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.

Our Pristine Mind

I picked up Orgyen Chowang's very accessible introduction to Dzogchen meditation because it was recommended reading for Michael Taft's fundamentals of non-dual awareness class.  Chowwang takes a tact almost diametrically opposed to the dense and philosophical one we saw from David Loy.  Our Pristine Mind aims to be a completely practical, jargon free meditation manual.  Chowang is at pains to make his language as simple as possible, to use similes that anyone can easily understand, and to avoid almost any reference to all religious or philosophical traditions.  In fact, I don't think he even mentions that what he's explaining is the basics of Dzogchen until the final chapter!  This makes the book so breezy and accessible that you can hand it to anyone, a style which fits perfectly with the minimalist approach of nondualism.  

Minimalism, however, is often, and in a sense rightfully, accused of being repetitive.  And, at least as a book, Our Pristine Mind suffers from this same problem.  Chowang does a great job of introducing the concept of Pristine Mind and distinguishing it from ordinary mind by explaining that we ordinarily identify ourselves with "mental events" such as our thoughts and emotions and perceptions.  But then he goes on to say that developing our connection to Pristine Mind is the cure for literally everything that ails us.  Feeling bad?  Return to PM.  Getting arrogant?  PM.  Relationship got you down?  World on fire?  Mini-bread catastrophe?  Yep, all you need to do is reconnect with your innate Pristine Mind.  Seriously though, while perhaps the path is really this simple, perhaps we just keep repeating It's Gonna Rain till the magic happens, it makes for a bit of a boring book by conventional standards.  

Nevertheless, I found myself very excited about the first half of the book.  Having had a few glimpses of the mindset that Chowang is describing, I found that his description of it was the simplest I've come across.  You are not your mental events!  If you are anything, you are the space in which those mental events take place -- the empty space of Pristine Mind.  All of our thoughts and emotions arise and pass away within the immanence of this space just as the clouds float across the clear blue sky.  They are empty in themselves, mere effects, like special effects, not causes.  If you have never experienced this change of perspective, this shift in identification, you may rightfully wonder what it means and if it's even possible.  Unfortunately, Chowang can't immediately help you with that doubt because these ideas only begin to make sense when you meditate on them and experience them for yourself.  Until that point Pristine Mind is as tangible as Never Never Land.  Fortunately though, Chowang does provide both the framework that gives you an image to aim for, as well as the simple step-by-step recipe his master taught him.  Don't follow the past.  Don't anticipate the future.  Remain in the present moment.  Leave your mind alone.  This pacifist and minimalist program seems to be the core of many different schools of nonduality.  Like minimalism, while it may take a long time to develop into something, when it does, you feel like you've gotten something beautiful from absolutely nothing.  

Philosophy and Religion in Plato's Dialogues

When I saw that my thesis advisor from back in the day was publishing a new book on Plato just as I finished reading his complete works, I felt compelled to complete the circle -- Andrea Nightingale was the professor who brought Plato to life for me for the first time back in sophomore year.  A lot of what I remember distinguishing her as an excellent professor seems to be exactly the same.  The book explores Plato's extensive reference to ancient Greek religious practices as his way of marking the Forms as divine entities.  In other words, she still explores Plato's ideas in context and treats his writing as literature.  This technique quickly makes the received interpretation of Plato's philosophy as "Platonism" look like a pretty one dimensional reading.  She also remains a very clear writer and thinker.  There's nothing grandiose and vague in her ideas, and nothing trendy and jargony about her style.  So while her book is clearly an academic work mainly meant for the other two people who specialize in this sort of stuff, even a fucuuking amateur was able to read and understand it without too much trouble.  At the level of specific details, I got a lot out of reading this, and I'll go into the particulars of what I learned about each of the four dialogues she analyzes in a moment.  

First though, the bad news.  Nightingale's thesis that Plato considered his Forms divine cuts against the grain.  If western philosophy has a deeply religious bent from right from its inception, it undermines the claim that western thinking is uniquely rational, scientific, and universal.  While this claim has obviously changed its form many times since Plato, having today morphed into what we might call 'scientism', discovering an overtly religious aspect right at its root can't help but make us more aware that this same thread runs through the whole project.  Today, this is an inconvenient fact for pretty much everybody.  As you might expect from someone who proposes a controversial thesis -- indeed, she begins by observing this idea goes against all her own training -- Nightingale is at pains to nail her argument down against every possible objection.  This makes for a very clear and thorough presentation, but also for a lot of repetition.  Sadly, it also means that in 250 pages, we don't really get that far, philosophically speaking.  Because the fact that Plato's Forms are "out of this world" and that his style tends towards myth and poetry the more closely his content approaches them, is actually kinda obvious if you read these texts with an open mind.  To excise this aspect of Plato and treat him as a purely rational thinker clearly does violence to the man and his work.  Since I had already come to this (apparently controversial) reading, all the time spent convincing me to take seriously the idea of Plato's mysticism was time wasted.  I would have liked to see Nightingale take the next step and ask what impact this thesis has on our overall view of Plato's philosophy and what implications it might hold more generally for our view of the western cannon and mindset.  Perhaps the last question is too broad and vague for an academic work, but it seems to me the first should be a natural companion to her thesis.  After all, while all the detailed textual work is indispensable, when I listen to someone who has spent 30 years studying Plato, I hope to come away with something broader than the knowledge that the word ἐπόπτης at line 210a in the Symposium refers to an initiate to the Eleusinian Mysteries.  That's fascinating and all, but shouldn't there be some attention given to why I should care?  Aside from a brief mention of Heidegger's ideas about Plato's "ontotheology" or Ricouer's claim that there is a "polytheism of Forms" the larger questions are simply not addressed.

The good news is in the details.  First, there's a lot of Greek language in the book, which alerted me to all kinds of etymological connections I hadn't known about.  For example, I'd never noted that theoria has a reference to the divine (theos) hiding in plain sight -- originally it meant a kind of sacred pilgrimage to gaze on religious objects.  Kinda changes the resonance of "theory", no?  Or who knew that autopsy literally means "seeing for oneself"?  Or that our "choreography" is a reference to the choreia or "choric dances" that the Greeks used for religious festivals?  Or  that "harmony" is the translation of kosmos?  Or etc ... it's enough to make you want to learn Greek.

Second, Nightingale's real contribution with this book is how she puts together the details of Plato's language with what was already known about various aspects of ancient Greek religious life.  Her basic thesis is that Plato considered the Forms a new type of divine entity.  So when he tries to talk about what these new divinities are like, he couches the discussion in a language already familiar to his readers.  Not only does he deploy a new mythology, but he makes specific reference to the Greek habit of seeing the gods directly in the form of a divine epiphany, as well as particular reference to both Orphic and Eleusinian mystery cults.  Nightingale does a great job of pinning down exactly where and how Plato's language takes this religious turn when it comes to talking about the Forms.  As I observed, while Plato's "high and mighty" tone is obvious and unmistakable, there are many details the casual reader will never catch.  

For example, in the Symposium, Diotima's speech (given via Socrates) makes unmistakable reference to the two stages involved in entering the Eleusinian mystery cult.  First, you become an "initiate", and later a "see-er" or epoptes.  In the second and final stage, through what sounds like a combination of clever tricks with torchlight, you get to see some dazzlingly bright vision of the goddess Persephone.  That is, you don't just understand something about the goddess or learn some secret information; the epoptes actually sees the goddess, has some direct experience of the divine.  Likewise, the whole point of Diotima's speech is that the philosopher, through a series of stages, can actually have some experience of Beauty in itself.  Understanding the Forms rationally is a stepping stone to experiencing them directly in the form of a divine epiphany.  Plato is introducing a new theology here.  I think taking this mysticism more seriously could put a substantially different spin on our interpretation of the Forms.  Unfortunately, it's not immediately obvious to me how to join this idea to the more rational and dialectical aspects of Platonism.  Of course, I presume it isn't obvious to Nightingale either, as she doesn't suggest any means of integrating what she's uncovering.  At the very least, it bears mentioning that Socrates' trial and execution for "profaning the gods" looks a lot different in this light.  Perhaps the Athenians understood him much better than we do!

The other big and non-obvious example Nightingale gives us is her analysis of Plato's references to Orphism in the Phaedo.  In reading Plato, I was often struck by just how Christian he sometimes sounds.  I mean, he's all about ascending, purifying, leaving behind the dirty world and our corrupt physical body.  In fact, Phaedo famously ends with Socrates owing a cock to Asclepius, presumably because this god of healing has cured him -- of the illness called life.  Obviously, calling this aspect of his philosophy "Christian", and interpreting it through the lens of original sin, redemption, and guilt, is an anachronism.  Except, it turns out that Plato did have a Fall myth available to him.  The Orphics believed that humans were created from the soot of the Titans that Zeus killed with his thunderbolt upon discovering that the Titans had eaten his son Dionysus.  As a result, we inherited something of the guilt for the Titans' action.  Our punishment, according to the Orphics, is to be born into a body and doomed to perpetually reincarnate until ... well, until we become initiated into Orphism, purify ourselves, and obtain forgiveness and release from Dionysus.  After that, our immortal soul will dwell in some non-incarnate paradise.  Plato makes extensive reference to this myth in his dialog.  In fact, it's built right into its structure.  Socrates is literally imprisoned, but with his death, his soul is about to be freed from the prison of his body.  As a true philosopher, since he has practised leaving his body behind for so long, undoubtedly his soul will ascend to the realm of the Forms after this purification.  So again, Plato is creating a new theology here.  He takes an existing religious story and substitutes in his own new, more abstract, gods.  

Nightingale covers several other ways that Plato either explicitly marks the Forms as divine or refers to the experience of them in the same way that his contemporaries would have referred to seeing a divine epiphany.  But I imagine you get the idea by now.  Plato's project was to make what is literally "out of this world" actually appear within it.  It's an inherently mystical and religious project, and the master used all the tools at his disposal to bring it alive for his readers.

Sons and Lovers

I can't remember now how this D.H. Lawrence novel ended up on my kindle; I hadn't really planned to read it.  But it slowly transitioned from something that was conveniently lying on the nightstand at the right moment, to something that drew me in enough to read the whole thing.  Sons and Lovers is the story of the Morel family, and more specifically, the story of the coming of age of the world's most archetypical mama's boy, Paul Morel.  While I enjoyed the keen psychological insight of the novel as well as the writing, at times I felt it reeked a bit of soap opera.  Perhaps the problem is that Lawrence manages to get you invested in characters that you never actually quite like.  As humans they are a bit of a caricature, with their stubborn obsessions and chronic inability to really figure themselves out.  Which of course actually makes them as realistically frustrating to deal with as yourself and everyone you know.  The other thing that drew me into the novel was the way the complexity of the writing progressed as the story unfolded.  Early in the book, when the story is mostly focused on the mother, the succinct, matter of fact tone matches her personality and education.  Then, as the story of her first two sons begins to take shape, the writing changes to reflect their development, until it culminates in the almost cosmic speculative tone that Paul embodies by the end of the novel.  It's a pretty impressive piece of literature that also manages to be an engrossing tale.