Digital Charnel Ground

David Chapman posted recently on the Buddhist concept of a charnel ground – a practice of meditating on the fact that the world is a grisly killing field, that  you and everyone you know and love are fated for death, and that your subtle and sublime existence will end up as nothing more than fuel for monstrous beasts.

I had a vision of a sort of information-theoretic version of that – that life is a process of creating these beautiful, intricate, delicately balanced mechanisms we call living things, and all of them end up getting eaten, their beautiful structures reduced to crude raw material for something else. The universe apparently is a process that generates astonishing complexity and then throws it callously away.

Given that our digital machines are for the most part images of ourselves, mirror-worlds and mirror-selves, is there a technological equivalent of a charnel ground? Well, sort of:



Someday there will be software that is capable of contemplating these in order to free itself from the wheel of reimplementation.

Labor and Discipline

I seem to have accidentally established a tradition of Labor Day posts. Therefore, I'm obligated to come up with one today, therefore, it starts to take on some of the less pleasant aspects of work. Not that I really mind, and not that there is actually anything forcing me to do it. In a way it's good to have my choices of what to write about slightly constrained, rather than wandering all over creation like I usually do.

One of the chief status markers in our world is enjoying work or at least appearing to. People who work at tasks they dislike for the sake of a paycheck are low-status; high-status people are supposed to be working for the sheer joy of it. This makes intuitive sense, because if you don't like your work then you need to have someone telling you what to do and thus are inherently lower status than your boss. But almost everyone answers to someone.

It may be that figuring out a working relationship between what one wants to do and what one is obligated to do is the key to life. Certainly religions work with this problem (see the recent post on submission, eg); so do political ideologies (what is libertarianism but a bogus answer to this question?). It was the foundation of Freud's theory of mind and later theories of moral development like Kohlberg's.

The issues come up in education and child rearing. I am, in theory, a great believer in self-direction in education, since it largely worked for me (or at least, it's how I learned whatever it is I know -- perhaps I'd have been better off with more externally imposed discipline, but there's no way to know). Schools always seemed like broken institutions since they are inherently designed to undermine whatever natural joy a student has in learning and replace it with a top-down authoritarian model. But people are different -- one of my kids, for example, is teaching himself music largely on his own; the other has had discipline and attention problems in school but (to my great and ongoing surprise) responds well to the extraordinarily strict discipline of his classical ballet instructor.

A large part of the process of becoming an adult is an ongoing process of learning to get oneself do certain things whether one wants to or not. It's always been problematical for me anyway, but I wonder how universal my experience is. Some people seem to manage without a struggle, others are happy to rely on the external discipline of a corporate hierarchy or similar authority system. Do hunter-gatherers have these problems? Do they work?

Work in the abstract is an intriguing and irreducible combination of the spontaneous and the disciplined, the autonomous and the externally imposed. I think that's why the concept of labor is so fetishized by Marxists; it is something that must be done and yet there are so many different ways it can be done and so appears to be a potential fulcrum for harnessing economic forces and transforming society. Buddhist meditation (in so far as I understand it, which is not far) treats breathing in much the same way; it's a bodily function that can be completely automatic or the object of focused conscious attention or both at the same time, and thus is a fulcrum for reconciling the willed and the inevitable.

Fuck Hope

"Don't confuse me with those who cling to hope. I enjoy describing things the way they are, I have no interest in how they 'ought to be.' And I certainly have no interest in fixing them. I sincerely believe that if you think there's a solution, you're part of the problem. My motto: Fuck Hope!

"I am a personal optimist but a skeptic about all else. What may sound to some like anger is really nothing more than sympathetic contempt. I view my species with a combination of wonder and pity, and I root for its destruction. And please don't confuse my point of view with cynicism; the real cynics are the ones who tell you everything's gonna be all right."

-- George Carlin (via Dennis Perrin)

"Turning your mind toward the dharma does not bring security or confirmation. Turning your mind toward the dharma does not bring any ground to stand on. In fact, when your mind turns toward the dharma, you fearlessly acknowledge impermanence and change and begin to get the knack of hopelessness."

-- Pema Chödrön, Buddhist nun, When Things Fall Apart

Religion and Science: Peace in Our Time?

I've been wanting to say something here about the evolution wars, since God only knows there isn't enough debate going on in the blogosphere and elsewhere on that topic. Something vaguely in the vein of Stephen Jay Gould's manifesto for giving religion and science their separate spheres of influence, truce instead of war, etc. Maybe I'll get to that someday. In the meantime, the Dalai Lama has published a book on science and spirituality in which he apparently is prepared to accept that science can trump religion:

"My confidence in venturing into science lies in my basic belief that as in science so in Buddhism, understanding the nature of reality is pursued by means of critical investigation: if scientific analysis were conclusively to demonstrate certain claims in Buddhism to be false, then we must accept the findings of science and abandon those claims."
-- His Holiness the Dalai Lama, as quoted in an article by Michael Shermer

Well that's a good start then. Actually his approach is much different from Gould's, though both are aiming at stopping the incessant strife between religion and science. Gould divides up reality in to what he calls Non-overlapping Magisteria, separate territories in other words. The Dalai Lama seems more intent on exploring a single reality by different means.

Update: George Johnson at the NYT does a mostly favorable review.