Year: 2004

Zen Lessons

Some thoughts reading Herrigel, still mid Dr Austin. Nothing new, just recognisable significance. (Kingston on-line to the rescue.)

Basic stuff – Koans – learning documented Koans, learning documented answers to documented Koans, learning aproaches / concepts applicable to documented Koans, are all irrelevant; this is a meta-meta-meta-meta- … -meta-problem. (I did say this year’s word might be meta ?)

Why breathing ? Breathing is special – sub-conscious, natural min and max limits (physiological need reflex, physical lung capacity, generally subconscious (even deep sleeping) act, but normally conscious of actual (when “conscious”), and consciously do-able / controllable. More a matter of self-attention than consciousness per se. (What else is like breathing ? – thinking itself for sure, definitely not heartbeat, definitey not basic digestive tract / internal organ function reflexes, without specific training, walking ? falling off a log ? Not much really – pretty special case. What else in non-higher intelligent beings / life-forms.) But what about gut feel ?

Teacher / Pupil – not just (passively) enabling / permitting self-discovery, but leading (with implicit trust / respect) to way of discovery, and discovery iself. Leading a horse to water is not enough. Pupil must “submit” even if self-awareness is eventual goal. Explaining “concept”, or concept grasped in words is not even close. Contrary to “liberal” fashion. Preparation is major part of any task (see 90% below), see Pirsig’s ZMM.

Knowing the moment – chaos ? – predicting snow falling from laden leaf ? Letting go the drawn string is more a matter of understanding the balance of forces and controlling / permitting the equilibrium to occur. Like squeezing a trigger, ever more gently as the “tipping” point is reached.

Learning Paradox – “He who has to walk 100 miles should reckon 90 (miles) as half the journey”. 90% of efort is learning to “loose the arrow”, but still leaves 50% learning how to hit a target – with assurance (in your sleep). Learning (how to consciously execute) the knack / trick, is fraud, not the point ? (In a journey of 100 miles, the distance – 100 miles – is only half the journey – or, if you like, a journey is more than a distance.)

Rocket scientists just wanna have fun ?

Burt Rutan, co-owner of the sub-orbital X-Prize-winning spaceship, describing his past with Werner von Braun et al in the space-race concludes with “Mostly what I’m doing though, is just having fun.” Life’s-work rather than day-job. That’s the spirit.

Is No News Good News ?

Eeek, it’s a week since I’ve posted. Actually, I’ve had a cold, and found myself sleeping whenever I had the opportunity, so that might account for letting things slip. Been continuing to read Austin’s “Zen and the Brain”, which has ben getting a bit technical brain-physiology-biochemistry-wise, and a bit detailed on the teaching and practice of Zen.

As a result of the latter, I’ve resurrected Eugen Herrigel’s “Zen in the Art of Archery” which, although brief, I read none-too-thoroughly first time around. Like D T Suzuki, Herrigel seems de-rigoeur background. Already noticing details I’d missed. The focus on breathing, the straight-arm / clamped-thumb grip, to name a couple.

Talking of brain activity reminds me of Adam Zeman’s talk on the scientific basis for consciuousness at Cambridge Crosstalk Society in June 2003, in collaboration with the Cambridge Centre for Quantum Computation. [Summary here, half-way down.] He also has a book published, which was the basis of his talk. Seem to remember his stuff was more up-to-date / comprehensive in terms of scans with colour maps to document levels of consciousness. Austin’s book is mostly textual in describing this stuff.

Following up the link to Gerald Edeleman, I find a reference to Richard Feynman’s “Meta-Wondering” – I wonder why I wonder why I ….. wonder why I wonder. Nice concept.

Self Organising Motes from Intel

You’ll like these Alex. Saw these demonstrated at FIATECH yesterday. Really neat. Aimed a ultra-low power distributed network architectures for control systems, but the neatest aspect is their individual awareness of relationships to other motes. By negotiation they organise their own network topology. Reminded me of our smart templates approach to self-knowing packets of XML.(Can’t help thinking of the AI / A-Life connotations.)

Obvious “toy” potential – “They’ll be in the shops for Christmas”.

Levels of Causality

And there’s more from Dr Austin. Taking emergent as high and fundamental as low, he talks of higher level emergent properties having causal effects on the underlying structures, such that the emergent properties are “causal realities”. As in Pirsig’s levels of static quality, the high can control the lower, but the lower must only ever support, never constrain, the higher. Never forget your roots.

Quirks Emerge Beyond Our Quarks

Dr Austin again. “Sperry takes over where William James left off. Neurosciences have rejected reductionism and mechanistic determinism on the one hand, and dualisms on the other…. higher level interactions [of the] brain are presumed to be reducible [only in principle] in terms of fundamental physics. How does it help us to know about quarks, molecules and the brain’s high water content ? We have personal quirks which go beyond our quarks …. Interactions of a [complex] system, always much more than the sum of their parts …. our brain develops new emergent properties.” Whahaay, ‘ere we go. See Brian Josephson below.

Who was it said something like “To know about a man’s make up in terms of his chemistry is only of interest if you intend to make fertiliser out of his body” ? Blogged somewhere ealier.

“Thinking with meat” [after Terry Bisson]. Getting there.

Greeley Tangles The Web

The plot thickens further …

I’m now reading Dr Austin’s “Zen and the Brain”. Not surprisngly for a real US medic he spends a fair amount of time apologising for his mystic tendencies and acknowledging christian religious sensibilities, before he dares launch us into his Zen treatise. (I suspect 2/3 of this 800 page tome is down to such political correctness.)

Plenty of homage to Herrigel and Suzuki in laying down the history of modern Zen foundations. Not a single reference to Pirsig – oh well. But a positive citation for a certain Father Andrew Greeley. A Catholic PhD Sociologist of some note apparently, and the very same Andrew M Greeley of the National Opinion Research Center who slammed Pirsig in 1975 for his “bigotry”.

(I just sent Pirsig a question about that reaction a couple of days ago – weird.)

Off The Road

Just finished Kerouac on BA2027. Aren’t west-bound transatlantic flights a great place to read – 90% of the book in the one sitting. I guess I need to understand a little of the circumstances under which it was written – one drug induced sitting ? – published 1955 about 1947 to 1949 period in which the author refers to writing and successfully publishing a first work.

The music and the locations are seductive; the drink, drugs, driving and women plain wild. A great east-west anthroplogical thread in there – the fellahin cultures, the Tao. (We know Pirsig was influenced by Kerouac. He would have read on-the-road immediately prior to his “teaching quality” episodes.)

What did Sal and Dean mean, headed for Times Square in 1948 driving through the tunnel from Jersey, by “We are a bunch of Arabs going to blow up New York” ? Intriguing.