A Science versus "Spirituality" Brouhaha Again? With TED???

I was away on business when they elected a new pope.   I have an unwritten as of yet lengthy response in mind to my colleagues in the Buddhist blogosphere that were going in a sort of ecumenical direction regarding the new Pope, a.k.a. Francis.

But I saw something else come to my attention that I thought I'd set straight, though it promises to be at least as entertaining from a blogosphere food-fight perspective, and that has to do with the brouhaha regarding TED, two guys named Sheldrake and Hancock, P.Z. Myers and Jerry Coyne, if I've recalled all the names correctly.   

Apparently some folks don't like that P.Z. Myers and Jerry Coyne got Sheldrake's and Hancock's videos removed from a TED/TEDx site.    Apparently this is so because Myers and Coyne decried the pseudo-science in the Sheldrake and Hancock material.

I first got wind of this via C4Chaos (who has directed me to John Ratcliffe's blog ).

I myself am loathe to go into the details of Sheldrake /Hancock.  I've seen too many TED/TEDx videos in my lifetime.   However, I will make a few points...

• I don't have any inclination to view a talk called "The Science Delusion."   The very name of the talk suggests a desire to frame the term "science" as we know and use it today into something it is not.   There is no "materialist science," "alternative science" or "mainstream science" apart from a science that deals with observables and the scientific method. Period.   And I might add P.Z. Myers' one paragraph critique of Sheldrake's video is more or less enough for me.   The constants of the universe might be changing, but that's only observed if we observe it according to the scientific method!
• I have read a bit about Graham Hancock simply because that was most accessible in the time I had; if I had an inclination to produce TED/TEDx talks he'd be right up there with Ramtha in terms of my preferences for speakers...but I may be meaning that ironically on second thought. I might want to have a TED parody...but I digress...no I'm not...
• Let's get this out front and center: TED/TEDx talks are largely bunk.   They're always more about style than content anyway. They've had some rather questionable folk in the past on, who put on rather questionable material.  Too much Malcolm Gladwell. Too much fancy graphics.  Too entertaining.  But the "curators" of TED/TEDx have the right to define what they call TED/TEDx any way they deem fit.  When people complain about "censorship" they're assuming that TED should put just anything on. They don't have to. And they can still be ideas worth spreading, if only as cautionary tales.
• Actually I was digressing a bit.  While I haven't viewed the videos in question,  I have read this bit from Hancock to Chris Anderson who is the TED conference "curator."  Hancock quotes from his presentation:

 “What is death? Our materialist science reduces everything to matter. Materialist science in the West says that we are just meat, we’re just our bodies, so when the brain is dead that’s the end of consciousness. There is no life after death. There is no soul. We just rot and are gone. But actually any honest scientist should admit that consciousness is the greatest mystery of science and that we don’t know exactly how it works. The brain’s involved in it in some way, but we’re not sure how. Could be that the brain generates consciousness the way a generator makes electricity. If you hold to that paradigm then of course you can’t believe in life after death. When the generator’s broken consciousness is gone. But it’s equally possible that the relationship – and nothing in neuroscience rules it out – that the relationship is more like the relationship of the TV signal to the TV set and in that case when the TV set is broken of course the TV signal continues and this is the paradigm of all spiritual traditions – that we are immortal souls, temporarily incarnated in these physical forms to learn and to grow and to develop. And really if we want to know about this mystery the last people we should ask are materialist, reductionist scientists. They have nothing to say on the matter at all. Let’s go rather to the ancient Egyptians who put their best minds to work for three thousand years on the problem of death and on the problem of how we should live our lives to prepare for what we will confront after death…”

Now his second and third sentences create a straw-man.   And the "we just don't know" bit has its  own name as a logical fallacy: argumentum ad ignorantiam - the argument from ignorance.   There are models that deal with consciousness that deal with the relationship between what we observe and what is out there, but any of the useful ones, the ones we can talk about, exist in the structure of that which observable. 

I would find it interesting to say the least if Hancock were to litigate this thing.  He'd lose, if what he's quoted above is representative of the rest of his material.  Evidently he got his start pushing something that looks as well grounded scientifically as "the bible code," namely the Orion Correlation Theory.

I know some  people want their consciousness to be indicative of more than observables interacting with each other.  But the nature of observables are such that we can carry out useful things with the observables without any consideration, use or purpose of an underlying metaphysic.  That atheists pointed this out is immaterial to that point, and I'm sure P.Z. Myers and Jerry Coyne would agree on that - and even that their atheism is immaterial to the science itself.

We Buddhists of the Mahayana variety especially are fond of talking about non-duality, but I think some  do not get that non-duality does not mean that the structures of language and observation are somehow "false" in and of themselves. 事存函蓋合理應箭鋒拄 the Sandokai asserts.   Things exist, box and lid fit, principle responds, arrow points  meet.   The absolute doesn't trump the relative and vice versa.  Physical laws will be physical laws; observables being observed (and consequent measurable distortions therein) aren't trumped by anything "outside the system," because it's all here anyway.   And it's not as though we need to bend either Mahayana Buddhism or science to fit one another.  Our constraints are constraints one way or the other.

When my life is busy, less blog posts ...but I had to pipe up on Merzel...

It's kind of strange, but there are priorities.  But that one I did with Dylan, well, I could watch the video in that 3 or 4 more times.  And I already have. 

But I digress.  There is a confluence of 2 events that gives me schadenfreude on the one hand, and a degree of sorrow on the other; both though flow from hubris, and it's entirely possible (yes it is) that the event that gives me schadenfreude might ultimately have harmed more people than that which gives me a degree of sorrow.  Perhaps it's a miniature mutant version of Stalin's famous dictum that one death is a tragedy, but millions of deaths are just statistics.

On the one hand the reviews of the Broadway extravaganza Spiderman are out. or at least there's one the NY Times.   You know when you see in the home page "may be among the worst musicals ever" that you're in for a reading treat that's the NY Times equivalent of a Friar's Club Roast.  This musical catastrophe, which employed who knows how many people and cost how many millions will probably close soon; careers will be stalled, bills won't get paid - it'll be an economic mess.  And thanks, at least in part, to the hubris of Bono, who, with the Edge once made good rock n' roll, especially when he was on Long Island.  I'm sure all involved had wished he'd have moved to Davos and never schemed to make a comic book equivalent of Springtime for Hitler. 

Read the review though is a dark joy to read- if you ignore the human costs - and frankly, there's no reason to be overly serious here; the cast and all involved should have had career parachutes the moment they sensed this was the Hindenburg.

Career advice for all: be on the outlook for risk.  Your banker is. Ah, I could tell you stories.  Someday if we meet I will.

Then of course there's the abrupt resignation of Genpo Merzel, and I truly feel sorrow for all around.

I have chosen to disrobe as a Buddhist Priest, and will stop giving Buddhist Precepts or Ordinations, but I will continue teaching Big Mind.  I will spend the rest of my life truly integrating the Soto Zen Buddhist Ethics into my life and practice so I can once again regain dignity and respect. My actions have caused a tremendous amount of pain, confusion, and controversy for my wife, family, and Sangha, and for this I am truly sorry and greatly regret. My behavior was not in alignment with the Buddhist Precepts. I feel disrobing is just a small part of an appropriate response.

I am also resigning as an elder of the White Plum Asanga. My actions should not be viewed as a reflection on the moral fabric of any of the White Plum members.

 Know what I said, "Be on the outlook for risk?"  It applies here too.

Hubris (manifested as greed)  seems to be at the heart of both of these debacles, in my view.   The hubris shows in Merzel's apology (which I take as "as sincere as he can muster at the moment").  And it also shows in the link on the "Big Mind" home page to this study.

Objectives: To test the hypothesis that a novel Zen dialogue–based method can bring about significant improvements in spiritual, meditation, and well-being parameters. Design: A pretest–posttest design was used with participants being randomly assigned to either treatment or no treatment group at the Zen Center. The participants were 14 females and 2 males within each group with no prior formal Zen or meditation training. Those participants in the treatment group received intensive interaction for 1 day with an experienced Zen teacher using a dialogue method to induce a deep meditative state without instruction in formal meditation sitting practice. The outcome was measured with multiple previously standardized instruments designed to assess meditation states, well-being, and spirituality. Results: A repeated-measures analysis of variance showed statistically significant differences between the treatment and control groups for all parameters measured. In addition, the meditative state measure suggested qualities consistent with deep meditation experiences. The results justify further investigation of the technique as a rapid spiritual intervention tool particularly for clients facing end-of-life issues.

I had thought I had made a blog post on the topics of science and reality...but I haven't been able to find it.  But my point is - the point I'd wanted to originally make when I saw related articles I can't find now - was that researchers - and investors I might add - always need to be on the lookout for confirmation bias.  There is a whole host of other issues I could raise with this "Big Mind" "study," but for now, I'm just awed by the fact that there's so much hubris/shame associated here that they thought - somebody thought - they could legitimize this thing with a cargo-cult scientific "study." I mean, this really is cargo cult science!   I could probably  think of a dozen objections to the purpose, method, outcomes and usefulness of this "study."

It's all the same.   Hopefully I can be on the lookout for such things in my own life.

More on that Bem article about "psi" woo and science in general.

The story makes the NY Times.

In recent weeks science bloggers, researchers and assorted skeptics have challenged Dr. Bem’s methods and his statistics, with many critiques digging deep into the arcane but important fine points of crunching numbers. (Others question his intentions. “He’s got a great sense of humor,” said Dr. Hyman, of Oregon. “I wouldn’t rule out that this is an elaborate joke.”)

Dr. Bem has generally responded in kind, sometimes accusing critics of misunderstanding his paper, others times of building a strong bias into their own re-evaluations of his data.

In one sense, it is a historically familiar pattern. For more than a century, researchers have conducted hundreds of tests to detect ESP, telekinesis and other such things, and when such studies have surfaced, skeptics have been quick to shoot holes in them.

But in another way, Dr. Bem is far from typical. He is widely respected for his clear, original thinking in social psychology, and some people familiar with the case say his reputation may have played a role in the paper’s acceptance.

Peer review is usually an anonymous process, with authors and reviewers unknown to one another. But all four reviewers of this paper were social psychologists, and all would have known whose work they were checking and would have been responsive to the way it was reasoned.

Perhaps more important, none were topflight statisticians. “The problem was that this paper was treated like any other,” said an editor at the journal, Laura King, a psychologist at the University of Missouri. “And it wasn’t.”

Many statisticians say that conventional social-science techniques for analyzing data make an assumption that is disingenuous and ultimately self-deceiving: that researchers know nothing about the probability of the so-called null hypothesis.

In this case, the null hypothesis would be that ESP does not exist. Refusing to give that hypothesis weight makes no sense, these experts say; if ESP exists, why aren’t people getting rich by reliably predicting the movement of the stock market or the outcome of football games?

Instead, these statisticians prefer a technique called Bayesian analysis, which seeks to determine whether the outcome of a particular experiment “changes the odds that a hypothesis is true,” in the words of Jeffrey N. Rouder, a psychologist at the University of Missouri who, with Richard D. Morey of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, has also submitted a critique of Dr. Bem’s paper to the journal. 

 Recently I have also read a bit of critique on a poorly written article in the New Yorker which points to some valid concerns in science,  but does so in a way that seems to question the scientific method itself.  In particular,  it conflates a bias that researchers might have for unconsciously wanting particular outcomes of experiments with problems with the scientific method itself.  (See here and here for good critiques of the article.)  

It is possible that Bem wanted very much the results he got, perhaps too much.    But I also know that the point of the use of Bayesian analysis might have a point as well (plus there's that infinite energy issue I alluded to earlier).  I will be reading the Rouder and Morey article to determine the extent of their critique of Bem.  As I noted earlier,  the wording of the Bem paper itself was problematic to me; it seemed hard to verify that all possible contributors to the outcome of experiments might not have been isolated. After scanning the critique, though they clearly have a point: Bem's statistical analysis does indeed appear problematic.

Even in science, attachments to outcomes have consequences.  Good science can only be practiced with non-attachment; otherwise one is likely to run into trouble.

Update: I see that Dr. Cassandra Vieten is defending the Bem article.

But I’ll put my cards on the table – given all that I’ve read – scientific studies yielding evidence both for and against, theories for and against, and data from the thousands of people I’ve surveyed and interviewed about their noetic (subjective) and psi experiences, combined with recent discoveries in serious physics that provide possible underlying theories - there are enough data to warrant a much closer look at experiences that seem to transcend the currently understood boundaries of time and space.

I think I agree with what English astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington said (in reference to the uncertainty principle in physics) in 1927: “something unknown is doing we don’t know what.” And whatever it is, I think like the Facebook relationship status: "it's complicated." My proposition here is that we work to figure out what. Let’s take the lid off of the box and use the power of science, reasoning and systematic observation to explore this realm of our human experience. Why? Because experiences of “psi,” real or imagined, have profound influences on people’s lives. Because it’s possible, in fact quite probable, that our current ideas about the structure and function of reality are probably not complete. And, because it’s totally fascinating – at least to me and, it appears, many others.

It is absolute nonsense a) to claim that recent discoveries in physics provide underlying theories to this stuff, and b) that the Uncertainty Principle is in any way a useful way to appeal to ignorance.  Of course our theories about the physical world are incomplete.  But that doesn't mean any old thing goes; it doesn't mean that there's any increased likelihood that the law of gravity as seen on the scale of human perception is going to be repealed tomorrow.

A (very little) bit more on that "psi" woo junk...

So I've been reading a bit of the "Bern article" mentioned before here.  There's a few items that I have thought of in response to them:

• In at least the first reported one (on "erotic stimuli") it is not clear to me that the results are in fact, statistically significant.
• It is not clear to me that all variables in fact were isolated; for example, were there really no other cues available?  I don't know if all other explanatory effects were removed.
• Finally, there's a bit of electrical engineering/physics problems associated with this whole thing, namely, that if such anti-causal behavior in fact happened, it would necessarily imply that infinite energy was available.  I'm sorry, I didn't make the laws of physics.  This phenomenon is easy to explain by way of analogy: imagine an "anti-causal" tuning fork, that is, one that responds to being hit before  it's hit.  Well, if such a beast existed, one could simply tap off the energy before the impulse was input and then ...simply don't hit it.  Since we have no such mechanisms, we can pretty safely assume they don't happen in nature.

And frankly, I'm also kind of bored with the question, because  it stems from a desire to want something more than what's around right now.   It's greed, folks.

More on Dr. Charles Tart

The more I look at the interview on Buddhist Geeks a while back with Dr. Charles Tart, the more questions I have. Let's start here:

...[T]he prime kind of evidence for [reincarnation] is not the stuff you see in the movies where somebody’s hypnotized and regressed, cause that usually yields an awful lot of fantasy. But, really, it’s the cases which now number in the thousands of little kids, usually somewhere between three and six years old or something like that, who suddenly start talking about a previous life, and who talk about it with enough specificity, they lived in such and such a town. Their name was so and so. They had relatives named so and so and all that, that you’re then able to go to that other place and find someone who died not long before that kid was born and be able to come up with a reasonably good match there. If there were one or two cases like that you’d think “ah, you know, coincidence or they heard somebody talking about somebody who died,” but we’ve got thousands of them where that kind of thing has been ruled out. You know, when you’re a three year old and you suddenly start talking with specificity about somebody in a village 150 miles away who died, there’s no context with your family in that village or something, and it matches, then you’ve got something to look at.

Most of these cases were collected were originally by a psychiatrist named Ian Stevenson, now deceased for several years, who himself never said he proved reincarnation, but he collected a lot of evidence for it. And his successors at the University of Virginia Medical School, now have, let’s see, last time I talked to them they have about 4,000 cases total in their files and about 2,000 of them have been analyzed and digitized enough to go into the computer that they’re beginning to look for patterns in them.

I’ll tell you one of the most interesting patterns that’s been found for instance, and that is that a lot of these kids remember a violent death. And it’s as if the trauma of that violent death somehow knocked out the usual forgetting mechanism for reincarnation. And particularly interesting subset of those kids, they not only remember being killed in a certain way, but they have birthmarks on their body that look like the kind of scars you would expect if they were killed that way. So for instance, some little four year old remembers being killed because somebody shot him in the chest with a shotgun, and he’s got a little round birthmark on the front of his chest, and a much bigger one on his back behind that, which would look like the entrance and exit wounds for a shotgun AT close range. So you apparently get these biological markers once in a while. 

 Now it seems, based on my bits of searching from Dr. Tart's book, that he became interested in a literal reincarnation after reading some book about some past life regression from hypnosis, one Bridey Murphy story in fact.  Unfortunately,

The 'facts' related by Bridey were not fully checked before the publication of Bernstein's book The Search for Bridey Murphy. However, once the book had become a bestseller, almost every detail was thoroughly checked by reporters who were sent to Ireland to track down the background of the elusive woman. It was then that the first doubts about her 'reincarnation' began to appear. Bridey gave her date of birth as December 20, 1798, in Cork, and the year of her death as 1864. There was no record of either event.^[1] Neither was there any record of a wooden house, called The Meadows, in which she said she lived, just of a place of that name at the brink of Cork. Indeed, most houses in Ireland were made of brick or stone. She pronounced her husband's name as 'See-an', but Sean is usually pronounced 'Shawn' in Ireland. Brian, which is what Bridey preferred to call her husband, was also the middle name of the man to whom Virginia Tighe was married. But some of the details did tally. For instance, her descriptions of the Antrim coastline were very accurate. So, too, was her account of a journey from Belfast to Cork. She claimed she went to a St. Theresa's Church. There was indeed one where she said there was—but it was not built until 1911. The young Bridey shopped for provisions with a grocer named Farr. It was discovered that such a grocer had existed.

Color me "skeptical," but this is clearly evidence for someone wanting to believe suggested "memories," rather than reincarnation.

It seems, based on the previews of Tart's book on Amazon as well as Google, that Tart's "evidence" for reincarnation is similar kinds of stuff.

Now the fact of the matter, is if Dr. Tart had firm evidence of this or other paranormal activities that could be scientifically demonstrated, he could win  $1 million from the James Randi foundation. But Tart's claims such as they are, are notoriously resistant to being scientifically verified with the scientific method.

Tart also claims in the interview on Buddhist Geeks that humans "can" do various paranormal activities:

These [telepathy, clairvoyance, pre-cognition, psychokinesis, and psychic healing] are the big five. These are the things human beings can do, that we don’t have any feasible explanation of, in terms of our current material understanding of the world, or reasonable extensions of that. And I say reasonable extensions, because who knows but that there might be some drastic revisioning of physics the way, for instance, quantum physics revisioned classical physics, and then things might fit in. But for now, they don’t fit in, and that’s why I talk about non-materiality; they don’t fit that material kind of view of things. So, we should study these things on their own terms.

It is of course, rank nonsense. How strongly can I put this?  Buddhist geeks had on a guy who has made scientific claims that any reasonably bright older grade school or middle school kid can debunk.

How strongly can I put this, and still practice the precept of right speech: I strongly suspect Dr. Charles Tart is making claims that cannot be verified scientifically, and uses charges of "scientism" to attempt to smear and discredit those who point out very plainly that Tart's claims are not borne out by any evidence based on repeatable applications of the scientific method.  I am willing to reconsider my suspicion should Dr. Tart provide evidence to the James Randi Foundation as per its $1million  challenge for evidence of the paranormal. 

In positing woo versus metaphysical naturalism  as Tart does implicitly whilst impugning legitimate scientific inquiry, he, to my way of thinking, defames both the Dharma and legit scientists and engineers.  For a variety of reasons as I have stated on my blog, this is an absurd dichotomy, and the absurdity would be readily acknowledged by competent philosophers with real backgrounds in philosophy.

I realize these are strong words, and I really do not fault Vincent Horn for this interview; he isn't an expert in these kinds of issues, and even myself, I'd have to do about an hour or two's  work before I could verify the scientific soundness of some tests of the paranormal.   But that said, I would hope we all recognize that the issues of the metaphysical are much broader than Stephen Batchelor versus woo, and that there are rational, evidence based middle grounds with which to work here that avoid woo as well as grandiose claims about the nonexistence of that beyond the physical, if only because of the failure of our own perceptions and language.  That's a whole other ball of wax compared to Ouija boards.

Buddhist "rationalism," "metaphysical naturalism," good science and good Buddhism

Barbara's Buddhism blog has a post that's somewhat about the first two topics mentioned in my title, with a bit of flavoring on the issues of karma and rebirth. It's worth a read.

The issues of karma and rebirth aren't that difficult to deal with as a westerner, as noted in the text and comments, with the understandings of non-duality, dependent origination, and emptiness as meant in Buddhism.

I did want to post a few other things here though on this point.

• We in the West are often somewhat anachronistic in our imputing viewpoints to people in the past.  We have been jaded somewhat by our Western, scientific, rationalist viewpoint that, even if many people in their day to day existences are bat-poop crazy, have at least exposure to the idea that logic and empiricism exists.  It is not at all clear if these ideas were known to Hakuin, let alone Dogen.  
• Barbara draws from a Buddhist Geeks blog post here, by Dennis Hunter.   Frankly, I don't have the time to read all of it, but I'm reminded that I still have a blog post coming on why Charles Tart appears to be  a woo-filled crackpot, and what science is and is not, and why from my more-or-less Mahayana postmodern phenomenological existentialist point of view a  metaphysical naturalist perspective critiquing Tart would be erroneous, even though my critique arises from the very same scientific method that metaphysical naturalists would use to dismember Tart's arguments.  I probably share a lot of Hunter's sentiments, but as a scientist with a  more-or-less Mahayana postmodern phenomenological existentialist point of view.
• And yes, yes, yes, those are Western philosophical concepts through which I apprehend Eastern philosophy.  I am not and cannot be a metaphysical virgin in my thinking here.
• And none of it matters unless it is useful to my realization in practice.
• So I myself am not really swayed by critiques on Batchelor on rebirth, though I'm not that intrigued to go into depth on Batchelor in the first place! See my recent posts here and here.
• I do  wish to critique though, in the spirit of inquiry, Hunters bit here:

But there is also good reason to feel ill-at-ease about the agenda behind this movement [ of Buddhist rationalism]. It’s hard to escape the feeling that the whole movement is founded upon the prevailing materialist assumptions of Western scientism (“mind = brain function, nothing more”), and fueled by a wish to dismiss rebirth and karma in order to bolster the illusion of intellectual certainty and further reinforce that doctrine. One can dress up this kind of reductionist philosophy and call it “agnosticism” but—as they say in the advertising industry—that’s just putting lipstick on a pig.

 I don't think that any modern philosopher in the vein of myself would hold this view of being either ill-at-ease with the metaphysical naturalist perspective applying to a rejection of  a literal rebirth (as I note on Barbara's blog, karma's a whole other kettle of fish).  A literal rebirth is a falsifiable hypothesis, and the fact that life has the characteristic that there are an exponentially increasing number of live beings on earth over time has always posed a fundamental conundrum for this viewpoint, if one assumes that the literal rebirth is on earth (and if it's on the planet Ogo, well then it's non-falsifiable as a belief of course, and literal assertion of such beliefs becomes sundered from observation and therefore neither worthy of respect nor defense, but of course disrespect, ridicule and all that should only be applied insofar as it can be skillful to help increase wisdom, compassion and generosity).

We scientists though, express our certainty tentatively, as I wrote recently in a comment on another blog, but I'm willing to bet my salary that Dr. Charles Tart's "evidence" for rebirth is not what one would normally recognize as being consistent with well conducted scientific experiments, and therefore,  scientfically, phenomenologically, existentially, almost everywhere, except on a set of measure zero,  as far as we can tell, for all intents and purposes, it indeed is a false hypothesis.   This is not from the position that this is all there is, a metaphysical naturalist position.  Metaphysics, by its very nature, deals with issues that are "above" or "beyond" or "outside" of the scientific domain.  To have the position "This is all there is," or "There's more to us than what we can measure and observe" are metaphysical positions and neither one is in the domain of science!!!

More on Charles Tart later...

Was it moral for scientists and engineers to design the atom bomb? The Pornoscanners?

Proulx michel imples the answer is "no" on a comment here.

The part about the pornoscanners is based on my reading of Jane Hamsher's post here, which includes the link to the threatened possible sexual molestation of a passenger here.

The answer to the first question, I'd say is "Wrong question, but if forced for an answer I'd say 'yes'." The reason I say yes is because I think it's easy to see how game theory applies in this question .

The second question is more difficult, but I would say, no, it was not moral to do so especially when you consider the principals involved - namely Michael Chertoff. People do have a responsibility to at least try to work with people who are dedicated to others. It's clear that the possible sexual abuse of untold numbers of people didn't matter to Chertoff - what mattered was lining his pockets.

D'uh! Of course many Americans think Buddhism is a cult! Look how non-Buddhists talk about us and then look at our "luminaries" and what they say & do ...

On Saturday, Barbara O'Brien expressed dismay, dismay at the idea that, um, some Americans might not perceive the prospect of a Buddhist temple down the street in the same way that they might perceive the prospect of a Methodist Church down the street.  And then yesterday, Tricycle's Rachel Hiles posts on the blog a similar post.  Both posts mention this article on the Newsweek site...

While researching their forthcoming book about American religion, the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam and his colleagues polled on this hypothetical question: Say a group of Buddhists wanted to build a large temple in your community. How would you feel? Putnam & Co. asked about Buddhists because, they had discovered, Buddhists are one of the least popular religious groups in the country. People like Buddhists less than they do atheists and Mormons—and only slightly more than they do Muslims. Like Muslims, Buddhists “do not have a place in what has come to be called America’s Judeo-Christian framework,” Putnam and his coauthor, David Campbell, write in American Grace: How Religion Divides and Unites Us. The book comes out next week...

 OK, to the point: look how Buddhism gets portrayed in the US media:

And it wasn't just Larry King...






To my knowledge, this is the only time someone who was referred to as a Zen practitioner  has been portrayed in American TV media. (OK, let's leave out Phil Jackson. And, OK, I remember Joan Halifax was on Firing Line a couple of decades ago, if my memory's correct.  )

And of course...

OK, he's your kindly Tibetan uncle.  But, um, frankly, he might have been a great poet, but this guy was scary to a large portion of America raised on Swanson TV dinners and Jell-o:



I've always  wanted to write a satire and/or comedic film adaptation of Howl, but I digress...

Elsewhere in America,  there's Terry Jones,  and the omnipresent availability of fundamentalist Christian media in America. I don't want to spend much time getting into that; I've done that quite a bit here; even correcting atheists and "metaphysical naturalists" on their misconceptions about Buddhism.

There are distortions aplenty these days by the right wing, the left wing, and the mainstream media about Buddhism in America.  There are like distortions about Buddhism written in this very blog about Buddhism in America.

Look, quite simply if  American Buddhists want a better image of Buddhism in America, they're going to have to do a better job of  presenting themselves as Buddhists in America.  So, among other things, it might be a good idea for American Buddhists to take a noticeable step back  from the loonies, the radicals, the folks in MSIA, the folks in the Lenz Foundation, and all that hooey. I'm talking to you recipients of the largess of the Lenz Foundation, and those folks that don't have a problem with the Huffington Post's censorship policies.

(Sigh) That's not what is in the body of knowledge of quantum physics...

James Ure talks a bit about quantum physics and Buddhism.  I'd opined on this issue before.  To summarize: I do wish people had a better understanding of what science is. But here's a nice starting point:

Science only talks about what science talks about.

It doesn't go further. So when James Ure writes...

Work within quantum physics has shown what Buddhists have known for centuries upon centuries--That an observing mind is necessary before countless variables within the field of potentialities become tangible to the deluded mind, which does so by compartmentalizing them into a "form." which it promptly labels and categorizes. In other words, an orange is only an orange when our mind labels it as such but in reality it is nothing more than a collection of interactions between various particles and perceptions converging together in that moment of observation as an, "orange." When dissected through meditation it is found that the orange is made up of the sun, the minerals in the Earth, clouds that provide the water to grow, vitamins, chemicals interacting with the spectrum of light to give off what the limited human eye and mind perceive to be orange. And many innumerable things, which themselves can be broken down even further.

 I cringe slightly.  Here's why...

That an observing mind is necessary before countless variables within the field of potentialities become tangible to the deluded mind, which does so by compartmentalizing them into a "form" which it promptly labels and categorizes.

 This seems  to say - I'm not sure, but it seems to say that a detection or estimation device is necessary to detect or estimate, provided that this device is labeled as "mind," and the output of the detection/estimation device does so by putting the observables into equivalence classes (i.e., the space of observables is partitioned into disjoint subsets via some common property uniquely assigning each point in the space to a particular subset of the space in the equivalence class).

Now that language is slightly better suited for detectors (that which does hypothesis tests on a finite or countable space of alternatives) versus estimators (which do so on uncountably infinite spaces of alternatives).

But to be honest, in the language of detection and estimation theory, this is kinda sorta of a tautology.  Let's continue...

In other words, an orange is only an orange when our mind labels it as such but in reality it is nothing more than a collection of interactions between various particles and perceptions converging together in that moment of observation as an, "orange."

Our mind labels an orange an orange because our mind is in part a sub-optimally evolved meat-based classifier, and by convention, some people label some fruits oranges. But the "reality" of an orange is no more or less the fruit itself or no more or less the collection of particles in time and their relationships in time, space, and energy.

The orange is that collection of particles, and vice versa,  and in part because of this collection of particles and their relationships it is perceived as an orange.  The other parts of this situation have to do with the observer of the orange and the medium in which the orange is observed.

This has nothing at all to do with quantum physics, I'm afraid to say..

 When dissected through meditation it is found that...

 Better to say, "when dissected through observation and experiment  it is found that..." if you want to be spot on as to what any science teaches.  Observation and experiment are only meditation insofar as they are performed with a practice of mindfulness of that task as meditation; without some direction towards that end, it is just another task performed with a monkey-mind.  Yeah, at some level they are the same and different, etc., but to transcend monkey-mindedness, skill must be employed, and that's what separates mindful observation and experimentation that a Buddhist scientist or engineer might perform and the garden variety of observation and experimentation.  But perhaps I digress.

Buddhism can teach you many, many, many valuable things - things that will save your life for a more opportune time to die.

But to adhere to the idea that by studying and practicing Buddhism you'll "understand" quantum physics or detection and estimation theory is indicative to that Buddhism must be studied and practiced more.

Science and engineering do not do metaphysics. The question of whether or not a detector is "good," beyond whether it is optimal in the Neyman Pearson sense or some other criteria is only true insofar as the modeled space of observables is worth observing, and science and engineering are silent on these issues.  Yes, the emptiness of existence is completely consistent with science because science can't tell you the meta-criteria for which you should do things; that is in the province of philosophy from which science has not split off; i.e., metaphysics, ethics, morals, and so forth.  Buddhism as practice and philosophy actually straddles all of those realms and more, and completely permeates each of those realms.

But please dear readers, that is not even metaphorically like quantum physics, OK?  Pretty please?

May I be so impudent as to ask whether or not this rosy future of transcendance of our biolgy might also apply to child laborers making bricks in the developing world?

From an article on the NY Times website on Singularity University:

At that point, the Singularity holds, human beings and machines will so effortlessly and elegantly merge that poor health, the ravages of old age and even death itself will all be things of the past.

Some of Silicon Valley’s smartest and wealthiest people have embraced the Singularity. They believe that technology may be the only way to solve the world’s ills, while also allowing people to seize control of the evolutionary process. For those who haven’t noticed, the Valley’s most-celebrated company — Google — works daily on building a giant brain that harnesses the thinking power of humans in order to surpass the thinking power of humans.

Larry Page, Google’s other co-founder, helped set up Singularity University in 2008, and the company has supported it with more than $250,000 in donations. Some of Google’s earliest employees are, thanks to personal donations of $100,000 each, among the university’s “founding circle.” (Mr. Page did not respond to interview requests.)...

On a more millennialist and provocative note, the Singularity also offers a modern-day, quasi-religious answer to the Fountain of Youth by affirming the notion that, yes indeed, humans — or at least something derived from them — can have it all.

“We will transcend all of the limitations of our biology,” says Raymond Kurzweil, the inventor and businessman who is the Singularity’s most ubiquitous spokesman and boasts that he intends to live for hundreds of years and resurrect the dead, including his own father. “That is what it means to be human — to extend who we are.” 

Good for the Times, I think they get my point:

“The Singularity is not the great vision for society that Lenin had or Milton Friedman might have,” says Andrew Orlowski, a British journalist who has written extensively on techno-utopianism. “It is rich people building a lifeboat and getting off the ship.”

Even PZ Myers falls from trees...

I've much appreciation for the dark, sacrilegious with of PZ Myers.  Admittedly, he does from time to time live up to his critics worst invectives, but I understand from whence his own invective emerges; it's kind of the sickness and medicine he and religion trade with each other.  But, as they say in Japan, even monkeys fall from trees now and then.

His latest fall is in an otherwise biting article against a quack practitioner of Chinese medicine. Now I've been a consumer of Chinese medicine now and again; some of it works, especially the wintergreen oil preparations they use (containing saclicylates - aspirin like compounds).  In Myers article, though, he gets a bit too dismissive:

... I'm left marveling: there are no acupuncture points anywhere, it's all a load of hokum, so where do they get off rejecting so unambiguously an assertion from another quack? I see claims that sticking a needle in an ankle will fix a problem in an elbow, for instance, so using their own unsubstantiated illogic, maybe dithering about in the vagina is just the thing to fix a case of dandruff.

Well... there's a study out now...

Acupuncture eases pain in the limbs because it releases a natural molecule called adenosine, neuroscientists in the United States reported on Sunday.

The mechanism was discovered through experiments in lab mice, which were given an injection of an inflammation-inducing chemical in their right paw.
The researchers inserted fine needles below the midline of the mice's knee, at a well-known acupuncture location called the Zusanli point.

They rotated the needle gently every five minutes for 30 minutes, mimicking a standard acupuncture treatment.
During and just after this operation, levels of adenosine in the tissues surrounding the needle surged 24-fold. The mouse's discomfort -- measurable by the rodents' response time to touch and heat -- was reduced by two-thirds, they found...

Previous work has focused on acupuncture's effectiveness on the central nervous system -- the trunk of nerves in the spinal cord and brain -- rather than the peripheral nervous system.

In the central nervous system, acupuncture creates signals that cause the brain to produce powerful anti-pain chemicals called endorphins.

I'm  inclined to give this credence; its authors are with the University of Rochester Medical Center. They do real science there and are funded to do so.  It is true that like chiropractic (which is useful for very minor back and neck problems, but not much else, in my understanding), acupuncture is often touted as a panacea, but it does have its place in medicine it seems.

Perhaps they'd like to talk to a real science/engeineering guy...

The Buddhist Geeks, did that nice interview with Genpo Dennis Merzel, which enabled Gniz to consider Merzel's responses here. It turns out the Geeks are also planning on having a "Dharma 2.0" conference in Boulder CO in 2010.

I tweeted them. I presume that means I tweeted Vince Horn, since the agenda seems to cover some of what I cover here:

* Buddhism & Technology – The information age has radically altered almost every dimension of our personal lives, our society, and economy. What impact will it have on the Buddhist tradition, and are there ways we can consciously adopt technologies to benefit Buddhist communities?

* Cutting-edge Buddhist Practices – Many Buddhist teachers are being informed directly by other pre-existing traditions of personal exploration and change. The result is that all sorts of innovate and interesting hybrid practices are emerging in the Buddhist world. Are these practices as radical as their creators claim? Or are there examples of teachers who are simply watering down the teachings of the Buddha, re-packaging them in fancy garb, and charging gobs of money for them? We’ll explore these questions, as well engage in some of the more promising of these hybrid practices.

* Buddhism & Science – Scientific explorations into the benefits of Buddhist-style meditation have exploded in the past several years. What is the implication for the Buddhist tradition, and for the wider populous?

* The Future of Buddhism in the West – Underlying all of the previous topics is a question about where we are now, and where we are heading tomorrow. With such an array of complex factors influencing the development of Buddhism today, how can we engage with the future in a way that honors the rapidly changing nature of things, and the need to act quickly at times, with the deep-rooted need to stay present with what is?

I figured, with all I have recently said about "Intelligent" "Design," (especially the Wilber kind), "Biocentrism," and other fads, it would be useful to have a real engineer (i.e., and applied scientist) with over 50 patents (or is it 60?) address some Buddhists to talk about What Science Really Is, and How Buddhism Relates to Science.

Or I could talk about Buddhism and Technology. As a guy whose work is actually in phones I use, I know something about the latter, and as a Buddhist, well, I know something about the former. But then if I went there I would go all Nagarjuna/nullity on the whole issue, because ultimately it's how you behave, it's how you practice with the other sentient beings, not things that increase our footprint and are hard to recycle.

Of course, I could also talk about "The Future of Buddhism in the West," especially given my position that whatever I've seen from the Big Names from Buddhism in the West, there simply has not been anyone like a Lin Chi, a Yun-Men, a Dogen or a Hakuin.

I could also talk about Buddhism and Western Ethics or What I Have to Do Ethically in My Job versus What Some Buddhists Do. With respect to some Buddhists, those that give away the Dharma, I come up short (well duh, I labor in a capitalist enterprise!) With others, though...

Anyway, if they reply maybe it would be useful to start a dialogue there. Worst comes to worst, Boulder's not such a bad place...

My problem with the movie "Avatar"

Having now actually seen "Avatar" with my son yesterday I can now pronounce my verdict: I have a problem with these kinds of movies in general, and it's this: The indigenous people can be, and often are, just as stupid and brutish as us Westerners. They just haven't figured out how to have a bigger footprint yet, in general.  But there are exceptions, and that's why there's ruins all over the place.

We Americans look like naive fools when we paint the "first beings" as somehow more in an "unfallen Eden state"   than we are.  As Gwynne Dyer noted, "first people's" conflicts tend to actually kill more people over time as a percentage of their  population  than our ridiculously jump-the-shark lethal armies have done.  And that tends to carry over to chimpanzees as well (but not, evidently to bonobos).

In addition movies like "Avatar" also seem to be a catalyst that gets conservatives like  Ross Douthat to write odd things about pantheism.

Lankavatara Sutra Chapter 2, Section XXVIII and XXIX

And as usual, I'm not any kind of certified teacher by anyone, I don't play one on TV, I'm just reading the text and seeing what it means based on my knowledge and learning...

Some key text (my hyperlinking added):

[The Buddha said, "My concept of the]Tathāgata-garbha is not the same as the ego taught by the philosophers; for what the Tathagatas teach is the Tathāgata-garbha in the sense, Mahāmati, that it is emptiness, reality-limit, Nirvana, being unborn, unqualified, and devoid of will-effort; the reason why the Tathagatas who are Arhats and Fully-Enlightened Ones, teach the doctrine pointing to the Tathāgata-garbha is to make the ignorant cast aside their fear when they listen to the teaching of egolessness and to have them realise the state of non-discrimination and imagelessness. I also wish, Mahāmati, that the Bodhisattva-Mahāsattvas of the present and future would not attach themselves to the idea of an ego [imagining it to be a soul]. Mahāmati, it is like a potter who manufactures various vessels out of a mass of clay of one sort by his own manual skill and labour combined with a rod, water, and thread, Mahāmati, that the Tathagatas preach the egolessness of things which removes all the traces of discrimination by various skilful means issuing from their transcendental wisdom, that is, sometimes by the doctrine of the Tathāgata-garbha, sometimes by that of egolessness, and, like a potter, by means of various terms, expressions, and synonyms. For this reason, Mahāmati, the philosophers' doctrine of an ego-substance is not the same ... as the teaching of the Tathāgata-garbha. Thus, Mahāmati, the doctrine of the Tathāgata-garbha is disclosed in order to awaken the philosophers from their clinging to the idea of the ego, so that those minds that have fallen into the views imagining the non-existent ego as real, and also into the notion that the triple emancipation is final, may rapidly be awakened to the state of supreme enlightenment. Accordingly, Mahāmati, the Tathagatas who are Arhats and Fully-Enlightened Ones disclose the doctrine of the Tathāgata-garbha which is thus not to be known as identical with the philosopher's notion of an ego-substance.["]

That's why these folks who say,"See? Buddhism is Biocentrism!" don't quite know what they're talking about, regarding the "Mind only" schools, including Zen Buddhism, have considered "Buddha nature pervades the whole universe."


The notes by the translator say the next section "strangely found its way" to its present position. I quote it in its entirety; I think it actually belongs where it is...

The personal soul, continuity, the Skandhas, causation, atoms, the supreme spirit, the ruler, the creator, —[they are] discriminations in the Mind-only.

While there is an Awareness of which we can be aware which transcends the "small mind" (I assume that's not trademarked!) to make further discrimination about Awareness - about which Biocentrism is one such discrimination - is to be dealing in different matters and views than what Buddhists in Mind schools have referred to as Mind, Buddha nature, or (as I've done right here) Awareness.

Vacation Reading

Mark Chu-Carroll reminds me to read a paper recently co-authored by intelligent design creationist William Dembski, "The Search for a Search - Measuring the Information Cost of Higher Level Search," which while not published in the IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, was published in IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics in September.

This is of import because intelligent design creationists generally haven't produced anything worth printing in a respectable journal, and this paper makes appeals to intelligent design creationism within it (but evidently its appeals are essentially "on a set of measure zero" as folks like me are wont to say).

More recent stuff on this by Dr. Chu-Carroll here.

I'd like to understand the issues behind it, to know bad science better.

More on 12 Step Groups...

At the tail end of an unusually successful week which I hope to allude to more here, I had an e-mail exchange with a relative that was odd, to say the least. This particular relative of mine, a woman, had long had behaviors that most of the rest of my family had considered, ah, unusual, which I won't go into here, but suffice it to say that while her son was growing up, other members of my family, along with myself, concluded that, "He's going to have problems growing up."

He did, exhibited some substance abuse behaviors over a prolonged period of time, got put in rehab, and has been in a 12 Step group for a number of years, and to my knowledge has not re-engaged in those behaviors. Good for him. I hope that he never experiences the downsides of 12 Step programs, which have been well-documented.

Anyway, the other day this relative - the son's mother - sent around to family members an article from Nature, (sorry, no free linky) in which she claimed "studies discussed add new insight into AA and similar programs."

Within this article, despite my relative's claims, no studies' results were actually discussed through the entire article. That I could find. While some papers were listed as footnotes, clearly the publication requirements for Nature do not match the peer review requirements for any of journals in which I've been published.

Now 12 Step programs have never been shown safe and effective for anything (which, when pointed out to my relative she replied that safety and effectiveness for treatments applied only to "drugs and devices," as though things that insurance companies pay for for heath purposes - like 12 Step meeting attendance in rehabs- don't all need to work and it's OK if they hurt you or make you suicidal!) As someone committed to helping all beings transcend suffering, this is appalling, to say the least.

Now I had never read Nature, but as it turns out, it's somewhat less sophisticated than Scientific American, if this article is any judge (the author of the article is a freelance writer, with no scientific, medical, or public health policy background listed in the article). Anyhow, the telltale signs that this was not an article about any of the aforementioned disciplines was here:

Spiritual control
And then there is religion, which has been shown to have a strong inverse association
with drug addiction. Psychologist Michael McCullough, who studies religion and behavior at the University of Miami in Florida, calls this inverse association “one of the most unsung findings in the entire literature on drug and alcohol abuse”. Both adults and children deemed religious by various measures “drink, smoke and do drugs less often”, McCullough says. “If they get into trouble with drinking
and drugs and smoking, they’re more likely to be able to get away from those problems.” McCullough suggests that when a person commits to any cultural system that regulates behavior, the psychological effort to conform strengthens the brain systems that mediate self-monitoring and self-control. “What makes religion unique, I think, is that the code of conduct isn’t just laid down by your parents
or your friends or your principal at school, but ostensibly by the individual who is superintending the Universe, so it has an extra moral
force.”

Now, this would make any scientist's alarms go off, because here is an empirically testable claim; it is falsifiable: does religion, specifically a monotheistic religion make one less likely to abuse drugs and alcohol?. We can look at studies of religious people and behaviors.

And the answer is no, it does not. While there is less alcohol consumption amongst sects that prohibit it, we certainly have the experience as a nation with Prohibition (both of alcohol and drugs like marijuana) that shows that prohibiting consumption of substances tends to produce more harmful behaviors than the act itself. The history of alcohol prohibition, for example, was that prohibition produced substantially higher consumption of alcohol (and more unsafe alcohol) than prior to Prohibition. That, plus the explosion in crime, was why it was repealed. This situation has also been observed in teaching sexual abstinence only to youths.

And 12 Step Groups ( links here)?

After several months of indoctrination with A.A. 12-Step dogma, the alcoholics in A.A. were doing five times as much binge drinking as a control group that got no treatment at all, and nine times as much binge drinking as another group that got Rational Behavior Therapy.

It would be unethical to recommend such things, and so it's not surprising that the author of the Nature article is not a member in a profession where such ethical concerns are paramount. We know, at any rate, why these "findings" are "unsung."

It's because they've been found to be false.

Why do people push stuff that's obviously false?

Why did the Bushies push abstinence education? Why does the Catholic Church dissuade people from using condoms for the prevention of many sexually transmitted diseases?

Religious belief. Evidence contrary to one's belief is often discounted.


Let's continue a bit:

Some religious rituals, he says, have been shown to provoke enhanced activity in prefrontal regions. “It’s as if certain forms of prayer and
meditation are pinpointing precisely those [prefrontal] areas of the brain that people rely on to control attention, to control negative emotion and resolve mental conflict.”

There's been studies done on meditation, and it's kind of telling that the author refers to certain forms of prayer and meditation. Which ones? Which ones should someone avoid? I could probably look up studies, but the fact that this is all blurred by the author suggests that this is a point he probably does not want to make.

This blogger became a Zen Buddhist because of the personal efficacy of practicing mindfulness throughout the day. I make no claims regarding the efficacy of my practice on a worldwide scale; and think there was wisdom in dissuading just anyone from joining the temple. While I desire to help all beings transcend suffering, part of the process of skillful means of that is not to proselytize.

However the twelve-step strategies actually work on the brain, “there is now excellent documentation that those who attend AA-type programmes regularly do very well by anyone’s standard”, says Thomas McLellan, director of the Treatment Research
Institute in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The problem, McLellan says, is that the
vast majority of people who enter such programmes do not go regularly — they
drop out after a few days or weeks — and are more than likely to relapse.

As long as "anyone's standard" isn't a correlation of attendance with the program and not engaging in abusive behaviors, one might conclude that AA type programs "do very well by anyone's standard."

I could go on. Later on in the article there's a quote about a researcher linking substance abuse issues to "Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder." These two disorders may well be social constructs combined with a great deal of suggestion.

Finally, on this point, it's useful to remember the words of William Blake about 200 years ago: "Prisons are built with the Stones of Law, Brothels with the Bricks of Religion." Prohibition in the form of religion coerced by a monotheistic deity was caught out by the Romantics. No amount of brain jargon will remove that, and such things have the added difficulty that they lack concision and elegance.

How then to deal with substance abuse?

Pay attention. Teach others to pay attention.