The Bhagavad Gita

In my continuing effort to read more of the source material covered in David Loy's Nondualism book, I picked up the copy of the Bhagavad-Gita that I still had from freshman year.  It's amazing what a difference 25 years can make in one's thinking.  All the marginalia indicate that I was obsessed with comparing the Gita to Plato's Republic (which I'd just read for the first time as well).  Certainly, there are some comparable elements.  You can find support in both books for a division of society based on the varying "nature" of  individuals -- ie. support for a form of caste system.  In addition, both books definitely describe a sort of hero's journey where the philosopher begins in confusion and gradually journeys towards the true source of reality.  Plato narrates this journey in the cave allegory.  The Gita builds it directly into the structure of the dialog between Krishna and Arjuna.  The story begins with the great hero Arjuna's doubt on the eve of a momentous battle.  He's not sure he even wants to fight, given the senseless violence he sees in it.  Krishna gradually convinces him that he must fight by gradually unfolding a series of teachings which climax halfway through when Krishna's directly reveals the totality of his divine form.  The denouement fleshes out the intellectual understanding of this form and ultimately Arjuna decides to return to the field of battle (and presumably slaughter all his enemies, but, you know, now killing them with kindness, so to speak).  In other words, the similarities between The Republic and The Gita are pretty superficial.  If there's any book of philosophy that doesn't imply that society should be organized and that philosophy should reveal the truth, it was written pretty recently.  These are not very distinctive points of resonance.  

In fact, if you read the Gita with the concepts of nondual philosophy in mind, the books bear almost no resemblance to one another.  Yes, the Gita does have a few passages that could be read as supporting the Indian caste system.  But actually, these parts cut against the much larger theme that individual action should be looked at through a nondual lens.  Every action should be undertaken as a sacrifice to Krishna, and should not concern itself with its possible fruits for the actor.  This viewpoint substantially changes the interpretation of the idea that, "everyone in society does what they must, or what they are naturally suited for".  A nondual concept of action that divorces the individual's intention from their action, and emphasizes that emptiness of the actor, might be compatible with a caste system, but, properly understood, it's a long way from justifying that system.  And yes, our hero Arjuna moves from confusion to certainty, from doubt to the apodictic.  But in true nondual fashion, the knowledge he receives is not knowledge of the universe, but that he is the universe, that he and everything else arise inseparably within Krishna.  So in both cases, the proposed correspondence between the two books is actually closer to a contrast.  Makes you wonder how professors can stand to read the drivel that freshmen must invariably write.  R.I.P. Mark Mancall. I'm sorry for what I put you through.

In any event, The Gita is the most interesting follow up to Loy's book that I've read so far.  It's a much clearer work than any of the Taoist texts.  While there are some confusions and crosscurrents, you don't need to strain to see a nondual philosophy at its core.  It asks the fundamental question of why act at all in a particularly stark way.  And it answers it equally clearly -- "you" don't act at all, only Krishna acts, or better yet, simply is.  When you realize you aren't separate from the universe, the apparent individual choice involved in acting falls away.  The whole point of the dialog is clearly to bring Arjuna to this nondual realization rather than "convince" him to act in a conventional sense.  

In addition, unlike the Taoist fragments, The Gita is a fully constructed piece of literature.  And it's great.  It's short, dramatic, poetic, and climaxes in a really powerful scene where Krishna reveals the mind-boggling chaos of his totality.  I gave it 5 stars.  Or maybe that was Krishna's own review?

The Feeling of Life Itself

When I saw that Christof Koch, once my possible graduate advisor at CalTech and now the head of the Allen Institute for Brain Science, had written a new book about consciousness, I was pretty excited.  Not only has Koch done a lot of great work on the visual system over the years, but he also struck me as more broadminded than your average research scientist.  Indeed it seems that since the days when he worked on very specific neural systems, he has gone on to become a leading proponent of the Integrated Information Theory of consciousness -- a big picture mathematical theory that purports to calculate whether it feels like anything to be a given chunk of matter.  

Unfortunately, the book was pretty disappointing.  Koch does a good job of posing the question of consciousness by distinguishing it from intelligence, attention, linguistic ability, and information processing in the conventional sense.  All he's concerned with is the most vexing problem of what it means to have an experience at all, for a particular state to feel like something.  He also does a reasonable job of outlining what evidence there is that this particular theory (IIT) is the right one.  This isn't something one can prove of course, especially when we're talking about a phenomenon as slippery as consciousness.  But he at least does a good job of talking about what testable predictions have so far been made, and extrapolating what other surprising predictions the theory implies.  However, what he does not do is give you a decent explanation of the damn theory itself.  

Koch tries to pack his entire description of IIT into a single 12 page chapter.  After reading it 3 times and trying to work through the simple example system he shows (but does not explain) I still have only the vaguest notion of how the theory works.  As far as I can tell, the basic idea is that some parts of the universe are so densely and reciprocally connected by causal interactions that cutting them into pieces would produce some sort of qualitative change in how they behave.  Since the states of these parts of the universe "matter to themselves", in the sense that they form a sort of self-causing feedback loop, and since we look for loops that can't be made any smaller without breaking them in this sense, then these are the parts that are conscious.  This is an appealing idea to me, very reminiscent of Spinoza's conatus, but like I say, Koch's description of even the basic notion is so poor that I'm not confident of my interpretation.  

The actual theory is entirely mathematical, and meant to provide a precise calculus behind the basic intuition that consciousness is another name for the causal organization of matter.  I wish I could explain that theory to you.  The overall point is clearly to calculate one number Φ that measures consciousness.  However, even though I don't see any math in it above my pay grade, the explanation Koch gives for this calculation is so crummy that I'd have to carefully read another source to be able to tell you about it.  In an otherwise fairly readable book this seems like an abject failure to me.  I mean, in an unforgivable move, Koch doesn't even spend a page or two working through the simple example system he presents.  This part, "the heart of the book" as Koch himself calls it, is just a total and complete flop.    

It's hard to understate how disappointing this failed chapter is for the book as a whole.  If we don't come away with at least some genuine understanding of the theory, how can we evaluate whether it responds to the problems Koch outlined at the beginning or is useful in the applications (mostly thought experiments at this point) he mentions towards the end?  This is a shame because I think there is something really intriguing about the theory.  For one, it shares a flavor similar to the interpretation Manuel DeLanda gives of Deleuze's philosophical system -- the virtual is defined as the structure of the phase space of the actual.  And it also leads to several counterintuitive thought experiments.  For example, one of the most surprising claims of IIT is that even a perfect computational simulation of a conscious system will not be conscious.  This comes straight out of the basic premise that consciousness is not a property of the functional aspects of a chunk of matter, not about the input-output relations between the world and that chunk, but about the internal causal architecture of the given chunk.  As a result, Koch ends up claiming that a brain simulated with a Von Neumann architecture cannot be conscious, but one simulated on neuromorphic hardware could be.  In other words, some day Google may simulate me in such a way that it can predict all of my behavior and store all of my memories without this simulation being at all conscious.  Another intriguing example comes up at the end of the book in reference to something called "expander graphs" which are organized in a way similar to the topographic maps of visual, auditory, or somatic sensation that are so important to our brain (and phenomenology).  These systems are meant to illustrate the opposite kind of surprise to the first example.  While no one claims these systems are highly intelligent or have anything other than a simple function, IIT predicts that they have a surprisingly large amount of consciousness.  I'd love to be able to think more about these debates, but unfortunately Koch has not equipped us to do so.  Perhaps he's a zombie scientist?

Update: The physicist Scott Aaronson, a critic of IIT, manages to give an understandable technical definition of Φ in a blog post.  Which only makes Koch's failed attempt more mysterious to me.  

Cultivating Stillness

A friend of a friend recommended this updated translation and commentary on an old Taoist text several years ago.  Since it was on the shelf and I've been on a Taoism kick, I finally got around to trying it out.  I didn't read the whole works because it quickly became clear that I didn't have the background to understand it.  Everything useful (to me) was contained in the translator's introduction.  The book is composed of an original text attributed to Lao Tzu (though probably written a few hundred years after this already semi-legendary figure's death) and an accompanying commentary written some thousand years later by another Taoist sage.  The original text is cut from the same vaguely suggestive poetic cloth as the Tao te ching.  Actually, it's probably not even as clear as the classic.  As a result the commentary is ridiculous from a literary perspective.  There simply isn't enough information in every 3 lines of the original to adequately inform 5 pages of commentary.  It's clear that the later commentary is operating from within a fully developed Taoist system that he projects back on the original and pretends to elaborate from it.  The introduction provides a little bit of information about this system of "internal alchemy".  Whether fortunately or not, this is really just enough for the casual reader to see that the system is complicated and requires years of tutelage under a master to even begin to appreciate.  In essence, it's designed to be a meditation manual written in code to prevent it from falling into the hands of some dunce like myself.  And it worked.

Chuang Tzu Basic Writings

Continuing my exploration of Taoist book already on my shelf, I picked up the Burton Watson selection and translation of Chuang Tzu writings.  As we saw with Lao Tzu, the writing attributed to "Master Chuang" can only loosely be credited to the third century BCE sage of that name; in fact, what has come down to us is another collection of greatest hits along with a few B sides.  In this case, however, we have at least moved from the level of the telegraphically compressed to the merely obscure.  While there's not enough here to describe a Chuang Tzu system, we at least have more than the fragmented poetry of Lao Tzu.  The short but fully formed allegorical stories that comprise the bulk of this book let you sink your teeth into their interpretation a little more.

As with Lao Tzu, the defining feature of this philosophy seems to be the inversion of opposites.  Again and again we see that the things the ordinary man values are mere encumbrances, and the things he holds as useless or base are where true wisdom lies.  With Chuang Tzu though, this takes on an almost Nietzschean tone advocating the revaluation of all values, a dimension that wasn't obvious in the Tao Te Ching.  There's more humor here, more levity of style, more "free and easy wandering", to quote the title of one chapter, that matches the counter-cultural content.  There's also more signs that fit with interpreting the Way along the nondual lines that David Loy laid out.  A boundaryless vastness, a stillness, a silence beyond words and even conceptualization -- these are the core features of the emptiness that replaces the subject-object duality as the ground of things.  That said, to use the book as a meditation manual is still clearly impossible.  Which leads me to wonder just how Taoist meditation is taught.  These classic texts so far appear to be entirely philosophical in their outlook.