Zen & The Art of Chicken Sexing

In Japanese commercial hatcheries when chicks are born, trained sex spotters divide them into males and females. This is known as chicken sexing. The divided groups are treated differently. The females are fed because they will produce eggs; a few males are fattened for meat while the rest are deemed useless and early on meet a fate later encountered by all animals in a factory system.

Under pressure from the production line, the chicken sexer must almost instantly choose the correct bin for each chick, a difficult task as cockerels and females look almost exactly the same. Differences appear only after four to six weeks of age.

Some Koans of Quantum Mechanics

After a two-week sesshin, and in deep meditation, a Zen disciple is tapped on the shoulder by a monk so the disciple can visit his Zen master about his assigned koan. He arises in the silent zendo, padding past others in lotus position, and enters a room for dokusan with his roshi. With a gassho to the Zen master, the disciple sits and waits for his teacher to speak. The roshi studies him silently. Then, rather than asking the student to show him Mu, the Roshi poses these to him, and they are all quantum puzzles:

Is There Such A Thing As A Core, Common Mystical Experience?

John Hayes: Is There Such A Thing As A Core, Common Mystical Experience?

To this day still a believing Christian, back in the 1960s, John Hayes, a psychologist and self-described Zen-Catholic, was a Franciscan friar watching with curiosity while the counter-culture used psychedelics with impunity. Through his own meditation and religious practice, Hayes believes he has had sensations that he would label mystical. But these mystical states—which he described to me as “moments of unitive experience” —were significant enough that when he heard about a surprising research project at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine he was more than intrigued. Doctors at JHU were investigating the effects of psilocybin—the active ingredient in the more common variety of hallucinogenic mushroom—and looking for volunteers.

After some considerable thought, he and other theology students signed up. Would it have substantial and sustained personal meaning as spiritual experience? More at Search Magazine (science, Religion, Culture

You will find a list of people so inclined at the Mystical Experience Registry.

Here is a Wikipedia account of mysticism.

What I think. That mystical experiences help us understand our senses are bounded, which of course limits our understanding of the universe. Without his epilepsy, Dostoevsky could not have written so brilliantly and profoundly about existence. However caused, the experience is an anomaly of brain function that opens vistas of the natural we otherwise could not have beheld. That statement does not make me an atheist. People emerge from the experiences changed to the core. Have they pierced the veil? I leave the debates to theologians.

Non-Duality’s No-Self and Antonio Damasio

Non-Duality’s No-Self and Antonio Damasio

Non-Duality is the term for a view of the world as not two, but one—not the duality of a person and the world outside him or her, but instead a subjective experience in which the perceiver and the perceived participate with one another in a sense, according to some experiencers, that all is part of incessant movement, a dance, so to speak. There is no experiencer, no experienced. All is experienc-ing. Everything is part of the subjectivity, with nothing outside. The view derives from Eastern belief, principally Hindu advaita, which literally means without duality and from Buddhism (Zen, for example).

A central tenet of non-duality is that self—that which we call our self—does not exist. The evidence is offered by a methodology. The disciple is told to look for his self, and to do so relentlessly. Eventually, he concludes that he cannot find it. Only thoughts, feelings, and sensations are there. These are subjective—part of a world which is wholly conscious and without "external" objects. As for the chair in which he sits, all that is also subjective. The pressure of his body against the seat is sensation. His visual perception of it is also sensation. A sense of self-survival does not disappear. What fades eventually or vanishes abruptly is the autobiographical self, the sensation that "I am angry," or "I am upset," as examples. Sub-personalities remain. The predilection for mystery novels, as an example, does not go away. A liking of certain types of people remains. One still gets angry, etc, but the sensation passes quickly rather than lingering as fixed-cause for the autobiographical self ("They are always doing that to me.") Advaita and Buddhism have no problem with Damasio's arguments.

The reader would be unwise to dismiss all this as so much balderdash. Quite able intellects, including philosphers George Berkeley and David Hume, have been unable to disregard conclusions they reached. Hume, for example, concluded as much about the self—that insufficient evidence can be found for its existence. Berkeley posited that nothing is material, and to be is to be perceived. Esse est percipi. Speaking only about self, Antonio Damasio has a different take on the situation. Damasio, M.D., Ph.D., currently is Allen Professor of Neurology, and Head of the Neurology Department at the University of Iowa. In Descartes’ Error* he offers another way to look at the phenomenon of the self. (* Subtitled, Emotion, Reason, and The Human Brain) As an example of his point, he refers to neural signals from the elbow joint. Of these signals he says, they

“will happen in the early somatosensory cortices in the insular regions [of the brain].”

Of them, he also states,

“Note again, that this is a collection of areas, rather than one center.”

With this comment Damasio offers a point of view as to why the self cannot be found when we introspect for it, either through deliberate search or with meditation. We gain a simple inference from his remark. Introspection requires focus, and focus implies search for isolated neural phenomena. The self is not part of isolated phenomena. It is part of a collective. Picture the focused beam of a flashlight. Self cannot be found with such a search.

By again referring to the early sensory cortices in the brain, he elaborates and makes an important observation regarding the self. First, the build-up to his comments on the self, then what he has to say about the self. In the build-up to his points, he explains that the early sensory cortices generate topographical representations. That is, the cortices represent sensory input to other areas of the brain. But if that were the end of it,

”I doubt we would ever be conscious of them as images. How would we know they are our images? “

He states that they would mean nothing to us, these representations. We would not know what to do with them. He says something would be missing, subjectivity—a subject to make meaning out of them. Something else is needed. Here is his first point:

“In essence, those neural representations must be correlated with those which, moment by moment, constitute the neural basis for the self. “

That is, without a sense of self, they offer no utility for the organism, which must use them to survive in the moment or to plan ahead. It must make meaning out of them.

He lays to rest the homunculus, the little man inside, the intermediary, which somehow bridged Descartes’ gap between mind and the world outside. His second point:

“Self is not the infamous homunculus, a little person inside our brain, perceiving and thinking about the images the brain forms. It is, rather, a perpetually re-created neurobiological state. Years of justified attack on the homunculus concept have made many theorists equally fearful of the concept of self. [Emphasis mine—he does not lend support to the no-self camp] But the neural self need not be homuncular at all. What should cause some fear, actually, is the idea of a selfless cognition.”

In short, cognition cannot occur without a self to cognize things. Introspect, meditate, all you want but, according to Damasio, don’t use your findings as evidence of no-self. Given his explanation, the attempt to find a self implies cognition at work, with a self involved in the effort. Even though self cannot be found—because cognition involves focus and self is non-focused—the neural self is involved in the very attempt to find itself.

Damasio's thesis in Descartes' Error is that Rene Descartes mistakenly held that thinking can be separated from emotion. That can be found in Mind Shadows at Descartes' Error:Antonio Damasio, Somatic Markers, As-If Loops, and Moral Decision-Making, 11 April 2004.

Beyond Memes

Beyond Memes

Memes and genes have much in common. Both are selfish in that each "wants" itself replicated.

As memes develop in human culture, itself a product of mind, they carry only information, which requires consciousness to convey them for further replication. In themselves, memes are part of a blind force.

As with genes, successful memes beat the competition. They get copied. In a day we meet countless numbers of them, words on a Wheaties box, songs on the car radio, news on television. Remembering maybe less than five percent of a day's experiences, we see or hear Tony Blair, George Bush, John Kerry, Martha Stewart, Big Bird, Mickey Mouse, Teletubbies, Jay Leno, Fords, Chevies, Jaguars, Toyotas, Oscar Mayer weiners, Heinz Catsup, Starbucks Coffee, Bach fugues, Beethoven sonatas, Justin Timberlake, Janet Jackson, Dixie Chicks, McDonalds, email messages, newspaper captions, street posters, the family dog.

Consciously or subconsciously, those that get remembered have a chance for survival. Others eventually die, their only hope dwindling as fewer and fewer leap from human brain to human brain.

Poets once wrote of the good, the true, and the beautiful as that which is worthy of survival. Although it can be, this is not necessarily the case with memes. Think of them as viruses.

Viruses, either biological or computer, seek a host. Memes, then, can be a kind of parasite in that they "piggy back" until one brain passes them on to another.

Sometimes they survive best in groups of memes.

Richard Dawkins uses Roman Catholicism as an example of meme groups. By this group, the religion grows. Memes are church teachings, including the catechism and prayer. During mass one sings hymns. Worshippers feel nearer to God as they walk into a catheral with high, vaulted ceilings, the organ music resonating off stained glass windows. These become part of memetic gospel, to have many children so that the faith can be passed on generation to generation. Of course, the pinnacle meme is the promise of everlasting life or its counterpart, fear of eternal damnation. Attendant upon this group is faith in Church dogma and doctrine. God's invisibility is also part of the meme group. Observing people, He notices their deeds and numbers their days. This meme group has been remarkably successful, surviving and prospering for hundreds of years.

Memes arise in the mind without invitation. They come and go. A tune may haunt somebody for days, its lyrics or melody returning each morning until it wears away and something replaces it. Often planted by society, culture, or religion, they shape entire peoples and dominate lives. They offer no escape from themselves and whole populations become their willing servants.

Such a meme in the United States is individualism. It evolved out of American history and the struggle to tame the land. Settlers, pioneers, and immigrants of all kinds found themselves in the wilderness without societal resources and dependent only on their own grit. Neighbors lived on the other side of the mountain, in the next valley, down river. When a Nebraska sod farmer saw chimney smoke on the horizon he might pack up his family and move further west because he disliked civilization's encroachment. (Also see Mother Cultures: Individualist and Collectivist, 19 January 2004 at a companion site.)

Today in the United States, people remain steeped in the myth of individualism, a kind of tough self-responsibility, to the neglect of the ties that bind. Unlike Europeans, Americans think less of their mutal interdependence and more of their own responsibility to make it in the world. This has fostered great respect for the self-made, the billionaires who command corporate empires, but it has blinded them to their need for one another, thereby affecting social institutions.

As for memes, they continue to arise as unbidden viruses, our minds hosting them. They are welcome guests for minds, although some people know them for their true nature. Memes reveal to us that, for the most part, we don't think. Instead, we are thought. We have no understanding unless we recognize memes for what they are.

To do this, consciousness must empty itself. Meditation allows one approach; another depends on dwelling upstream from where memes enter. The first, is done by sitting, say, in Buddhist Zazen; the second, by turning the "flashlight" of consciousness on thoughts. Either approach requires months, or years, perhaps decades, of application. Eventually, the investigator may discover that mind itself is the meme of memes, the matrix that sustains them, and is as illusory as they are.

Meme theorists such as Dawkins and Dennett will continue to manufacture memes disguised as theories about mind, and well they should, for their reasoning has promoted new ways to think about mind. But unless they steadfastly apply themselves to methods known in the East for centuries, they will never really know whereof they speak. Given the tenor of their thought, they might regard "beyond memes" as naive intuition, unsupportable by sophisticated inquiry, but they have achieved no breakthroughs in consciousness study. Instead they ingeniously marshal evidence in new ways. Only investigation into the "beyond meme" concept would allow understanding, not labels. Intellectual work on consciousness is absolutely necessary but much of it misses the point because thinkers and researchers think about it rather than direct attention to experiencing it. Let them get away on a Zen retreat, or put them somewhere in solitude for extended periods, and always with their resolve to pay attention to what happens.

(Also see Enlightenment Gene, 3 March, Memes and Why Evolution Favored The Irrational Brain 26 February, Memes, Genes, and God, 31 December.) Thorstein Veblen in The Theory of The Leisure Class wrote about memes without having a name for them. Read him on Dogs as a meme 27 May 2004.