Blind, pitiless, indifferent...
Saturday April 10, 2010
Over the last few days, in what spaces I have had between working on a couple of chapters for an introduction to philosophy, I have found myself thinking about the idea that crops up again and again in contemporary writing. The idea is this: that we live in a blind, indifferent and pitiless universe. Here’s Richard Dawkins, in his article “God’s Utility Function”: “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” Dawkins is not, of course, the first to argue this – he goes on to quote Housman’s Tell me not here, it needs not saying, which ends like this:
For nature, heartless, witless nature,
Will neither care nor know
What stranger’s feet may find the meadow
And trespass there and go,
Nor ask amid the dews of morning
If they are mine or no.
Many might argue that to attribute “pitilessness” (or, indeed “witlessness”!) to the universe as a whole is nothing but sober truth-telling. Capacity for pity is, after all, simply not a property of the universe as a whole, because the universe is not that kind of thing. After all, in saying that the universe is “pitiless” we are not saying that the universe is out to get us, only that our purposes are our own purposes, our hopes our own hopes, our stories are our own stories, and that these hopes, purposes and stories are not written up there in the stars.
There is something fishy going on here, however. Firstly, why is “pitiless” an interesting thing to say about the universe as a whole? After all, we could equally well say that the universe as a whole is “humourless” or that it is “chinless”, but these don’t seem interesting, or perhaps even sensible, things to say about the universe.
“Pitiless”, when we use it in an everyday sense, is not simply saying that something lacks a certain property, the property of “pity”. To describe something as “pitiless”, and to do so interestingly, is to suggest that the thing described should be capable of feeling pity, but that, because it has its own purposes, it chooses not to. To usefully deem something indifferent or pitiless, in other words, we might want it first to have the capacity for partiality or pity. This is perhaps why it would seem fairly odd to say that my toothbrush is pitiless even though, technically, we could argue that it is.
To call the universe as a whole “pitiless” (or, for that matter “indifferent” or “meaningless”), it seems to me, is both unreasonable and unhelpful. It is not that the universe is indifferent or pitiless, so much as that to talk about indifference or partiality, pitilessness or pity, in relation to the universe as a whole is to take these concepts and to apply them in places where they do not belong.
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Throwing Away the Ladder
Saturday April 3, 2010
It’s the day before Easter, and I’m sitting outside in the sunshine with a pot of Chinese tea, trying to convince myself that it’s warm enough not to be holed up inside. There’s an April chill in the air, and I suspect that the cold will be cumulative, so I’ll make this post relatively short. Still, it is nice to see the sun again, and to sit here listening to the birds twittering and bumble bees chugging around and the distant sounds of traffic and barking dogs. And it’s nice to be away from my philosophy books for a while, after quite a few days of intensively reading about all things Wittgenstein for a book I’m working on (which is one – but only one – reason for the title of this post).
What I want to write about here, however, is not Wittgenstein, but something I came across a couple of days ago whilst reading the New Scientist. Last week’s edition carried a brief article which asked the intriguing question how many ways can we be conscious? The article suggested that consciousness is not a simple either/or business (either we are conscious or we are not), but that there is increasing evidence that the kinds of things the brain does are much more intricate and many-layered than this.
Now the idea that there are different kinds of consciousness is one that is familiar within the Buddhist tradition, where there are all kinds of rankings of states of mind, for example the familiar list of hierarchically-ranked dhyānas. The idea of a hierarchy of consciousness is one that I think is deep-rooted in us. It appears in the New Scientist article as well, which ends by saying “consciousness is looking increasingly like a ladder rather than a light switch.”
This tendency to see consciousness hierarchically may, however, be the very thing that gets in the way of understanding the real implications of what is going on here. After all, it’s all very well to loaf around all day in the “higher” states of dhyāna, and these may indeed feel higher as one sits on one’s cushions. But it is not clear in what sense they could be considered “higher” if we wanted to do something more practical like pilot a plane or perform brain surgery. I’d choose a brain surgeon with ordinary everyday bog-standard consciousness (whatever that might be) over fourth-dhyāna consciousness (whatever that might be) any day…
Leaving aside metaphors of ladders and ideas of hierarchy, the fact that what we designate as “consciousness” is not one but many things, that there is a multiplicity of different kinds of mental states, and that our binary opposition “conscious/unconscious” is not up to the task of talking about this multiplicity of states, is one that should give philosophers of consciousness pause. What, after all, is philosophy of consciousness actually about, if we start finding that our notion of consciousness itself begins to fragment in this way?
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Meditating and Knowing
Saturday January 2, 2010
Firstly, I should wish all visitors to thinkBuddha.org a happy New Year, if a little belatedly. Since I got back from retreat, I’ve had my head down working on the next philosophy book, and it has been good to have some time away from teaching, and a bit of the clarity that comes from meditation, to really get some thoughts on paper.
So for a few days, we were up before five in the morning and on our cushions for the first sit of the day. And when the sky started at last to lighten, the view from the window of the meditation room when I opened my eyes was – pleasingly – that of a bare branch against the sky, strikingly similar to the image at the head of this site. Anyway, the question that I was preoccupied with on this retreat was this: what kind of knowledge comes from meditation?
I should give some background to this question. I’ve been recently reading Paul Sheldon Davies’s book Subjects of the World: Darwin’s Rhetoric and the Study of Agency in nature
Now this is interesting in terms of meditation for sometimes it is suggested that in meditation one can experience the arising and the passing away of mental events directly, without any mediation, such that the mind becomes transparent to itself. And whilst something goes on in meditation – a settling down of the everyday noise, greater attunement to the various fizzes and pops and crackles of the mind going about its business – what interests me is the question of what degree of knowledge we can really hope for from meditation. What I want to know is this: how transparent? How inerrant is this knowledge that comes from meditation? Because I see no a priori reason to assume that this knowledge gained from meditation is any less subject to distortion, confabulation and “spin” than the daily, non-meditative chunterings of our mind. Or, to put it differently, if we can be wrong about things that seem convincing in daily life, can we also be wrong about things that seem convincing in meditation?
These questions might seem to be hard to answer; but at the same time, I think that it would be perfectly possible to design some cunning experiments to test whether the kind of first-person perspective that is claimed to arise from meditation is any more accurate than the first-person perspectives of our day-to-day lives. And even if we do not do the experiments in the meditation hall itself, it is said that there are those who are so well established in meditation that they can keep this kind of awareness up when they are not on the cushions, so we could test them in the lab whilst not engaged in meditation, and see if the have any less propensity to error. This might be a lot of fun. One could run the kinds of cunning experiments that researchers in psychology like to perform to see if there is a difference between what is actually going on, and first person accounts of what the subject thinks is going on (see Sue Blackmore’s website for some details on the experiments undertaken by Wegner, for example), but do these experiments on meditative virtuosos. And we might, of course, find that there is a difference in performance. But I suspect that we might find something else rather interesting: that these meditators were, like the rest of us, saddled with human minds that are largely opaque to themselves. If this was the case, then there would be interesting consequences, not least for how seriously we could take at least some of the claims made for meditation.
It may be, however, that there would be rather less than general enthusiasm at the idea of taking part in experiments such as this. A lot of the research into meditation tends to be into the benefits of meditation. Experiments aiming to explore the limits of meditation, rather than the spiffiness of meditation (although they might tell us some interesting things) might have a rather harder time attracting recruits.
Even if seasoned meditators, like the rest of us, have minds that are opaque to themselves, I do think that meditation as a method may still have some kind of important role in helping us to understand our minds, even if it is not a matter of bringing us direct knowledge of the mind’s inner workings. The role of meditation may be more negative than positive. For there are, broadly speaking, two different kinds of rhetoric when it comes to meditation in Buddhism. Very crudely put, on the one hand there is the rhetoric that speaks of meditation as a path to inerrant, inner knowledge – meditation is a way of knowing our minds, of reaching certain knowledge, and on the other hand there is the rhetoric that speaks of meditation as a means of overturning the things that we think we know, as a means of unknowing or not knowing. And I have a hunch – it is no more than that – that the second approach to meditation may have a really rather powerful role to play in the understanding of the mind. For many of our everyday concepts for dealing with the mind seem to me to be concepts that are rooted in complex metaphysical stories, stories that (as the Madhyamikas might like to say) tend to dissolve under analysis. Much of what I read on philosophical approaches to consciousness seems to be founded on a mass of false first-person “certainties”, certainties that some forms of meditation can call radically into question. Could it be that meditation could be a way of freeing us up from the myths that we spin about our minds (the myth of agency, the myth of some kind of inner, substantial self, and so on). I like to think of this not as a form of phenomenology (gaining data on what the mind is like) but as a form of unphenomenology (unpicking the assumptions that we have about what the mind is like, recognising that we don’t really know what we think we know). And perhaps in the space that is thereby created, we might be able to come to a quieter, more sober, more subtle and truer perspective on what it means to be a minded, embodied creature, here in the midst of the world.
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Darwin's Dharma?
Monday February 16, 2009
I’m sure that I’m lagging behind here, and that most thinkBuddha readers are already ahead of the game; but for those who have missed it, here’s a footnote to my note on Darwin Day. According to the Nature blog, psychologist Paul Ekman claimed at a recent meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science that Darwin’s views on compassion are strongly reminiscent of Tibetan Buddhism, to the extent that there could be a direct line of influence. One of the passages that Eckman suggests is suggestive of such a connection is drawn from Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotion in Man and Animals:
Love, tender feelings, &c. — Although the emotion of love, for instance that of a mother for her infant, is one of the strongest of which the mind is capable, it can hardly be said to have any proper or peculiar means of expression; and this is intelligible, as it has not habitually led to any special line of action. No doubt, as affection is a pleasurable sensation, it generally causes a gentle smile and some brightening of the eyes. A strong desire to touch the beloved person is commonly felt; and love is expressed by this means more plainly than by any other. Hence we long to clasp in our arms those whom we tenderly love. We probably owe this desire to inherited habit, in association with the nursing and tending of our children, and with the mutual caresses of lovers.
In his talk, Ekman apparently listed eight possible ways in which there could have been a direct influence of Tibetan Buddhism on Darwin, including the influence of his friend Joseph Hooker, who conducted botanical research on the Tibetan plateau. And certainly, towards the end of Darwin’s life, Buddhism was not something completely unknown in Europe. But at the same time conditioning factors (as good students of Buddhism must know) are deep and complex and multiple, and it might be easy here to over-egg the pudding, or to draw rather too far-reaching conclusions. So we shouldn’t be racing to crown the old bearded fellow with a lama’s hat just yet. After all, the quote above does not seem to stand in need of such explanations, however intriguing such reflections may be. Nor, indeed, does the following passage from The Descent of Man of 1871, despite its striking similarity to some ideas found in Buddhist texts:
This virtue [of humanity], one of the noblest with which man is endowed, seems to arise incidentally from our sympathies becoming more tender and more widely diffused, until they are extended to all sentient beings.
I admit to being intrigued by Ekman’s claims, and perhaps there is something else to be said here about the complex intellectual history of Darwin’s work. The world is much leakier than the historians sometimes credit; ideas move much more quickly than we sometimes are willing to admit. But what matters more than this, I think, is the sentiment – and, no doubt, the practice – of human sympathy, wherever it comes from. At the very least, it suggests that those who accuse Darwinism of being an affront to ethics have simply not read their Darwin with enough due attention.
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Darwin Day
Thursday February 12, 2009
Today is Darwin Day, marking two hundred years since the birth of Shropshire’s finest – or one hundred and fifty years since the publication of the Origin of Species; and there are celebrations to mark the event taking place across the world.
Two years ago, whilst travelling in Bulgaria, I read the Origin of Species from cover to cover for the first time. It is one of those books that is so talked about that you assume that you know what is in it, without having read it. As a result, I put off reading it for far too long. When I at last got round to reading it, I found myself overwhelmed by the patience and the care with which Darwin constructed his arguments, by the way that the book testifies to long hours of observation, by its patient accumulation of endless amounts of data, by its careful sifting of facts, by its the mixture of hesitancy when hesitancy is due and qualified certitude when the data seem to require it. The story goes that Alfred Russel Wallace, when he read the book, claimed to be relieved that Darwin published first, because he knew that he himself would have been incapable of producing a work of such singular care.
Why celebrate? Because Darwin’s book, as I read it, offers us the possibility of a return to a sense of at-homeness in the world, a sense that we are a part of things, no longer separated off. It presents a view of life that has to it, as Darwin wrote in the end of his book, an astonishing grandeur. It is a testament to the value of careful attention as a way of releasing us from the blindness of dogma. That is to say, I read the Origin of Species as a kind of quiet science, almost Lucretian in spirit, a science that – beyond triumphalism and clamour, and beyond the shrill assertions of the creationist rabble – offers the possibility of a new kind of poetics, a new sense of our place in the world.
How will I be celebrating Darwin Day? Not with diatribes against the willful and darkly strange obsessions of the Biblical literalists, nor with polemics or arguments. But by leaving my desk, and going outside where I can (now that I turn my mind to it) hear the wood-pigeon calling on the roof of the house opposite, and a dog barking some way off, so that I may experience that wonder of being here at all, amongst so many of my kin.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
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On Advertising
Tuesday January 13, 2009
Occasionally I get emails of effusive praise for this blog from people who, curiously enough, seem to have only the scantiest acquaintance with it. And when there is this curious combination of effusive praise and minimal acquaintance, I know that I only have to read on a sentence or two to see that the email writer has some product that they want me to advertise here, in return for a small consideration. When I receive these emails, I generally reply by saying as delicately as I can that although their product sounds fascinating, in general I do not carry adverts on the site. The reasons for this are several. Firstly, because I fondly imagine that people come to this site either a) by accident or b) because they have a passing interest in reading what I have written, and not c) because they have an overwhelming desire to buy more stuff. Secondly, because advertisements are pretty unaesthetic, when it comes down to it. Thirdly, because I don’t want to recommend things that I haven’t checked out myself. And fourthly, because not carrying advertising allows me to maintain a kind of freedom that I suspect I would not otherwise have.
However, if last night’s programme on BBC Radio4 is anything to go by, I’m clearly missing out, because advertising is apparently the most fun that you can have with your clothes still on (although I’m not sure who advertising is supposed to be this much fun for – the advertisers or the advertisees). It was, I confess, a rather alarming broadcast. It began with advertising executive and presenter Robert Wright boldly claiming that the advertising industry increases the sum total of happiness in the world. The evidence mounted for this was both slight and spurious. Wright supported his claim by saying that brain science shows (one should always beware of claims that begin with words such as “Scientists have found…”) that when one buys a luxury product, it “releases pleasure energy” (I’m not entirely sure what this is, but I’ll let it pass) inside the brain.
Call me obstinate, but on this basis of this argument, I am unpersuaded. For whilst it is no doubt true that there is a kind of pleasure in acquisition of things, it is also the case that the stimulation of the brain’s pleasure centres does not correlate with an increase in happiness. Happiness, whatever it actually means – as the ancient philosophers knew – is clearly not the same thing as pleasure. Even those pleasure-loving Epicureans knew that there are pleasures and pleasures and that some pleasures are conducive to happiness, whilst others are positively harmful.
In blurring the distinction between happiness and pleasure, Wright effectively sidestepped the serious moral issues raised by the advertising industry. For, contrary to the upbeat nature of the radio programme, there is quite a lot of credible research that suggests that the free rein given to advertisers is extremely harmful, and that indicates that what unchecked advertising spreads is not happiness, but, on the contrary, dissatisfaction and unhappiness. This tendency to sidestep wider moral questions was particularly worrying given that much of the programme was given over to an exploration of the increasing interest that the advertising industry is taking in brain science.
One of the interviewees was Gemma Calvert, professor of neuro-imaging at Warwick University and founder of neuro-marketing company Neurosense. Professor Calvert had a breezily positive view of how it might be to all of our benefit if advertisers paid closer attention to the developing understanding of brain function that is taking place in the sciences. Her argument was, more or less, this: that with a closer understanding of the way the brain works, the advertising industry can much more effectively target their campaigns, and can therefore design products that people want, thereby reducing advertising “clutter”. “We are trying to find out what you do want,” Professor Calvert said, “in order to sell you things that you are going to buy and that are going to produce greater experiences.”
The problem here is with that seemingly innocuous word “want”. Most of the time, advertising is not a matter of responding to pre-existing wants – let alone needs – but is instead a matter of creating wants where formerly they do not exist. If I invent a new brand of chocolate, then for anybody to want it, I have tell people that exists and to persuade them that they might want it: the advertising is logically prior to the wanting.
There is, no doubt, a place for advertising, but it is hard not to be concerned about the increasing reach of the advertisers in selling us things that hitherto we didn’t know we needed; and in the face of mounting evidence that much advertising is destructive of human happiness, there is a good case for increased regulation. But given that the prevailing economic wisdom, such as it is, insists – contrary to most of the evidence – that happiness and social justice can only be secured if we continue to spend our money and to acquire things that we do not need, that does not seem likely to happen any time soon.
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Mystery
Saturday December 20, 2008
It is probably fairly clear by now, even if you have only glanced in passing at this blog, that I am not particularly mystically inclined. As Stephen Batchelor writes, “The Buddha was not a mystic. His awakening was not a shattering insight into a transcendental truth that revealed to him the mysteries of God. He did not claim to have had an experience that granted him privileged, esoteric knowledge of how the universe ticks.” Whilst I’m not sure that these days I would be quite as bold as Batchelor is about what the Buddha was or wasn’t like – the distances in time are too great, the records upon which we rely are too compromised – I’m in agreement with the spirit of this quote. Wisdom, as I have suggested before, is simply not the kind of thing that can be esoteric. There may be esoteric knowledge (for example, there are people who know a whole load about the social lives of naked mole rats, which by my standards, and by the standards of most people I know, seems pretty esoteric), but there is no esoteric wisdom.
But what do I mean by “wisdom”? The best definition of wisdom that I can find is that by Walter Benjamin, who talks in his essay The Storyteller about wisdom as “counsel woven into the fabric of real life”. Such counsel is, Benjamin writes, “less an answer
to a question than a proposal concerning the continuation of a story which is just unfolding.” I love the story that Benjamin tells about the unfolding of story (or, what I would prefer, the multiple stories) of our lives, about how wisdom is the ability to put proposals about how these stories might continue. Such wisdom is both pays attention to that which is unfolding, and then has the ability to ask “what if…?”
The question “what if…?” is one that can lead us in unexpected directions, because it is a question that is rooted in the acknowledgment that we do not have complete knowledge of things, rooted, in a sense, in mystery. But there are mysteries and mysteries. One of the things that often strikes me about many of those things that are claimed to be mysteries – from the “mystery of Christmas” to many of the so-called mysteries of the East such as people who claim to go without food for months (yes, I’m looking at you, Ram Bomjon), levitating monks and yogis, rebirth and all the other implausible things that I find myself writing about from time to time here at thinkBuddha – is how utterly unmysterious they seem to be to those who hold to them. When your local UFO society says that they have seen mysterious lights in the sky, you know that they don’t really believe them to be mysterious at all, but that they believe them to be lights from spacecraft piloted by beings of higher intelligence from a distant galaxy, and that they very likely believe these same aliens to be involved in a protracted and somewhat unseemly experiments on human abductees… which is all rather specific. Or when Reverend Brimstone, your neighbourhood evangelical preacher recovers from an illness and proclaims it a mystery, you know once again there are quite specific beliefs about what has happened – in this case, that the good Reverend has been singled out by God, on account of the Good Work that he is doing, and cured by means of divine agency, so that he can get on with the job.
One of the things that I dislike about such so-called mysteries is that those who talk about them are, in the end, too damned certain about what precisely is happening. So certain, in fact, that they will refuse to consider all other explanations, whatever the evidence. And so, in the end, such mysteries seem curiously unmysterious, even on their own terms. I prefer other kinds of mysteries: the mysteries of how naked mole rats go about organising their social lives; the mysteries of how the mind goes about its business; the mysteries of precisely what kinds of strange creatures swim in the dark depths of the seas; the mysteries of the bubbling, bafflingly paradoxical soup of the subatomic world. I am not a scientist, but I love the methods by means of which the sciences investigate the world. I love the tentativeness, the genuine perplexity, the wonder. I love the fact that, to find out all those astonishing, genuinely astonishing, facts about naked mole rats, termites, blue whales and periodical cicadas, facts about distant galaxies and exoplanets and nebulae, countless individuals have spent their days lying on their bellies on the plains, bobbing on small boats on the surface of the seas, sitting waiting in forests and jungles, peering through telescopes and making subtle calculations with the kind of patience that would put most self-proclaimed yogis to shame. For here there are genuine mysteries, mysteries that are not rooted on a prior claim to knowledge, but are rooted in a prior commitment to investigation. In this way, at their best the sciences offer us proposals about the stories that are unfolding, and how these stories might be interpreted and continued, how they might be joined with other stories into fragile webs of knowledge. There is, I think, the possibility of wisdom here, as we follow the threads of mysteries that are vast and wide-ranging enough for a whole lifetime: paying attention, advancing proposals about the unfolding of the stories in progress, coming to know the world ever more closely and, in this knowledge, coming to appreciate the wonder of things, just as they are.
Image: Vlastní Dílo – Creative Commons ShareAlike
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