecular interaction? What is a cultural value? How are you going to show scientifically that a certain culture has certain values?

You can't.

Science has no values. Not officially. The whole field of anthropology was rigged and stacked so that nobody could prove anything of a general nature about anybody. No matter what you said, it could be shot down any time by any damn fool on the basis that it wasn't scientific.

(ibid, Ch.4)

So Pirsig identifies the problem as the attempt to reduce values to the physical properties and behaviour of matter. Pirsig's answer to this quandary was to reverse the hierarchical primacy of patterns of matter over values such that matter becomes a particular pattern of values. Then, to the extent that metaphysics determines the purview of science, Pirsig argues that:

If science is a study of substances and their relationships, then the field of anthropology is a scientific absurdity. In terms of substance there is no such thing as a culture. It has no mass, no energy. No scientific instrument has ever been devised that can distinguish a culture from a non-culture.

But if science is a study of stable patterns of value, then cultural anthropology becomes a supremely scientific field. A culture can be defined as a network of social patterns of value. As the Values Project anthropologist Kluckhohn had said, patterns of value are the essence of what an anthropologist studies.

Kluckhohn's enormous mistake was his attempt to define values. He assumed that a subject-object view of the world would allow such a definition. What was destroying his case was not the accuracy of his observations. What was destroying his case were these substance-oriented metaphysical assumptions of anthropology that he had failed to detach from his observations. Once this detachment is made anthropology is out of the metaphysical quicksand and onto hard ground at last.

(ibid, Ch.8)

The reversal of the primacy of matter over values is the key to Pirsig's philosophical solution (the MOQ) to the obstacles faced by an anthropologist and this move, and its validity, will be the focus of the next post. More generally I want to consider how Pirsig's ideas bear up to recent developments in philosophy and science and how well my aontic approach aligns with the MOQ.

Identity and Violence

2006-08-08T15:06:00.000+01:00

Just started reading an interesting book called Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny by Amartya Sen. The ideas expressed so far resonate with the non-reductionist, anti-essentialist leanings of this blog and the multilateral, relational upaya which I'm advocating as an alternative mode of understanding. Of particular pertinence to the explicit value topography of recent global politics is this excerpt (taken from pages 10-12):

A remarkable use of imagined singularity can be found in the basic classificatory idea that serves as the intellectual background to the much-discussed thesis of "the clash of civilizations," which has been championed recently, particularly following the publication of Samuel Huntington's influential book, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order. The difficulty with this approach begins with unique categorization, well before the issue of a clash - or not - is even raised. Indeed, the thesis of a civilizational clash is conceptually parasitic on the commanding power of a unique categorization along so-called civilizational lines, which as it happens closely follows religious divisions to which singular attention is paid. Huntington contrasts "Western civilization" with "Islamic civilization," "Hindu civilization," "Buddhist civilization," and so on. The alleged confrontations of religious differences are incorporated into a sharply carpentered vision of one dominant and hardened divisiveness.

In fact, of course, the people of the world can be classified according to many other systems of partitioning, each of which has some - often far-reaching - relevance in our lives: such as nationalities, locations, classes, occupations, social status, languages, politics, and many others. While religious categories have received much airing in recent years, they cannot be presumed to obliterate other distinctions, and even less can they be seen as the only relevant system of classifying people across the globe. In partitioning the population of the world into those belonging to the "Islamic world," "the western world," “"the hindu world," "the Buddhist world," the divisive power of classificatory priority is implicitly used to place people firmly inside a unique set of rigid boxes. Other divisions (say, between the rich and the poor, between members of different classes and occupations, between people of different politics, between distinct nationalities and residential locations, between language groups, etc.) are all submerged by this allegedly primal way of seeing the differences between people.

The difficulty with the thesis of the clash of civilizations begins well before we come to the issue of an inevitable clash; it begins with the presumption of the unique relevance of a singular classification. Indeed, the question "do civilizations clash?" is founded on the presumption that humanity can be pre-eminently classified into distinct and discrete civilizations, and that the relations between different human beings can somehow be seen, without serious loss of understanding, in terms of relations between different civilizations. The basic flaw of the thesis much precedes the point where it is asked whether civilizations must clash.

This reductionist view is typically combined, I am afraid, with a rather foggy perception of world history which overlooks, first, the extent of internal diversities within these civilizational categories, and second, the reach and influence of interactions - intellectual as well as material - that go right across the regional borders of so-called civilizations. And its power to befuddle can trap not only those who would like to support the thesis of a clash (varying from Western chauvinists to Islamic fundamentalists), but also those who would like to dispute it and yet try to respond within the straitjacket of its prespecified terms of reference.

The limitations of such civilization-based thinking can prove to be just as treacherous for programs of "dialogue among civilizations" (something that seems to be much sought after these days) as they are for theories of a clash of civilizations. The noble and elevating search for amity among people seen as amity between civilizations speedily reduces many-sided human beings into one dimension each and muzzles the variety of involvements that have provided rich and diverse grounds for cross-border interactions over many centuries, including the arts, literature, science, mathematics, games, trade, politics, and other arenas of shared human interest. Well-meaning attempts at pursuing global peace can have very counterproductive consequences when these attempts are founded on a fundamentally illusory understanding of the world of human beings.

Smolin on relational physics

2006-08-07T15:38:00.000+01:00

Lee Smolin is a process physicist who I find very interesting to read. The below is from an article featured in Brockman's The Third Culture: Beyond The Scientific Revolution - which you can link to here http://www.edge.org/documents/ThirdCulture/z-Ch.17.html - in which he talks about a relational model of physics as having the potential to provide a theoretical basis for the elusive quantum theory of gravity. Bold italics are my emphasis:

[A]t the Planck scale, which is twenty powers of ten smaller than an atomic nucleus, space looks like a network or weave of discrete loops. In fact, these loops are something like the atoms out of which space is built. We're able to predict that — just as the possible energies an atom can have come in discrete units — when one probes the structure of space at this Planck scale, one finds that the possible values the area of a surface or the volume of some region can have also come in discrete units. What seems to be the smooth geometry of space at our scale is just the result of an enormous number of these elementary loops joined and woven together, as an apparently smooth piece of cloth is really made out of many individual threads.

Furthermore, what's wonderful about the loop picture is that it's entirely a picture in terms of relations. There's no preexisting geometry for space, no fixed reference points; everything is dynamic and relational. This is the way Einstein taught us we have to understand the geometry of space and time — as something relational and dynamic, not fixed or given a priori. Using this loop picture, we've been able to translate this idea into the quantum theory.

Indeed, for me the most important idea behind the developments of twentieth-century physics and cosmology is that things don't have intrinsic properties at the fundamental level; all properties are about relations between things. This idea is the basic idea behind Einstein's general theory of relativity, but it has a longer history; it goes back at least to the seventeenth-century philosopher Leibniz, who opposed Newton's ideas of space and time because Newton took space and time to exist absolutely, while Leibniz wanted to understand them as arising only as aspects of the relations among things. For me, this fight between those who want the world to be made out of absolute entities and those who want it to be made only out of relations is a key theme in the story of the development of modern physics. Moreover, I'm partial. I think Leibniz and the relationalists were right, and that what's happening now in science can be understood as their triumph.

[....]

The picture that emerges from both relativity and quantum theory is of a world conceived as a network of relations. Newton's hierarchical picture, in which atoms with fixed and absolute properties move against a fixed background of absolute space and time, is quite dead. This doesn't mean that atomism or reductionism are wrong, but it means that they must be understood in a more subtle and beautiful way than before. Quantum gravity, as far as we can tell, goes even further in this direction, as our description of the geometry of spacetime as woven together from loops and knots is a beautiful mathematical expression of the idea that the properties of any one part of the world are determined by its relationships and entanglement with the rest of the world.

Karma and constraint

2006-08-07T09:52:00.000+01:00

Following on from the last post, a couple more brief thoughts on how karma can begin to be related to evolution. As I see it, the propensity for patterns of values to recur in experience constrains change in the value topography* of any given state of affairs. This propensity can be seen as karma operating as a negative feedback loop writ large upon a world considered in its entirety as an open system. Without this constraint there is no possibility of the sustained development associated with any concept of evolution.

Yet this constraint also seems to be a salient condition of much suffering. I think this same propensity for recurrence of values is among the conditions that keep conflicts raging, unquenchable and destructive desires burning, prevent societies from flourishing and lead to beliefs stagnating.

* I am conscious that describing all phenomena in terms of values is a lemma in these recent posts about karma and evolution. The next few posts will be my attempt to support this proposition.

Notes on karma, suffering and Pirsig

2006-08-05T22:59:00.000+01:00

If dependently arising values provide us with a way to think about all phenomena and if karma provides us with a directional process by which values are dependently arisen then one may be tempted to ask more about the direction in which we think these values may be headed. One answer to this has been provided by the Metaphysics of Quality (MOQ) proposed by Robert Pirsig in Lila. In it he writes:

Karma is the pain, the suffering that results from clinging to the static patterns of the world.

(Pirsig, Lila, Ch.32)

But he says of this suffering:

If you eliminate suffering from this world you eliminate life. There's no evolution. Those species that don't suffer don't survive. Suffering is the negative face of the Quality that drives the whole process.

(ibid, Ch.29)

So Pirsig is saying that the "direction" of the karmic process of dependently arising values is an aspect of that which is generally recognised as evolution. He elaborates on this in correspondence with Dr. McWatt:

The MOQ sees the wheel of karma as attached to a cart that is going somewhere - from quantum forces through inorganic forces and biological patterns and social patterns to the intellectual patterns that perceive the quantum forces. In the sixth century B.C. in India there was no evidence of this kind of evolutionary progress, and Buddhism, accordingly, does not pay attention to it. Today it’s not possible to be so uninformed. The suffering which the Buddhists regard as only that which is to be escaped, is seen by the MOQ as merely the negative side of the progression toward Quality (or, just as accurately, the expansion of quality). Without the suffering to propel it, the cart would not move forward at all.

(Pirsig to McWatt, 1997)

For any readers who are unaware of Pirsig's ideas, and hence what some of the terms mean in the quotes above, I intend to spend a little time covering the basics with respect to what I've been writing about here. The only point I wish to make here is that of the link of karma to evolution.

More on karma

2006-07-31T12:38:00.000+01:00

So what am I saying here? I'm saying that we, as humans, see patterns in our experience. We see repetitions of patterns which, for whatever reason, we tend to think of as having a cause or basis which exists in its own right, of its own accord. We think of this independent existence as an underlying core which structures the patterns of our experience by which we come to know it. I'm saying that the search for this underlying core, and the attempt to define it, and even "get in touch with it", once and for all, has largely been the goal of philosophy, science and religion.

So I'm saying, What if there is no underlying core? What if I give up on this reductionist urge? Well, there are still patterns to my experience. This doesn't make them fundamental or anything because "fundamental" is what I've given up on. But these patterns are my life and my reality, and I think they are reality enough. For the most part these patterns are consistent and expected. At times these patterns have changed dramatically and in unexpected ways. On a few occasions these patterns have almost completely dissipated. It was when these familiar, consistent patterns were almost entirely absent from my awareness that I first became convinced of their status as patterns, without any underlying core.

So do I think that the world is an illusion? No. I think it is best not to think of the world as an illusion, you will almost certainly get seriously hurt thinking that way. It is best, in my opinion, to think of the world in some way which does not contradict everyday experience. The idea that the world has an underlying core which determines its structure seems to me, from a historical perspective, to defy experience, or at least it seems dispensable. We have moved from one 'underlying core' to the next. From Plato's world of Eidos to the scientists constructing theoretical vibrating strings beyond the boundaries of observation, through to the mystics finding oneness beyond the boundaries of everyday perception and intelligibility, one underlying core steps up to replace the last. It seems there is always another way of reducing the world to one thing or another.

So I have said that, for example, the self is not so much this or that but this, that and anything else that is compelling enough to warrant continued focus. The cause of an event is not this or that, but those conditions which draw their salience from a given context of inquiry. I have said that if one is to adopt a model of the world, as it seems one must, then one of interdependent conditions is the least likely to admit of the reduction which I'm trying to avoid. So instead of reductionist inquiry, I advocate relational inquiry: an inquiry which seeks to sketch varying models of salient relations which enable us to understand and predict experience within multiple contexts. I have therefore advocated the application of the Buddhist notion of karma by which certain active values of the past can be thought of as constraining the emergence and evolution of active values in the future. For the reason already stated, I don't think karma is the fundamental process of the world. I do think one can gain multiple, instructive perspectives on most events by considering them within a karmic model of recurring value patterns. By creating, highlighting and promoting those values now which we want to see propagate and evolve in the future we may become active participants in the karmic process with which we understand the world.

As an inappropriately brief but pertinent example, if one thinks of the current Middle East crisis in these terms you can build various models of relations at work which can be seen to fuel the conflict in mutually dependent ways. There is the immediate salient condition of the conflict which is the capture of Israeli soldiers by Hizbollah fuelled by their valuing destabilisation by provocation and maintenance of Israeli fear and unease. There is the recurrence of Israel valuing its unconditional right to defend itself by any means necessary. These two opposing values are largely dependent on each other. In the larger context of history there is the recurring Jewish value of the right to occupy the stretch of land presently defined as Israel. There is the recurring Arabic value of the resistance of the right of Jews to occupy said land. In a larger political context there is the recurring American and British value of the need to support western democracy at all costs in the Middle East. There is the recurring American and British value of resisting Iranian development of nuclear capability. In a religious context there is the recurring Judaist value of the right of Jews to occupy said land. There is the recurring Shi'a Muslim value of the desire to bring about a Shi'a majority in Lebanon. There is the recurring Judao-Christian value of resisting a dar al-Islam. There is the recurring Jewish value of feeling unjustifiably reviled throughout history.... I could go on but you can begin to see the complexity of values and dependent relations which one can discern in this present conflict, the great tragedy of which is that all of these related values appear to be stronger than the value given to a child's life. Any viable, multilateral solution to the crisis must spend some time with a variety of relational models to determine which values can be engaged and/or disengaged in order for the situation to progress to something better. The search for an unequivocal and underlying core to the problem is not the right approach, in my opinion.

Salient conditions

2006-07-06T16:33:00.000+01:00

I spent a lot of time earlier on in this blog looking into causation and I want to briefly conclude the inquiry here. If, as I think is the case, any thing or event you can discern has potentially innumerable conditions and those conditions have their conditions and those conditions etc....then when you identify a 'cause' you are in fact selecting from a potentially unlimited number of related 'causes'. Clearly, not all conditions will usually be considered equally pertinent, and in any case it is neither practical nor desirable to include as something's cause the entire history and breadth of possible conditions. Generally speaking, it seems to be the case that some conditions will simply be more striking than others and will be the most likely to be described as a cause. Therefore, to avoid slipping into a deterministic or essentialist understanding, I prefer to think of causes as 'salient conditions'. The salience should be seen as dependent to some degree on the context of the inquiry and therefore different contexts may attend to other conditions.

Notes on karma

2006-07-06T11:14:00.000+01:00

I think the self is best thought of as a locus of active relationships between beliefs, desires, memories and sensations, the delineation of which is dependent on a particular purpose. Furthermore, each active relationship is dependent on another without exception. In principle, therefore, the delineation of these relationships can extend to the whole interdependent network which constitutes the universe or, at the other extreme, contract into a single point. In this framework, looking for the 'real self' becomes problematic if not futile. This is not to state that there is no stability to the self. Rather, it is to state that such stability comes from the recurrent focus on certain relationships and that this focus is neither inherent nor immutable.

In the Buddhist tradition this process of recurrence is described by the concept of karma. Peter Hershok, in the Journal Of Buddhist Ethics, Volume 10, 2003, states that, "The teaching of karma invites attending to the consonance between the topography of our ongoing experience and the pattern of our own values and intentions. A basic insight resulting from this practice is that patterns of value and intention are in complex feedback with patterns of experience—a sort of chicken-and-egg relationship in which neither can be claimed fully foundational or original in the strict sense."* So the stability of the self, and of the states of affairs, both of which are inextricably and mutually co-dependent, is subject to the karmic process of evaluative contextualisation. Indeed, neither the self nor states of affairs stand apart from this evaluative context. Put another way, the self and states of affairs just emerge from and consist of this recurring yet changing evaluative context.

Thus the upaya of which I have recently written is perhaps found in a sensitivity to values and their 'karmic efficacy'. Its means is perhaps the ability to approach a troubled situation with the skill to redraw its 'value topography' in a way which redefines the boundaries of the self, the state of affairs, or both, in a new and better way such that the situation can proceed in a better direction. In a sense, this has always been what philosophy, science and religion do, when they are at their best. This is what I obliquely referred to when discussing alterity a couple of months ago.

What philosophy, science and religion do at their worst is take a particular value topography as final and in need of no further revision until it hardens and resists progression and new relation. This is what I have been roughly describing as essentialism. This 'error' isn't limited to these spheres of activity, however. Karma permeates everything, and so must the upaya by which it is approached.

*Pirsig readers will certainly be struck by the consonance between this concept of karma and the 'value-centered experience' at the heart of the Metaphysics of Quality.

Upaya: Praxis makes perfect

2006-07-04T13:52:00.000+01:00

Following on from the brief notes on Buddhist wisdom I made the other day, here is a useful article - http://ccbs.ntu.edu.tw/FULLTEXT/JR-PHIL/ew103934.htm - to remind me, and anyone reading, of the spirit of upaya in which the Buddha taught, and the spirit in which I want my blog to progress. I've worked through a lot of the abstractions now and want to get to some specifics at some point. Anyway, here is the conclusion from Schroeder's essay, an essay in which he has criticised Buddhologists who are prone to metaphysical abstraction and analysis:

The prejudice of those I have criticized in this article has to do with judging the value of Buddhism apart from its upayic role. Neglecting the actual practices of a Buddhist life, they view the doctrines of "emptiness," "non-self," and "dependent arising" apart from Buddhist praxis. Nagarjuna's "emptiness of emptiness," for example, is generally seen as a metaphysical maneuver: it deconstructs epistemological realism, essentialism, metaphysics, causality, and a referential view of language. It tells us something about how the mind posits "hidden" essences and "secret powers," how language carves the world into subject/object dualities, or how consciousness constructs an illusory world of "things" interacting "in" space and time. But it is precisely this metaphysical move that "skillful means" rejects because it forces us to think of Buddhist praxis in an abstract way, as something we can discuss apart from its rhetorical and pedagogical contexts.

Even more problematic is that many of the scholars I criticize see their interpretations of Nagarjuna as upayic. The majority of Madhyamika scholars I have discussed tell us that not only is Nagarjuna's critique of svabhava geared toward metaphysics but that liberation depends on understanding how it works. According to Murti, for example: The dialectic, then, as the Sunyata of drstis, is the negation of standpoints, which are the initial negation of the real that is essentially indeterminate. Correctly understood, Sunyata is not annihilation, but the negation of negation; it is the conscious correction of an initial unconscious falsification of the real. (Murti 1955, p. 271) Murti not only sees Nagarjuna as diagnosing a fundamental problem in human existence, but also thinks that his dialectical method will "cure" us. The problem is basically metaphysical in nature, and consists of "covering" the Real with a conceptual thought-which, according to Murti, amounts to an unconscious negation of "Truth." Thus, if we could reverse this process (negate the negation), then we would experience liberation. What is interesting about Murti's analysis is that it supposedly offers an upaya: "emptiness" is the "means" for correcting a "falsification of the real."
Frederick Streng also reads Nagarjuna in an upayic way. "Emptiness," he says, is the "means for quelling the pain found in existential 'becoming' which results from longing after an eternal undisturbed entity" (Streng 1967, p. 149). While Murti tells us that Nagarjuna is deconstructing a "conflict in reason," Streng tells us that Nagarjuna is attacking a referential view of language. By understanding what he calls a "relational norm of meaning," that is, that words are meaningful only in relation to other words, we will be "cured" of the longing for an "eternal undisturbed entity." C. W. Huntington, Jr., expresses a similar view: Recognition of the strictly contextual or pragmatic significance of the thoughts and objects that populate our mental and material world renders meaningless any search for a transcendental ground behind these phenomena . . . .What is immediately given in everyday experience is indeed all that there is, for the inherently interdependent nature of the components of this experience is the truth of the highest meaning: both the means to the goal (marga; upaya) and the goal itself (nirvana). (Huntington 1989, p. 40)
For Garfield, the upayic nature of Nagarjuna's philosophy lies in showing us the nature of what he calls "reification," or the tendency to take what is conventional for something essential: Reification is the root of grasping and craving and hence of all suffering. And it is perfectly natural, despite its incoherence. Nagarjuna intends one to break this habit and extirpate the root of suffering. . . Only with the simultaneous realization of the emptiness, but conventional reality, of phenomena and of the emptiness of emptiness, argues Nagarjuna, can suffering be wholly uprooted. (Garfield 1995, p. 314) According to Garfield, Nagarjuna's dialectic uproots this tendency to "reify" the world by showing not only that all phenomena are "empty" but that this very "emptiness" is itself "empty," or, as Garfield says, that it, too, is merely a conventional designation.
Given that all the thinkers above do see Nagarjuna's dialectic in an upayic way, how can I claim that their approach to Buddhism is, in fact, non-upayic? The main reason for this has to do with how they frame the problem. According to their accounts, Nagarjuna already knows in advance what everyone's problem is, and how to solve it. Whether the problem is "falsifying the real," a "referential view of language," "essentialism," or "reification," Nagarjuna is depicted as speaking universally; he not only diagnoses an innate "sickness" in human nature, but cures it by prescribing a set remedy: namely, "emptiness." However, both the problem and the cure on these accounts are abstract and essentialistic. Asserted independently of any rhetorical context and apart from the karmic dispositions of individuals, they are expressed with the assumption that there is a single cause to all human suffering and a single cure. If it is true that Nagarjuna is speaking in this way, and that his doctrine of "emptiness" is supposed to cure all "ills" no matter what the time, place, or cultural context, then it is debatable just how upayic his philosophy really is. Given that upaya rejects sweeping generalizations about human beings and their suffering, he would then suffer from the exact "illness" that "skillful means" is trying to cure. However, I have tried to argue against this view of Nagarjuna by showing how "emptiness" is a "skillful means" used against the Abhidharma Buddhists, and how it is making a claim about Buddhist practice. In this sense, sunyata is not a panacea at all, but an attack on the very tendency to think in this way.
After having attacked so many others for turning Buddhism into "bad medicine," however, and after having devoted this article to explaining how it is impossible to make sense of "skillful means" apart from the concrete needs and karmic dispositions of an audience, the position of my own argument is obviously problematic. Is this study an upaya? Is it grounded in the lives of others, a practical guide or a "raft" toward liberation? If it is true that "skillful means" is a practical guide, and that by thinking of it apart from praxis we lose sight of what Buddhism is all about, then have I not committed a grave error by offering an abstract account of up, upaya?
These questions expose my argument at its weakest point. This article is not a "raft" or a path toward liberation. It is not grounded in the Buddhist life of practice, nor is it a meditation device. Therefore it, too, is guilty of speaking about Buddhism apart from practice, and suffers from the problem of explaining its central ideas (e.g., upaya) apart from how they function in the lives of Buddhist practitioners. In effect, this article is afflicted with the very "illness" that the Buddha, Vimalakirti, Lin-chi, and Nagarjuna are fighting against.
On the other hand, what distinguishes my argument from those I criticize is that I am not offering a path to liberation. I have not determined in advance what any path is or said what one should do in order to attain liberation. On the contrary, I have tried to remain faithful to the doctrine of an upaya that undercuts our ability to say in advance-and previous to knowing who one's audience is-how liberation should be achieved. I believe that this is where my argument differs most from those I criticize. For most Western scholars, Nagarjuna's "emptiness" is a panacea, a medicine that will cure everyone regardless of the disease, and their interpretations are usually devoted to telling us what our problem is and how to cure it. And all of this, oddly enough, without even knowing who we are. I have simply tried to show why this approach "tends not to edification."

(John Schroeder, Nagarjuna and the doctrine of "skillful means", 2000)

The Relational Self in Buddhist Wisdom

2006-07-03T15:28:00.000+01:00

I have written about the possibility of a new widespread conception of the self, one in which the essentialised, Cartesian image is left behind in favour of a relational and dynamic entity. I now want to briefly consider how this conception is already applied in terms of Buddhist wisdom.

Buddhist wisdom broadly consists of insight into the conditions - the network of interdependence - from which things may have arisen as they have, and a keenly attuned capacity for dissolving and revising the meaning of situations that seem to have gone astray. A key element of this wisdom is the teaching of the three marks of existence: all things are suffering, impermanent, and without any abiding self or essence. It is with this knowledge, according to the Buddha, that one can set about dissolving the conditions of suffering.

Although it can often strike people as a basically negative teaching, in practice an awareness of the three marks can bring about profoundly constructive and positive insights. Perhaps the most crucial in this regard is the realization that no situation, regardless of how hopelessly conflicted it appears to be, is finally intractable. Indeed, seeing all things as impermanent is to see that change is always already taking place. The question then is not whether change is possible, but in what direction should it proceed? Because of dependent arising there are no permanent selves, no cores or essences of things or states of affairs, therefore all situations are open to positive revision and/or redirection. Finally, seeing all things as suffering is to resist the tendency to feel that if things are okay for me or for us, then they must be okay for everyone. It is also a reminder that dissolving the conditions of suffering or conflict is not a teleological affair, but an ongoing, dynamic activity.

So, Buddhist wisdom emerges as a capacity for increasingly flexible and subtly attuned responsiveness to changing relationships and possibilities between self and environment. As such, training for insight into the emptiness, i.e. the dependent arising of all things is strongly associated with meditative discipline. Meditative discipline undermines the essentialising effect of habit formation that constrains our capacity for flexible, situational response, while at the same time building a capacity for situational attunement. The general Buddhist pattern of skillfully dealing with suffering and conflict can be seen as a systematic relinquishing of our present , often habitual, horizons for relevance, responsibility, and readiness, whatever these may be. More positively phrased, it consists of developing the kind of appreciative and contributory upaya needed in order to fully accord with our situation, to expand or contract its network of interdependence, and respond to it as needed.

Finally, Buddhism does not imply an ultimate transition from a deplorable or troubling state of affairs to one that is desirable and free of trouble—a transition from a hell to a heaven. Rather, it is an active process of continuously and skillfully reorienting the pattern of relationships in which we find ourselves, indeed, the patterns by which we are at all. Thus, Buddhist liberation does not consist in being free, but in relating freely.

The Networked Self

2006-06-07T10:10:00.000+01:00

There is an argument that essentialism has flourished as an evolutionary strategy because of its ability to exploit rich inductive potential. This makes perfect sense to me when you think about the valuable inferences one can make from something's sensual appearance to its likely nutritional value, for example. Getting a little more sophisticated, our ability to consistently manipulate our varied environments, an ability which continues to flourish at the pinnacle of engineering, gains enormously from the knowledge of a material's invariable set of properties without the need for continual investigation and testing. I think there comes a point, though, where the exploitation of rich inductive potential, via the reification of supposedly intrinsic relationships between properties, gives way to maladaptation and/or prejudice.

I think one of the victims of essentialisation throughout the past has been the human self. The idea that the human self has a core set of inherent properties which determine one's growth, boundaries, capabilities, and identity has been with us in various forms for some time. It seems clear that how one conceives of the human self has massive implications for behaviour and morality and so I have been considering how well the essentialised self bears up in the 21st Century. I came across an excellent article by Kenneth J. Gergen who argues that the traditional individual/community binary has given way under the pressure of a largely technological transformation of the processes of sociation and this leaves space for a new candidate for the role of moral agent. It chimes in with the way I've been thinking but is formulated in much clearer terms. The full article can be found here: http://www.swarthmore.edu/SocSci/kgergen1/web/page.phtml?id=manu30&st=manuscripts=1

Here is an excerpt which questions the viability of the essentialised self as moral agent:

In my view the transformation of the technological ethos slowly undermines the intelligibility of the individual self as an originary source of moral action. The reasons are many and cumulative; I limit discussion here to several concatenating tendencies:

- Polyvocality. By dramatically expanding the range of information to which we are exposed, the range of persons with whom we have significant interchange, and the range of opinion available within multiple media sites, so do we become privy to multiple realities. Or more simply, the comfort of parochial univocality is disturbed....To the extent that these standpoints are intelligible, they also enter the compendium of resources available for the individual's own deliberations. In a Bakhtinian vein, the individual approaches a state of radical polyvocality. If one does acquire an increasingly diverse vocabulary of deliberation, how is a satisfactory decision to be reached? The inward examination of consciousness yields not coherence but cacophony; there is not a "still small voice of conscience" but a chorus of competing contenders.....if "inward looking" becomes increasingly less useful for matters of moral action, does the concern with "my state of mind" not lose its urgency? The more compelling option is for the individual to turn outward to social context - to detect the ambient opinion, to negotiate, compromise, and improvise. And in this move from the private interior to the social sphere, the presumption of a private self as a source of moral direction is subverted. If negotiating the complexities of multiplicity becomes normalized, so does the conception of mind as moral touchstone grow stale.

- Plasticity. As the technologies of sociation increase our immersion in information and evaluation, so do they expand the scope and complexity of our activities. We engage in a greater range of relationships distributed over numerous and variegated sites, from the face-to-face encounters in the neighborhood and workplace, to professional and recreational relationships that often span continents. Further, because of the rapid movement of information and opinion, the half life of various products and policies is shortened, and the opportunities for novel departures expanded...... It was only four decades ago when David Riesman's celebrated book, The Lonely Crowd, championed the virtues of the inner directed man, and condemned the other directed individual for lack of character - a man without a gyroscopic center of being. In the new techno-based ethos there is little need for the inner-directed, one-style-for-all individual. Such a person is narrow, parochial, inflexible. In the fast pace of the technological society, concern with the inner life is a luxury - if not a waste of time. We now celebrate protean being. In either case, the interior self recedes in significance.

- Repetition. Let us consider a more subtle mode of self-erosion, owing in this instance to the increasing inundation of images, stories, and information. Consider here those confirmatory moments of individual authorship, moments in which the sense of authentic action becomes palpably transparent. Given the Western tradition of individualism, these are typically moments in which we apprehend our actions as unique, in which we are not merely duplicating models, obeying orders, or following conventions. Rather, in the innovative act we locate a guarantee of self as originary source, a creative agent, an author of one's own morality. Yet, in a world in which the technologies facilitate an enormous sophistication in "how it goes," such moments become increasingly rare....Should one attempt to secure confirmation of agency from a public action - political remonstrance, religious expression, musical performance, and the like - the problems of authenticity are even more acute. First, the existing technologies do not allow us to escape the past. Rather, images of the past are stored, resurrected, and recreated as never before. In this sense, the leap from oral to print memory was only the beginning of a dramatic technological infusion of cultural memory. Thus, it becomes increasingly difficult to avoid observations of how any notable action is historically prepared.

- Transience. To the extent that one is surrounded by a cast of others who respond to one in a similar way, a sense of unified self may result. One may come to understand, for example, that he is the first son of an esteemed high school teacher and a devoted mother, a star of the baseball team, and a devout Catholic. This sense of perdurable character also furnishes a standard against which the morality of one's acts can be judged. One can know that "this just isn't me," that "If I did that I would feel insufferable guilt." However, with the accumulating effects of the technologies of sociation, one now becomes transient, a nomad, or a "homeless mind." The continuous reminders of one's identity - of who one is and always has been - no longer prevail. The internal standard grows pallid, and in the end, one must imagine that it counts for little in the generation of moral action.

There is a more subtle effect of such techno-induced transience. It is not only a coherent community that lends itself to the sense of personal depth. It is also the availability of others who provide the time and attention necessary for a sense of an unfolding interior to emerge. The process of psychoanalysis is illustrative. As the analyst listens with hovering interest to the words of the analysand, and these words prompt questions of deeper meaning, there is created for the analysand the sense of palpable interiority, the reality of a realm beyond the superficially given, or in effect, a sense of individual depth. The process requires time and attention. And so it is in daily life; one acquires the sense of depth primarily when there is ample time for exploration, time for moving beyond instrumental calculations to matters of "deeper desire," forgotten fantasies, to "what really counts." Yet, it is precisely this kind of "time off the merry-go-round" that is increasingly difficult to locate. In the techno-dominated world, one must keep moving, the network is vast, commitments are many, expectations are endless, opportunities abound, and time is a scarce commodity.

Each of these tendencies - toward polyvocality, plasticity, repetition, and transience - function so as to undermine the longstanding presumption of a palpable self, personal consciousness as an agentive source, or interior character as a touchstone of the moral life. Yet, while lamentable in certain respects, the waning intelligibility of moral selves is much welcomed in other quarters. Both intellectually and ideologically the concept of the self as moral atom is flawed. On the conceptual level, it is not simply that the conception of moral agency recapitulates the thorny problems of epistemological dualism - subject vs. object, mind vs. body, minds knowing other minds - but the very idea of an independent decision maker is uncompelling. How, it is asked, could moral thought take place except within the categories supplied by the culture? If we subtracted the entire vocabulary of the culture from individual subjectivity, how could the individual form questions about justice, duty, rights, or moral goods? In Michael Sandel's terms, "To imagine a person incapable of constitutive attachments...is not to conceive an ideally free and rational agent, but to imagine a person wholly without character, without moral depth.

(Kenneth J. Gergen, Technology, Self, and the Moral Project)

Maladaptive beliefs?

2006-06-06T17:26:00.000+01:00

Culture profoundly alters human evolution, but not because culture is learned. Rather, culture entails a novel evolutionary tradeoff. Social learning allows human populations to accumulate reservoirs of adaptive information over many generations, leading to the cumulative cultural evolution of highly adaptive social institutions and technology. Because this process is much faster than genetic evolution, it allows human populations to evolve cultural adaptations to local environments, an ability that was a masterful adaptation to the chaotic, rapidly changing world of the Pleistocene. However, the same psychological mechanisms that create this benefit necessarily come with a built in cost. To get the benefits of social learning, humans have to be credulous, for the most part accepting the ways that they observe in their society as sensible and proper. Such credulity opens up human minds to the spread of maladaptive beliefs. Tinkering with human psychology can lessen this, but it cannot be eliminated without also losing the adaptive benefits of cumulative cultural evolution.

(Robert Boyd & Peter J Richerson, Culture, Adaptation & Innateness.)

Haslam article on essentialism

2006-04-18T10:25:00.000+01:00

Finally have some time to get back to this. I've found a good article by Nick Haslam on essentialism. It is a good overview of the essentialist/antiessentialist debate outside of a purely philosophical context and warns against its hasty polarisation.

This is his conclusion:

Throughout this paper I have argued that essentialism poses less of a threat than is commonly imagined, and that antiessentialist critique is therefore often misplaced and unproductive. Essentialism is neither a unified syndrome within social-scientific explanation, nor is it entailed whenever natural-kind concepts or biological underpinnings of human diversity are invoked. Accordingly, it is wrong to set up essentialism as a straw man whose demolition implies that human kinds should be given social constructionist (conventionalist or nominalist) explanations. Realist accounts of at least some human kinds can be developed that avoid essentialism but accommodate natural scientific and social constructionist elements where appropriate. Essentialism is equally differentiated at the level of laypeople's intuitive understandings of human kinds, and it is a mistake to treat it as a monolithic and purely pathological or ideology-driven phenomenon. Essentialist thinking appears to be grounded in basic cognitive principles and adapted to serve the process of social learning, and has distinct components with different implications for stigma and prejudice. In short, the binary opposition of essentialism and antiessentialism is one that social inquiry should aim to go beyond.

The full article can be read here

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2267/is_n2_v65/ai_20964254/print

More notes on rebirth

2006-03-20T13:50:00.000Z

Thinking more about rebirth in Buddhism I thought of Rorty's description of the self in Objectivity, Relativism and Truth:

"Think of human minds as webs of beliefs and desires, of sentential attitudes - webs which continually reweave themselves so as to accommodate new sentential attitudes. Do not ask where the new beliefs and desires come from. Forget, for the moment, about the external world, as well as about that dubious interface between self and world called "perceptual experience." Just assume that new ones keep popping up, and that some of them put strains on old beliefs and desires. We call some of these strains "contradictions" and others "tensions." ....the web of belief should be regarded not just as a self-reweaving mechanism but as one which produces movements in the organism's muscles - movements which kick the organism itself into action. These actions, by shoving items in the environment around, produce new beliefs to be woven in, which in turn produce new actions, and so on for as long as the organism survives. I say "mechanism" because I want to emphasize that there is no self distinct from this self-reweaving web. All there is to the human self is just that web."

(Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism and Truth, p93)

Using this definition of a self and applying it to a concept of transmigration one could say that samsāra can be understood as an uncontrollable 'rebirth' of beliefs and desires within each new situation. We are all familar with the short-lived quenching of desire which is soon followed by its resurgence, often in greater magnitude and potency. This cyclic arising, ceasing and re-arising of beliefs and desires is perhaps nothing short of the continuing rebirth of the self. Rorty is simply describing a process here for his own purposes but Buddhism pays attention to this process in the context of the suffering it entails when the same set of beliefs and desires, particularly those characterised by greed, hatred, and prejudice, are reborn again and again with less of the 'reweaving' occurring than perhaps should or could be.

To balance out my thoughts here, I have found a few articles which would view what I am saying with disdain. I copy below an example, taken from this link:

http://www.accesstoinsight.org/lib/authors/bodhi/bps-essay_06.html

The aim of the Buddhist path is liberation from suffering, and the Buddha makes it abundantly clear that the suffering from which liberation is needed is the suffering of bondage to samsara, the round of repeated birth and death. To be sure, the Dhamma does have an aspect which is directly visible and personally verifiable. By direct inspection of our own experience we can see that sorrow, tension, fear and grief always arise from our greed, aversion and ignorance, and thus can be eliminated with the removal of those defilements. The importance of this directly visible side of Dhamma practice cannot be underestimated, as it serves to confirm our confidence in the liberating efficacy of the Buddhist path. However, to downplay the doctrine of rebirth and explain the entire import of the Dhamma as the amelioration of mental suffering through enhanced self-awareness is to deprive the Dhamma of those wider perspectives from which it derives its full breadth and profundity. By doing so one seriously risks reducing it in the end to little more than a sophisticated ancient system of humanistic psychotherapy.

Notes on Psychological Essentialism

2006-03-20T10:16:00.000Z

The basic tenet of psychological essentialism is the idea that key human cognitive processes, those which determine how we approach experience, reflect a basic belief that unobservable essences are causally responsible for the surface features we observe. As such, the world is divided up into essences from which preset associated properties can be inferred.

The concept seems to have been introduced by Douglas L. Medin (Psychological Essentialism, 1989) during his investigation into similarity-based and explanation-based categorisation processes. Medin argued that categorisation is theory-driven, whereby concepts must conform to an overall world-view, rather than just a delineation of phenomena by lists of observable attributes. He also suggested that psychological essentialism can function with "placeholders" in that one can believe that a given category possesses an essence without knowing what the essence is, thus supporting inductive generalisation under ignorance of 'true causes'. Seen this way psychological essentialism can be understood as a reasoning heuristic which, according to several studies, e.g., by Susan A. Gelman (Essentialism in Everyday Thought, 2005), is readily available to, and used by, preschool children and adults alike.

H. Clark Barrett (On the Functional Origins of Essentialism, 2001) argues that, scientifically speaking, it is not enough to see psychological essentialism as simply a useful strategy and argues that speaking of a propensity for humans to 'essentialize' entails making proposals about where such a propensity comes from and, in particular, the cognitive mechanisms by which it is subserved. He sees a process of natural selection, operating on competing representational and inferential systems, as a rich area for further investigation.

Gelman (2005) argues that the propensity for essentialization is influenced by the language that children hear. For example, she has some evidence that, to a child learning language, nouns imply that a category is relatively more stable and consistent over time and contexts than adjectives or verb phrases - e.g. "carrot-eater" was judged by a group of 5-7 year olds as being a more stable property of someone than if they are merely said to "eat carrots when they can."

Johannes Keller (In Genes We Trust, 2005) argues that, as well as epistemic motives, there are existential and ideological motives behind psychological essentialism which provide potential links to increased levels of prejudice and stereotyping.

I will look into some of this in more detail and I have made these notes simply to pull out some of the threads of what appears to be a burgeoning area of investigation. Despite the demise of essentialist metaphysics, it seems to me that essentialism nevertheless dominates laypeoples' beliefs and attitudes. Reading the likes of Keller there seem to be grounds for correlating essentialist beliefs and attitudes with some of the negative aspects of the present state of the world. This I need to do a lot more work on. As previously noted, I am currently most interested in seeing how far these contemporary studies of the ubiquity of essentialism underpin the understanding of perception held by Madhyamikan Buddhism and, consequently, how far Madhyamikan Buddhism offers an appropriate approach to moving away from its dominance, should that be desirable.

To wrap up these notes, I find it interesting that the propensity to essentialize may be best conceived as a successful evolutionary expedient. This fits well with a pragmatist perspective and curtails the scope of metaphysics (in its "How It Really Is" guise) somewhat. Also, it seems as though psychological essentialism could account for the ubiquity of folk theories of causation which I have touched upon recently and, perhaps, could be what was behind the beginning of philosophy when it first went behind appearances to unobservable true causes.

Buddhism without rebirth?

2006-03-08T09:31:00.000Z

As the famous story goes, following a profound experience at the age of 35, Siddhartha Gautama professed to have penetrated through his ignorance and confusion to uproot the conditions of cyclic existence before proceeding to instruct those who followed him to do the same. As is also well known, he didn't write anything down. His teachings were 'preserved' orally for around 300 years before being committed to the written word. Despite the occasional claims of putative anthological eminence the sheer proliferation of 'Buddhist' texts makes any knowledge of what the Buddha taught a question of choosing a favoured school and interpretation*.

I choose the school of Mādhyamika, and more specifically, Mādhyamika as interpreted by Garfield and Magliola. One important reason for this is that it is evident from sections of the Pali canon** that Siddhartha Gautama believed in karma as the process of rebirth, as was the dominant belief during his time. Indeed most biographies state that it was the experience of 'seeing' his previous lives and how they conditioned his present one that was the first of three insights leading to his enlightenment. For reasons stated above, just what the Buddha understood by 'rebirth' and how it differed from the prevailing world-view at the time is far from conclusive and would be an interesting topic to investigate - one which I may need to return to. However, like the majority of the Western world, I don't believe in rebirth in any literal sense and so my present concern is how Buddhism - in particular dependent origination and how it relates to samsāra and nirvāna - can be interpreted in the absence of what many consider to be the fundamental concept of rebirth. I believe Garfield's interpretation of Mādhyamikan Buddhism provides a good account of how this is possible.

He does this by distinguishing the psychological/philosophical aspects of Buddhism from the cosmological and soteriological aspects which may or may not have been directly inherited from the Vedic tradition. Transmigration (rebirth) is discussed when focussing on Chapter XXVI of the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā - Examination of the Twelve Links.

One is caught in cyclic existence for a reason, Nāgārjuna asserts, because one acts. There are three general kinds of actions distinguished in Buddhist action theory - physical, verbal, and mental. These actions in turn have immediate psychological consequences for the agent. That is they give rise to new psychological dispositions. In the framework of Buddhist action theory, these dispositions are themselves conceived of as actions existing in a potential form, and of course when actualised, they emerge as new actions of body, speech, or mind. These in turn lead to a variety of new such consequences and to the continuation of cyclic existence. Transmigration - the continuation of samsāra - for Nāgārjuna is then simply a dependent consequence of one's actions.

Continuing through the traditional presentation of the twelve links, Nāgārjuna notes that consciousness is a consequence of dispositions and depends on them and that "name and form" follow as a consequence of consciousness. These, therefore, are obviously also dependent phenomena.

There are two ways to think of the twelve links, generating two parallel circles of explanation: One can approach them from the standpoint of transmigration, which provides a standard Buddhist explanation of the cycle of life. Or one can think of them as providing a phenomenological analysis of the nature of experience. In the former sense, we could say at this point in the story that actions performed in the past and dispositions inherited from one's previous history lead to new actions whose consequences are cyclic existence. In particular, the actions and dispositions from one's prior life, on this view, lead to the generation of a new consciousness, which upon entering the womb, gives rise to a body that will get a particular name.

Or, from a phenomenological perspective, we can see dispositions to attend to or to interpret particular phenomena in certain ways (perceptual or conceptual "sets") and actions upon them leading to our becoming aware of external or internal phenomena (consciousness), which leads to our representing them as having determinate locations and denominations (name and form). These two levels of analysis are obviously quite compatible, and while the former plays a central role in Buddhist cosmological and soteriological theory, the latter is important in Buddhist psychology and practice.

(Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, p336-337)

It is the latter understanding of the twelve links which I believe survives the transition to the contemporary Western world without much difficulty. I further believe that the Buddhist analysis of experience bears a strong resemblance to the contemporary study of what is termed psychological essentialism although I have only just started my reading on the subject. This is what I want to explore in more detail now.

* I should qualify this statement here and acknowledge that Zen Buddhism claims to be a "teaching beyond scriptures" and insists that what the Buddha taught can only be understood through direct experience.

** For example, in the Pali canon there are detailed descriptions of the six realms of rebirth, our human world being the most opportune for the achievement of nirvāna.

Enter the Dragon*

2006-03-07T14:41:00.000Z

At around 5th century BCE in India there were those who considered the socio-religious Brahmanic structures maintained by the 'householders' to be oppressive. Such people wished to break free in order to seek an alternative understanding of the self and the world. These were the peripatetic 'renouncers' who attempted many different ways of gaining personal insight outside of any specific tradition, often subjecting themselves to extreme temperatures, hunger, thirst, and other forms of asceticism. They sought answers to the same big questions asked by the Vedas, the most important one being, What is the ontological status of the self? All possible answers to this question seemed to be held at the time:

The strong materialistic view in which there is no immaterial self at all.

The annihilationists who believed that, if there is a self, it is annihilated upon physical death anyway.

The eternalists, such as the Upanishadic brahmins, who held that the ultimate self is a permanent and unchanging essence, i.e., Atman (self) is Brahman (ultimate reality).

Others who, although rejecting an eternal self, believed in the existence of a self which survives physical death.

For those who did believe in some form of continuity of the self they would also have believed in karma and the transmigration of self which constituted samsāra and so the point of seeking answers to these questions was that knowledge of the nature of the self would have effected the moksha (liberation) from samsāra that they sought.

Such was the philosophical climate into which was born Siddhartha Gautama at around 485 BCE.

*In Ch'an Buddhist literature the enlightened are sometimes referred to as dragons. Also, of course, 'Enter the Dragon' is a definitive martial arts movie starring the legendary Bruce Lee.

Socio-morphic origins of causality in Indian Philosophy

2006-03-07T09:48:00.000Z

As noted in previous posts with respect to the Orphic thread, in looking into the origins of causality in Indian philosophy one finds similar socio-morphic conceptions to those found in the writing of the early Western Presocratics. However, there are three significant differences I wish to comment on. The first is that causation seems to have initially been deeply intertwined with sacrifice, moreso than in anything I have found thus far in Western texts. The second is that causation is not itself within the dominion of a particular god or gods. The third is that causation is closely linked with a concept of rebirth.

In ancient Hinduism, sacrifices performed for the gods (devas) were crucial in obtaining the material benefits given to humans by the gods. The efficacy of these sacrifices was determined by their being performed in exactly the manner and order prescribed by the tradition and this proper order of a sacrifice was called rta (aka Rita).

In the Rig Veda, it is rta that controls all the changes and operations of the universe including the actions and thoughts of the gods. That is, the gods as well as humans were all subordinate to rta, so rta was conceived of as an eminent force in itself. The great Vedic deity Varuna, the guardian of the cosmic order, is the special guardian of rta punishing those who do not speak the truth or who commit improper actions, but not even Varuna created the rta. In the Vedas, it is rta that enables natural bodies to move rhythmically and in balance without undergoing the disorganizing and destructive effect otherwise implicit in motion*. It is because of rta that there is a cosmos, an ordered universe that undergoes change without becoming chaos. By adhering to rta the sun follows its daily path, rising and setting to support the world with its light. The stars fade at dawn but shine again at dusk. Rta is a dynamic principle of cosmic order, manifesting itself in change, not in rigidity.

In the Upanishads, rta is applied to the ethical realm of human society through the concept of karma. Karma entails that whatever you do determines what you become in this life and, by means of samsāra, in the next life. In relation to rta, karma means something like "the causal law of the deed" in which every act is the result of some previous act which caused it. Everything you do is caused by what you have done in the past and in turn will cause your future actions. In this sense the principle of rta implies a strict adherence to law and rule in conformity with the aim and purpose of the processes of the cosmos. Any action set in opposition to or incongruous with the universal order of rta sets in motion a natural reaction, endeavouring to set right the balance of cosmic equilibrium which has been disturbed by it. It is thus karma which subjects the doer of such action to metempsychosis (rebirth) in other conditions and environments than that in which the action has been done.

The Upanishads are most concerned with the freeing (moksha) of oneself from the suffering entailed by the causal processes of karma and samsāra, through identification of the self with the ultimate reality of Brahman. The nature of this suffering, the transformative means of its cessation, and of what this transformation consists, provide notable differences between Buddhism and the philosophical milieu out of which it emerged.

As a final note, one can see that, in ancient Indian philosophy, the impersonal causal principle of rta is applied to all aspects of activity in the cosmos, from the actions of an individual, to the movement of the stars, albeit operating over different timescales of relation. Thus, being equally impersonal from the outset, ethical and natural causal processes were ultimately no different in the Indian mind whereas, in the West, 'natural' causal processes left behind their ethical, personified origins, e.g., Ananke, as they were gradually depersonified by the later Presocratics, then by Plato and Aristotle and so forth. In doing so, the moral and physical processes of the world were gradually separated and the impersonal physical processes were eventually crowned 'reality'.

*The similarities of rta with the Chinese Tao should be apparent to those with an interest in Eastern philosopy in general.

Causation as Folk Science

2006-02-28T15:12:00.000Z

I've found an interesting article on the role of causality in science written by John D. Norton (University of Pittsburgh). The abstract and conclusion, cited below, provide a good summary of his position. It seems to support my understanding that debates about the metaphysics of causation have largely given way to a pragmatism which is not at all incompatible with dependent origination. Indeed it is interesting to see that Norton talks about "recovering" causation from ontological inconclusiveness much as dependent origination "recovers" conventional reality from the same.

The full text is available at http://www.philosophersimprint.org/003004/

I deny that the world is fundamentally causal, deriving the skepticism on non-Humean grounds from our enduring failures to find a contingent, universal principle of causality that holds true of our science. I explain the prevalence and fertility of causal notions in science by arguing that a causal character for many sciences can be recovered, when they are restricted to appropriately hospitable domains. There they conform to a loose collection of causal notions that form a folk science of causation. This recovery of causation exploits the same generative power of reduction relations that allows us to recover gravity as a force from Einstein's general relativity and heat as a conserved fluid, the caloric, from modern thermal physics, when each theory is restricted to appropriate domains. Causes are real in science to the same degree as caloric and gravitational forces.

(John D. Norton, Causation as Folk Science, 2003, Ch.1)

On the one hand, causes play no fundamental role in our mature science. Those sciences are not manifestly about causation and they harbor no universally valid principle of causality. On the other, the actual practice of science is thoroughly permeated with causal talk: science is often glossed as the search for causes; and poor science or superstition is condemned because of its supposed failure to conform to a vaguely specified principle of causality. I have argued that we can have causes in the world of science in same way as we can retain the caloric. There is no caloric in the world; heat is not a material substance. However in many circumstances heat behaves just as if it were a material fluid and it can be very useful to think of heat this way. It is the same with cause and effect. At a fundamental level, there are no causes and effects in science and no overarching principle of causality. However in appropriately restricted domains our science tells us that the world behaves just as if it conformed to the sort of folk theory of causation outlined above. Finally I have suggested that we need not expect the exact same notion of cause to be invoked in each of these many domains. The proliferation of different account of the nature of causation suggests that there might be no single notion of causation, so that the best single account we can have is a loose folk theory, not all of whose elements will be accepted in every application.

(ibid, Ch.7)

Progress notes

2006-02-27T13:28:00.000Z

Time for a quick review of where I am with all this. So far, I’ve glossed over the kind of Buddhism I’m interested in with particular reference to antiessentialism and alterity and pointed out some similarities with neo-pragmatism. I’ve said that dependent origination is the philosophical centrepiece of Buddhism which provides an alternative to essentialist causality and ontology. I then rattled through the socio-morphic origination and later significant development of the concept of causality in western philosophy. This exercise showed that, in Hume, the west had arguably “emptied out” the dominant essentialist conception of causation from a metaphysical point of view but that, nonetheless, it appears to remain as a central theoretical expedient in scientific practice. I would like to further understand how causality is actually treated by the scientific-community-at-large and whether it is generally either an explicit or tacit assumption going into the production and validation of theory. However, I’m not too sure how I can do this just yet. Also, I want to wrap up this rather cursory piece of historical analysis with a brief review of the philosophical climate in which Siddhartha Gautama formulated his teaching (which is the putative basis of Nāgārjuna’s exposition in the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā) and its relevance and/or dominance of today’s climate. The purpose of all this is to see what is actually being rejected by adopting dependent origination to avoid the unnecessary thrashing of a straw man.

Moving forward I want to explore the relevance of all of this to contemporary concerns. One of the first questions I have with respect to this is, Is naïve/psychological essentialism the salient condition of metaphysical essentialism or vice versa? In doing this I want to explore what is meant by naïve/psychological essentialism and my working hypothesis is that it equates to what Buddhism refers to as the “ignorance” which compounds the twelve links of samsāra and that, whilst being a successful cognitive expedient, its tendency for reification can lead to such problems as diminished cognitive flexibility, stereotyping, racism, fundamentalism, hopelessness and more. I want to see if the best elements of Buddhism and neo-pragmatism can or should be combined to address the alleged negative effects of essentialism.

The emptiness of causation in western metaphysics?

2006-02-21T13:38:00.000Z

The Aristotelian conception of causality is a generative theory in that a specific cause generates a necessary effect by triggering an inherent potency. All effects are determined by the essence of the thing in which the effect occurs. So in consequence of their essence, entities follow certain laws of action and have no alternative to doing so.

This concept of causality as arising from the metaphysical essence of things dominated the west in one form or another until it was abandoned by Galileo (1564-1642) who reconceptualized causes and effects not as inherently determined properties of substances or things but as the consequence of the laws of motion. Thus, he disregarded the properties of the objects he was looking at and focussed instead on their positions as they varied across time. He connected cause and effect relationships only to the motions or states of things and consequently disconnected them from the putative essences of the things themselves.

In this model actions are conceptualised as necessary reactions to some previous action or motion or force. This position was stripped of its generative heritage even further by the Scottish empiricist David Hume (1711-1776) who originated the use of the term succession with respect to causality thereby heralding the beginning of a successionist theory of causation. Hume pointed out that we observe nothing but the regular succession of events and argued that the idea of a necessary connection between cause and effect is thus derived from habitually felt expectation and has no other foundation. Causes merely occur prior to and contiguous with effects. The relationship is not one between objects but between experiences. Causation to Hume, in other words, was no more than a predictive expedient.

Kant, Hegel, Whitehead and others attempted other metaphysical conceptions of causality but if I may be so bold as to say that, with Hume, we see causation effectively leaving the realm of significant metaphysical development whilst remaining woven into the development of scientific formulae and statistical probability, as well as into lay beliefs. If this is the case, then after over 2000 years of metaphysical development, causation effectively amounts to something like:

These give rise to those,
So these are called conditions.

Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (I:5)

Or in more words:

To assert the emptiness of causation is to accept the utility of our causal discourse and explanatory practice, but to resist the temptation to see these as grounded in reference to causal powers or as demanding such grounding. Dependent origination simply is the explicability and coherence of the universe. Its emptiness is the fact that there is no more to it than that.

(Garfield, Dependent Arising and the Emptiness of Emptiness, Ch.2)

Aontic metaphysics

2006-02-21T10:26:00.000Z

I've coined a term to describe the type of philosophy I'm promoting here: aontic. It's an attempt to convey a repudiation of the Being/Non-Being division which is generally assumed to be the starting point of metaphysics. I think anti-ontological is more or less the same thing but aontic is not necessarily implying a dialectically opposed doctrine nor simply a critique of ontology but can also be just a philosophy with a different starting point to the question of Being.

Buddhism is aontic in that it neither affirms nor denies the 'existence' of the self and the world. Its starting point is the process of experience in the context of human suffering. The relative absence of aontic philosophy in the western canon is what I think has often led to an erroneous interpretation of Buddhism as a form of nihilism, which is, of course, based on the tacit assumption that existence/non-existence is a fundamental category. However, the Buddhist metaphysical* concept of the dependent origination of phenomena is not coextensive with a categorisation of phenomena into existing/nonexisting.

* Is aontic metaphysics an oxymoron? Certainly if we accept the Aristotelian conception of metaphysics as the science of being qua being it is a contradiction in terms. However, we can also define metaphysics as the elucidation of general principles and assumptions and in this sense there is no problem.

Aristotelian causality

2006-02-17T09:16:00.000Z

After Plato we get to the most elaborate treatment of causality in Ancient Greek thought - from Plato's student, Aristotle (384-322 BCE).

Aristotle famously distinguished four kinds of “cause”*: the material out of which things come; the form which things eventually have when they are perfected; that which brings about this completion, the efficient cause; and finally the purpose or function of such things, the final cause.

Being a quasi-empiricist, he opposed, even ridiculed, Plato's conception of transcendent Essences. As far as he was concerned the invisible realm of Essences was merely a hypothesis that could never be verified. However, following Plato, he developed a doctrine of categories which he believed defined the essence of an object. He argued that these essences could be identified on the basis of inductive arguments based on the observation of the phenomenal realm and that the phenomenal realm, despite always being in flux, moves towards specific ends. In this sense the phenomenal realm demonstrates a certain telos and as such physical matter is ordered according to its telos and substance. In other words, matter does not have the potential to become just anything but is ordered according to what it can, will and should become.

So while Plato contrasted the inherent structure of Essences with the flux of all phenomenal things, Aristotle taught that, from a condition of potentiality, each phenomenal thing necessarily strives toward achievement of a full reality in which its inherent essence is actualised. Thus, according to Aristotle, the phenomenal realm itself contains an inherent structure which allows observation from which logical principles can be deduced and induced. Enter science.

So the inherent potentiality and subsequent actuality of phenonema become the key characteristics of an Aristotelian notion of causality and the regularity of nature. To return to an example used in an earlier post, the phenomena of ice becoming water when heated is explained in Aristotelian terms as the actualisation of ice's potential to become water. The heat is the efficient cause of this change in state but unlike Platonic causality there is no fundamental transition from "iceness" to "waterness" because the "waterness" was already the potency of the block of ice itself. However, like Plato, Aristotle maintains that the cause of change must be assumed as an absolute necessity. Everything which undergoes change is made to do so necessarily by something. What undergoes change is what has a potency or capacity to do so and this actualization of mere potency, by definition, requires an actual agent; nothing which just has a capacity to undergo change can bring about that change by itself**. However, unlike Plato, the efficient cause is normally another phenomenal object, and not a transcendental Essence.

Finally, it's not completely clear to me what place necessity has in Aristotle's conception of causality. Given the identification of an effect on something with its inherent potency, then with any given efficient cause one can assume a necessary effect. Also, Aristotle's definition of knowledge makes use of a necessity condition by which that which is deemed knowledge is knowledge of that which necessarily holds in all cases. However, Aristotle's use of the inductive technique, and use of phrases such as "for the most part" when talking about the validity of the conclusions of deductive statements, seems at odds with a concept of unwavering necessity. For the moment at least, it seems to me with my limited reading that, with Aristotle, necessity became entangled with scientific generalisations as a mode of explanation and had left the domain of Ananke behind.

* The Greek word is aition which it seems is just whatever one can cite in answer to a “why?” question. So an aition is best thought of as an explanation or an explanatory factor. This understanding of "cause" is just what Nāgārjuna seems to mean by condition, yet Aristotle's exposition of causality doesn't seem to have entirely followed through in this rather pragmatic vein.

** This brings about an infinite regress which Aristotle "solves" by positing an "Uncaused Cause" which was later seen, by the likes of Aquinas, as another name for God. This infinfite regress, and the avoidance of Aristotelian-type solutions, is important to understanding Nāgārjuna's rejection of inherent causality.

More on the Orphic thread

2006-02-10T15:59:00.000Z

I don't want to get too side-tracked by this but my research into the origins of causality has shined a light on some interesting connections between the Presocratics, Orphism and the Vedic tradition and the apparent ubiquity of mysticism. There is plenty of material, a flavour of which is copied below. Note the reference to rta which is where my reading on the origins of causal order in Indian philosophy seem to be leading. (Pirsig readers will no doubt recognise rta from LILA.)

In dealing with pre-Socratic thought, we constantly find ourselves in an atmosphere more akin to that of the Orient than to that of the West. As the late professor F. H. Smith pointed out, the apeiron of Anaximander is almost exactly the Hindu nirvikalpa, the nameless and formless, called Aditi, the unlimited, in the Rg Veda. Moreover, this Aditi which is nirvikalpa, is ordered by the immanent Rta or dharma, just as in Anaximander an immanent dike ensures that all things shall eventually return to the apeiron whence they came: "From which all things take their rise, and by necessity (PT: Ananke) they are destroyed into these; for all things render just atonement to one another for their injustice according to the due ordering of time."

There may even be an echo of the monism of the Upanishads in Empedocles, which, like many other features of his philosophy, seems to have been mediated through Orphism....A distinct tradition of mysticism runs through Orphism, Pythagoras, and Plato which is as unlike anything in Greek thought as it is like the Hindu mysticism of the Upanishads....Reality is not now what is perceived by the senses but what lies beyond them....Orphism and Hinduism have much in common. Just as the Brahmins kept the belief of the shamans or medicine men of the Vedas that man could become a god, but attempted to achieve this union not by drinking the intoxicating soma but by abstinence and ascetic practices so Orpheus purified the old Dionysiac religion and substituted asceticism for drunkenness. The aim of Orphism seems to be the liberation of the soul from the chains of the body, and this is to be achieved by asceticism but man must pass through many lives before he achieves final freedom. This is very far, indeed, from genuine Greek religion of any period, but almost exactly the predominant view of the Upanishads. Even the metaphors in which this conception is clothed are the stock Hindu and Buddhist metaphors - the wheel of life in the Upanishads appears as the "sorrowful weary wheel" of Orpheus.

(Hinduism and Buddhism in Greek Philosophy, A. N. Marlow, Philosophy East and West 4, no. 1, APRIL 1954)

Necessity and the Orphic creation myth

2006-02-09T12:21:00.000Z

Going back to the Presocratics and their appeal to the force of Necessity I have read a little more and picked up a thread which leads back to the Orphic Mystery Cult. The Necessity that frequents the Presocratic fragments is actually Ananke/Adrasteia, partner of Khronos in the Orphic Creation Myth. I am aware of the danger of going too far and committing a genetic fallacy here but it is nonetheless interesting to think that any theories which incorporate a concept of necessity, such as the laws of physics, are indebted, in however small a measure, to the secret wisdom of a mystery cult.

A point I wish to make is that, looking back on these stories, we can easily imagine how one may have taken an abstract concept such as 'necessity' and 'personified' it yet we have little reason to favour that interpretation over its opposite, i.e., that the abstract concept of necessity was derived from the story of Ananke. I say this because I will be looking at the Indian origins of causation and it will be interesting to see if they have an exact equivalent of Ananke in their mythos.

This is a brief introduction to the Orphic creation myth, the full article is referenced by a url below.

In the beginning, there was Time, which the Greeks called Chronus or Khronos. This was a period called the Unaging Time, when nothing existed and nothing grew old; indeterminate and (almost) limitless time, which some people would call Aeon. Existing at the same time as Chronus was Adrasteia, or Ananke, meaning "Necessity".

Chronus and Adrasteia combined to create primordial Spirit and Matter, which were called Aether and Chaos. (Hesiod had referred to Aether as the upper atmosphere, where the air was clean and pure; he referred to Aether as male entity, while in the Orphic myth, Aether was seen as female being. Chaos was fathomless void, abyss or the yawning gap. With Hesiod, Chaos was a male primordial being, whereas in Orphic myth, the role had changed.) A third primordial being came out of Time and Necessity, Erebus – "Darkness". Chronus then combined with Aether, or possibly with Chaos and Aether, so the primeval beings caused mists to form and solidify into a Cosmic Egg.

http://www.timelessmyths.com/classical/creation.html#Orphic

Placeholder: Plato and Nāgārjuna

2006-02-09T11:54:00.000Z

A couple of thoughts about Nāgārjuna and Plato. Plato believes that there are no causal powers in the merely apparent realm of things. Insofar as Plato's world of things corresponds to Nāgārjuna's conventional reality, this agrees with Nāgārjuna when he says that no powers of causation can be found in conventional reality, only correlation of phenomena. They would also agree that in conventional reality things have no inherent existence. There would be no argument that Essences cannot themselves be subject to causation because they are immutable and that only Essences can provide a generative cause of phenomena. Nor would they disagree that Being can only be ascribed to Essence.

Where they depart, and it is a fundamental departure, is that Nāgārjuna completely denies Plato's Essences and hence the possibility of generative causality and the question of Being/Non-Being. The basis of this denial will come later.

Platonic causality

2006-02-09T10:02:00.000Z

Reading on into the Phaedo, we get to Socrates' exposition of causality.

There is nothing new, [Socrates] said, in what I am about to tell you; but only what I have been always and everywhere repeating in the previous discussion and on other occasions: I want to show you the nature of that cause which has occupied my thoughts, and I shall have to go back to those familiar words which are in the mouth of everyone, and first of all assume that there is an absolute beauty and goodness and greatness, and the like; grant me this, and I hope to be able to show you the nature of the cause, and to prove the immortality of the soul.

Cebes said: You may proceed at once with the proof, as I readily grant you this.

Well, he said, then I should like to know whether you agree with me in the next step; for I cannot help thinking that if there be anything beautiful other than absolute beauty, that can only be beautiful in as far as it partakes of absolute beauty - and this I should say of everything. Do you agree in this notion of the cause?

Yes, he said, I agree.

He proceeded: I know nothing and can understand nothing of any other of those wise causes which are alleged; and if a person says to me that the bloom of color, or form, or anything else of that sort is a source of beauty, I leave all that, which is only confusing to me, and simply and singly, and perhaps foolishly, hold and am assured in my own mind that nothing makes a thing beautiful but the presence and participation of beauty in whatever way or manner obtained; for as to the manner I am uncertain, but I stoutly contend that by beauty all beautiful things become beautiful. That appears to me to be the only safe answer that I can give, either to myself or to any other, and to that I cling, in the persuasion that I shall never be overthrown, and that I may safely answer to myself or any other that by beauty beautiful things become beautiful.

(Plato, Phaedo:100b-e)

So something is only insofar as it partakes of its Eidos i.e., Essence or Form. Put another way, the causes of the phenomena that appear to our senses are their Essences. This provides an account of generative, ontological, causality but what about the more mundane occurrences of cause and effect such as melting ice by applying heat?

There is a thing which you term heat, and another thing which you term cold?

Certainly.

But are they the same as fire and snow?

Most assuredly not.

Heat is not the same as fire, nor is cold the same as snow?

No.

And yet you will surely admit that when snow, as before said, is under the influence of heat, they will not remain snow and heat; but at the advance of the heat the snow will either retire or perish?

Very true, he replied.

And the fire too at the advance of the cold will either retire or perish; and when the fire is under the influence of the cold, they will not remain, as before, fire and cold.

That is true, he said.

(Plato, Phaedo:103c-d)

So ice becomes water when its 'iceness' retires at the advance of heat and it presumably partakes in 'waterness' in its stead. Therefore, causality does not, and cannot, occur amongst Essences because they never change but their relationships between each other and the phenomena in which they are instantiated are defined such that causality is merely the appearance of a phenomenon's changing participation in the immutable Essences.

More notes on causality in early western philosophy

2006-02-08T15:43:00.000Z

The socio-morphic understanding of causation (and the consequent regularity of nature) as being the product of a divine system of retributive justice is found to some extent in the works of many of the Presocratics, such as Heraclitus (535-475 BCE)...

The Sun will not overstep his measures; if he does, the Erinyes [Furies], the handmaids of Justice, will find him out. (Diels, Fragmente, 94b)

...and Parmenides (b. 510 BCE), who states that Justice holds Being in its place by the "pronouned" force of Necessity:

"Necessity holds [being] fast in the chains of limit" (Fragment VIII 31)

But when we get to the likes of Anaximenes (of Miletus, 585 - 525 BCE) we see the emergence of somewhat depersonalised forces of necessity and causation drawn from more natural and observable connections, the state-changes of air in this case. This is in accordance with a generally recognised transition in Greek thinking from mythos to logos.

Finally we come to Plato, in which the principles of causation are fully expressed without reference to divine systems of retribution.

Socrates. ...for does not everything which comes into being, of necessity come into being through a cause?

Protarchus. Yes, certainly; for how can there be anything which has no cause?

Soc. And is not the agent the same as the cause in all except name; the agent and the cause may be rightly called one?

Pro. Very true.

Soc. And the same may be said of the patient, or effect; we shall find that they too differ, as I was saying, only in name - shall we not?

Pro. We shall.

Soc. The agent or cause always naturally leads, and the patient or effect naturally follows it?

Pro. Certainly.
Soc. Then the cause and what is subordinate to it in generation are not the same, but different?

Pro. True.

(Plato, Philebus:26)

Predictably, for Plato, causation applies to the creation of the world of sensible appearance whilst the world of Forms, being eternal and immutable, requires no causality for its existence, as we can see in the Timaeus.

Timaeus: First then, in my judgment, we must make a distinction and ask, What is that which always is and has no becoming; and what is that which is always becoming and never is? That which is apprehended by intelligence and reason is always in the same state; but that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is. Now everything that becomes or is created must of necessity be created by some cause, for without a cause nothing can be created.

(Plato, Timaeus:28a-29d)

Interestingly, in the Phaedo, Plato has Socrates distinguish between causes and conditions, as, if you recall, does Nāgārjuna. However, I'm not yet sure if the distinction is the same one. Certainly, there is a prima facie resemblance between Nāgārjuna's "conditions" and those described by Plato below. Of course, if the distinction is the same, Nāgārjuna rejects the "causes" that Plato seeks to elevate. I want to ponder the Phaedo in more depth but for now I want to "bookmark" the following:

There was a time when I thought that I understood the meaning of greater and less pretty well; and when I saw a great man standing by a little one I fancied that one was taller than the other by a head; or one horse would appear to be greater than another horse: and still more clearly did I seem to perceive that ten is two more than eight, and that two cubits are more than one, because two is twice one.

And what is now your notion of such matters? said Cebes.

I should be far enough from imagining, he replied, that I knew the cause of any of them, indeed I should, for I cannot satisfy myself that when one is added to one, the one to which the addition is made becomes two, or that the two units added together make two by reason of the addition. For I cannot understand how, when separated from the other, each of them was one and not two, and now, when they are brought together, the mere juxtaposition of them can be the cause of their becoming two: nor can I understand how the division of one is the way to make two; for then a different cause would produce the same effect-as in the former instance the addition and juxtaposition of one to one was the cause of two, in this the separation and subtraction of one from the other would be the cause.

Nor am I any longer satisfied that I understand the reason why one or anything else either is generated or destroyed or is at all, but I have in my mind some confused notion of another method, and can never admit this. Then I heard someone who had a book of Anaxagoras, as he said, out of which he read that mind was the disposer and cause of all, and I was quite delighted at the notion of this, which appeared admirable,and I said to myself: If mind is the disposer, mind will dispose all for the best, and put each particular in the best place; and I argued that if anyone desired to find out the cause of the generation or destruction or existence of anything, he must find out what state of being or suffering or doing was best for that thing, and therefore a man had only to consider the best for himself and others, and then he would also know the worse, for that the same science comprised both. And I rejoiced to think that I had found in Anaxagoras a teacher of the causes of existence such as I desired, and I imagined that he would tell me first whether the earth is flat or round; and then he would further explain the cause and the necessity of this, and would teach me the nature of the best and show that this was best; and if he said that the earth was in the centre, he would explain that this position was the best, and I should be satisfied if this were shown to me, and not want any other sort of cause. And I thought that I would then go and ask him about the sun and moon and stars, and that he would explain to me their comparative swiftness, and their returnings and various states, and how their several affections, active and passive, were all for the best. For I could not imagine that when he spoke of mind as the disposer of them, he would give any other account of their being as they are, except that this was best; and I thought when he had explained to me in detail the cause of each and the cause of all, he would go on to explain to me what was best for each and what was best for all. I had hopes which I would not have sold for much, and I seized the books and read them as fast as I could in my eagerness to know the better and the worse.

What hopes I had formed, and how grievously was I disappointed! As I proceeded, I found my philosopher altogether forsaking mind or any other principle of order, but having recourse to air, and ether, and water, and other eccentricities. I might compare him to a person who began by maintaining generally that mind is the cause of the actions of Socrates, but who, when he endeavored to explain the causes of my several actions in detail, went on to show that I sit here because my body is made up of bones and muscles; and the bones, as he would say, are hard and have ligaments which divide them, and the muscles are elastic, and they cover the bones, which have also a covering or environment of flesh and skin which contains them; and as the bones are lifted at their joints by the contraction or relaxation of the muscles, I am able to bend my limbs, and this is why I am sitting here in a curved posture: that is what he would say.

He would have a similar explanation of my talking to you, which he would attribute to sound, and air, and hearing, and he would assign ten thousand other causes of the same sort, forgetting to mention the true cause, which is that the Athenians have thought fit to condemn me, and accordingly I have thought it better and more right to remain here and undergo my sentence; for I am inclined to think that these muscles and bones of mine would have gone off to Megara or Boeotia - by the dog of Egypt they would, if they had been guided only by their own idea of what was best, and if I had not chosen as the better and nobler part, instead of playing truant and running away, to undergo any punishment which the State inflicts. There is surely a strange confusion of causes and conditions in all this. It may be said, indeed, that without bones and muscles and the other parts of the body I cannot execute my purposes. But to say that I do as I do because of them, and that this is the way in which mind acts, and not from the choice of the best, is a very careless and idle mode of speaking. I wonder that they cannot distinguish the cause from the condition, which the many, feeling about in the dark, are always mistaking and misnaming. And thus one man makes a vortex all round and steadies the earth by the heaven; another gives the air as a support to the earth, which is a sort of broad trough. Any power which in disposing them as they are disposes them for the best never enters into their minds, nor do they imagine that there is any superhuman strength in that; they rather expect to find another Atlas of the world who is stronger and more everlasting and more containing than the good is, and are clearly of opinion that the obligatory and containing power of the good is as nothing; and yet this is the principle which I would fain learn if anyone would teach me.

(Plato, Phaedo:96e-99d)

An oracle of Necessity: Western origins of causation

2006-02-06T10:50:00.000Z

But where things have their origin, there too their passing away occurs according to necessity; for they pay recompense and penalty to one another for their recklessness, according to firmly established time.

(Anaximander, Hermann Diels "Fragments")

With respect to the Presocratics, the idea of natural laws emerged as an analogue of social laws. In what many consider to be the oldest surviving fragment of western written philosophy (see above) Anaximander (of Miletus, c. 610-546 BCE) talks of the necessity of the cessation of a thing's existence as recompense for its coming into being. What seems to be at stake here is a cosmic balance which, following its "reckless" disruption, is restored by necessity. Of just what this "necessity" comprises is not clear from the single Anaximander fragment above but a cursory glance at fragments from the Presocratic philosopher and mystic, Empedocles (of Acagras in Sicily, c. 492-432 BC), predictably, locates it within the authority of the gods:

There is an oracle of Necessity, ancient decree of the gods, eternal and sealed with broad oaths...
(Empedocles, Fragment 115)

These views are generally described as “socio-morphic” because they explain things like the origins and present state of the cosmos or the regular/periodic routine of nature as being the result of decrees and/or arrangements made by the gods. These divine decrees were predominantly conceived in the context of the regular arrangement of society or the edict of a law giver. In particular, social systems of retributive justice were applied to explain the phenomena of orderly nature.

More to follow.

Rebel Without A Cause

2006-01-30T16:54:00.000Z

These give rise to those,
So these are called conditions.

Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (I: 5)

Pratītya-samutpāda (dependent origination) is the Buddhist alternative to a theory of inherent causality. It recognises the everyday experience of regularity and correlation without investing philosophical capital in an ultimately real force, or power, linking essential causes to necessary effects. In other words, causation, from a Mādhyamikan perspective, is empty; and as such we talk of conditions. As Garfield says in Dependent Arising and the Emptiness of Emptiness:

To assert the emptiness of causation is to accept the utility of our causal discourse and explanatory practice, but to resist the temptation to see these as grounded in reference to causal powers or as demanding such grounding. Dependent origination simply is the explicability and coherence of the universe. Its emptiness is the fact that there is no more to it than that.
(Garfield, Dependent Arising and the Emptiness of Emptiness, Ch.2)

It may be "simple" but I think the "explicability and coherence of the universe," and/or lack thereof, is the undercurrent that has pulled all the thinkers into an ocean of mythological, philosophical and scientific creativity. Causality is a major product of this creativity and before examining what it means to reject it, and how and why, I think it will be useful and interesting to investigate its historical development and variation to provide some background, shared and diverse, to the development of pratītya-samutpāda. This will be the main focus for the next couple of weeks.

Notes on the tetralemma

2006-01-26T09:33:00.000Z

The tetralemma is the 'four-cornered logic' employed in Buddhist philosophy which can appear odd to those of us with a western heritage of Aristotelian syllogisms. As I will probably use the tetralemma at some point it is worth posting some notes which I have already written which relate it to some of the things I've been writing about in this weblog.

I think the tetralemma is best understood within the context of the Buddhist doctrine of two truths, the satyadvaya. As previously described, the two truths are typically designated ‘conventional’ and ‘ultimate’. Conventional truth applies to facts about the everyday reality of things, people and events. It is designated conventional in the sense of being the product of human interests and dispositions and does not correspond to anything independently or inherently true. Ultimate truth is deemed inexpressible in the sense that, in the absence of convention, there is no candidate for metaphysics-strength predication, including the ascription of existence/non-existence itself. Significantly, both conventional and ultimate truth has the same consequence – nothing can be said to exist by virtue of its own essence.

The tetralemma is comprised of four propositional formulations expressed positively or negatively.* Where x is any proposition and –x is its negation, a positive tetralemma takes the form of:

x
-x
Both x and -x
Neither x nor -x

I think the positive tetralemma is an expression of the conventional validity of the two truths. The positive import of the two truths is that whilst it is stated that nothing is inherently real, i.e., nothing exists by virtue of its own independent essence, the familiar everyday world is, nonetheless, conventionally real and exists in a way which does not contradict experience. With this acceptance of conventional truth we are not left with an absurd conception of reality in which nothing exists in any sense whatsoever. Thus the contradictory standpoints of (naïve or philosophical) reification and nihilism are repudiated in favour of a ‘middle way’. The four formulations of propositions are traditionally presented in an order in which each view presents a progressively better expression of the middle way perspective whilst each is valid with qualification. Constrained by usual proofs, then, a positive tetralemma therefore permits and commits one to state that, e.g.:

The self is real (conventionally true, i.e., it exists in a dependent reality along with everything else we derive from experience)
The self is not real (ultimately true, i.e., it has no essence)
The self is both real and not real (conventionally real but ultimately unreal)
The self is neither real nor not real (neither ultimately real nor completely nonexistent)

A negative tetralemma takes the form of:

Not x
Not -x
Not (x and -x)
Not (neither x nor -x)

The negative tetralemma is the self-destructing logic of the ultimate truth (the emptiness of emptiness!) which denies the validity of any philosophical assertion of any kind including that of the attribution of existence and non-existence to anything. The import of the negative tetralemma is that it ultimately denies the validity of the doctrine of two truths which is itself designated a conventional truth.

An example would be its treatment of the proposition that "śūnyatā exists in time."

"Śūnyatā exists in time" should not be asserted.
"Śūnyatā does not exist in time" should not be asserted.
"Śūnyatā both does and does not exist in time" should not be asserted.
"Śūnyatā neither does nor does not exist in time" should not be asserted.

The negative tetralemma is purely about what can't be said about śūnyatā and, ultimately, nothing can be said. But even one who is aware of that may make mistakes. I think the fourth lemma is the most common mistake that even the most dedicated mystic may make but is avoided by a thoroughgoing application of the negative tetralemma. In this case the fourth lemma falsely implies the independent existence of time to which śūnyatā can be propositionally related.

*There is some dispute over whether Siddhartha Gautama endorsed the use of the positive tetralemma, but Nāgārjuna is less controversially interpreted as doing so.

Alterity

2006-01-23T16:50:00.000Z

Jay Garfield's systematic exposition of Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā is my most referenced source for interpreting Mādhyamikan Buddhism but I have found the work of Robert Magliola valuable too. In particular, Magliola's interpretation highlights the differential mysticism of Mādhyamika in opposition to the more popular strand of centric mysticism which often characterises Buddhism and older Hindu thought, such as the philosophy of the Upanishads. Central to differential mysticism is the characterisation of reality as an implacable process of alterity. It is through this alterity that any candidate for identity is thoroughly negated. This, Magliola states, is in stark contrast to the self-identity implied by the undifferentiated center one finds in centric mysticism. Citing Frederick Streng, Magliola begins to make this contrast clear in Derrida on the Mend:

"A major difference between Nāgārjuna's negative dialectic and the Upanishadic analogic use of words, however, is that unlike the 'Neti, Neti' (not [this], not [that]) expression in the Upanishads there is no inexpressible essential substratum which the negations attempt to describe. For Nāgārjuna, in place of the Brahman-Atman is anātman (no individual identity). The purpose of Nāgārjuna's negations is not to describe via negativa an absolute which cannot be expressed, but to deny the illusion that such a self-existent reality exists." Nāgārjuna "is not saying that the true eternal state of reality is a blank; the calmness of nirvāna does not refer to an ontological stratum beneath or behind the flux of experienced existence."

(Streng, cited in Magliola, Derrida on the Mend, p93-94)

He also elaborates on the origins and rise of the ultimate self-identity implicit in centric mysticism, its adoption by some schools of Zen Buddhism, and its subsequent dominance of Western perceptions of mysticism. It is an interesting section on Buddhism's history which I may return to but here I will refer only to its concluding comments which I think are important as they serve to accentuate a conception of reality that could easily be mistaken for Nāgārjuna's position but which is, in fact, rejected.

Westerners, through the good offices of Zen's great missionary to the West, D.T. Suzuki, know only of logocentric (and thus absolutist) Zen, and indeed there is no question that logocentric Zen has been for quite some time now Zen's most popular form. Or, to avoid needless confusion, let us call it "centric Zen," since its whole effort is to transcend logos understood as the language of is and is not and to achieve the 'undifferentiated center'. Thus Suzuki declares that "The meaning of the proposition 'A is A' is realized only when 'A is not-A'," that Buddhist philosophy is the "philosophy of self-identity," and that in this self-identity "there are no contradictions whatsoever." The supreme self-identity, indeed the only self-identity in the ultimate sense, is centric Zen's śūnyatā: "Emptiness is not a vacancy - it holds in it infinite rays of light and swallows all the multiplicities there are in this world."

(ibid., p97)

So, the point being made here is that, in the differential mysticism of Mādhyamika, śūnyatā, i.e., emptiness, is not an Upanishadic substratum nor a frame in which the entire multiplicity of phenomena is contained, or held, as it is in the 'absolutised Zen' described above. Instead, recalling from an earlier post that emptiness is dependent arising, it is characterised as a process of ongoing, ever-altering dependency and is thus always other than what is framed by any fixed term of reference or singular gnostic experience, hence the significance of the term 'alterity'. Therefore, the idea of enlightenment as a centering of awareness upon an immutable reality is untenable to the differential mystic. Rather, as Misra, cited in Derrida on the Mend, puts it:

[E]nlightenment itself is reality, in my view, not anything about which one is enlightened. And this is, according to me, the basic distinction between the Vedanta and the Mādhyamika: that in Vedanta enlightenment is enlightenment of Brahman, the awareness of Brahman as the Absolute, and in Mādhyamika enlightenment, or prajñā, does not mean the awareness of any reality. It means the awareness that things are essenceless or śūnya (empty of essence)....and this is freedom.

(ibid., p95)

Bullshit detector

2006-01-20T16:44:00.000Z

David Skillicorn at Queen’s University in Ontario, Canada, has developed an algorithm which analyses the usage patterns of 88 "deception-linked" words to rate the level of spin in political speeches. It should be installed in the House of Commons with a certain level set for immediate disqualification.

http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8615

Notes on satyadvaya

2006-01-19T15:38:00.000Z

The Buddha's teaching of the Dharma
Is based on two truths:
A truth of worldly convention
And an ultimate truth.

Those who do not understand
The distinction drawn between these two truths
Do not understand
The Buddha's profound truth.

Without a foundation in the conventional truth,
The significance of the ultimate truth cannot be taught.
Without understanding the significance of the ultimate,
Liberation is not achieved.

Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (XXIV: 8-10)

Satyadvaya (the two truths) is absolutely central to an understanding of Mādhyamikan Buddhism. They are:

Samvrti-satya: The conventional, or worldly, truth which applies to the everyday world of distinct phenomena and their relationships. This includes everything from the quark to human consciousness. It is designated conventional in that this individuated world is dependent on human dispositions and collective interests.

Paramārtha-satya: The ultimate, or sublime, truth which applies to reality in the absence of conventions, i.e., śūnyatā. Ultimate truth is deemed inexpressible in the sense that, in the absence of convention, there is no candidate for metaphysical-strength predication, including the ascription of existence/non-existence itself. Significantly, both conventional and ultimate truth has the same consequence – nothing can be said to exist by virtue of its own essence.

The general conception of two levels of truth is prevalent in Indian philosophy and can be traced to the Upanishads. To my knowledge, its prevalence in India is matched in scale by its absence in western philosophy. As such, some unfortunate misunderstandings can occur when a western philosopher hears of the two truths.

One major western misunderstanding of the satyadvaya which springs to mind would be to read in an appearance/reality distinction where paramārtha is the reality behind the samvrti appearance. This mistake would follow naturally from the assumption that śūnyatā is some kind of substance-in-itself which has been hitherto concealed by convention and/or faulty perception. This is not consistent with the Mādhyamikan rendering of the satyadvaya which asserts the ontic identity of conventional phenomena and the emptiness of śūnya whilst maintaining an epistemologically significant distinction between the two truths. The subtletly of this position and its consequences upon an understanding of the whole of Nāgārjuna's philosophy is expressed in the famous section from the Mūlamadhyamakakārikā:

By a misperception of emptiness
A person of little intelligence is destroyed.
Like a snake incorrectly seized
Or like a spell incorrectly cast.

Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (XXIV: 11)

So, how should one cast this spell? I can't put it better than Jay Garfield does, so I won't:

Nāgārjuna establishes a critical three-way relationship between emptiness, dependent origination and verbal convention, and asserts that this relation itself is the Middle Way toward which his entire philosophical system is aimed. . . .Nāgārjuna is asserting that the dependently arisen is emptiness. Emptiness and the phenomenal world are not two distinct things. They are, rather, two characterizations of the same thing. To say of something that it is dependently co-arisen is to say that it is empty. To say of something that it is empty is another way of saying that it arises dependently.
Moreover, whatever is dependently co-arisen is verbally established. That is, the identity of any dependently arisen thing depends upon verbal conventions. To say of a thing that it is dependently arisen is to say that its identity as a single entity is nothing more than its being the referent of a word. The thing itself, apart from conventions of individuation, has no identity. To say of a thing that its identity is a merely verbal fact about it is to say that it is empty. To view emptiness in this way is to see it neither as an entity nor as unreal - it is to see it as conventionally real.
(Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, p304-305)

I will return to the satyadvaya in due course, particularly with respect to understanding Robert Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality in a non-dualistic way.

What's wrong with essences anyway?

2006-01-17T16:37:00.000Z

There are at least three answers to this.

One is that the naïve and/or philosophical reification of individuated entities is the misconception to which the twelve links of samsāric existence adhere. I intend to get to this much later.

Another is the pragmatist objection to essences which revolves around the manifest futility of essentialist metaphysics since its Aristotelian inception.

A third is evolution. As far as I have thought it through, if we take seriously the idea of cosmological evolution then any worldly* presence of essence becomes untenable because any given referent has the entire history of the evolved universe, up to and including its present state, as its conditions. Take these away as circumstantial, relational properties, as an essentialist must, and what essential property in this world can one possibly be left with? For surely an essence cannot be said to evolve, or emerge in any way, without violating the requirement that it be nonrelational with respect to time, i.e., that it be eternal.

* I say "worldly" because I suppose one may argue that the essences of all possible things already exist in some kind of atemporal transcendental realm.

Notes on svabhāva

2006-01-16T15:58:00.000Z

Today I want to make some notes on my use of the term essence. I have thus far defined it rather negatively as "that which something has, or is, without dependence on conditions." I'll now add a little to this definition.

For anything to be without dependence on conditions means it comprises one or more nonrelational properties including, necessarily and significantly, the property of existing by virtue of itself. This is simply because if it didn't exist by virtue of itself it would depend on something else for its existence and would therefore have conditions. Furthermore, it has to be capable of being identified without reference to anything else. For how can one claim to have identified a nonrelational property in purely relational terms without contradiction?

So, a positive addition to my definition of essence is: that which has self-existence and self-identity. A further characteristic of an essence, if we want to apply a full-strength meaning to it, is that it is immutable. The simple argument for this is that if an essence is subject to change then its identity is related to the passage of time and this relational dependency precludes its status as an essence. More on this later. For now, I want to begin to place my use of essence in the philosophic context in which I intend to proceed. As noted in a previous post, a concept of essence is used negatively in the formulation of my position; a position which takes as its starting point the idea of pratītya-samutpāda (dependent origination) as elucidated best, in my opinion, by the Buddhist school of Mādhyamika.

The Mādhyamikan term for this use of essence is the Sanskrit word: svabhāva. Svabhāva is most commonly translated as self-nature. Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā can be characterised as a dialectical attack on the putative existence of svabhāva and the lack of svabhāva is an accurate definition of śūnyatā (emptiness). Jay Garfield, translating and commentating on Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā, describes this relationship of śūnyatā to svabhāva in a down-to-earth way:

[W]hen a Mādhyamika philosopher says of a table that it is empty, that assertion by itself is incomplete. It invites the question, Empty of what? And the answer is, Empty of inherent existence, or self-nature, or in more Western terms, essence. Now, to say that the table is empty is hence simply to say that it lacks essence and importantly not to say that it is completely nonexistent. To say that it lacks essence, the Mādhyamika philosopher will explain, is to say, as the Tibetans like to put it, that it does not exist "from its own side" - that existence as the object that it is - as a table - depends not on it, nor on any purely nonrelational characteristics, but depends on us as well. That is, if our culture had not evolved this manner of furniture, what appears to us to be an obviously unitary object might instead be correctly described as five objects: four quite useful sticks absurdly surmounted by a pointless slab of stick-wood waiting to be carved.

(Garfield, The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way, p89-90)

Note that nothing in this example hinges on the fact that the table is an artifact. The same points could be made about the tree from which its wood was hewn. The boundaries of the tree, both spatial and temporal (consider the the junctures between root and soil, or leaf and air; between live and dead wood; between seed, shoot and tree); its identity over time (each year it sheds its leaves and grows new ones; some limbs break; new limbs grow); its existence as a unitary object, as opposed to a collection of cells; etc, are all conventional. Removing its properties leaves no core bearer behind. Searching for the tree that is independent of and which is the bearer of its parts, we come up empty.

(ibid, footnote, p90)

It is this down-to-earth understanding of the lack of essence in the world which provides the modern basis of my philosophic project by linking Nāgārjuna to the renowned American pragmatist, Richard Rorty and, later, to Robert Pirsig. In Philosophy and Social Hope, Rorty explains his antiessentialist position:

Starting from Bacon's claim that knowledge is power, [pragmatists] proceed to the claim that power is all there is to knowledge - that a claim to know X is a claim to be able to do something with or to X, to put X into relation with something else. To make this claim plausible, however, they have to attack the notion that knowing X is a matter of being related to something intrinsic to X, whereas using X is a matter of standing in an extrinsic, accidental relation to X. In order to attack that notion, they need to bring down the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic - between the inner core of X and a peripheral area of X which is constituted by the fact that X stands in certain relations to the other items which make up the universe. The attempt to break down this distinction is what I shall call antiessentialism. For pragmatists, there is no such thing as a nonrelational feature of X, any more than there is such a thing as the intrinsic nature, the
essence, of X.

(Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope, p50)

We antiessentialists would like to convince you that it...does not pay to be an essentialist about tables, stars, electrons, human beings, academic disciplines, social institutions, or anything else. We suggest that...there is nothing to be known about them except an initially large, and forever expandable, web of relations to other objects. Everything that can serve as a term of relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on for ever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations.

(ibid, p53-54)

So, hopefully I have brought attention to the (unoriginal) observation that both Nāgārjuna and Rorty are antiessentialists. Not surprisingly, they have quite different methods of formulating the philosophic consequences of this stance. Both formulations have benefits and I will explore each in due course.

Dependent Origination: A philosophical position statement

2006-01-13T15:01:00.000Z

When I claim to be a (diet-)* Buddhist, what I mean is that for all practical purposes I take to be true the concept of pratītya-samutpāda (dependent origination) and the satyadvaya (“two truths”) through which it is explicated. In my opinion, in a philosophical sense, dependent origination is Buddhism. I find dependent origination to be a completely rational and adequate characterisation of reality which as far as I am aware precludes none of the presently accepted scientific truths about the physical universe whilst agreeing with a neo-pragmatist repudiation of essentialist metaphysics and the appearance/reality distinction which goes with it.

Dependent origination is a Buddhist technical term for the entirely conditional reality of phenomena. Reality is designated conditional in that not one aspect of it originates or exists independently of every other; everything is dependent on conditions. If everything is dependent on conditions, and an essence of something is just that which it has, or is, without dependence on conditions, it follows that nothing has, or is, an essence. Furthermore, if a thing exists inherently only by virtue of its essence, and if nothing has an essence, then nothing exists inherently. If nothing exists inherently then there is no “way the world inherently is” and thus no tenable metaphysical-strength distinction between appearance and reality. With no hard metaphysical distinction between appearance and reality one can make no philosophical sense of a hard correspondence of knowledge to independent reality.

So much for my metaphysical and epistemological position statement. There are naturally a lot of unsupported statements in such a brief summary of an entire philosophy and I intend to work through each claim in more detail.

* For example, I have never even visited a monastery.

Resolution #1

2006-01-12T14:27:00.000Z

One of my New Year resolutions was to create a weblog.

If only the rest were that easy.

I want to use this log as a single place to express my thoughts with the knowledge that they might be read by somebody else (so had better be well written) and also simply because I enjoy writing. I enjoy writing because I enjoy the challenge of articulating my thoughts. I also enjoy reading others' thoughts, particularly when they are well articulated. Philosophers' thoughts tend to be well articulated so it is no coincidence that I enjoy reading and writing about philosophy. I don't really have an agenda but philosophy is what I think I'll mainly be writing about here although I can opine at will about politics, religion, football, music and films too, so they'll almost certainly make an appearance.

Philosophically speaking, I'm currently closest to the writing of Pirsig, Nāgārjuna and Rorty. I have contributed to the moq.org (Robert Pirsig) discussion forum for a couple of years but recently bowed out due to a combination of lack of time, frustration and boredom as it became clear to me that arguments are mostly concluded through attrition. Despite this it's generally a good forum and I'll certainly be writing a few things about Pirsig's Metaphysics of Quality here.

Politically, it's sufficient to say I'm drifting at the moment (I live in the UK, by the way) and religion-wise I'm an atheist/diet-Buddhist. Just what this amounts to should become clear as this blog grows.

The rate that this blog will actually grow is something I'm not sure about. Time is currently at a premium but I'll just see how it goes.