There's abuse and there's abuse and there's narratives

I had written a somewhat long post that I have refrained, so far, from publishing.  

And I'm going to publish this one instead, although I'd like to make a point or two in this post that will have been made in the other post, if I decide to publish that one. (That one's just a bit too incendiary perhaps.)

Let's stipulate that some women were harmed as a result of abuse by Sasaki Roshi - though I have absolutely positively no first hand knowledge of any events in the matter.  My interest is that of a lay practitioner in the Rinzai school, as well as a guy who's known his share of bad things flown his way and all related suffering to that.  Not to mention all the crap that I've inflicted on others as well.

But were all women who interacted with Sasaki Roshi harmed, and were they all harmed to the same degree?

Likely not.  This is not to minimize the suffering of all who were greatly harmed but it is to point out a fact that is sometimes lost, especially if one is too attached to a narrative.

Richard Dawkins, in his book The God Delusion mentioned that he was the recipient of highly inappropriate sexual advances on the part of some clergy member.  But Dawkins makes a very interesting point, one that I heartily endorse.   That point is that the abuse of children by attempting - and succeeding often - at convincing  them they are fundamentally damaged goods who will suffer the fires of hell for eternity can be far more damaging and widespread than the incidents of sexual abuse by Christian clergy. 

He's right. 

He's so right.

I was never sexually abused by clergy, but I sure as hell was the recipient of various forms of abuse predicated upon the above narrative. 

We should be careful about the narratives we are prescribing for the harm we see around us.

More on Martial Arts, 功夫, and "spirituality."

I think there is a place for what, for want of a better term, might be considered "the sacred."   I tend to denigrate the word "spirituality" though because it is hard to pin down a unique meaning for this.  It's not to say that I denigrate things that are conducive to life, harmony, compassion, wisdom,  and generosity, and in that sense I would agree that a "spiritual" practice that would encompass those attributes would be beneficial.  But I think, as the Buddha suggested, it's a good idea generally to deprecate usages and appeals regarding the supernatural.

This post is in response to a video I saw of one Matt Thornton, which I posted here.  I've been meaning to communicate with Mr. Thornton, but haven't had the opportunity yet, though he lives in the Portland area.  I think we'd get on quite well. But I think he hasn't met someone quite like me, a person who engages in what some might call "spiritual" practices, and gets what he's saying about the psychological /"spiritual" aspects of martial arts.

In the video above Mr. Thornton makes a convincing appeal for knowledge of Brazilian Jiu Jitsu, though I understand his school also teaches Jeet Kun Do, which is a descendent martial art of Wing Chun (詠春券).  He also makes a very good point or two or three regarding how unprepared many "martial arts" schools leave their trainees when it comes to a real confrontation.  (See also Sam Harris's blog post on the subject here.)

But the thing I wanted to get recorded here is that what Mr. Thornton denigrates in his video, is the idea that what are commonly called "spiritual" practices (see around 18:34 and following in the video.) "Cultural superstition" is one thing that Mr. Thornton associates with Buddhism, and that "Buddhists" pretend to know things they do not know, e.g., what happens after death.  But Mr. Thornton should be aware that many Buddhists do not go to that point.  That said, I'm sure Mr. Thornton doesn't get the proper function of a Buddhist chanting service for example.  When we chant about Buddha nature pervading the universe, it is not necessarily a supernatural statement.   An awareness that transcends our own awareness may or may not exist in a vacuum, but it undeniably appears to be ubiquitous amongst sentient beings, for starters.  And that what I call "I" is a construct of my mind is pretty near empirically verified.  But also, our awakened nature does pervade the universe; as it is in the universe and the universe pervades itself and is interdependent with/in all phenomena. Where does it end?

Still, Mr. Thornton gets that a martial arts practice has a profound effect on one's sense of self. One has to get quite humble to learn about one's self, and useful martial arts are a good vehicle for that. And there are variations of Buddhism, real Buddhism, that are overly supernatural.  That's unfortunate, but such supernaturalism is not the entirety, it is not even the essence of Buddhism.   And Mr. Thornton should be aware that there are practitioners of Buddhism, such as myself, who abjure spiritual hucksterism, yet still find the practices of Buddhism do seem to benefit myriad beings.

But yeah, if hucksters advertise on my site (and some hucksters do), and you click on their links everyone involved is responsible to the extent that they choose to involve themselves.  You pays your money and you takes your chances. So it goes.

Shorter version of the last post:

I know that I know what I know.
They know that they know what they know.
I don't know what I don't know.
They don't know what they don't know.
I know some of  what they don't know.
I know some of what they know.
They don't know that what they don't know
includes some of what I know.
I don't know that what I don't know
includes some of what they know.


(Apologies to R.D. Laing)

Technology, Buddhism and Creativity

 

I came across this article, which talked of "The Internet of Things" and Buddhism, via a Tweet from Buddhist Geeks.

"Internet of things?" I say to myself.  I've done that.

Yeah, I have.

No need to go into details, but yes there are real flesh and blood Buddhists developing real technology now. I generally don't talk about it on this blog because I prefer to make sure there's a pretty high wall between what I do here and what is attributed to those to whom it should be professionally, including myself, colleagues, employer, etc. However, it is possible for me to talk as an individual generally about technological developments and it is a matter of public record that I've been involved in the development of technologies enabling the wireless internet.  So as long as I don't get too specific, I'm OK here from an ethical point of view.  And while I don't do applications for M2M (that is, "machine to machine"  which is how "Internet of Things" is more commonly and compactly referenced), as a real technologist I have a few perspectives on that article.

First, let's take this part:

Perhaps when the abstract idea of a “web of life” becomes physical—when our plants, houses, boats and bodies are interconnected through technology—interconnectedness will feel more real to us. Perhaps we will better understand the impact of our behaviors when visualized aggregated data shows us the consequences on air quality of taking the bike instead of the car to work. But will this knowledge of our connection to all other things make us better people? Or will we just fuel our addiction to stimulation, becoming experience junkies who use increasingly advanced devices to post updates, tweets and check-ins and win badges, rewards and social status? What happens when our plants start tweeting that they’re thirsty and our cars check themselves in at a parking lot by the beach? What was supposed to be enlightening becomes performance art.

The Internet of Things will produce data sets like we’ve never seen before, but that doesn't necessarily mean we will have more meaningful products. So the question becomes, how can we design connected objects with meaning and mechanics to make people engage in better behavior? 

Reality check:  

• M2M devices and applications are going to be made in those nasty places where cell phones already are made. It will be the case because people with economic and political power can cause it to be so for their own benefit.  
• Applications in automotive, agriculture, health and energy are already being developed with specific objectives in mind.  Those objectives happen to be making more stuff and services to serve people to make other people money.  It's up to the end users, who may aggregate for good ends, to produce good ends from these interconnections.
• You won't make people engage in better behavior through devices themselves just as you won't make people better chefs by designing better steel for knives.  People with better knives can become just as well better killers.  Technologies are a set of tools. Don't forget that.

Matt Rolandson says, “The first step is to put meaning on the agenda in the product development process, as emotional and philosophical intention, by encouraging designers with ideas about how to manage intention and awareness. A lot of what is developed today uses the triggers of fear or social stress..."

Reality check:

I could go on about how products are designed today, the "Agile Development" fad/trend, etc. Instead, I'll go a bit meta on this and simply point out that this has been done for years in industry, though many (rightfully) disagree as to what "meaning" means here, and what is "right" and "ethical."  But for anyone who doubts what my point here, I'd suggest they read The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker.  And those of us who are in Buddhism and technology are endeavoring to practice it as we make our project plans, reports, software modules, and systems.  We are endeavoring to benefit all beings when we determine what sorts of technology and development we pursue. 

[Vincent] Horn sees a future when the use of bio- and neuro-feedback gets more advanced and thereby can tell us when our minds start to wander, when our attention goes away. A big part of Buddhist thinking is being reminded to be present, and a number of technologies are being developed toward that end. Vince sees a huge potential to automate certain activities in order to free up energy to explore new vistas of the mind.

Reality Check

I see that and other things.  I just can't tell you about it at all other than to ACK what Vincent wrote above.  Suffice it to say, he ain't seen nothin' yet.

As the Internet of Things is being developed, there is a question of whether the movement toward an interconnected society will be hindered by monetization. 

Finding sustainable models of development will be done, because the market will demand it. 

One other point I'd like to make though, which is not considered at all by those in that article. It has to do with creativity and technological development.

Engineers design stuff and create groundbreaking research for a couple of reasons: First and foremost, it's fun to create, or to lead others to create.  It's enjoyable. It's like mountain climbing or going on an adventure to develop something that no one ever did before; you are pretty much seeing what has never been seen before in the history of humanity. Folks like me (including me)  had to prove theorems that were previously unknown to make the stuff work today that works today.  We're driven to do it, just as an artist is driven to create art.  Even if we don't make oodles of money in Silicon Valley (though we're not uncomfortable.)

It's why I'm skeptical when I see futurist stuff (I'm looking at you Ray Kurzeil).  Many technologists (including the author) have been around the block on these things.  When I see someone using a smartphone, I have to think to realize that my inventions made that scene possible.  The reason is, because me, like hordes of other technologists, are driven by the question best that morphed into the of a Cartoon Network ripoff of Mythbusters; that is, "Dude, what would happen if...?" To say we should design a product that "reinforc[es] a positive identi[t]y for" end users would kill the creativity.  Or as Rilke is reported to put it, if my creative demons are exorcised, then so will be my creative angels.  We make tools; we make amoral tools.  Maybe app designers can find good ways to use them, but you can't design a knife that won't cut you if used wrongly.

 Moreover, that scene of the smartphone user wasn't made by a single technologist or even one single group of technologists.  There was, simply for starters, all beings involved in supply chains, including those workers in those nasty  places I mentioned earlier. Futurists tend to be blissfully unaware that the cost of these things in human life and experience needs to be acknowledged and addressed.  Since they're not involved directly in doing  and don't see the doing, it's going to be significantly more difficult for them to be aware of it.  Here's a hint, though: what was the photo at that adorns the top of this blog portraying?

Finally, in regard to futurism and Kurzweil, I'll quote a section of the Wikipedia article on him; these bits are consonant with my view of the subject:

Kurzweil's ideas have generated much criticism within the scientific community and in the media. There are philosophical arguments over whether a machine can "think" (see Philosophy of artificial intelligence). Mitch Kapor, the founder of Lotus Development Corporation, has called the notion of a technological singularity "intelligent design for the IQ 140 people...This proposition that we're heading to this point at which everything is going to be just unimaginably different—it's fundamentally, in my view, driven by a religious impulse. And all of the frantic arm-waving can't obscure that fact for me."^[50]

VR pioneer Jaron Lanier has been one of the strongest critics of Kurzweil’s ideas, describing them as “cybernetic totalism”, and has outlined his views on the culture surrounding Kurzweil’s predictions in an essay for Edge.org entitled One Half of a Manifesto.^[51]

Pulitzer Prize winner Douglas Hofstadter, author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, has said of Kurzweil's and Hans Moravec's books: "It’s as if you took a lot of very good food and some dog excrement and blended it all up so that you can't possibly figure out what's good or bad. It's an intimate mixture of rubbish and good ideas, and it's very hard to disentangle the two, because these are smart people; they're not stupid."^[52]

Of course Hofstadter's point could be generalized significantly: Much of what everyone does (including myself)  is a mixture of very good food and dog excrement blended together. That's why folks invented process improvement - or as the Japanese put it,  改善処理　(kaizen shori).　Or, as Patti Smith put it, "The transformation of waste is perhaps the oldest preoccupation of man..."

We have to question how we're questioning as to figure out what to improve.

  That about says it all.

What do you know?

I went to bed last night after playing the guitar last night, with the thought of "We're all largely empty space," because that's one of those things you learn in physics class that astound you when you start to think about it.  It also tends to be the spark, I think, for lots of folks injecting all kinds of woo - reinforcing memes into their thinking as a result.

I was playing guitar well last night. I haven't really been playing much in the past few years, but oddly enough, hearing of Miyavi, it must have brought back some muscle memories or something connected between the cerebellum and cerebrum. It reminded me of this:

 At the same time, I'm still reminded of how woefully inadequate I am of my 詠春拳 (Wing Chun Ken) skills.

It's easy for us to think we're experts...or not - it's hard overall to assess our level of skill.

Ah, just do it.

Comfort with impermanence or "novelty-seeking" gets revised.

It's now a measure of health.

“Novelty-seeking is one of the traits that keeps you healthy and happy and fosters personality growth as you age,” says C. Robert Cloninger, the psychiatrist who developed personality tests for measuring this trait. The problems with novelty-seeking showed up in his early research in the 1990s; the advantages have become apparent after he and his colleagues tested and tracked thousands of people in the United States, Israel and Finland.

“It can lead to antisocial behavior,” he says, “but if you combine this adventurousness and curiosity with persistence and a sense that it’s not all about you, then you get the kind of creativity that benefits society as a whole.”...

Fans of this trait are calling it “neophilia” and pointing to genetic evidence of its importance as humans migrated throughout the world. In her survey of the recent research, “New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change,” the journalist Winifred Gallagher argues that neophilia has always been the quintessential human survival skill, whether adapting to climate change on the ancestral African savanna or coping with the latest digital toy from Silicon Valley.

“Nothing reveals your personality more succinctly than your characteristic emotional reaction to novelty and change over time and across many situations,” Ms. Gallagher says. “It’s also the most important behavioral difference among individuals.” Drawing on the work of Dr. Cloninger and other personality researchers, she classifies people as neophobes, neophiles and, at the most extreme, neophiliacs. (To classify yourself, you can take a quiz on the Well blog.) 

 The quiz is actually here. I scored in the "Curious" category myself.  Evidently I guess the practice pays off after a while, because otherwise I'd probably be in the "dangerous" category.

Non-violence, 武道, laughter, and hypocrisy

Once again, a post on Nathan's blog and my recent experience with Wing Chun has provided grist for the blog.  That post points to this post at the "Interdependence project" by one J. Brown.  I quote:

I have only been in one fight. It was in the third grade. I don’t recall what the impetus was but it ended up in a war of words between me and another boy on the basketball court. I remember deciding to hit him but when I went to strike my arm went slack. It was as if my body overrode my minds directive and I was incapable of trying to harm him.

The other boy did not have the same issue and I was quickly pinned and squirming to be free. The only black girl in our class, Latisha, came to my aid and pushed him off of me before he got any punches in. We were friends and no one messed with Latisha.

I can trace my inclination for yoga back to that day. I learned something important about myself. I am not naturally inclined towards violence. Even as a boy, I recognized that this was not true of everyone. As an adult, it makes sense that I embrace a life philosophy that puts a premium on nonviolence.

 Well, my history was different. My siblings and I were subject to bullying as a young kids, and I don't know about J. Brown's history otherwise, but the point where a kid fights back is where the bullying generally stops. Like J. Brown, I too don't think of violence as the first  thing when in an altercation, and in the intervening years between the time I fought back against a bully and now I have learned very much about the proper applicatoin of power.

Power, authority, and responsibility are a three-legged stool of a metaphorical sort; you can't have any two legitimately  without the third, and to abjure any one of them, as Rollo May pointed out, is inherently unhealthy for people.  Understanding this and embracing it is an important key to healthy relationships, organizations, and societies.

And at some point the proper application of power may need to be the application of violence to eliminate the possibility of greater harm. That is the principle of budō (武道), and why for a very long time I've understood that there was an undercurrent of unrecognized hypocrisy or at least ignorance in the dogmatic pacifist.  I too was a dogmatic pacifist once, one who thought he was "unlucky" to have been bullied as a young kid, perhaps as a means of rationalizing or forgetting the fact that real abuse had been done to me.

Somewhere along the line I realized that there were entire strains of human experience unknown to me in the manner that Henry Miller noted that where he came from,  Brooklyn, the notion of temperate climates was unknown.  Long Island, my home region, borders Queens which borders Brooklyn.  The notion that you can walk down any street, and firearms notwithstanding, nobody will mess with you and you have no need to mess with them is a very temperate climate indeed.

J. Brown, and Nathan later in his post  get to the point that there is aspects of harm to one's self that arise from a yoga practice from time to time.  I had to really chuckle at this bit from Brown:

I remember a particular occasion when I was teaching one of my trademark power vinyasa classes. I was barking out my well prepared sequence and, instead of my usual attention to everyone’s alignment, I happened to be noticing the facial expressions of the people in my class.

They looked miserable. They were filled with struggle and strain, just doing their best to get through and not enjoying themselves much in the process. There was a distinct lack of joy.

Afterwards, several students came up to thank me and tell me how great the class was. It made me feel uncomfortable. Walking home, I kept thinking: “What am I doing?”

 One of the most temperate aspects of the martial arts training I've been receiving is just how very very different it is from the "regimented" types of martial arts practice (forms, uniforms, etc.)  that's so common in other schools.  But the thing that really hooked me on this way was not just that (though at 54, with my own Zen teacher, and with the forms of Zen, I don't need more excuses for forms).  It was the attitude of teacher and participants.

There was frequent from-the-belly laughter. There's laughter because the old sifu can take somebody twice his size and three times his weight and throw him across the room, everyone knows it, the guy is as gentle as a kitten, but in the course of showing one how and why a particular move should be done exactly a certain way there's this weird mechanical magic that is just astounding.  There's laughter because we're so much younger than he, and we're so incompetent at this (and I am among the most incompetent).  And there's laughter because we incompetents occasionally see that we've had this power all along; we just didn't know how to use it, and when we get a glimpse of it, a glimpse of being able to practice this magic, it's knee-slapping funny because it makes a mockery of all the preconceptions we've had about ourselves all our lives, at least those regarding how we were physically present in the world.

In short, I have fun doing this. And I don't know about yoga, but I do know that the only way to get better at what I'm doing is practicing, but practicing without expecting perfection in each attempt, just attempting an iota of improvement.   I feel sorry for those Marine boot-camp yoga and martial arts ways.  They have too much extra baggage, I think.  But I do also think embedded into their harm situation may be a condition of a distorted notion of power, authority and responsibility.

I don't know, maybe I'm lucky; (see "unlucky" above); I think I am to have at least once in my life, found a teacher who can do this, and fellow students who are patient with my incompetence.

Update:
It's also interesting to read Brad Warner's piece on juggling and Ken Wilber and prowess on the "Suicide Girls" site (which I got from his regular blog).  I share his displeasure towards someone "like Ken Wilber who does tricks — ones that nobody can ever even verify he’s accomplished, by the way — [and makes]  tons more money than that street juggler down on Venice Beach who does something far cooler."  But I would part ways a bit with Warner based on what my Zen teacher's my the Wing Chun teacher's attitude towards the student, and heck, any good teacher (which, I think Warner may think he is). That is, the whole point of Rinzai teaching practice - and Wing Chun teaching, (that is, what the teachers do in teaching) as I've experienced it is, physical and mental disabilities notwithstanding in the latter case, you can do it too!  That's why it's often very funny - because I never really thought it might be possible  to heave a big linebacker across a room with my hand. But today I realize it might not entirely be out of the question someday, given the right confluence of circumstances. And that's funny.

The juggler and Ken Wilber, and the yoga marine drill sergeant  - imply what they do is way, way beyond your skill.

But it isn't.  It's just likely that you never studied juggling, Wing Chun, or fancy electronic brain tricks.

You know, it's like magicians' magic. You don't have to kill yourself or make tons of money to do something, but you can have fun, become more mindful, and more psychologically whole.  And you can laugh, too.

Sanity, 見性, responsibility

On travel I usually bring as many back issues of Harper's that I haven't yet read.  And so I was fascinated to read in the December issue an article on the possible prevention of psychosis (subscription required).  This article bears upon not only whatever responsibility we may have for the recent violence in Tuscon Arizona, and yet another reason why "he was insane, and there was nothing we could have done" was an inadequate response, but also the nature of mind and consciousness  and sanity, and its relation to kensho (見性 ), satori (悟り ) and other meditative states.

If you can get a copy of this article, I strongly suggest you read the whole thing, because I'm touching on only a tiny part of this article:

It is impossible to predict the precise moment when a person has embarked on a path toward madness, since there is no quantifiable point at which healthy thoughts become insane. It is only in retrospect that the prelude to psychosis can be diagnosed with certainty. Yet in the past decade, doctors have begun to trace the illness back to its earliest signs. [T]he First Episode Psychosis Clinic at the University of Illinois Medical Center ... is one of about sixty clinics in the United States that work to help people experiencing early psychotic symptoms maintain a grasp on reality. About a third of these programs focus exclusively on patients who appear to be in what is known as the prodrome, the aura that precedes a psychotic break by up to two or three years. During this phase, people often have mild hallucinations—they might spot a nonexistent cat out of the corner of their eye or hear their name in the sound of the wind—yet they doubt that these sensations are real. They still have “insight”—a pivotal word in psychiatric literature, indicating that a patient can recognize an altered worldview as a sign of illness, not a revelation. 

By working with people when they are still skeptical of their own delusions, doctors hope to stop the disease before it has really begun. Three years ago, the results of a study of nearly 300 patients who sought treatment because of “recurring unusual thoughts,” “unusual sensory experiences,” or “increased suspiciousness” were published by the North American Prodrome Longitudinal Study, a collaboration of eight prodromal outpatient clinics. The researchers found that 35 percent of patients had a psychotic break within two and a half years of enrolling at a clinic...

Although the DSM [(Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders )] is written by the country’s leading psychiatrists, the neurological mechanisms behind mental disorders are too poorly understood to have much bearing on the way the manual separates health from pathology. Instead, the fifty-eight-year-old book guides psychiatrists toward diagnoses with checklists of behavioral signs that require a “minimal amount of inference on the part of the observer” (according to the 1987 edition). The outer limits of normality are decided by committee, with definitions of illness deferring to consensus opinion. A “delusion,” one of the five key symptoms listed for schizophrenia, is a “false belief . . . firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes.” A “bizarre delusion,” a more severe symptom, has gone through numerous revisions. In one edition of the manual, it had to have “patently absurd” content with “no possible basis in fact”; in the next, it involved “a phenomenon that the person’s culture would regard as totally implausible.” After the revision, 10 percent of patients who were previously deemed schizophrenic were given a new diagnosis, the majority of them because their delusions were no longer bizarre.

The DSM is designed to avoid the slippery spaces between disorders, the complaints not easily named or seen. Perhaps more than any other disorder, the psychosis risk syndrome puts pressure on the logic of the entire enterprise, as it forces doctors to break down the process of losing one’s mind. They have to identify delusions before the patient really believes in them. When does a strong idea take on a pathological flavor? How does a metaphysical crisis morph into a medical one? At what point does our interpretation of the world become so fixed that it no longer matters “what almost everyone else believes”? Even William James admitted that he struggled to distinguish a schizophrenic break from a mystical experience.

 There are, as I've said, many "take-aways" in this artcle, among them:

• There is, evidently, some kind of a continuum between total full-fledged psychotic break from reality and "normal" behavior and...
• Those that experience it often, if not inevitably are aware that their beliefs aren't necessarily normal
• And they are often suffering from the delusions they are having
• And we have a responsibility, I think, to try to understand this process, 
• But since we stigmatize the ill and the mentally ill, that's problematic.

More to the point of what I want to say, is I was somewhat struck by what the sufferers of prodrome (pre-psychotic break syndrome) were expressing and my own Zen practice as well as tiny tiny bit I know about neurology; you can't help but be.

Our "self" is something our brain creates for us, and there isn't "one" place in the brain this "self" can be said to reside.  And yet it is just this "self" that apparently suffers in a psychotic break.  The questions that one clinic asks possible prodrome patients include:

Do you daydream a lot or find yourself preoccupied with stories, fantasies, or ideas?
Do you think others ever say that your interests are unusual or that you are eccentric?
Do familiar people or surroundings ever seem strange? Confusing? Unreal? Not a part of the living world? Alien? Inhuman?
Have you ever felt that you might not actually exist? Do you ever think that the world might not exist?

 There are, it seems to me, a number of koans embedded in each of those questions.  Do you daydream a lot? What is a lot? What is a daydream? What is the living world? What is alien? What is inhuman? What does it mean to exist?  How do we know the world exists?

The other question, "Do you think others ever say that your interests are unusual or that you are eccentric?" is even more interesting: I suppose (I hope) the answer to this question doesn't allow the imaginative to be swept into a psychotic diagnosis.

The fact that in  kensho (見性 ), "seeing into one's nature,"  one sees that one's nature is sunyata, is clearly not to say that one's nature is one rock solid unchanging essence. (Or not.)  Is this the same as a psychotic break? Different? 

I think the difference between a Zen practice, including 見性 and a psychotic break is several:

• We generally aren't suffering because we are questioning everything.
• We aren't usually existentially disturbed at the consideration, and acting within, the premise that the self is a construct of the mind; rather, we are for whatever reason, reassured by it, because we understand this is the nature of all beings.
• We try  not to be attached to beliefs and delusions, including the belief in non-attachment.

Also, there is a strong link between the incidences of psychosis and deprivation - whether it's a deprivation caused by being a minority, or by being economically disadvantaged, the incidence of psychosis seems to increase.

We have a responsibility to find out these issues to their core, and to try to help those who need it.  I would also venture - again as a rank nonspecialist who is clearly writing from the most his most ignorant parts - I would venture that the use of mindfulness based methods might be applied to these prodrome people with interesting results.  It's a study that begs to be done, if it's not already being done, simply because the links between the mystical states and the psychotic break are striking.

More on the interplay between the resevoir of memes in society and disordered behavior

Regarding the ongoing discussions of what motivates people to do violent acts, and where responsibility lies (see NellaLou's excellent post today) perhaps a more clear-cut, and less controversial example - unless, ah, you're a Mormon - can be found in the case of Elizabeth Smart.  Now one cannot tar all Mormons by the behavior of  Glenn Beck,  and it is certainly folly to blame the Mountain Meadows massacre on any Mormon alive today.  But it is hard to deny that Mormon theology and practices, and memes are somehow intertwined with the Elizabeth Smart case, and in particular, were used by Brian David Mitchell to perpetrate his crimes.

This may sound like a strange story to people who are not from around here, but everything that happened in Mitchell's life, at least up to where he kidnapped Elizabeth, is not that unusual within the Mormon community. Most Mormons do not have visitations and revelations, but some still do, and when it happens, there tend to be dramatic consequences.
For example: In 1993, while LDS Apostle Howard Hunter was addressing 15,000 BYU students in their basketball arena, a young man named Cody Judy appeared on stage and stood behind Hunter with a briefcase he said contained a bomb. He gave Hunter a three-page letter describing how God had made him, Cody Judy, the new prophet of the Church. He told Hunter to read it or he would blow everybody up. There was no bomb in the briefcase, only a Book of Mormon. Judy was taken to the state mental hospital, where he jumped from his third-story window and escaped into the mountains. For three weeks he traveled "like a deer," fearing a massive manhunt. Then, suddenly, he showed up at the Church-owned television station and asked for some airtime on the news. Then he spent eight years in prison, and when he got out he worked in a video store and ran for public office. Now he has a Facebook site.

Prophesy and polygamy often go together. One of the responsibilities of being the new prophet is to spread "the seed of David" and produce the new chosen people. This takes a lot of women and a lot of effort.

I had a friend in high school who was a gifted athlete and a charming young man. His family lived down the street from mine, next to the Salt Lake Country Club. Late one summer night, he burst into my bedroom, very frightened. He said he'd been making out with his girlfriend on the ninth green and his guardian angel appeared in a glowing light above a sand trap. The angel told him to take his hand out of his girlfriend's pants and not to put it back, ever again. At the time, no one mentioned schizophrenia. We all thought it was just part of being a Mormon—even when he attacked his father because he thought he was the Devil, even when he would go down to Temple Square and walk up to young women and tell them that God had just told him they were to be married in the Celestial Kingdom. We thought this was strange, but not necessarily out of the ordinary. His family sent him on a mission, thinking it would be good for him, but it only made him more crazy. He came back and went into the psych ward at the University hospital, where they put him on heavy medication. He struggled with a marriage and numerous low-paying jobs and volunteered as a live actor in the temple, portraying "Heavenly Father Behind the Veil," but his health went downhill fast and he died at age 29 due to organ failure from all the medication he was taking.
Then there was the group of polygamists in central Utah who claimed to be receiving "unanimous revelations," where not one but all ten men would receive the same revelation at the same time. Angels and apostles and resurrected beings had appeared to them, and they had seen and heard many wonderful things. For instance, they were told they were all new prophets and they should start a new church called "the True and Living Church of Jesus Christ of the Last Days," which they did. Then God told them that they should become polygamists, which they did. Then, unfortunately, God told only some of them that they should sleep with more than one wife in the bed at a time, which they did, and this caused their quorum of 10 apostles to break apart, as some considered the practice to be an abomination unto the Lord.
Prophesy and polygamy often go together. When God speaks to a man and tells him he is the new prophet and must now take charge of the only true church, the next thing He often tells the man is to become a polygamist. This is because one of the responsibilities of being the new prophet is to spread "the seed of David" and produce the new chosen people. This takes a lot of women and a lot of effort.
Many people in Salt Lake City, Mormon and non-Mormon, are opposed to polygamy, but very few are in favor of prosecuting and punishing the crime. This is because there are a lot of polygamists in these parts, and it would be very expensive and socially chaotic to go after them. Polygamy is a long-established part of the local culture, and, then, we all live in something that resembles a polygamous culture, where affairs and serial monogamy are common. So who will be the first to throw a stone? And what will become of it?
In this way, we tolerate polygamy, apparently even among crazy homeless people dressed as characters out of the New Testament...

 It was perhaps the pervasiveness of Mormon ideology and thought that helped keep Mitchell at large as long as he was; he did not appear out of the ordinary (indeed for a while, before he kidnapped Elizabeth Smart he did ceremonies at the LDS temple itself!), though in media portrayals he appears completely loony.

We don't have - yet - the luxury of really knowing the social nexus of Jared Lee Loughner, but one thing is clear, though it is also clear already some of his behavior was already thought to be bizarre before he ever committed a violent act.  There is no point in pointing fingers at those who knew Loughner, but as I see it, there is also no point in condoning  those who have been putting hate and vitriol into the discourse either.  Were those with whom he was acquainted too blinded by the pervasiveness of violent ideas and discourse to be unaware of how really dangerous Loughner was becoming?

This is more intricate than you're reading about, even here.

More on the interplay of mental disturbance, culpability, and interdependence

In thinking more about the Giffords incident, for some reason I was reminded by Case 43 of the Mumonkan; wern't you?  Ah, I jest.

首山和尚、拈竹篦示衆云、汝等諸人、若喚作竹篦則觸。

Shuzan Oshõ held up his shippei [staff of office] before his disciples and said, "You monks! If you call this a shippei, you oppose its reality.

不喚作竹篦則背。

If you do not call it a shippei, you ignore the fact.

汝諸人、且道、喚作甚麼。

Tell me, you monks, what will you call it?"

Mumon's Comment

無門曰、喚作竹篦則觸。

If you call it a shippei, you oppose its reality.

不喚作竹篦則背。

If you do not call it a shippei, you ignore the fact.

不得有語、不得無語。

Words are not available; silence is not available.

速道、速道。

Now, tell me quickly, what is it?

Mumon's Verse 頌曰

拈起竹篦      Holding up the shippei,

行殺活令      He takes life, he gives life.

背觸交馳      Opposing and ignoring interweave.

佛祖乞命      Even Buddhas and patriarchs beg for their lives.

I had been thinking about the shippei as a metaphor for Loughner's mental condition, which, if true, opposes the reality of the interdependence of his condition and those around him and the sources that triggered his ideation.

But Mumon's verse ... well that astounded me.  But that's it.

(Update: Or perhaps a better metaphor is the political vitriol, which opposes the interweaving of action and thought.  Which makes the last verse that much more meaningful.)

Exposure to luxury items is found to be related to narcissism

According to these guys:

Harvard professor Roy Y.J Chua and London Business School assistant professor Xi Zou found that people who live luxuriously may be psychologically different than everyone else. 
More specifically, people who drive around in town cars and zip across the country in private jets make selfish decisions that enable them to do so.  They make decisions that best benefit themselves and don't consider others as much. Chua says this could be the reason so many high-paid executives, like those on Wall Street, act irresponsibly.
"People who were made to think about luxury prior to a decision-making task have a higher tendency to endorse self-interested decisions that might potentially harm others," Chua and Zou wrote in their February 2010 paper, "The Devil Wears Prada? Effects of Exposure to Luxury Goods on Cognition and Decision Making."

Or, in Chua and Zou's words:

This paper demonstrates that mere exposure to luxury goods increases individuals’ propensity to prioritize self-interests over others’ interests, influencing the decisions they make. Experiment 1 found that participants primed with luxury goods were more likely than those primed with non-luxury goods to endorse business decisions that benefit themselves but could potentially harm others. Using a word recognition task, Experiment 2 further demonstrates that exposure to luxury is likely to activate self-interest but not necessarily the
tendency to harm others. Implications of these findings were discussed.

So,  one might wonder why and how folk exposed to the lap of luxury develop compassion, because clearly some do.  It's the whole Buddha narrative you know.  Perhaps exposure to the inevitability of suffering and death is indeed the trigger.  It'd be an interesting follow-up experiment, no? That would be what I would call doing research into the link between Buddhism and human behavior.

Faux Compassion and Kindness v. "Experimental" Compassion and Kindness

When you've fallen on the highway and you're lying in the rain,

and they ask you how you're doing of course you'll say you can't complain --

If you're squeezed for information, that's when you've got to play it dumb:

You just say you're out there waiting for the miracle, for the miracle to come.

                                                                              -L. Cohen

Nathan discusses "the Artificial Buddhist Personality."  Maybe folks who read me might not guess it, but in real life, in my work life, my language is considerably saltier than I put on in this blog. I could tell you a joke about a penguin, for example... This is a public forum and the internet persona never dies, you know.

But I don't think I witnessed faux humility and graciousness when I saw Leonard Cohen last week.  I'm often not in the mood for mercy, compassion and forgiveness, let alone humility and graciousness, but luckily, I sometimes remember that it's a good idea to try that out as a gambit.  Not because it's a George Costanza gambit that doing the opposite of one's natural inclination leads to a more successful outcome, but because I've sat long enough to figure out that there's a lot of junk going on in my head that isn't conducive to a harmonious outcome if I go with my default inclination.   When I can put my mind in that mode, it's an experiment, just as when I have to step outside of my inclination to hide under a rock and be hard with those who work for me. 

Regarding the latter situation, as well as pretty much anything else work related, I have phrased it to my manager in terms of acting on behalf of my employer; he has at times been incredulous of this - that's his nature, to be incredulous.  He has at times thought such statements insincere.   But truth be told, I have worked long enough to figure out that not a damn thing gets done unless you get the imaginary Greek chorus of upper management, home office management, colleagues, customers and shareholders to go along with you - then you can get the actual management to go along with you. And so even the tiniest thing one does in the course of one's work day can be thought to be observed by this imaginary Greek chorus.  It's not being insincere; it is, as best as I can make out today, acting in harmony with the Daodeching (道德 經).    I used to be bothered by my manager's assertion, but then I figured out he doesn't understand that, and it's part of my job to encourage him to understand why I act the way I do.  So that's not really a problem.

But I really don't see myself as having that much time these days for false fronts on the compassion front.  It is true that people who are in a stage of bliss from all the meditation at first might assume such a persona, but after a while it gets boring, just as it is when you're impossibly rich and you're on your way to an orgy at 6 in the morning and you run out of gas.   There's no point in saying you're waiting for the miracle; you just want the damned gas.  Hopefully you can get it without descending too far away from the better inclinations of our species.

It's just about time for zazen.  May all beings not get bored.

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself..." and Blogisattva Awards

"-And you are the easiest person to fool," wrote Richard Feynman in "Cargo Cult Science," which I had mentioned earlier, here.  David Brooks, who normally writes political columns that are risible for their lack of depth and disingenuous (his Bobos in Paradise bit has been widely debunked) ,  reports evidence in support of Feynman's maxim.

Classic research has suggested that the more people doubt their own beliefs the more, paradoxically, they are inclined to proselytize in favor of them. David Gal and Derek Rucker published a study in Psychological Science in which they presented some research subjects with evidence that undermined their core convictions. The subjects who were forced to confront the counterevidence went on to more forcefully advocate their original beliefs, thus confirming the earlier findings.  

This explains many things.  Here's Gal and Drucker's own words...

A seminal case study by Festinger found, paradoxically, that evidence that disconfirmed religious beliefs increased individuals’ tendency to proselytize to others. Although this finding is renowned, surprisingly, it has never been subjected to experimental scrutiny and is open to multiple interpretations. We examined a general form of the question first posed by Festinger, namely, how does shaken confidence influence advocacy? Across three experiments, people whose confidence in closely held beliefs was undermined engaged in more advocacy of their beliefs (as measured by both advocacy effort and intention to advocate) than did people whose confidence was not undermined. The effect was attenuated when individuals affirmed their beliefs, and was moderated by both importance of the belief and open-mindedness of a message recipient. These findings not only have implications for the results of Festinger’s seminal study, but also offer new insights into people’s motives for advocating their beliefs. 

 I am very seriously thinking of plunking down $35.00 just to buy this article.  It's interesting that the researchers were talking about religious beliefs here specifically.  I don't know - I haven't read the article - if this falls into the class of "cargo cult science" articles of which Feyman spoke, but I believe he was speaking largely of clinical psychology, not the behavioral work whose importance has increased after Feyman's death.

What I do know is this: I could get this way if I am not mindful of the tendency for this to happen. In a certain sense, we should not trust our beliefs and opinions, but also, we can and should trust that we can question and reevaluate our beliefs and opinions.   The position on questioning beliefs and opinions of course, is a belief and an opinion, but is often supported by the evidence of experience: if one tests a belief or opinion, whether the test confirms or denies the belief or opinion, it confirms the idea that we can and should trust our beliefs and opinions; it seems difficult to falsify except if you life in a Tale of Despereaux  kind of existence, where people want to sanction you for going out of the box and questioning.  For whatever reason, that kind of coercion didn't take with me.  Maybe it had to do with my ancestors and why they left Poland.  I come from a long line of feisty folk.

I see that the Blogisattva Awards finalists are out. I truly congratulate all of them for being recognized by their peers in the Buddhist Blogosphere.  While in the past I had been a finalist in one or two categories, I'm very happy, actually not to be a finalist this year.  It's good to see works from other bloggers, for one thing.  For another thing,  I haven't participated much in that kind of thing.  Also in the back of my mind is I'm thinking of actually meeting some of these folks at the Buddhist Geeks Conference.  I think I could probably provide a perspective they might not have. 

Still, a part of me  - a part I have to question - says, deep down, "How come they didn't recognize me???"   Well, the reason for that, aside form the relatively minor role circumstance plays, is that I simply didn't write the posts that did get recognized.  So what?   I hadn't written the posts to get recognized in the first place; rather, I think - after about 5 years - I'm just starting to get what it means for "me"  to do this Buddhist blogging thing.   And it's to try to promote wisdom, generosity, and compassion in blogging in a way that elicits in the reader's mind a  vast emptiness and no knowing.  And to record how practice infuses my life. And finally, or perhaps as a result of the last bit, how to find practice in the everyday. And in particular, how science and Buddhism really  are reconciled, from an equally rigorous scientific viewpoint and Buddhist viewpoint.    That's the perspective I could probably provide to others, I hope.

And dammit, that's hard; it's a skill!

And I  fail at those kinds of things, and so it's obviously ridiculous of me that other bloggers should hold other bloggers to a standard based on what "I" think is good blogging; it's laughable for me to have that thought.  And I do and I laugh.

 "The first principle is that you must not fool yourself-and you are the easiest person to fool."

My web-surfing, my mind, my dukkha

One of the interesting things about the internet - how many sentences do you read that begin like that anymore? - is that it gives, irrefutably, a history, a memory, of where your mind's been.

I of course, have a number of things I do each day with the 'net, a number of things that involve family needs, work, retirement planning, my interests in the news, politics, science, and fitness.

So here's where my mind is today:

• Most Americans don't care about the budget deficit compared to unemployment.
• The Hindu has a book review of a history of Cambodian Buddhism.
• Finland opposes an Irish bailout.  Things could get weird here, as in Argentina weird.
• "In-country" operations means a lower dollar probably won't significantly reduce unemployment.
• Here's the best conclusion to this post: Focused attention will be more satisfying than random wandering of the mind:

I’m not sure I believe this prediction [about focused attention versus random wandering of the mind], but I can assure you it is based on an enormous amount of daydreaming cataloged in the current issue of Science. Using an iPhone app called trackyourhappiness, psychologists at Harvard contacted people around the world at random intervals to ask how they were feeling, what they were doing and what they were thinking.

The least surprising finding, based on a quarter-million responses from more than 2,200 people, was that the happiest people in the world were the ones in the midst of enjoying sex. Or at least they were enjoying it until the iPhone interrupted.

The researchers are not sure how many of them stopped to pick up the phone and how many waited until afterward to respond. Nor, unfortunately, is there any way to gauge what thoughts — happy, unhappy, murderous — went through their partners’ minds when they tried to resume.

When asked to rate their feelings on a scale of 0 to 100, with 100 being “very good,” the people having sex gave an average rating of 90. That was a good 15 points higher than the next-best activity, exercising, which was followed closely by conversation, listening to music, taking a walk, eating, praying and meditating, cooking, shopping, taking care of one’s children and reading. Near the bottom of the list were personal grooming, commuting and working...

You might suppose that if people’s minds wander while they’re having fun, then those stray thoughts are liable to be about something pleasant — and that was indeed the case with those happy campers having sex. But for the other 99.5 percent of the people, there was no correlation between the joy of the activity and the pleasantness of their thoughts.

“Even if you’re doing something that’s really enjoyable,” Mr. Killingsworth [of Harvard] says, “that doesn’t seem to protect against negative thoughts. The rate of mind-wandering is lower for more enjoyable activities, but when people wander they are just as likely to wander toward negative thoughts.”

 But then we mindful Buddhist folks kinda knew that, didn't we?

Buddhism and the Liquidity Trap and the Election

I have a couple of colleagues, one of whom with which I presently work (not closely) who is, um, let's say an avowed right wing extremist.  Tomorrow, right-wing groups are expected to make large gains in the American elections, which I attribute to  reasons known only to elites which don't admit Paul Krugman to their inner sancta, or perhaps naked, abject greed on the part of oligarchs playing a game (in the game theoretic sense) in which they adopt a  strategy by which they individually seem to benefit in the short term but wind up with all being harmed in the long term.

The ideologues have their reasons, and that's where I would say Buddhism enters into the picture,  though again, as a compact explanation I'm still led to think of the Tao te Ching:

When the great Tao is lost spring forth benevolence and righteousness.

When wisdom and sagacity arise, there are great hypocrites.

When family relations are no longer harmonious, we have filial children and devoted parents.

When a nation is in confusion and disorder, patriots are recognized.

Where Tao is, equilibrium is. When Tao is lost, out come all the differences of things.

Do away with learning, and grief will not be known.

Do away with sageness and eject wisdom, and the people will be more benefited a hundred times.

Do away with benevolence and eject righteousness, and the people will return to filial duty and parental love.

Do away with artifice and eject gains and there will be no robbers and thieves.

These four, if we consider them as a culture, are not sufficient.

Therefore let there be what the people can resort to:

Appear in plainness and hold to simplicity;

Restrain selfishness and curtail desires.

But - to put a more Buddhist spin on it, all dharmas are fundamentally empty.   In Buddhism, we start from a few positions - very few, compared with Christianity or other montheisms.   Our "noble truths" are realities, that are experienced - the aren't things that can't be really refuted from observation.  There is suffering or discomfort at least that all beings experience.  There is a a cause to that suffering, there is a way to transcend that suffering, and the eight-fold path, when followed works. 

But all dharmas are fundamentally empty, as the Mahayana tradition asserts.

Early Buddhist schools of Abhidharma , or scholastic metaphysics, analyzed reality into ultimate entities, or dharmas , arising and ceasing in irreducible moments in time. The Mahayanists reacted against this realistic pluralism by stating that all dharmas are "empty," without self-nature ( svabhava ) or essence. This was a radical restatement of the central Buddhist teaching of non-self ( anatman ). It was declared that not only ordinary objects, but the Buddha, nirvana , and also emptiness itself are all "empty." The teaching attempts to eradicate mental attachment and the perception of duality, which, since it is a basis for aversion to bondage in birth-and-death ( samsara ) and desire for nirvana, may obstruct the bodhisattva's compassionate vow to save all beings before entering nirvana himself. Wisdom ( prajna ), or direct insight into emptiness, is the sixth perfection ( paramita ) of a bodhisattva. It is stressed by both Buddhist writers and Western scholars that emptiness is not an entity nor a metaphysical or cosmological absolute, nor is it nothingness or annihilation. "Empty" things are neither existent nor nonexistent, and their true nature is thus called not only emptiness but also suchness ( tathata ).  

Politically, the state of affairs in which we find ourselves is but a singular instance of tathata amidst myriads of others.   The ignorant and greedy and hateful may yet cause a reply of the 1930s, including but not limited to a major war breaking out to decide the fortunes of those few who've been playing the game  but risk losing their piece of the Empire.   And, barring ill health or severe misfortune, folks such as myself might yet profit from it one way or the other, but at the end of the day, it is all without substance and form.  No doubt the triumph of greed, hatred, and ignorance will cause a pandemic of dukkha, rife with opportunity to help the benighted in ways which were not previously possible, simply because you words cannot really help much at the end of the day.

So there is a good chance that the American elections will bring an exacerbation of the liquidity trap - a situation where there will be no government intervention in the economy to protect people's livelihood.  And that will mean that incomes will fall, unemployment will be high and likely increase, and that most of the world will experience greater impoverishment.

Like Krugman, it is hardly the outcome I would have the world choose,  but it appears that many are hell-bent on going down this path.   But, as Leonard Cohen wrote, "Every heart to love will come, but like a refugee." 

Get ready for a flood of refugees if the pundit predictions come true.

More on Procrastination, Planning, and Dukkha

I have a few more minutes now to expound a bit more on the post I made yesterday.

When we plan, we often think we are creating an expectation about how certain things will be done within the context of certain events we expect to happen.   But as any good project manager or field commander knows,  all plans go awry at some point, and there are still expectations of things that need to be done and events that will happen, as well as the realization that certain unexpected things had to be done or weren't done, and unforeseen events happen. 

Murphy's Law is real, and it is a hindrance, really, only when dukkha is reigning over the planning and execution of the plan.   The "plan" must be carried out moment to moment anyway, even though in the very near term we might value surfing the net over coming through on our deliverables.

So when we regret procrastination - or other "unforseen" events, we are really regretting a realization of a world that never existed, where all plans and expectations were fulfilled.  

Such a world doesn't exist as far as I know, but it is possible to be dependable despite Murphy's Law.

 The trick is neither to be come too attached to the plan or too attached to departing from the plan,  or even, oddly enough the execution of the plan.

The practice of breath-counting in meditation is one of humanity's greatest inventions: not only does it "build up concentration" or, if you like, help you develop 情理気 (I presume I got the Kanji right on that one - it's joriki!) or concentration energy, but it also helps develop nonattachment. Your "plan" of course is trivially simple: count from 1 to 10 in synch with your breath.  But if you lose count, go back to the beginning.  The trick of course is not to see "10" as some kind of success, and not to see losing count as some kind of failure.  Either attachment will of course result in an inability actually carry out the exercise!

Executing all the other plans of life are similar cases, in my experience.

Murphy's Law is a Corollary of Dukkha

That's the conclusion my Rube Goldberg mind came to after reading this article in the New Yorker by James Surowiecki on procrastination.

Academics, who work for long periods in a self-directed fashion, may be especially prone to putting things off: surveys suggest that the vast majority of college students procrastinate, and articles in the literature of procrastination often allude to the author’s own problems with finishing the piece. (This article will be no exception.) But the academic buzz around the subject isn’t just a case of eggheads rationalizing their slothfulness. As various scholars argue in “The Thief of Time,” edited by Chrisoula Andreou and Mark D. White (Oxford; $65)—a collection of essays on procrastination, ranging from the resolutely theoretical to the surprisingly practical—the tendency raises fundamental philosophical and psychological issues. You may have thought, the last time you blew off work on a presentation to watch “How I Met Your Mother,” that you were just slacking. But from another angle you were actually engaging in a practice that illuminates the fluidity of human identity and the complicated relationship human beings have to time. Indeed, one essay, by the economist George Ainslie, a central figure in the study of procrastination, argues that dragging our heels is “as fundamental as the shape of time and could well be called the basic impulse.”...

Most of the contributors to the new book agree that this peculiar irrationality stems from our relationship to time—in particular, from a tendency that economists call “hyperbolic discounting.” A two-stage experiment provides a classic illustration: In the first stage, people are offered the choice between a hundred dollars today or a hundred and ten dollars tomorrow; in the second stage, they choose between a hundred dollars a month from now or a hundred and ten dollars a month and a day from now. In substance, the two choices are identical: wait an extra day, get an extra ten bucks. Yet, in the first stage many people choose to take the smaller sum immediately, whereas in the second they prefer to wait one more day and get the extra ten bucks. In other words, hyperbolic discounters are able to make the rational choice when they’re thinking about the future, but, as the present gets closer, short-term considerations overwhelm their long-term goals. A similar phenomenon is at work in an experiment run by a group including the economist George Loewenstein, in which people were asked to pick one movie to watch that night and one to watch at a later date. Not surprisingly, for the movie they wanted to watch immediately, people tended to pick lowbrow comedies and blockbusters, but when asked what movie they wanted to watch later they were more likely to pick serious, important films. The problem, of course, is that when the time comes to watch the serious movie, another frothy one will often seem more appealing. This is why Netflix queues are filled with movies that never get watched: our responsible selves put “Hotel Rwanda” and “The Seventh Seal” in our queue, but when the time comes we end up in front of a rerun of “The Hangover.”

The lesson of these experiments is not that people are shortsighted or shallow but that their preferences aren’t consistent over time. We want to watch the Bergman masterpiece, to give ourselves enough time to write the report properly, to set aside money for retirement. But our desires shift as the long run becomes the short run..

Why does this happen? One common answer is ignorance. Socrates believed that akrasia was, strictly speaking, impossible, since we could not want what is bad for us; if we act against our own interests, it must be because we don’t know what’s right. Loewenstein, similarly, is inclined to see the procrastinator as led astray by the “visceral” rewards of the present. As the nineteenth-century Scottish economist John Rae put it, “The prospects of future good, which future years may hold on us, seem at such a moment dull and dubious, and are apt to be slighted, for objects on which the daylight is falling strongly, and showing us in all their freshness just within our grasp.” Loewenstein also suggests that our memory for the intensity of visceral rewards is deficient: when we put off preparing for that meeting by telling ourselves that we’ll do it tomorrow, we fail to take into account that tomorrow the temptation to put off work will be just as strong.

Ignorance might also affect procrastination through what the social scientist Jon Elster calls “the planning fallacy.” Elster thinks that people underestimate the time “it will take them to complete a given task, partly because they fail to take account of how long it has taken them to complete similar projects in the past and partly because they rely on smooth scenarios in which accidents or unforeseen problems never occur.” When I was writing this piece, for instance, I had to take my car into the shop, I had to take two unanticipated trips, a family member fell ill, and so on. Each of these events was, strictly speaking, unexpected, and each took time away from my work. But they were really just the kinds of problems you predictably have to deal with in everyday life. Pretending I wouldn’t have any interruptions to my work was a typical illustration of the planning fallacy.

 I'll have more to say on this in another post; I'm just too pressed for time right now.

If a moral code is not "utilitarian" according to some performance measure, what the hell good is it????

As a systems engineer (communication systems, that is), I likely have a few things that I do not agree with in Sam Harris's new book,  “The Moral Landscape,”  if the critical review in the NY Times Book Review is to be believed.

In particular, I'm not quite sure a  "purely" scientific explanation can be found for "the moral code."  As I think I've written on this blog before, in systems engineering, particularly in the areas of control systems engineering, there are critical concepts of observability and controllability.  A system is observable if all its states can be observed; that is, if the states can be determined from measurements.   States are those values or conditions of a system that given its history (perhaps only a very limited history) and given an input, the state of the system in the future can be predicted.  Likewise a system is controllable if for any desired state condition there exists an input to bring the state to that point.  In short, it is not clear to me, even if human beings can be reduced precisely to meat machines, that humanity and moral choices are completely observable or controllable, in which case the moral landscape or code will not only always be complete, but complete in a defective, non-trivial way as opposed to those aspects of natural numbers of which Gödel wrote.  In short, there will be unanswerable and debatable questions.

Having said that however,  (and having seen Harris on The Daily Show last night)  I would take issue with the position of the NY Times reviewer, Kwame Anthony Appiah.  Appiah writes:

Harris means to deny a thought often ascribed to David Hume, according to which there is a clear conceptual distinction between facts and values. Facts are susceptible of rational investigation; values, supposedly, not. But according to Harris, values, too, can be uncovered by science — the right values being ones that promote well-being. “Just as it is possible for individuals and groups to be wrong about how best to maintain their physical health,” he writes, “it is possible for them to be wrong about how to maximize their personal and social well-being.”

But wait: how do we know that the morally right act is, as Harris posits, the one that does the most to increase well-being, defined in terms of our conscious states of mind? Has science really revealed that? If it hasn’t, then the premise of Harris’s all-we-need-is-science argument must have nonscientific origins.

In fact, what he ends up endorsing is something very like utilitarianism, a philosophical position that is now more than two centuries old, and that faces a battery of familiar problems. Even if you accept the basic premise, how do you compare the well-being of different people? Should we aim to increase average well-being (which would mean that a world consisting of one bliss case is better than one with a billion just slightly less blissful people)? Or should we go for a cumulative total of well-being (which might favor a world with zillions of people whose lives are just barely worth living)? If the mental states of conscious beings are what matter, what’s wrong with killing someone in his sleep? How should we weigh present well-being against future well-being?

It’s not that Harris is unaware of these questions, exactly. He refers to the work of Derek Parfit, who has done more than any philosopher alive to explore such difficulties. But having acknowledged some of these complications, he is inclined to push them aside and continue down his path.

Now at first glance it appears Appiah is making an objection similar to mine, but I don't think so.  "Science" hasn't "revealed" a moral code (I cringe when someone like,  say, Deepak Chopra uses phrases like "science reveals." It smacks of those miracle organ enlargement/reduction pill ads). True, but can we know another's well being?

Uh, that's what we Buddhists call compassion.  We can't knowthe "well" being of another in its entirety, but we can get that the beings we see and of which we have experience, either directly or indirectly, had existences and senses and experiences as total to them as ours are to us.

In the sense of the transcendence of the suffering of all beings, the moral code of the Buddhist religion is indeed a utilitarian outlook.  And regardless of the toy problems raised by philosophers, the existence of the Buddhist moral code,  by its mere existence, without bombast, shouts an indictment of all alternative moral philosophies, as I see it:  If a moral code is not "utilitarian" according to some measure of "goodness" what the hell good is it????  If it is not utilitarian according to some measure of goodness, then it must follow as night follows day that such non-utilitarian moral codes are themselves morally inferior in a utilitarian sense to any such code that does have a performance measure. 

And on that point, I can agree with Harris, even if I think Harris is overly optimistic about the prospects of science. 

No matter, we humans have evolved a certain degree of compassion and empathy.