The Useless Tree

The Needham Question.....and the Chuang Tzu Answer

       Jonathan over at Frog in a Well has a post about the the "Needham Question," named for the great historian of Chinese science, Joseph Needham: Why didn't China develop theoretical science in the manner of early modern Europe?  He does a good job of reminding us how fraught the very question is:      

Half a century of scholarship has produced a massive aggregation of knowledge about science and technology in China which shows, among other things, that scientific and technical progress continued throughout the early modern period (which, started a half millenium earlier in China than in the West) but that China’s population obviated the need for the kind of massive “labor saving” capital equipment, so industrial production moved in other directions.

    He also recommends an article by Nathan Sivin, "Why the Scientific Revolution Did not Take place in China - or Didn't it?

    Here is a quick summary of some of the most common reasons given for China's supposed lack of theoretical science:  

....China’s bureaucracy siphoned talent away from a potentially entrepreneurial merchant class, China did not have the spur to competition that Europe’s many warring states inflicted on each other, China’s totalitarian government quashed initiative.

      I'm not a historian, and will defer to those who dig deeply into this issue, but let me throw out another factor that may have contributed to a certain skepticism toward grand, abstract, theoretical scientific explanation:  Chuang Tzu.

     Chuang Tzu's aversion to abstraction and analysis is well known.  Chapter two of the book that bears his name is, among other things, a powerful statement of epistemological skepticism that works against the modern scientific enterprise.  "Those who divide things cannot see" - that, in itself, would seem to reject the scientific method.  

      Of course, Chuang Tzu wrote long, long before early modern transformations came to China.  But, however we date those broader historical eras, his book was still being read, and had thoroughly permeated the intellectual culture of China, when the precursors of modern science were taking shape there.  To some extent, his skepticism may have given some pause to those Chinese thinkers who were predisposed to move toward abstract theoretical explanation.  In some ways, Chuang Tzu prefigures the "linguistic turn" in twentieth century Western philosophy, a turn that ultimately leads to a fundamental critique of modern science.  At the very least, Chuang Tzu may have planted a seed of doubt in the Chinese intelligentsia toward grand scientific theorizing.

     I would also throw into the mix the destructive effect of Qin Shihuangdi.  His attack on the intellectuals and destruction of texts had a particularly deleterious on the Later Mohists, an indigenous Chinese logical tradition that, as Graham suggests, might have (and that is a very hypothetical "might have") developed into a foundation for something like a more abstract scientific argumentation.  Their texts were not re-discovered until the 19th century.

     Between Chuang Tzu and Qin, theoretical science faced some powerful obstacles, both material and intellectual, in early modern China.

(Sorry if the formatting of this post is odd.  Typepad has changed its system and I am trying to get used to it.)

The Tao of Neuroscience

    I'm not a big fan of David Brooks, but a friend brought today's column, "Neural Buddhists," to my attention, and it seems right for a post here.

    Brooks is thinking about the intersection of recent popular publications on neuroscience and enduring questions of spirituality.  He anticipates a new debate on science versus faith, one that puts the defenders of faith on the defensive; or, at least, challenges defenders of particular faiths.   The new science creates more subtle understanding about the human brain/mind and the creation and perpetuation of belief.  Here's a key graf:

This new wave of research will not seep into the public realm in the form of militant atheism. Instead it will lead to what you might call neural Buddhism.

If you survey the literature (and I’d recommend books by Newberg, Daniel J. Siegel, Michael S. Gazzaniga, Jonathan Haidt, Antonio Damasio and Marc D. Hauser if you want to get up to speed), you can see that certain beliefs will spread into the wider discussion.

First, the self is not a fixed entity but a dynamic process of relationships. Second, underneath the patina of different religions, people around the world have common moral intuitions. Third, people are equipped to experience the sacred, to have moments of elevated experience when they transcend boundaries and overflow with love. Fourth, God can best be conceived as the nature one experiences at those moments, the unknowable total of all there is.

    My peculiar critique - peculiar, that is, to my interest in ancient Chinese thought - would be: why label these ideas as "Buddhist?"  They may be Buddhist, to some degree, but they are also to be found in other systems of thought, particularly Confucianism and Taoism.

     Take those first two points, for example: self is relational and morality is inborn.  This is right out of Mencius.  For example:

We are, by constitution, capable of being good....That's what I mean by good.  If someone's evil, it can't be blamed on inborn capacities.  We all have a heart of compassion and a heart of conscience, a heart of reverence and a heart of right and wrong.  In a heart of compassion is Humanity, and in a heart of conscience is Duty.  In a heart of reverence is Ritual, and in a heart of right and wrong is wisdom.  Humanity, Duty, Ritual, wisdom - these are not external things we meld into us.  They're part of us from the beginning, though we may not realize it.  Hence the saying: "What you seek you will find, and what you ignore you will lose."  Some make more of themselves than others, maybe two or five or countless times more.  But that's only because some people fail to realize their inborn capacities.   (11.6)

     The "we" here is not confined to any particular cultural or national group.  Mencius means all of us, anywhere in any historical time period.  It is an argument about universal human qualities.  Barbarians, uncivilized people who do not realize their inborn capacities, can learn to be good.  They can learn to express their innate moral sensibilities.   And those notions of Humanity and Duty are all about social selves: individuals  embedded in social relationships.  Indeed, the self, from a Confucian perspective, is literally meaningless outside of its social context.  As the context develops and changes over time, as we move from one set of relationships and duties to another, the self, too, changes.  The self is social and dynamic.

     And take that last line of the Brooks excerpt above: God is "...the unknowable total of all there is."  If a Taoist read that phrase, she might say, "that's not God, it's Tao."  And so it is.  Transcending boundaries is what Taoism is all about, as is accepting the infinitude of Way.  The love part is a bit more difficult, since Chuang Tzu might ask us to reduce our emotional attachments to life generally, but there is certainly the possibility of joy and happiness there.

     In any event, my point is simple: it's not just about Buddhism.  I suspect Brooks' invocation of Buddhism simply reflects a certain ignorance of ancient Chinese thought.  Americans just don't know enough of it to bring it into these kinds of conversations, even when the reference is obvious.

     Oh well, I guess I have a lot of work to do in my calling to bring ancient Chinese thought into modern American life.

     And one more thing.  I think, for the purpose that Brooks has created here, Confucianism and Taoism might be better references than Buddhism.  They provide most of what the was searching for in the Buddhism reference but without the additional matter of reincarnation, which I suspect, the neuroscientists might question...

UPDATE: Commenters have raised the question of a Mencius bumper sticker to raise his visibility in the US.  It's a branding thing.  Well, here's an image; we might have to spice it up a bit, but it's a start:

This Just In: Confucius is Right

     Here's an AP story:

CHICAGO -- Newsflash for rock stars and teenagers: It turns out everything doesn't go downhill as we age _ the golden years really are golden.

That's according to eye-opening research that found the happiest Americans are the oldest, and older adults are more socially active than the stereotype of the lonely senior suggests.

The two go hand-in-hand _ being social can help keep away the blues.

"The good news is that with age comes happiness," said study author Yang Yang, a University of Chicago sociologist. "Life gets better in one's perception as one ages."

 But for those of us who read Confucius, this comes as no surprise, as Analects 2.4 says:

The Master said: "At fifteen I devoted myself to learning, and at thirty I stood firm.  At forty I had no doubts, and at fifty understood the Mandate of Heaven.  At sixty I listened in effortless accord.  And at seventy I followed the mind's passing fancies without overstepping any bounds."

       In other words, if we know how to age, we get better with age.

Way is Vast - More Vast than even the Best Scientists can Know

    About two weeks ago I did a post on synthetic biology, a term that struck me as ironic, if not fully oxymoronic.   The Taoist response came quite... naturally, dare I say.  Today there is something of a follow up in the NYT: Pursuing Synthetic Life, Dazzled by Reality. 

    Scientists, it seems, the more they search for synthetic life the more fascinated they are by the breadth and extent of biological diversity of earth.  They more they learn, the more they realize how little they know:

“My view is that we know less than 1 percent of what’s out there in the biological universe,” Dr. Venter said.

     Venter is the man who announced recently that his lab had produced a complete DNA sequence of a microbe, the start, perhaps, of synthetically created life.   We might understand him as embodying a certain human arrogance: believing that he can become a creator of nature instead of simply just a manipulator of nature.  But even he has to marvel at what lies beyond his knowledge, and also beyond his scientific reach:

Way is vast, a flood
so utterly vast it's flowing everywhere.

The ten thousand things depend on it:
giving them life and never leaving them
it performs wonders but remains nameless.

Feeding and clothing the ten thousand things
without ruling over them,
perennially that free of desire,
it's small in name.
And being what the ten thousand things return to
without ruling over them,
it's vast in name.

It never makes itself vast
and so becomes utterly vast.

Tao Te Ching, 34

     That may be an apt description of Way, as seen from the point of view of the profusion of bacteria: small in name but utterly vast.

     I also like the way the author of the article talks about the diversity of biological existence:

Scientists who seek to imitate living cells say they can’t help but be perpetually dazzled by the genuine articles, their flexibility, their versatility, their childlike grandiosity.

    "Childlike grandiosity"  - sounds like something out of the Tao Te Ching. So much so, I wonder if she was somehow inspired by it.

Synthetic Biology

    I have drifted away from Taoism in recent weeks.  A trip to an election in another country will do that to you... But I saw a story in today's NYT that had my Taoist antenna tingling: Scientists Take New Step Toward Man-Made Life.  Here are the first couple of grafs:

Taking a significant step toward the creation of man-made forms of life, researchers reported Thursday that they had manufactured the entire genome of a bacterium by painstakingly stitching together its chemical components.

While scientists had previously synthesized the complete DNA of viruses, this is the first time it has been done for bacteria, which are much more complex. The genome is more than 10 times as long as the longest piece of DNA ever previously synthesized.

The feat is a watershed for the emerging field called synthetic biology, which involves the design of organisms to perform particular tasks, such as making biofuels. Synthetic biologists envision being able one day to design an organism on a computer, press the “print” button to have the necessary DNA made, and then put that DNA into a cell to produce a custom-made creature.

 So, right away passage 29 of the Tao Te Ching rushes through my mind:

Longing to take hold of all beneath heaven and improve it...
I've seen such dreams invariably fail.
All beneath heaven is a sacred vessel,
something beyond all improvement.
Try to improve it and you ruin it.
Try to hold it and you lose it.

For things sometimes lead and sometimes follow,
sometimes sigh and sometimes storm,
sometimes strengthen and sometimes weaken,
sometimes kill and sometimes die.

And so the sage steers clear of extremes,
clear of extravagance,
clear of exaltation.

     I don't think that this necessitates an absolutist anti-science fundamentalism but, rather, simply a certain skepticism about the most grandiose claims of scientific progress and truth.  A Taoist would ask: why are we doing this?  And what unanticipated results might emerge (I know, we cannot know ahead of time what will be unanticipated...)?  And, indeed, further on in the story the possibility of ruin emerging from improvement is to be found:

But there are concerns that synthetic biology could be used to make pathogens, or that errors by well-intended scientists could produce organisms that run amok. The genome of the smallpox virus can in theory now be synthesized using the techniques reported on Thursday, since it is only about one-third the size of the genome manufactured by Dr. Venter’s group.

...

Some activist groups say Dr. Venter is going too far, too fast, this time, and that the entire field of synthetic biology needs outside regulation to prevent the introduction of dangerous organisms, created either by evil intent or by innocent error.

     How can we control the long-term effects of human invention?  We can't it would seem.  All of our prosperity and economic growth and modern conveniences are, quite literally, melting the planet beneath us.  I am not as pessimistic as John Gray, whose book Straw Dogs I have now read, but it is hard to see how the horrible possibilities of man-made pathogens can be completely avoided.

     Interestingly enough, I do not associate Taoism with pessimism. Chuang Tzu, especially, always seems to be happy and care-free.  The world may be going to hell in a hand basket all around him, but he laughs.  C'est la vie, or c'est la Tao, he might say.  Human arrogance might well brings its own extinction but, for now, enjoy the scenery and don't worry about what the synthetic biologists are cooking up.   Steer clear of their extravagance...

More Taoist Cosmology

    A story today in the NYT describes some of the debates among physicists over the apparent order of the universe.  Is the seeming law-like "order" something that transcends space and time - something timeless and absolute - or is it something that emerged as the universe developed, something perhaps more immanent?

If the laws of physics are to have any sticking power at all, to be real laws, one could argue, they have to be good anywhere and at any time, including the Big Bang, the putative Creation. Which gives them a kind of transcendent status outside of space and time.

On the other hand, many thinkers — all the way back to Augustine — suspect that space and time, being attributes of this existence, came into being along with the universe — in the Big Bang, in modern vernacular. So why not the laws themselves?

   This gets my Taoist hackles up.  The Platonists, or neo-Platonists, seem to me to have a distinctly non-Taoist attitude:

...As far back as the fifth century B.C. the Greek mathematician and philosopher Pythagoras and his followers proclaimed that nature was numbers. Plato envisioned a higher realm of ideal forms, of perfect chairs, circles or galaxies, of which the phenomena of the sensible world were just flawed reflections. Plato set a transcendent tone that has been popular, especially with mathematicians and theoretical physicists, ever since.

 This seems to be assuming the thing that needs to be explained: order.  It also assumes that we are capable of fully and truly apprehending cosmic order.  How arrogant!  If Taoism teaches us anything it is the limits of human knowledge and language.  I tried to capture this in a previous post; here's an excerpt:

Way is, of course, the grand totality of all things at once now. It is the "everything" that string theory aims at explaining.  But the simplicity of Way comes not from our effort to impose a singular explanation upon it, which is, for a Taoist, simply impossible.  Rather, its simplicity comes from its straightforwardness: it is everything.  And since each thing has a certain integrity unto itself (Te), the totality of all things (Tao) is simply the numberless summation of everything.  We might say Tao is all Te. Its unity is simply a matter of coincidence; that is, the simultaneity of all things at this moment.  It is beyond our description and, certainly, beyond our explanation.

      Seems to me that a Taoist sensibility would be closer to this description of quantum mechanics, from the same NYT piece:

Plato and the whole idea of an independent reality, moreover, took a shot to the mouth in the 1920s with the advent of quantum mechanics. According to that weird theory, which, among other things, explains why our computers turn on every morning, there is an irreducible randomness at the microscopic heart of reality that leaves an elementary particle, an electron, say, in a sort of fog of being everywhere or anywhere, or being a wave or a particle, until some measurement fixes it in place.

 "Irreducible randomness," that's almost it...  But there continues to be this impulse, among modern scientists, to find a singular answer:

Dr. Wheeler has suggested that the laws of nature could emerge “higgledy-piggledy” from primordial chaos, perhaps as a result of quantum uncertainty. It’s a notion known as “it from bit.” Following that logic, some physicists have suggested we should be looking not so much for the ultimate law as for the ultimate program.

 But if randomness is really irreducible, why would we think there is an ultimate anything?  Why not just accept dynamism and change and  uncertainty, at some cosmic level at least?  The author of the article seems - ultimately - to come to this kind of openness:

...Since cosmologists don’t know how the universe came into being, or even have a convincing theory, they have no way of addressing the conundrum of where the laws of nature come from or whether those laws are unique and inevitable or flaky as a leaf in the wind.

 That last image could be something in Chuang Tzu.  And, happily, the writer makes a final apt observation, not lamenting the absence of a singular, universal law of nature but discovering it in its own negation:

The law of no law, of course, is still a law.

 That comes pretty close to the Tao Te Ching...

Cloning: It's not just for Buddhists and Hindus

    John Tierney writes in today's NYT about global religious differences and human cloning:

“Asian religions worry less than Western religions that biotechnology is about ‘playing God,’” says Cynthia Fox, the author of “Cell of Cells,” a book about the global race among stem-cell researchers. “Therapeutic cloning in particular jibes well with the Buddhist and Hindu ideas of reincarnation.”

     I had not thought before about the connection between reincarnation and human cloning.  My sense is that it may not be the notion of reincarnation per se that provides a culturally more permissive environment for cloning research in Asia.  The key idea might be karma, the belief that what happens to us in the next life is determined by what we do in this life and, by extension, what happens to us in this life depends upon what we did in the last life.  Thus, for the cell that is to be destroyed or transformed by experimentation or cloning, its fate is a function of actions in its previous life.  Reincarnation without karma (which is conceivable, even if it is not Buddhist or Hindu) would likely not produce the same attitude toward stem cell research.

     There is something the short Tierney article misses, however.  No mention is made of Confucianism which, as I have argued elsewhere, also provides a rationale for stem cell research and cloning.  A Confucian defense of such scientific techniques would not rely upon a notion of God or reincarnation.  Rather it would emphasize the social utility of the research.  Since, from a Confucian perspective, individuals have meaning and significance only in social contexts (or, put differently, individuals isolated by themselves without social connections, have no meaning or significance), then research that might provide great social benefits is justifiable even if a not yet fully social life (which is how a Confucian might define a stem cell or embryo) is lost in the process.  This argument would not extend to the sacrifice of a socially embedded individual - and that would be any person who is a part of a family or social network, virtually every individual human who is born.  Rather, it would be limited to unborn human tissue.  That is how I understand it, at least.

     Also, Tierney misses an ancient Chinese basis for the rejection of stem cell research and cloning.  Philosophical Taoism would not invoke God in its avoidance of such research but would simply acknowledge the vastness of Way and our incapacity to ultimately control its unfolding.  Deep human intervention into natural processes would be seen, by Taoists, as going against Way. 

     In short, Tierney is focusing only on "religious" dynamics and ignoring philosophical grounds for or against cloning.  And in doing so, he is missing a rather large part of the East Asian story.

Blindsight

     When I see things like this, a paragraph from a New Yorker story on how the brain works, I can't help but think of Taoism:

We assimilate information unconsciously all the time; at any given moment, we process thousands of stimuli, of which we pay attention to only a few. As you read this sentence, you may not be aware of the birds singing in the back yard, but your brain has analyzed the sound and concluded that it poses no threat to you. In the past several decades, scientists have uncovered particularly dramatic examples of unconscious processing. In the early seventies, researchers at M.I.T. studied four patients who had experienced trauma to an area of the brain involved in vision and had been found to have a condition that was later called “blindsight.” These patients’ eyes functioned normally, but they did not perceive much of what was in their field of vision. When the researchers flashed a light at the patients and asked them to describe what they saw, the patients reported that they had seen nothing. Yet the researchers noticed that their eyes often located the source of the light. In a second experiment, a blindsight patient was shown pictures of faces displaying happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. The patient said that he could not see the faces, yet he was frequently able to correctly identify the emotions...

 Our brains can take in and process information unconsciously.  This could lead to the conclusion that our conscious knowledge or understanding is not all that we "know".  Indeed, in order to open ourselves fully to our perception and interaction with the world around us, we must accept our unconscious, find a way of attuning ourselves to it without recourse to our consciousness.  Maybe this is what the Tao Te Ching means when it says: "give up learning and troubles end."  Or, give up exclusive reliance on conscious rationality and you will expand your knowledge.  We can see without seeing.  (OK, that is not all that that line can mean, but the new neurology gives that line a new dimension...

     And you just have to love the name the neurologists gave to this unconscious capacity: Blindsight.  Sounds like a character out of Chuang Tzu!   

The Last Thing We Forget

   I have long thought about why Confucius places so much emphasis on the cultivation of our closest loving relationships.  He tells us constantly to respect our elders; he also says that we should cherish the young, which I take to mean our children especially, and help our friends.  Spouses should care for one another.

    Many people see in this a deep Confucian desire for social order: if we solidify these close relationships, then a broader social order is more possible.  And that is part of it.  But I also think that Confucius recognizes, at least implicitly, the emotional power and necessity of love.  We should care for our parents because, at some deep human level, we love them, even if our lives with them have been difficult.  Likewise for children and spouses and friends.  Building upon those loving bonds makes us better people and allows us to extend humanity in the world.  This may sound like an anachronistic assertion - taking a modern sensibility and projecting back into the different world of the past - but I think there is some truth in it: for Confucius, love was essential for human fulfillment; social order was a secondary effect of Humanity based on love.

     And here I find modern grist for this notion.  In a recent issue of the New Yorker, Oliver Sacks writes a very poignant piece about a man who has experiences a profound amnesia.  He cannot remember things that were said or that  happened literally minutes ago.  But through the blur of no past and the rush of a constant present (think about that for a while), he recognizes  his wife:

How, why, when he recognized no one else with any consistency, did Clive recognize Deborah? There are clearly many sorts of memory, and emotional memory is one of the deepest and least understood.

....

It seems certain, likewise, that in the first two years of life, even though one retains no explicit memories (Freud called this infantile amnesia), deep emotional memories or associations are nevertheless being made in the limbic system and other regions of the brain where emotions are represented—and these emotional memories may determine one’s behavior for a lifetime. A recent paper by Oliver Turnbull, Evangelos Zois, et al., in the journal Neuro-Psychoanalysis, has shown that patients with amnesia can form emotional transferences to an analyst, even though they retain no explicit memory of the analyst or their previous meetings. Nonetheless, a strong emotional bond begins to develop. Clive and Deborah were newly married at the time of his encephalitis, and deeply in love for a few years before that. His passionate relationship with her, a relationship that began before his encephalitis, and one that centers in part on their shared love for music, has engraved itself in him—in areas of his brain unaffected by the encephalitis—so deeply that his amnesia, the most severe amnesia ever recorded, cannot eradicate it.

 I think this captures an unspoken assumption of Confucian thinking.  Our closest loving relationships are the strongest social bonds we experience; and if we develop those well we can realize our innately good human nature and make good judgments about whatever challenges the world sends our way.   Our loved ones are the last thing we forget, and therefore should be the first thing we think of.

Taoist Physics

      Since we're talking about Taoism (see post below), how about this op-ed in today's NYT by Margaret Wertheim.  She discusses what shadows, immaterial presences that do not require energy to move, might mean for modern physics:

ON Thursday, on the summer solstice, the Sun will celebrate the year’s lazy months by resting on the horizon. The word solstice derives from the Latin “sol” (sun) and “sistere” (to stand still). The day marks the sun’s highest point in the sky, the moment when our shadows shrink to their shortest length of the year. How strange to think that these mundane friends, our ever-present familiars, can actually go faster than the sun’s rays.

I remarked on this recently to my husband as we sat on the porch with our shadows pooling by our chairs. Nothing can go faster than light, he insisted, expressing what is surely the most widely known law of physics, ingrained into us by a thousand “Nova” programs.

That is the point, I explained: Nothing can go faster than light. A shadow isn’t a thing. It’s a non-thing. It’s the absence of light.

Special relativity dictates that we cannot move anything more quickly than the particles of light known as photons, but no law says you can’t do nothing faster than light. Physicists have known this for a long time, even if they generally do not mention it on PBS documentaries.

 Brilliant!  Not only does this give us a new insight into "doing nothing," but it also helps illustrate the fusion of being and non-being.   Thing only makes sense in relation to no-thing; material is tangible only because of immateriality.  You get it...