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The Transitive Theory of WeirdnessSunday October 5, 2008
A couple of weeks ago, rugby player Johnny Wilkinson was in the press talking about quantum physics and Buddhism. The BBC quoted Wilkinson as follows: I read about Schrodinger’s Cat and it had a huge effect on me […] It was all about the idea that an observer can change the world just by looking at something; the idea that mind and reality are somehow interconnected. It is difficult to put into words, but it hit me like a steam train. I came to understand that I had been living a life in which I barely featured […] I do not like religious labels, but there is a connection between quantum physics and Buddhism, which I was also getting into.” Culturally speaking, this is an interesting passage, in part because Wilkinson repeats the very common trope of drawing parallels between quantum physics and various New Agey ideas. When this is done, often the connections between the two are made in the vaguest terms. An exquisite example of this is in the film Old Joy – a wonderful film in which almost nothing happens, and one (as an aside) that features probably the finest and most doggy performance by any dog in the entire history of film. The film is about two men, played by Daniel London and (the also pretty damn weird) Will Oldham, and a dog, played by a dog, who go into the woods in search of hot springs, get lost, find the springs, bathe and then go home. About half way through the film, Kurt, the character played by Will Oldham, is sitting by the fire and staring into the flames, and is stoned out of his head. ‘Quantum physics, man,’ he says (and it’s some time since I’ve seen the film, so I don’t remember the exact words), ‘I just intuitively understand it.’ ‘Explain it to me, then,’ his sceptical friend replies. ‘I can’t explain it man,’ Kurt rambles on. ‘It’s intuitive, you know. I just understand it on a deep level.’ This came back to me as I read the quote from Wilkinson. Heartfelt though it clearly was, it was not at all clear what he meant. Now it may well be that there is something in what Wilkinson has read – about Buddhism and about quantum physics – that has struck a chord, and that has been humanly useful, and I’m fine with this. Certainly it may be the case that a cursory reading of the popular literature on quantum mechanics (and that is the most that I think I will ever attain to, if that) might provide one with a bunch of metaphors that may be, as the anthropologist Levi-Strauss once famously said, “good to think with”: useful as a way of reflecting upon life. And if these metaphors help, then perhaps all well and good. But it is also worth being clear that having access to this bunch of metaphors is not at all the same kind of things as the understanding, or the doing, of quantum mechanics. Quantum mechanics, after all, is a hard discipline, one that is steeped in complex mathematics that takes years of training. I don’t understand it, intuitively or otherwise. Neither, it is clear in the film, does Kurt. Nor, I very much suspect, does Johnny Wilkinson. What is going on here is what I like to think of (or I do now, having just invented the term) as the Transitive Theory of Weirdness, and as this is a phenomenon that is quite widespread, it is one that is bears some reflection. It goes something like this. a: quantum physics is pretty damn weirdb: idea x is pretty damn weirdthereforec: idea x is like quantum physics. This, of course, makes no sense at all. There are many kinds of weirdness. Some of them are well supported by the data (the quantum world really is very, very strange, but this weirdness is supported by a wealth of good empirical data) whilst others are not (the ideas that yogis can fly or that they can go months without food are also very, very strange… but they are supported by no reliable data whatsoever). It is important to distinguish between different kinds of weirdness, and to ask questions about empirical data, because of the way in which the Transitive Theory of Weirdness is often deployed. Very frequently, it is used to justify spurious and untenable perspectives upon the world, on the grounds that any weird claim whatsoever is supported by the baseline weirdness of quantum mechanics: it is true and good, that is (and is supported, of course, by the physics) because it is weird. This claim that there is a link between the weirdness of a proposition and its truth is seriously undermining of any clear-headed thought. If we sign up to this, then there is no limit to the amount of junk that we can let into our brains. Indeed, this Transitive Theory of Weirdness might tempt us to accept things – Kierkegaard-style – on the “strength” of their absurdity, to accept them more readily the more bizarre they become. But this is not a good idea. As Sue Blackmore has said, I think, it may be good to be a bit open minded, but if you are too open minded (and “open-mindedness” is the cardinal virtue of the New Age), your mind becomes like a skip, and anybody walking past can throw whatever junk they like into it. As a result, I remain sceptical of those who want to draw connections between whatever brand of wisdom they are selling and the mysteries of the quantum world. And certainly when it comes to Buddhism, I am not convinced that the comparison throws any particularly useful light either on any aspects of Buddhism or on any aspects of quantum mechanics.
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Good Karmic Input, Anyone?Tuesday September 30, 2008
thinkBuddha.org got a mention in an article in the Philadelphia Inquirer last week. The article was about websites that see their task – and here I am quoting – as promoting niceness, and claimed that thinkBuddha.org “welcomes good karmic input”. I confess to being a little baffled. I’m not entirely sure what good karmic input is (and therefore, I’m not entirely sure whether it is something that I would, in fact, welcome…), nor am I sure that promoting niceness is what I’m about. Is niceness always something to be striven for (see the link here, which is adorned by slightly alarming pictures of Tony Blair and Prince Charles sipping tea)? Once again, I’m not entirely sure… But, having said that, I don’t want to appear churlish. It sure is nice, after all, to be mentioned. Thanks to Lisa Solonynko for the photograph
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Literature and LaughterThursday September 25, 2008
Three posts in as many days: it’s uncommonly busy here on the thinkBuddha blog. But I do want to write a brief post to say that my review of Ralph Flores’s book Buddhist Scriptures as Literature has been published in volume five of the Western Buddhist Review. The link to the review is here, and explores some of the themes that I have taken up on this blog, in particular in my recent post where I argued that one of the best ways of reading religious texts may be by thinking of them as lies in which not everything is false. One of the themes I’m interested in thinking about in the review is that of laughter. If one reads texts as literature (i.e. as lies in which not everything is false) then – as I wrote in this earlier post – it allows the possibility of laughter to return, causing havoc amongst the high-seriousness of interpretation, just as Monkey, in the Journey to the West, caused havoc amongst the many berobed officials of heaven. It is striking how little good, subversive fun there is in most interpretation of religious texts. But it should come as no surprise that the Gate-keepers of Truth often seek to abolish laughter and play: they have done so ever since the Greek gods banished the god of laughter, Momus, from Mount Olympus. However, this does not come without a cost: for in so doing, they also threaten to abolish much of the power of the texts that they claim to be speaking for.
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The Poetry of DeathWednesday September 24, 2008
It’s been a week of epitaphs. Last Sunday we were up in the village of Heptonstall in Yorkshire with a friend from Turkey. We were up there to visit some friends, but as we arrived a little early, we wandered with our visitor into the ruins of the old church of Thomas à Becket and admired the inscriptions on the stones beneath our feet. And then yesterday I was down here in Leicester for my first session teaching at De Montfort University, a session during which we were encouraging new students (just in case…) to explore the epitaph as a literary form and then to write their own epitaphs. And as I am the newest member of staff, my colleagues inveigled me into writing my own. So I decided to do so in the style of a Japanese jisei or “farewell poem to life”. Yoel Hoffmann has edited a magnificent collection of these Japanese Death Poems, a curious literary form in that the poems are ideally written the moment before one dies. Here are a few examples: Since I was bornI have to dieand so… Kisei (1764) Oh I don’t carewhere the autumn cloudsare drifting to Bufu (1792) Death poemsare mere delusion – death is death Toko (1795) It is, alas, bad form to write them in advance (and thus it is also awkward if, feeling the hem of death’s robe brushing against the back of your neck, you quickly scribble down a death poem only to find to your embarrassment that you don’t, in fact, die, but that’s another matter…). Bad form though it may be, I sat down to write my own jisei. I came up with the following. Where there is a Willthere is a Way – but nowno Will, no Way. But I think that the prize for the best Zen death poem must go to a Frenchman, and that is the old trickster and chess grand-master, Marcel Duchamp. In French it goes like this: D’ailleursc’est toujours les autres qui meurent. Or, in rough translation: Anyway, it’s always other people who die.
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The Sciences, the Humanities and the Human ImaginationTuesday September 23, 2008
Some time ago, I was at a conference on the subject of literature and science. As is the way with these events, there were few scientists presents, and a great number of people from the humanities, many of whom seemed to fall into one of two camps: firstly, the scholars of the nineteenth century who talked about such now discredited notions as ether and phlogiston and calorific fluid; and secondly, the science fiction buffs who, blinking through the thick lenses of their spectacles, talked about utopias, dystopias and how one can read Lacanian themes in Doctor Who. Despite being largely ignorant when it comes to the nineteenth century studies and science fiction, it was an interesting and stimulating event, but I could not help asking wondering at the fact that scientists were so very thin on the ground. Perhaps they were all too busy working on real problems to spend their time discussing Lacanian themes in Doctor Who. On day two, however, the scholars of the humanities managed to lure a Tame Scientist to speak to them. This, as you may imagine, was a cause of some excitement because, although they would not like to admit it, the mild-mannered humanities types probably themselves suspected that it is the scientists who work on the real problems. And not only had these historians, utopians, dystopians and literary theorists managed to lure a scientist to their conference, but they had managed to secure a scientist of some international standing, who could talk about big, scary things like the origin of the universe, antimatter, dark matter, and what goes on inside a black hole. The scientist began by showing a slide of a time-line in the fashion of Carl Sagan. Those who remember Cosmos will remember Sagan leaping around in his corduroy jacket on a giant two-dimensional calendar representing the life of the universe, from the big bang to the present, as a single year; and they will remember how, relative to the age of the universe, we human beings made an appearance rather late on New Year’s Eve. But whilst Carl Sagan used this metaphor as the starting point for a kind of poetic wonder at the universe, the eminent scientist used it as a stick to beat the scholars of the humanities. ‘This,’ he said, pointing to one vanishingly small end of the line, ‘is what you study.’ He smiled at the audience. ‘I study all the rest,’ he went on. This must have been a cause of considerable satisfaction, because he repeated the point a little later in the talk. After all, what is bigger, more important and more fundamental: the nature of antimatter (for example), or the prevalence of Lacanian themes in Doctor Who? Answers on a postcard, please. There was, however, something about this demonstration of the relative merits of the humanities and the sciences – if this was indeed what was being demonstrated – that struck a false note. It is not that the eminent scientist was wrong – the scholars of English literature, the historians and perhaps sometimes the philosophers as well, are preoccupied with a radically more circumscribed time-scale – that of human history, or even of recent human history – but one cannot gauge the importance of what they are doing by this alone, and to attempt to do this is to diminish not only the humanities but also the sciences. The sciences, that is to say, need the humanities. Science, after all, is a human activity, even if it is one that looks beyond the horizons that our ancestors imagined, and scientific knowledge is built up of human meanings. This is not to say that the knowledge of the sciences is just a human construct – for the sciences say some very powerful things about the world, and often provide the best knowledge that we have – but it is to say that when it comes to what all of this means, then the meaning resides in us. This is something that Carl Sagan knew well, as a strong advocate for how a knowledge of the sciences can enrich and deepen our understanding of ourselves and of the world. To see Sagan talk about the sciences is to witness one of the most passionate voices ever raised in celebration of the extraordinary depth, complexity and subtlety of the physical universe of which we are a part. Sagan was well aware that, if we are to understand the sciences, we do not need to take leave of the humanities; and thus Cosmos ranges from the origins of the universe to tales of medieval monasteries, to the bizarre and faintly comical image of Sagan flying around the outer reaches of the universe in a futuristic spacecraft, to the fascinating (although contested – see the link that follows) story of the Japanese Samurai Crabs. It is a rich and generous brew. Science needs the humanities because if scientists really want to communicate, they need to harness the human imagination, and this is something that those working in the humanities (when you can stop them banging on about Lacanian themes in Doctor Who) know something about. After all, hard science is often very, very hard. But hard science also matters a great deal for how we conceive of ourselves, of the universe, and of the possibilities that are before us. It matters because it has profound implications for how we think of ourselves and how we might best organise our human affairs. The reverse, however, is also true: the humanities need the sciences as well. I remember talking to a philosopher friend and saying, in an offhand way, that the philosophy of mind really needs to look at empirical evidence from cognitive science. He looked astonished. ‘But why?’ he asked, genuinely puzzled, and he was deaf to my protests that any philosophical picture of the mind that ignores what we know to be empirically true about the way that our minds and brains work is not a picture of mind at all, but a picture of what we would like mind to be, and that this is not the same thing. What I am talking about, I think, is what Edward O. Wilson called consilience – the possibility of a unified knowledge. Whether one is working in the sciences or in the humanities, such consilience seems to me like a worthy goal to aim for, a goal in which all knowledge might have a part. Even the study of Lacanian themes in Doctor Who, although – in this case – one might hope that it had a rather small part…
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Is this it?Tuesday September 16, 2008
Sitting on the bus today, I passed a sign reading “Is this it?” This is, no doubt a perplexing question, and after a little reflection I can only think that the most sensible answer is “Is what what?”, so prompting a long game of Questions, after the fashion of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. A second glance revealed that the question was part of an advertising campaign for the Alpha Course, a short course that aims, according to its publicity material, to examine that question of all questions, that of the Meaning of Life, from a Christian perspective. And if you think that this cryptic question “Is this it?” can be best addressed by going on to ask things like “How does God guide us?” and “Who is Jesus?” (questions that, one suspects, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern might dismiss as fouls, on the grounds of being non-sequiturs), then my best advice to you is that you should renounce this heathen tosh right away, and you should head off to the Alpha Course website where you will waste no more of your precious time. Still here? Good. Let me continue. This question “Is this is?” is an intriguing one, one that seems to be born out of a dissatisfaction with life and it is this dissatisfaction that I am interested in. Dissatisfaction is perhaps something that we all experience and, whilst dissatisfaction may not be the most pleasant state to be in, it is a state that is not without its virtues. Absolute satisfaction, after all, looks very like smugness, and there is a good case to be made for the claim that there is much in the world that we should not be satisfied with. If “Is this it?” is a question born of dissatisfaction, then there are two questions that can be asked in response that do not, I think, qualify as fouls in the game of Questions: firstly, what are the objects of our dissatisfaction?; and secondly, having established what these objects are, what are the most appropriate responses to these various dissatisfactions? I think it can be useful to break down the sense of dissatisfaction in this kind of analytical fashion, because there are different classes of objects of dissatisfaction that require different responses. Let us say I am dissatisfied with my ability to play the piano. This may be amenable to being broken down. Firstly, I might be dissatisfied by my technique. Secondly, I might be dissatisfied that my fingers are too short. Thirdly, I might be dissatisfied that I did not start playing when I was five years old, like my friend Sergei did. In the first case, I can respond by practising, getting myself some classes and so on; in the second case, finger extensions being out of the question, I can respond by adapting my technique to my hands, by recognising that, for better of worse, these are my fingers, and they are all I’ve got; and thirdly, I can respond with the recognition that I am not Sergei, that we have had different life-trajectories and that the time spent being miserable about what didn’t happen a few decades ago would be better spent playing my scales. There’s something here rather like Stoic practice. Or even (but don’t tell anyone I said this, as I don’t want to get a reputation) Buddhist practice. The Stoic Epictetus writes that we should distinguish between those things that are “up to us” and those things that are not up to us. The former, we can do something about. But we should train ourselves (and it does, no doubt, take a fair bit of training!) to not permit the latter to disturb us, because there is nothing we can do about them. When it comes to the question “Is this it?” this kind of analytical approach seems to be useful. What, precisely, are the sources of our dissatisfaction when we ask this question? We might just be fed up with the bus journey. We might have a more existential, nagging dissatisfaction that we can’t quite put into words. We might be dissatisfied that we are one day going to die. We might want to upgrade our life in one way or another (new job, new partner, new house, new cat, new car…). Or our dissatisfaction may be ethical in character – we really should not have said what we said last night. And when we have taken such an analytical approach, it is more possible to see the kinds of resources that we have at our disposal to respond to these myriad dissatisfactions. This does not necessarily mean that we should obliterate the objects of our dissatisfaction – some may not be amenable to obliteration (however much we may be dissatisfied with death, for example, it is going to happen); instead it means having an intelligent response to the particular dissatisfaction with which we are faced and to how we can best respond given the resources at our disposal. This, I think, is a long way from the usual response to this question of “Is this it?”, which is to bundle up all dissatisfaction in one unexamined ball and then, because we feel grudgingly about life as a whole, to conjure up vague, gauzy metaphysical entities – other realms, promises of overcoming that which cannot be overcome (our being as physical, biological, temporal creatures, for example) or other convenient fictions, fictions that betray a lack of appreciation of the richness and depth of the life we find ourselves in the midst of. Such a response is, I think, unhelpful precisely because it obscures the very things that may allow us to best respond to the dissatisfactions we encounter in our lives. Seeing dissatisfaction as something that is multiple and that therefore does not demand a single response, allows us to see it as a part of the fabric of our lives. It is not an existential problem to be overcome once and for all, but a continual call to look at the fine grain of our existence. As I sat on the bus thinking about the question Is this it? I found myself thinking that all the evidence points to the answer: Very probably, yes – at least in the sense of there being no other metaphysical realms to call upon, there being only this life and this world with its many shortcomings, demanding a constant response. But then I thought, Should we feel short-changed? When one starts to pay closer attention the nature of our many dissatisfactions, then the answer seems obvious: almost certainly, no. For my hunch – a hunch borne out to some degree by experience – is this: that the more closely and analytically we look at the dissatisfactions of our life, the more we become aware of the resources that we have to respond to them, here in the world. And responding to the nuance and the fine grain of our lives in this way seems, although not absolutely so, to be a deeply satisfying way of living.
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Lies in Which not Everything is FalseWednesday September 10, 2008
According to Wendy Doniger, in the South Sudan storytellers begin their tales with the following intriguing formula. This, by the way, calls for audience participation, and so the lines in bold are the ones spoken by the storyteller, whilst the italicised lines are those spoken by the audience. This is a story.Right!It is a lie.Right!But not everything in it is false.Right! This, more or less, is how stories begin in the South Sudan (although as I’m writing this in a cafe in Leicester I don’t have the book on me, nor do I have personal access to any South Sudanese storytellers, so this particular story may itself be a lie in which not everything is false…) I have always loved this little exchange, as it says a lot about the kind of relationship stories have with the question of truth. As a fiction writer, I confess to being a habitual liar. This is what fiction writers do – they make stuff up. They tell big fat lies. This, of course, makes writing fiction rather a curious business from the point of view of ethics, and this is something that I wrestle with from time to time. For example, in the book that I’m currently rewriting, I am writing about a couple of historical characters. I am inventing motives, desires, ideas, thoughts, passions that they may never have had. Indeed, I am inventing motives, desire, ideas, thoughts and passions that they almost certainly didn’t ever have. This, to say the least, is a problematic way of going on, and if Aristotle is right (as I suspect that he may be) in his claim that the dead are not beyond harm and injustice, then this is something that deserves to be taken seriously. But, having said this, the lies of fictions are lies in which not everything is false. And so the ethical waters that we navigate when spinning fictions (and all of us – not just novelists – spend our lives spinning fictions) are therefore rather choppy and turbulent ones. I’ve been thinking a fair amount about the relationship between fiction and lies thanks to Ralph Flores’s interesting book Buddhist Scriptures as Literature which I’ve been reviewing for the Western Buddhist Review. Flores’s book aims to re-read Buddhist texts as literature, rather than as timeless repositories of Truth, as doctrinal source-books or as uncomplicated and authoritative documents. Such an effort, I think, is thoroughly worthwhile, because it reinvigorates our thinking, thinking that becomes petrified as great monoliths of doctrine. And reading these texts as human texts that speak of human things allows us to see the texts as addressing our humanity. Sometimes it seems as if sacred texts – whether we are talking about the Bible, the Buddhist Sutras, the Communist Manifesto, or the complete works of Immanuel Kant – are treated as news-bulletins from the beyond rather than as human creations. So reading Kant, the Communist Manifesto or the Heart Sutra as literature puts a rather different spin on things. I’ll link to my review of Flores’s book when it is published, and I do not want to anticipate what I have written there in this blog. But what I want to suggest here are a few of the benefits, as I see them, of reading Buddhist texts (or any other texts that have an aura of authority to them) as literature. Firstly, to read Buddhist texts as literature has the effect of thinking afresh about what can seem like a litany of stale pieties (of course, some people may prefer stale pieties, but if I must have them at all, I like my pieties – like my pies – to be fresh out of the oven). There is always a danger of reading texts to confirm what we think we know, rather than to find out something new. But reading, I believe, should be a process of discovery and perhaps also of transformation, a process of finding unexpected things, rather than seeking confirmation of pre-existing views. After all, if you always see the same thing when you read, then why bother reading? So reading texts as litearature gives plays havoc with the well-ordered systems of our orthodoxies. Monkey runs rampant in the halls of heaven. And, when the mess has been cleared up, heaven is probably all the better for it. Following on from this, to read texts as literature allows the possibility of a return of lightness, play, subversion and wonder. To read as literature means is to call into question the high seriousness with which we look at texts, and allows questions of the form ‘what if…?’ to multiply. Thirdly – and this is, I think, a reflection of the last point – to read texts as literature permits the return of a kind of relish that can so easily be lost when texts become well-worn. It can restore texts to life when they had become dead and cold. But there is one final reason that I think that reading Buddhist texts as literature is beneficial, and this relates to the Sudanese storytellers I have quoted above. Think of the following: This is a Buddhist text.Right!It is a lie.Right!But not everything in it is false.Right! If any reading of a Buddhist text started like this, it would have an interesting and, I think, extremely positive effect. Because to relate a story knowing that it is a lie in which not everything is false is to place an ethical demand upon both the teller and the audience alike. It means that the text cannot be used as a refuge from the business of thinking about our lives, both individually and collectively, and it means that it is down to us to do the hard work of seeing what sense the story can make of our lives and seeing what sense our own lives can make of the story, amidst the play of words and images and falsehoods. In fact, I’d like to see the words of the Sudanese storytellers prefacing all the sacred books of the world, from Kant on downwards… But I am not holding my breath for the coming-to-pass of this particular brand of utopia.
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Dave Oct 7, 02:30 PM (The Transitive Theory of Weirdness) Will, you are a curmugeon after my own heart. I was brought up short by the word “skip,” which I gather from context must be akin … Tom Oct 6, 09:51 PM (The Transitive Theory of Weirdness) In a book review/essay I wrote eight years ago for Hundred Mountain, I tie Buddhism in with string theory. www.hundredmountain…. I remain convinced that physics and Buddhism … Jakob Oct 6, 01:35 PM (The Transitive Theory of Weirdness) So there is a spectrum of uncertainty. At one end this allows the kind of irrational open-mindedness you originally highlighted. At the other end, where … Will Oct 6, 08:12 AM (The Transitive Theory of Weirdness) Hi, Tom and Jakob,
Good to see you, Tom, and thanks for the links. There still is, as far as I can tell (and, as I … Jakob Oct 5, 10:50 PM (The Transitive Theory of Weirdness) Becoming a serial replier probably marks me out as some kind of cyber-crank but here goes anyway… I agree with all you say above, and this … Tom Armstrong Oct 5, 10:30 PM (The Transitive Theory of Weirdness) Will, I think that Wilkinson is just saying that finding a connection between mind and matter occurs both with Schrodinger’s Cat and in Buddhist philosophy relating … Will Oct 5, 09:40 PM (The Transitive Theory of Weirdness) Hi, Jakob, Thanks for the comment,which is indeed constructive. My impression is, as I hope is clear from the piece, that what JW is doing is …
Previous Posts
The Transitive Theory of WeirdnessSunday October 5, 2008Good Karmic Input, Anyone?Tuesday September 30, 2008Literature and LaughterThursday September 25, 2008The Poetry of DeathWednesday September 24, 2008The Sciences, the Humanities and the Human ImaginationTuesday September 23, 2008Is this it?Tuesday September 16, 2008Lies in Which not Everything is FalseWednesday September 10, 2008Lightness of TouchFriday September 5, 2008New Job in LeicesterThursday August 28, 2008On Gods and NationsFriday August 22, 2008NeuroethicsTuesday August 19, 2008
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