I fancy that sitting—a la meditation—is kind of like music for me. I’ve studied some theory and have some talent, but I never practice. Coloring in chords on paper isn’t at all like touring with a band, and reading about, say, Rinzai and Soto isn’t at all like sesshin. I mean: I assume. Having never done that.

But, I found a nice little rock off the path with a view and a slanted face and it was actually pretty comfortable. I zoned out, zoned out of zoning out (aka, zoned back in), tried to allow the thoughts to arise and fade, noted the immediacy of the wind’s action on the flowers nearby, tasted the weird almost panic-inducing intimacy of what I fancy to be less-mediated experience.

Soon, I felt sadness, and I recognized it as the sadness that I carry with me everywhere. I furrowed my brow at it. I tried not to suppress it. What the fuck is this thing anyway? What the fuck is it? So strange. As strange as the beauty of the scene, the beauty of the people I know. I felt alone, with the wind and the mountains which refused to either validate or damn my presence. Fucking silent mountains.

But then I started breathing consciously. Then, in the breathing, I felt that I was … participating in the scene: the wind, the rock, the mountains, the creatures living on the tundra. I was not so separate from all of that, because everything there was breathing. Some words came forth to describe the experience and they sort of echoed in my head, as the sadness expanded, and before too long I was crying. The words were “breathing is to participate in the divine. breathing is to participate in the divine …”

I clung to the repeating words like they were a rocking-back-and-forth hug I was giving to myself, but they were not much solace. Participation isn’t solace, it’s just I suppose that participating is less absurd than not participating. I suppose it’s also nice to have company.

I decided then that the world seems mostly to be beautiful, and mostly to be sad. This is my view, my predilection, I think. By and large, beauty unfolds from hardship, and heartbreak is the inevitable end of beauty. The things living in the tundra turn the mountain tops all green and lush in spite of the unforgiving climate. People give to each other and work for what’s right despite their own suffering and damage, and despite the astounding injustice of human stupidity.

Beauty and Heartbreak: those are my current favorite names for the demon and angel lovers who dance the world into being. They’re fucking nuts, but somehow it seems like the only sane choice is to join in…

If you haven’t seen it, the new trailer for J. J. Abrams’ Trek has been out for about a week. Looks action-packed for sure, and I’m glad the franchise is getting a facelift and some fresh blood. But I can’t shake the sense that they’ve given the bridge of the Enterprise to a boy band. Kirk and Spock look like they’re in high school. Maybe I’m just getting old.

My reading of the Wikipedia entry (and with Karl Urban’s McCoy completely missing from this poster) suggests that the traditional tripod of character dynamic among Kirk, Spock, and Bones will be reduced to two: Kirk’s and Spock’s fragmented personalities. (This along with with the boyish casting will undoubtedly get the K/S culture all atwitter … er … FYI, that link is safe for work, but potentially unsafe for your world view.) So that’s something of a departure from the standard Trek framework …

Also I have wondered if Abrams’ Trek won’t be so bleak as to violate the spirit of hope that was so important to creator Roddenberry. Based on Cloverfield and Lost, Abrams’ work—to me—reads dark and fatalist. But, according to Wikipedia, “[Abrams] does like Star Trek’s optimism though, being an optimist himself, and [he] felt the film would be a refreshing antidote to films like The Dark Knight.” So that’s good, I guess.

Anyway. Here’s my contribution to the meme. Not so funny, but oh well.

Which leaves me to say the thing I have said so many times, but which so many people don’t seem to want to understand: there is no such thing as the supernatural. If something exists, then it is real, and it is natural.

But I shoot for the middle path:

Whole-heartedly agreed that the word ’supernatural’ is meaningless. I cry a little inside whenever I see the word used by supposedly intelligent publications or people as if it has a referent.

But with respect to the whole discussion, I wanted to suggest a fundamental (ontological? epistemological?) difference between experience and representation of experience, and the consequences for science.

Let’s say we have the technology to hook someone to a machine that precisely constructs descriptions of her emotions in real time. We have a great deal of faith (ehem) that our model of the brain can convert electrical/chemical activity into these perfect descriptions. I’m not sure what such a description would be. Maybe it’s uncannily well-written, evocative prose. Or maybe a vector in some multi-dimensional emotional space that we know (somehow) is complete across the gamut of possible human emotion.

The person has experience, the machine constructs representations of that experience.

Now, if you could only pick one of those two things to have on a desert island, which would you pick? The exhaustive representation? Or the experience? Which is the more “valid” aspect of existence?

Neither; both. The two—a 1st person experience and a 3rd person representation of experience—are fundamentally separate yet equally valid aspects of existence. Science, no matter how perfect its models of the world are, will never be able to do more than generate representations. Experience can never be more than a private affair. Never the twain shall meet. (Except indirectly through the artifacts of reason and language and art and music and poetry and …)

So what’s the problem? you ask. Well, this places a real limitation on what science, as a method of investigation, is able to do, and raises questions about what “truth” and “validity” mean. Giving it short shrift, does a scientific account of an event always beat out a personal experience account of the same event in the battle for validity? If so, is that assertion “provable”?

The answer is of course, no, it’s not provable. Any claim science makes on validity depends on being able to represent the object of investigation.

So? What’s the problem? Two difficulties spring to mind:

1 – The practical impossibility of a complete model of the universe. Granted, this has little bearing on the everyday, whether your microwave works or not, but if we suppose that the project of science can be “completed,” then there is the problem of the amount of information and computation required to model the entire universe, if we suppose that, for any event, tendrils of causative dependency creep out into the entire universe (or at least to the information horizon of the speed of light), which, for completeness‘ sake, we must suppose.

But okay, forget the universe, how about modeling an afternoon thunderstorm? How about modeling a cup of tea? Completely? Without simplification? I don’t know, perhaps it will be possible some day. Maybe quantum computing will even be able to model the apparently probabilistic nature of the very small.

But, more relevant to the example above, how about modeling human emotion? Can we be sure that the multi-dimensional emotional space we made for our machine truly exhausts the gamut of human emotion? Can we prove it?*

Which brings us to …

2 – Representations must exist in some language, and science’s claims of validity in particular rely upon mathematics. I am no expert by any means, but one interpretation of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems is that “truth is a stronger notion than proof”. “Proof” exists only in the idealized, internal world of perfect spheres and such. “Truth” is something else. The philosophical implications for science are that “truth” is (provably!) slippery and the notion that science “explains” things, full stop, a bit naïve.

In fact, as should be well-known (but apparently isn’t), nothing is ever “proven” in empirical science. (I cry at the abuse of that word, too.) What we have in empirical science is a general consensus among experts, and faith, yes faith, that mathematical language maps well enough onto experience to trust the scientific models built from it. The models, the language, and the notion of proof are forever hermetically sealed away from the actual, 1st person experience of the world.

And that’s the part we care about, right? Our experience? Science is cool because it gives us microwave ovens.

So experience and 3rd-person representations of experience are (ontologically? epistemologically?) separate, but valid, aspects of existence. To compare the validity claims of science to the validity claims of personal experience is a bit like comparing apples and oranges. Ken Wilber would call each “true but partial.” It’s best, perhaps, to take each on its own terms.

Reuben Hersh calls mathematics a social activity, and if that’s true for math it’s got be even moreso true for science. Science is a collective representation of the world based on a very mature and useful method of inquiry. It is not, however, the holy grail or the end-all and be-all. I’ll take its results as wonderful things, and will often, but not always, defer to them in the face of a conflicting account of “truth” from my own 1st person experience of the world. Did I see a ghost? Probably not.

But, that’s a matter of judgement, not of mathematical necessity.

Um. Anyway. I spent so long writing it, and this blog has been so mundane lately, that I figured I’d post it here.

I am amused by, skeptical of, and annoyed by this group’s claims, but seriously: they are kooks before they are meditators. They just happened to have picked some kind of meditation as the vehicle of their kookery. Also, I’d argue that The Skeptic’s Dictionary entry linked to offers a rather impoverished perspective on meditation. (For example, that “TM” movement/cult may have started in 1956, but umm … the practice of meditation in general is slightly older than that.) I would recommend educating oneself beyond that viewpoint before passing judgement on the more general practice.

In point of fact, it can be argued that meditation is (or can be, or should be) a practice and not a set of ideas at all. This makes it a different animal than religious dogma, which says “you must believe this, just … well, because!” Those meditative practitioners I respect say “you should try doing this, and then the odds are good that you will experience this, and later you’re free to attach whatever intellectual model to that experience you want; it doesn’t really matter.”

In other words, the core of meditation is not so different from riding a bike. You might be an expert on human physiology and bicycle design, but still be unable to ride a bike. Put another way, you can have any intellectual model you want of how one rides a bike; wrong or right it really has no bearing on what it is you do when you ride a bike. Meditation is not (need not be) “sitting around, thinking about stuff.” You may think about riding a bike when you ride a bike, but that’s not what you do. You may think about things when you meditate, but that’s not what you do. In fact, in both cases, the less you live in your head, the more effective you’ll probably be. Meditation is (can be, should be) an action.

Meditation seen as practice is also NOT utterly different from science, in that there is a set of experiments you can perform and data you can collect. The interpretation of those data is up to you, though there are a few prevailing interpretations that have emerged over the millennia, and new interpretations sometimes emerge that may subsume previous interpretations. And just like science, your competence to evaluate any interpretation will be seriously hampered until you have performed the experiment and collected the data. NOT AT ALL like science, however, the interpretation of the data, the explanatory models, are (can be, should be) completely irrelevant. (Though some of them might be helpful tools, as well … )

Now, these analogies do fail because you can quantitatively measure a biker’s performance from the outside, and collect quantitative data about the world, but there appears to be no clear external metric on a meditator’s “performance.” Did she “dive deep into her own consciousness?” Who knows? It’s … uh, lets say doubtful that the people in the article actually accomplished the things they claim. (Though if they did, more power to them!) But I would argue that accomplishing things with external outcomes is not the point.

The point is that you can track your own internal experience and determine for yourself if it is something you value. Lots of people who have done the experiment come back saying that it’s valuable. They may explain their experience as identification with some unifying emptiness or as frolicking with domo-kuns in a meadow. It doesn’t matter.

But just as it takes years of dedication to “understand” a sport or martial art, it can take years of dedication to “understand” meditation, in the sense of an experiential, bodily understanding, not in the sense of possessing some intellectual model which you can develop in seconds by reading an article. I am arguing that the two are quite different.

So I won’t put forth any explanation of what it is or what it does. It probably doesn’t matter. I’ll just recommend (1) not conflating a practice with any particular ideas about it and (2) a fair inquiry into the practice as a practice before dismissing it on intellectual grounds.

(Oh, by the way, welcome to Boulder! )

Bush’s encouragement for us to go shopping after 9/11 brought us to the mirror, but we can’t see ourselves. Rich or poor, we are all pawns to the global economy. As egocentric as we are, we will never be as important as money. We are disposable. The economy must keep growing at the expense of rich and poor. We elect politicians who will ensure our misery.

“We will never be as important as money. We are disposable.” That pretty much captures the brand of cynicism I subscribe to. In the short term, the greed and small-mindedness of the elite stupid dominate.

But then there are occasional spots of light and I do think that over the long term, the dominating trend of life is towards … not “bigger,” per se, but more-encompassing. The ever-growing economy is a flatland version, a shadow, of the larger trend.

Even the ever-higher pile of steaming matter accumulating on the hearth of this administration—and hence this country—is bound to be eventually called for what it is by the good judgement of competent (or at least morally non-blank) people, and the seeming prescience of the framers of the US Constitution. “Shocking,” “absurd,” and “moronic” are Cheney’s flailing attempts to avoid “adult supervision,” according to the George Washington University Law Professor consulted by Olbermann in the clip linked to above. Amen to that.

Was reading the introduction to an edition of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics while sitting outside a café. (It’s for a class; not for pleasure, though I appreciate being told to read it.)

At the table next to me two fellows were talking and it quickly became obvious that they were evangelical Christians. They were discussing their faith and reading passages from the Bible, trading anecdotes of flaws in the fossil record, and generally musing on the virtues of Jesus and God.

I rubbernecked shamelessly. Not watching them, but I couldn’t stop myself from eavesdropping. I wondered why I treated their conversation like a car wreck, and realized that my reaction would be pretty offensive. Images of Bill Oreilly and America’s purported War on Christianity and so on … yup, er, I guess that’s me?

What I came up with in response was that it was the cult-like quality of their beliefs. It’s not that they ground their worldview in any particular set of beliefs, but that they ground it exclusively in a set of beliefs. To the absolute exclusion of everything else. At one point I overheard something to like “Buddhism, Hinduism, Daoism … I mean, I’m sure they can be helpful to people. But I feel better knowing that I’m worshipping the one who is really responsible for all of this.”

Not so compelling as a rational justification for Christianity, but of course emotional validations don’t need to be logical. Granted, of course, his was a magnificently tolerant position compared to what’s possible when religion and herdism join forces.

Anyway, it was sort of funny, sitting between the two parallel but very different lines of inquiry: what is moral? what is just? what is the highest good? asks Aristotle. “Worshipping God and Jesus in fellowship,” answers the guys at the next table. The main difference between Aristotle and evangelical Christianity seems to be that Aristotle and non-religious lines of inquiry in general ask questions. Religion, in the extreme, gives answers.

As I’ve said here before, I think truth and certainty are sort of like space and time, or alternatively, like silly putty: squash one direction and it expands to compensate in some other direction. There’s some fundamental constant that is preserved. The closer you get to certainty, the further you are perforce from truth in some sense. And vice versa.

As I was listening to these gentlemen, I started to understand the seduction of their certainty. “They were so confident and happy …” I overheard one of them say about, I think, members of a particular church. Well, that does sound nice, doesn’t it? I wondered what it would be like to be so absolutely certain of something. It would be so easy, I felt, to accept the answers given by God to men, the strength of knowing beyond doubt that you are in the right, that there is a comprehensible order to the world and that you understand it and have taken your place in it.

A woman leaving the café sneezed loudly, twice. Embarrassed, she smiled at an old man who sits motionless outside in the sun everyday for hours, eyes closed, brow wrinkled. I’d never seen him smile. His wrinkled leather face broke into a grin for the woman and it was sort of beautiful. Thought dropped away and I wondered if maybe neither truth nor certainty matter, that both the seduction of security and the nobility of questioning are illusions, because—perhaps, as the contemplative traditions say—nothing exists but the moment anyway. Thought dropped away and it seemed like both Aristotle and these folks’ version of Christianity are flailing attempts to placate the mind and the emotions, both bound to be fruitless because the mind and emotions are fleeting and impermanent when compared to the moment, which is always present.

Hmm. Anyway. Whatever …

That I think such a thing is probably not unrelated to my (at least) months-old debug wrestling match with 3Trace. Within this week I seem to have quaternions working for me as a representation of angular velocity and such, which is cool, but right when I feel like I can start to make some real progress, some completely aberrant behavior comes out of left field.

Currently I’ve somehow fiddled my project bits such that the app launches and runs and gets events, but someone isn’t getting told about it because the app icon does not show up in the dock and bringing the app’s window to the front does not switch out the menu bar. Er. Ooookay. No errors in any logs I’ve found, either. Yay.

I suppose you could say that science is debugging outward while mysticism is debugging inward. To truly debug, one must see that you and the bug are not-two.

Yeahhhhh I need to do something else for a little while.

There was a little sandwich shop a block down the street from work in Daly City. I’d go there a lot. Get a breakfast bagel in the morning, sometimes a sandwich at lunch. That was 4-5 years ago. I might go back there someday if it still exists, but that 4-5 years ago time? It’s gone. I will never again be that same person in that same sandwich shop, with the same other people, watching the same news while waiting for my breakfast. It’s gone. Forever.

I just suddenly find this very startling. I have no particular attachment to the sandwich shop. The breakfast bagels were pretty greasy, to be honest. It … it just seems so weird that those random moments and the me that experienced them are irretrievable. I think, “Wait, that can’t be right … can it?”

Well. Happy new year, everyone.

it may be because the universe seemingly treats innocence with no more respect than it does cruelty, and so, for example, six hundred thousand civilians are killed in Iraq for the sake of some small sad man’s ego. religious folk would ask God why He lets this happen.

i suppose i have the same question, sans anthropomorphism.

me: hey, so … this unconscionable injustice thing. what’s the deal, yo?

universe: …

me: hi. hello? yo, homie, what up?

universe: …

me: …

universe: oh, hey: you’re suddenly another year older and closer to death! fancy that!

me: bastard.

okay, anthropomorphism is fun. so sue me.

i think one answer is that on a large enough scale, even the searing injustice of war is lost in the glare of life’s evolving arc. we’re here. so on the whole, something’s going right. somehow, somewhere, there is an ounce of benevolence. perhaps it gets spread really thin.

the mystics might say that the face of God is beyond duality. every aspect of the manifest is a gesture in a dance of formlessness, emptiness. but to manifest, duality must arise. so then suffering and beauty are a dance, not the dancer. what, they suggest you ask, is doing the dance? this kind of story rings true for me, but it’s the kind of insight i must take on faith, having not really experienced it first-hand.

so i don’t know. i can’t side with the folks who claim without caveat that you create your own reality. it is obviously false in straightforward terms: innocent casualties and their surviving families do not choose to suffer. it may be that at some level Consciousness chooses to manifest and accepts suffering as an unavoidable consequence of that. again, that’s one of those things of which i do not have first-hand knowledge, so while i may like the sound of it, i can’t put my weight on it.

at the other extreme, however, nihilism just isn’t an option for me. i can’t do it. there’s no intellectual scaffolding behind that choice; it’s just how it is.

so i shy away from discussing it in flowery terms, but yes, i do ask the universe for what i want. it winds up sounding silly and vague, something like “i want, um, whatever it is that will, like, y’know, take me where i need to go.” apparently in my heart of hearts i think there is universal telos, and personal telos, and i’m not privvy to the specifics of either.

(but also, in some way, i think there isn’t any such thing. and that paradox is okay because i do steadfastly believe that the universe contains logic and not the other way around.)

whatever. i’ve never been big on specific personal ambitions anyway, so i think my role is to feel the subtle tugs, the tiny gravity of pervading benevolence — whatever it is, however much role “I” play in its creation — whatever “I” am — and follow its lead.

Just remember that you’re standing on a planet that’s evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That’s orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it’s reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the ‘Milky Way’.
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It’s a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it’s just three thousand light years wide.
We’re thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go ’round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe
The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that’s the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you’re feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space,
‘Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth.

- Monty Python, The Galaxy Song

I should be working on any of a multitude of things the completion of which are imminently necessary to prevent my being a complete failure in life.

But instead I’m reading about information theory on this blog. (More here.) I did this a lot in undergrad: I’d have a midterm in a linguistics class the next day and suddenly I’d find my girlfriend’s roommate’s Ocean Biology book irresistibly fascinating. For hours.

It’s an interesting thing because the definition of information in the context of mathematical information theory is sort of the reverse of what you’d expect, if I understand the author correctly. Information is divorced entirely from meaning and is purely a quantitative measure. The information density of a signal goes as the inverse of the amount of redundancy, which is roughly like saying the information present in a signal is the amount of randomness in the signal. By this measure, adding noise to a telephone signal increases information. (But not meaning, which is a completely different question.)

So by this definition, the oft-quoted law of thermodynamics that suggests that the universe is spinning down into a “heat death” of a sea of random particles doing random things implies that the quantity of information in the universe is constantly, irrevocably increasing.

Weird.

It makes better sense to me if I think of it in terms of a compression algorithm. Using some known algorithm, you can most likely compress a 10-second telephone voice signal to some extent without information loss. Heck, I can compress a 10-second sine wave right here for you: “10 seconds of a 440 Hz sine wave starting at 0.” There: what’s in quotes uniquely identifies 10 seconds of audio without any loss of information.* But I can’t uniquely specify 10 seconds of white noise without giving you every sample in order. That’s a lot of information.

So it makes sense, but it is a novel and counter-intuitive definition of “information” for me. And it brings to mind perennial musings on structure, meaning, and life.

Before any man-made object ever landed on Mars, James Lovelock predicted that it would be devoid of life because its atmosphere was chemically stable. That is, all chemical reactions that could take place in the atmosphere had already taken place, leaving behind a sea of gases in equilibrium. If there were life present, he reasoned, its chemical processes would probably be coupled to the planet’s chemistry, as it is on Earth. So chemically the planet was random, homogenous, flat, and dead. But apparently also at a local maximum of information quantity?

Autopoietic structures, such as hurricanes on the shallow end, and humans on the deep end, actually reduce the amount of information present, locally. It takes less information to describe a human than to describe equivalent amounts of chemicals randomly mixed in a vat. You know, from this particular point of view.

I guess what I find curious is that I can’t use the word “information” to refer to “interesting structures,” at least not when in the company of information theorists. I thought it was a useful word, but apparently not. Also I think it’s funny to point out how much of interest is missed by a tight specialization like this: how would an information theorist take into account the memory of a human in the accounting of the quantity of information present in our compressible selves as compared to a vat of chemicals? More generally, how would you deal with the behavior of a system in such an accounting? I dunno, maybe the questions don’t have meaning.

The really interesting question is, if I were reduced to a vat of equivalent mixture of chemicals, what color would I be?

Um. Okay. To work!