The Useless Tree

Thinking about Nothing

In a punchy book review in Sunday's NYT, philosopher David Albert takes down physicist Lawrence Krauss:

Lawrence M. Krauss, a well-known cosmologist and prolific popular-science writer, apparently means to announce to the world, in this new book, that the laws of quantum mechanics have in them the makings of a thoroughly scientific and adamantly secular explanation of why there is something rather than nothing. Period. Case closed. End of story....

Albert is having none of it, rejecting the very idea that physics can explain nothing, or how the universe arose from nothing (which for me, and for Daoists, is an odd question: why assume the universe had to come from nothing?):

...It happens that ever since the scientific revolution of the 17th century, what physics has given us in the way of candidates for the fundamental laws of nature have as a general rule simply taken it for granted that there is, at the bottom of everything, some basic, elementary, eternally persisting, concrete, physical stuff. Newton, for example, took that elementary stuff to consist of material particles. And physicists at the end of the 19th century took that elementary stuff to consist of both material particles and electro­magnetic fields. And so on. And what the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all the fundamental laws of nature are about, and all there is for the fundamental laws of nature to be about, insofar as physics has ever been able to imagine, is how that elementary stuff is arranged. The fundamental laws of nature generally take the form of rules concerning which arrangements of that stuff are physically possible and which aren’t, or rules connecting the arrangements of that elementary stuff at later times to its arrangement at earlier times, or something like that. But the laws have no bearing whatsoever on questions of where the elementary stuff came from, or of why the world should have consisted of the particular elementary stuff it does, as opposed to something else, or to nothing at all.

He is aware that quantum physics poses a somewhat different understanding of the "elementary stuff," describing it in terms of relativistic quantum fields.  But, Albert argues, the same problem applies:

...Relativistic-quantum-field-theoretical vacuum states — no less than giraffes or refrigerators or solar systems — are particular arrangements of elementary physical stuff. The true relativistic-quantum-field-­theoretical equivalent to there not being any physical stuff at all isn’t this or that particular arrangement of the fields — what it is (obviously, and ineluctably, and on the contrary) is the simple absence of the fields! The fact that some arrangements of fields happen to correspond to the existence of particles and some don’t is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that some of the possible arrangements of my fingers happen to correspond to the existence of a fist and some don’t. And the fact that particles can pop in and out of existence, over time, as those fields rearrange themselves, is not a whit more mysterious than the fact that fists can pop in and out of existence, over time, as my fingers rearrange themselves. And none of these poppings — if you look at them aright — amount to anything even remotely in the neighborhood of a creation from nothing.

Thus, Albert contends, we cannot explain nothing using relativistic quantum field theory.  

To press a bit further, it seems like he is saying we cannot explain nothing in reference to something.  That is, the purported nothing cannot exist without reference to something.  Nothing, then, cannot really exist independent of something and, therefore, the scientist's quest for explanation is rendered impossible, since the thing to be explained (the explanandum - in this case "nothing") cannot be analytically and temporally separated from the thing used to explain (the explanans - in this case "something").

I haven't studied that far into the philosophy of science to know if the explanation of "nothing" poses a fundamental problem.  From Albert I surmise that physics is inadequate to the task and that leaves room for religious and metaphysical speculations regarding nothing.  Nothing, perhaps, is the limit of science.

But it is territory where Daoism dares to tread, at least the Daodejing.  Think of this excerpt from passage 2:

All heaven knows beauty is beauty only because there's ugliness, and knows good is good only because there's evil.

Being and nonbeing give birth to one another, difficult and easy complete one another, long and short measure one another, high and low fill one another, music and noise harmonize one another, before and after follow one another....

That line - "being and nonbeing give birth to one another" - seems to get at Albert's point.  If we want to understand nothing, we can only do so by reference to something.  Passage 11 also suggests this sort of mutually constitutive relationship of something and nothing:

Thirty spokes gathered at each hub: absence makes the cart work.  A storage jar fashioned out of clay: absence makes the jar work.  Doors and windows cut in a house: absence makes the house work.

Presence gives things their value, but absences makes them work.

What is not there - the hole in the middle of the wheel; the emptiness in the center of the jar; the space within the house - gives definition to what is there.

And maybe that is the difference: scientists seek to explain, they want to analytically isolate things, declare one an antecedent and the other a consequent, and that's perhaps where a limit is reached when encountering nothing.  X might logically yield -X but -X is still framed in terms of X.  It is not really absence or nothing, which by definition would seem to be unrepresentable.  It is a negation.  Nothing is more than (less than?) negation. 

But this is a problem only if explanation is the goal.  If we are simply looking to describe, which is more in keeping with the correlative sensibilities of Daoism (and most classical Chinese thought) then there is less to sweat.  We can't explain nothing.  We can't really understand it.  We can only get a general sense of it in relation to something.  There is no certainty in our understanding of it.  And physics really can't explain it to us....

The Multiversal Dao

Seems like theoretical physicists have worked themselves into futility.  Or that, at least, is the sense that emerges from Alan P. Lightman's piece in Harper's Magazine, "The accidental universe: Science's crisis of faith." 

The search for ultimate theoretical explanation of the universe has, essentially, hit a dead end.  Actually, it might be better to say it has reached point of infinite, and inexplicable, variation: the multiverse. In short, if I understand this correctly, in order to adequately account for the dynamics and development of the universe, it is now necessary to invoke the existence of an infinite number of other, alternate, universes, each with its own unique and self-consistent set of principles and parameters.  The total of all these universes is, then, the multiverse.  Lightman highlights the problems this possibility poses for science:

Alan Guth, a pioneer in cosmological thought, says that “the multiple-universe idea severely limits our hopes to understand the world from fundamental principles.” And the philosophical ethos of science is torn from its roots.....

Evidently, the fundamental laws of nature do not pin down a single and unique universe. According to the current thinking of many physicists, we are living in one of a vast number of universes. We are living in an accidental universe. We are living in a universe uncalculable by science.

Science strives for explanation and calculation.  When it encounters what appears to be an inexplicable and incalculable problem it has failed in its most fundamental mission.  And that seems to be where physics is now.

Of course, none of this is surprising from a Daoist point of view.  Daoism tells us that our knowledge, indeed our language, will always be insufficient to capture the fullness and complexity of Dao (Way):

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.... (DDJ, 29)

As Lightman points out, when science fails at cosmology, a door is open to religious interpretation, in this case "intelligent design."

If such conclusions are correct, the great question, of course, is why these fundamental parameters happen to lie within the range needed for life. Does the universe care about life? Intelligent design is one answer. Indeed, a fair number of theologians, philosophers, and even some scientists have used fine-tuning and the anthropic principle as evidence of the existence of God. For example, at the 2011 Christian Scholars’ Conference at Pepperdine University, Francis Collins, a leading geneticist and director of the National Institutes of Health, said, “To get our universe, with all of its potential for complexities or any kind of potential for any kind of life-form, everything has to be precisely defined on this knife edge of improbability…. [Y]ou have to see the hands of a creator who set the parameters to be just so because the creator was interested in something a little more complicated than random particles.”

This has never made sense to me, from a Daoist perspective.  Both the scientists and the theologians seem to believe in an absolute binary here: either there is a singular scientific explanation for the universe or there must be a god-like designer who planned out the minutia that makes our current reality possible.  Both abhor the notion of randomness.  Why is there so much anxiety about randomness?  Yes, the partiuclars of the universe, the very fine margins of the basic forces, are marvelously narrow; a very slight variation would have meant that life as we know it would be impossible.  But why shouldn't we believe that what exists now is the result of trillions and trillions of random events and interactions taking place over billions and billions of years?  

If we accept randomness we then require neither a multiverse nor a God.

Daoism, I believe, indeed ancient Chinese thought more generally, is much more comfortable with randomness and inexplicability when it comes to cosmology and cosmogony.  Here's a quote from Fredrick W. Mote's little book, Intellectual Foundations of China:

The genuine Chinese cosmogony is that of organismic process, meaning that all parts of the entire cosmos belong to one organic whole and that they all interact as participants in on spontaneously self-generating life process... Needham, analyzing that Chinese model, calls it, "an ordered harmony of wills without an ordainer."  As he describes the organismic Chinese cosmos, it emerges to our full view as one in striking contrast to all other world conceptions known to human history.  It differs from other organismic conceptions, such as classical Greek cosmologies in which a logos or demiurge or otherwise conceived master will external to creation was regarded as necessary for existence.  And it contrasts still more starkly with the ancient Semitic traditions that led to subsequent Christian and Islamic conceptions of creation ex nihilo by the hand of God, or through the will of God, and all other such mechanistic, teleological, and theistic cosmologies....(15-16)

"Spontaneous self-generating life process."  No "Big Bang," no beginning, no end, just being and non-being, time and timelessness merging one into the other... In a sense, it is a resignation that we will never understand certain aspects of the universe.  And, in fact, we do not need to know certain aspects of the universe to live our lives now.  Instead of seeking a singular theoretical principle to guide us deductively, we can very well work from the ground up, inductively, in engaging the particulars of our existence.  Yes, theoretical physics can be fun (or so I'm told...) but we needn't take it so seriously.

For me, then, the interesting question is: why are people so nervous and afraid of randomness and uncertainty?

While I have no answer for that question, it is amusing that Lightman hits upon a metaphor that brings us back to Zhuangzi.  He writes:

If the multiverse idea is correct, then the historic mission of physics to explain all the properties of our universe in terms of fundamental principles—to explain why the properties of our universe must necessarily be what they are—is futile, a beautiful philosophical dream that simply isn’t true. Our universe is what it is because we are here. The situation could be likened to a school of intelligent fish who one day began wondering why their world is completely filled with water. Many of the fish, the theorists, hope to prove that the entire cosmos necessarily has to be filled with water. For years, they put their minds to the task but can never quite seem to prove their assertion. Then, a wizened group of fish postulates that maybe they are fooling themselves. Maybe there are, they suggest, many other worlds, some of them completely dry, and everything in between.

This brings to mind this passage from chapter 17 of Zhuangzi (Watson translation):

Chuang Tzu and Hui Tzu were strolling along the dam of the Hao River when Chuang Tzu said, "See how the minnows come out and dart around where they please!  That's what fish really enjoy!"

Hui Tzu said, "You're not a fish - how do you know what fish enjoy?"

Chuang Tzu said, "You're not I, so how do you know I don't know what fish enjoy?"

Hui Tzu said, "I'm not you, so I certainly don't know what you know.  On the other hand, you're certianly not a fish - so that still proves you don't know what fish enjoy?"

Chuang Tzu said, "Let's go back to your original question, please. You asked how I know what the fish enjoy - so you already knew it when you asked the question.  I know it by standing here beside the Hao."

Hui Tzu, the logician, seeks to prove and disprove.  Zhuangzi, the skeptic, understands better the limits of knowledge, even his own.  So when challenged, Zhuangzi embraces a kind of perspectivalism: he knows what he knows based on his particular position in a specific context.  Writ large, that is what the fish in Lightman's metaphor also suggest.  We really can't know much beyond our circumstances, whether that is a universe or the River Hao.

The Dao of Neutrinos

Last week we heard a lot about the experiment in Europe in which a neutrino was measured as traveling faster than the speed of light, a theoretical impossibility according to Einstein.  And so now we have a spate of articles asking: "Is Einstein Wrong?"  This causes anxiety for some, insofar as Einstein's theories have come to define some pretty basic assumptions about reality and knowledge:

If the OPERA result were correct it would point to some extraordinary things. We’ve all grown up understanding that the only sensible thing for matter to do is to never exceed (or indeed reach) the speed of light. It’s a fundamental piece of Einstein’s special theory of relativity, which is one of the best verified theories in modern physical science. I won’t go into the details here, but for matter with mass to exceed lightspeed there are a large number of headaches, not least of which are the most basic ideas of causality – at both the microscopic and macroscopic scales....

  Saswato Das has a nice piece along these lines in yesterday's NYT:

All sorts of strange things could happen if the speed of light can be exceeded. Causality — the relation between cause and effect — would be affected. Anyone traveling faster than the speed of light would be able to see fragments of a broken vase coming together. Faster-than-light travelers could go back in time — say, leave New York for Paris one evening and return the previous day.

Freaky...

But I don't share these anxieties (and I would be happy to arrive in Paris before I left...), and that's because I was reading the Daodejing this week. A philosophical Daoist would not be surprised at all that Einstein might be wrong.  Of course he is wrong, at least in the sense that human knowledge, generally speaking, is always less than the fullness and complexity of Way (Dao).  Henrick's translation of passage 34 gets at this:

The Way floats and drifts ; it can go left or right.

It accomplishes its tasks and completes its affairs, and yet for this it is not give a name.

The ten thousand things entrust their lives to it, and yet it does not act as their master.

Thus it is constantly without desires.

It can be named with the things that are small.

The ten thousand things entrust their lives to it, and yet it does not act as their master.

It can be named with the things that are great.

Therefore, a Sage's ability to accomplish the great comes from his not playing the role of the great.  There he is able to accomplish the great.

Way, the simultaneous expression of all things, being and nonbeing, is larger than the parameters of human language, mathematics included; thus, it is nameless, it cannot be expressed in words or formulae. We do, of course, use words and names to try to characterize and come to know some portion (always partial) of Way.  Thus, it can be associated with small or large.  But in its vastness, Way can move in ways that are unexpected: it can go left or right, float and drift.  Our names, or theories or hypotheses or knowledge, can never capture its totality.  And this goes for Einstein as well as anybody else.  We shouldn't expect the general theory of relativity to be a knowledge that is all encompassing.

Interestingly, Das makes reference to Karl Popper:

Testing theories through experimentation has always been the basis for scientific progress. The philosopher Karl Popper called this the notion of falsifiability of scientific theories.

Popper is obviously not a Daoist, but he does encourage a certain intellectual humility that a Daoist could appreciate: our knowledge is always unstable, subject to falsification; the best we can do is a kind of conjecture.  Or as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy puts it:

Scientific theories, for him, are not inductively inferred from experience, nor is scientific experimentation carried out with a view to verifying or finally establishing the truth of theories; rather, all knowledge is provisional, conjectural, hypothetical—we can never finally prove our scientific theories, we can merely (provisionally) confirm or (conclusively) refute them; hence at any given time we have to choose between the potentially infinite number of theories which will explain the set of phenomena under investigation.

Our knowledge is never finally established... because Way can float and drift, move left and right.

Should we give up on all science, then?  No.  I don't think a contemporary Daoist skepticism would reject all science all the time.  Rather, it would simply counsel humility.  We might reasonably determine how certain facets of Way generally unfold in time.  But we should always be open to things that exceed our knowledge.  We can never know Way and we can never control it, but we might come to learn how to move through certain aspects of Way, without, alas, arriving in Paris before we left...

Scientific Uncertainty

Science is not as certain as some of us may think: that is the message of an article in last week's New Yorker, by Jonah Lehrer: "The Truth Wears Off: Is there something wrong with the scientific method?" (sub. required).  This brings both Karl Popper and Zhunagzi to mind.

Popper is not nearly as skeptical as Zhuangzi, and Lehrer notes that Popper "... imagined falsification occurring with a single, definitive experiment...", which turns out to be a tad too simplistic.  But the Viennese thinker gave us the notion of science as conjecture, which can, and perhaps should, encourage a certain humility regarding the empirical standing of any statement. 

In any event, the thrust of Lehrer's article is that there is a tendency for the results of scientific research to weaken as particular studies are replicated, which he calls the "decline effect."  In other words, when what appear to be established "truths" are subject to repeated experimental scrutiny their evidentiary support erodes.  And so, he writes:

"But now all sorts of well-established, multiply confirmed findings have started to look increasingly uncertain.  It's as if our facts were losing their truth: claims that have been enshrined in textbooks are suddenly unprovable. This phenomenon doesn't yet have an official name, but it's occurring across a wide range of fields, from psychology to ecology..."

Our facts are losing their truth - enter Zhuangzi.  He might say our facts never had the truth we ascribed to them.  The distinctions we draw to create theories that invest facts with meaning are, to Zhuangzi, artificial devices that obscure as much, if not more, than they elucidate: "Those who divide things cannot see."  And the language we employ to describe and explain fails to capture the fullness and complexity of the realities that surround us:

The spoken isn't just bits of wind.  In the spoken, something is spoken.  But what it is never stays fixed and constant.  So is something spoken, or has nothing ever been spoken?  People think we're different from baby birds cheeping, but are we saying any more than they are?

Zhuangzi would never have accepted scientifically established theories to be fixed and constant, which is just about where Lehrer is coming down:

"Such anomalies demonstrate the slipperiness of empiricism.  Although many scientific ideas generate conflicting results and suffer from falling effect sizes, they continue to get cited in the textbooks and drive standard medical practice.  Why?  Because these ideas seem true.  Because they make sense.  Because we can't bear to let them go.  And this is why the decline effect is so troubling.  Not because it reveals the human fallibility of science, in which data are tweaked and beliefs shape our perceptions. (Such shortcomings aren't surprising, at least for scientists.)  And not because it reveals that many of our most exciting theories are fleeting fads and will soon be rejected. (That idea has been around since Thomas Kuhn)  The decline effect is troubling because it reminds us how difficult it is to prove anything.  We like to pretend that our experiments define truths for us.  But that's often not the case.  Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved.  And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true.  When the experiments are done, we still have to choose what to believe."

I can hear Zhuangzi now: "You mean you're only now realizing that there are no answers?" (105)

 

Science, Religion, Daoism

An nice little piece in the NYT The Stone philosophy blog by Tim Crane (no relation) about the difference between scientific and religious knowledge and belief.   Upon reading it, my first impression (which holds as my continuing impression) is that Daoist knowledge is more like religion than science (and I mean this in terms of philosophical Daoism...).  Take these lines for instance:

....Religion is an attempt to make sense of the world, but it does not try and do this in the way science does. Science makes sense of the world by showing how things conform to its hypotheses. The characteristic mode of scientific explanation is showing how events fit into a general pattern.

Religion, on the other hand, attempts to make sense of the world by seeing a kind of meaning or significance in things. This kind of significance does not need laws or generalizations, but just the sense that the everyday world we experience is not all there is, and that behind it all is the mystery of God’s presence. The believer is already convinced that God is present in everything, even if they cannot explain this or support it with evidence. But it makes sense of their life by suffusing it with meaning....

First, it is rather easy, I think, to assert that Daoism is not like science.  There is, in both the Daodejing and Zhuangzi, a skepticism about the capacities of human rationality and cognition to apprehend the fullness and complexity of Dao (meant here in its sense as the totality of all things, being and nonbeing).   Hence lines like: "If you give up learning, troubles end." (DDJ, 20).  

Harder, perhaps, is to argue that Daoist understanding is like religious belief (I took up this issue three years ago in this post: "Is Tao Like Logos?").  Let's state the obvious objection right up front: Daoism does not require a God-like figure, external to the universe of being, as a source of creation or meaning.  But if we change the wording of the lines above a bit, we can see a similarity:    

....Daoism is an attempt to make sense of the world, but it does not try and do this in the way science does. Science makes sense of the world by showing how things conform to its hypotheses. The characteristic mode of scientific explanation is showing how events fit into a general pattern.

Daoism, on the other hand, attempts to make sense of the world by seeing a kind of meaning or significance in things. This kind of significance does not need laws or generalizations, but just the sense that the everyday world we experience is not all there is, and that behind it all is the mystery of Dao. The believer is already convinced that Dao is present in everything, even if they cannot explain this or support it with evidence. But it makes sense of their life by suffusing it with meaning....

The idea that understanding, or meaning (I know there is a distinction here but there is an overlap as well), does not need laws or generalizations is in keeping with the epistemology of Daoism.  Generalizations take us away from seeing the broader context, and the interrelationship of things within a give moment, of Dao.  Also, there is always something beyond our knowledge: we cannot "know" Dao in some complete and comprehensive manner.  We can only experience one part of it, and from that part gain a sense of the totality of Dao.  Of course, what is beyond our knowledge is not defined, by Daoists, in terms of a God or deity or the supernatural.  Rather, Dao itself is just too vast to fit into any human understanding.  Finally, Dao is present in everything, just as everything is present in Dao.  That does not mean we can "know" the fullness in Dao by experiencing one part of it.  Or, as Ames and Hall put it in their translation of the DDJ:

A corollary to this radical perspectivism is that each particular element in our experience is holographic in the sense that it has implicated within in it the entire field of experience.  This single flower has leaves and roots that take their nourishment from the environing soil and air.  And the soil contains the distilled nutrients of past growth and decay that constitute the living ecological system in which all of its participants are organically interdependent.  The sun enables the flower to process these nutrients, while the atmosphere that caresses the flower also nourishes and protects it.  By the time we have "cashed out" the complex of conditions that conspire to produce and conserve this particular flower, one ripple after another in the ever-extending series of radial circles, we have implicated the entire cosmos within it without remainder.  For the Daoist, there is an intoxicating bottomlessness to any particular event in our experience.  The entire cosmos resides happily in the smile on the dirty face of this one little child. (18)

An organic totality without reference to God...

Notice, too, how religion seeks a kind of significance.  It provides meaning, normative as well as empirical, for particular lives.  My first reaction here is that Daoism resists this move.  At least in the sense that it produces a template of Meaning to which we can all turn for solace.  Rather, the DDJ and Zhuangzi both, at times, seem to be telling us that there is no Meaning beyond our particular experience - and we should accept and celebrate that.  We make our meaning in our everyday experience.  We do not have to search elsewhere, up in Heaven or in some church, for some sort of externally-granted meaning.  It is right there in front of us.  Zhuangzi, in particular, seems to suggest a kind of liberation in all of this.  We do not have to worry about social standards or the expectations of others, but only live our life as it unfolds before us and that is fine:

If you serve your own mind, joy and sorrow rarely appear.  If you know what's beyond your control, if you know it follows its own inevitable nature and you live at peace - that in Integrity perfected.  Children and ministers inevitably find that much is beyond them.  But if you forget about yourself and always do what circumstances require of you, there's no time to cherish life and despise death.  Then you do what you can, and whatever happens is fine. (54)

But, of course, there is a kind of significance-making in all of that.  When we give up the conscious Search For Meaning we discover a different sort of meaning, which is why Ames and Hall sub-title their translation of the DDJ, "Making This Life Significant."

So philosophical Daoism is more like religion than science in its ways of knowing and living.

Animals are not Human

That was one thought that came to mind as I read this NYT article: "Scientists Square Off on Evolutionary Value of Helping Relatives."   When I saw the headline my Confucian senses started tingling.  Helping relatives is obviously a Confucian idea and, from that point of view, there would be an evolutionary value to it, of sorts.  But I was frustrated by the article itself.  It focused mainly on studies of behavior among ants and other non-human animals:

Why are worker ants sterile? Why do birds sometimes help their parents raise more chicks, instead of having chicks of their own? Why do bacteria explode with toxins to kill rival colonies? In 1964, the British biologist William Hamilton published a landmark paper to answer these kinds of questions. Sometimes, he argued, helping your relatives can spread your genes faster than having children of your own.

For a Confucian, helping relatives is not about genetic propagation; it is a moral practice and obligation.  Indeed, genetics matters not at all to Confucianism.  Yes, we should rasie children in order to extend Humanity to future generations, but that does not require each person to have his or her own biological children.  Adoption is fine for the moral purposes of Humanity. 

And that is when I realized the key distinction.  Most moral theories, Confucianism included, place humans in a different category than animals.  Yes, I am aware of Peter Singer and other animal rights activists.  Those are interesting and important arguments.  But the actual ethical practice of most human communities have long been predicated on a moral distinction between humans and animals.  Most societies condemn cannibalism while accepting the consumption of animal meat. 

That much is fairly obvious.  But it is important to keep in mind when reading evolutionary biologists.  They sometimes come up with statements like this:

Each organism faces a trade-off between putting effort into raising its own offspring or helping its relatives. If the benefits of helping a relative outweigh the costs, Dr. Hamilton argued, altruism can evolve.

"Altruism" is the key term.  Obviously, it is meant here in a biological sense.  But it has a moral connotation.  And the two should not be confused.  In human terms, altruism can certainly evolve.  But that process is not simply a strategy for genetic propagation.  It is a self-conscious process of striving to live a morally good life.  It is guided by ideas and images and symbols.  It is fired by a will to good.  And those very human qualities (which may indeed be shared by some animals in some rudimentary fashion) are not included in the models of the evolutinoary biologists.

Why is this news?

So there I am yesterday, preparing for my ancient Chinese philosophy tutorial (which begins next week), when I see this headline on CNN: "Stephen Hawking: God didn't create universe."   I then see a similar story on the AP wire, which is then picked up by various outlets.   And I am thinking to myself: so what? This understanding has been around for over two thousand years, at least if F.W. Mote, in Intellectual Foundations of China, which I was reading yesterday, is to be believed:

The genuine Chinese cosmogony is that of organismic process, meaning that all parts of the entire cosmos belong to one organic whole and that they all interact as participants in on spontaneously self-generating life process... Needham, analyzing that Chinese model, calls it, "an ordered harmony of wills without an ordainer."  As he describes the organismic Chinese cosmos, it emerges to our full view as one in striking contrast to all other world conceptions known to human history.  It differs from other organismic conceptions, such as classical Greek cosmologies in which a logos or demiurge or otherwise conceived master will external to creation was regarded as necessary for existence.  And it contrasts still more starkly with the ancient Semitic traditions that led to subsequent Christian and Islamic conceptions of creation ex nihilo by the hand of God, or through the will of God, and all other such mechanistic, teleological, and theistic cosmologies....(15-16)

Hawking is not really saying anything new; he is saying something very old in a particular political-cultural environment.  It is not the statement itself that causes the controversy, but the environment: Christians are outraged at such a frontal assault on their beliefs.  But why should they even care?  At base, belief should not require rational argumentation.  The Christian God is a "higher power," something beyond and external to, human cognition and comprehension.  So why should there be any worry when a physicist makes an assertion about creation?  One either believes in an all-powerful creator God or not; the physics hardly matters....

Mind Wandering

Looks like psychologists have empirically confirmed a part of Zhuangzi:

But now that researchers have been analyzing those stray thoughts, they’ve found daydreaming to be remarkably common — and often quite useful. A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals. Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity and helps you solve problems.

This brought to mind the first chapter of Zhuangzi - 逍遙遊 - which Watson translates as "Free and Easy Wandering," and Hinton renders as ""Wandering Boundless and Free."  A passage from chapter three gets at the sensibility:

Just let your mind wander along in the drift of things. Trust yourself to what is beyond you - let it be the nurturing center.  Then you've made it.  In the midst of all this, is there really any response?  Nothing can compare to simply living out your inevitable nature.  And there's nothing more difficult....(56)

Notice that, unlike the psychologists, Zhuangzi does not worry about utility.  He would have a hard time defining "counterproductive," unless, of course, it meant taking one away from the natural unfolding of Way.  Mind wandering, for him, is not a matter of useful or useless, it is, in itself, simply reflective of human experience more generally.  We like to think that we are in control of our lives, but, in fact, we are wandering through time, subject to all sorts of unforeseen and unexpected forces and turns of fate.  And if we recognize that "inevitable nature" we can then come to "free and easy wandering"....

Now, what was I doing?....

Obama Does the Confucian (but not the Daoist) Thing on Stem Cells

Yesterday President Obama eased certain limits on embryonic stem cell research in the US.  There are still various questions and restrictions remaining, especially on the issue of whether public money should be spent on experimentation on embryonic stems cells, but the move on Monday is widely seen as supportive of further stem cell research.

Obama's decision will ignite anew the American debate on the ethics of embryonic stem cell research.  And both Confucianism and Daoism have something to say on these issues.

A modern Confucian position would generally, though with certain limitations, support embryonic stem cell research.  I derive this conclusion from a number of principles that I believe are rooted in The Analects and Mencius.

First, Confucians would not recognize an embryo as morally equivalent to a already-born and living human being.  When we consider the prime Confucian virtue of Humanity (ren - 仁) it leads us to an understanding of the essential sociability of personhood; that is, we become fully moral persons only through our social interactions with others.  This, then, suggests that an unborn embryo, in a pre-social condition (i.e. not yet fully embedded in living social relationships) has yet to achieve the same moral standing as an extant person.  This conclusion must be qualified to the extent that parents-to-be might recognize the potential personhood of a child-to-be and begin to create for him or her certain kinds of social relationships and expectations before birth. But this kind of recognition is contingent upon the parents' preferences: if the parents want to recognize the potential humanity of the fetus, and create for it a social context before birth, then the fetus may have a certain moral status as a person; but if the parents do not recognize the potential humanity of the fetus, and do not create for it a social context before birth, then the fetus can be denied the moral status of a person (in which case, and depending on further considerations, abortion would be morally acceptable).  That, I believe, is an internally consistent Confucian position.

In light of the above argument, there would seem to be circumstances (i.e. embyroes unwanted by the sperm and egg donors) that would lead a modern Confucian to accept embryonic stem cell research.  But, another important consideration for Confucians would be: to what end?

If the research works to enable individuals to better perform their duties (yi - 義) toward others, then it would be morally defensible for a Confucian. Stem cell science that allows children to better care for their parents (i.e. eases the burdens on parents of conditions like Parkinson's Disease) would be supported by Confucians.  But if the research was to advance improvements in the cosmetic appearance of otherwise healthy individuals, Confucians would resist it.  Such desires would be seen as unnecessary vanity and morally dubious.

Thus, for Confucians, acceptance of embryonic stem cell research is not unqualified, but under fairly clear conditions (i.e. involving embryos not yet embedded in social networks and for purposes that advance the fulfillment of familial and social duties) it would be permitted.

Philosophical Daoists, on the other hand, not so much.

The general Daoist embrace of wuwei (無為), which we might translate as "doing nothing" or "nothing's own doing," creates a certain skepticism toward advanced scientific research (I realize there is a difference here with Religious Daoists, who were famous for pursuing immortality; I am referring only to Philosophical Daoists).   This excerpt from Daodejing 29 expresses that skepticism:

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.

On the question of embryonic stem cell research, then, a modern Daoist might ask: why?  What do we think we are accomplishing by it?  The alleviation of human suffering?  Perhaps that will be gained in certain specific cases, though even that is not assured (i.e. curing one medical condition by no means saves an individual from another unrelated medical condition or some other personal tragedy).  But the broader experience of humans in the world, not to mention humans in Way, will not be fundamentally altered.  We will be born, live, decline, die in generally the same patterns as we always have.  Life expectancies can be extended but even those apparent advances would, for a Daoist, be weighed against the continual invention of new forms of human suffering (the evermore powerful forces of violence and war; AIDS; etc.). 

For Daoists, there is not an absolute rejection of scientific research.  Indeed, for Daoists there isn't really any absolute anything (Way is too vast and vague, beyond human understanding of capacity to shape or control).   Thus, the question of whether the state should ban or support any particular type of scientific research is a secondary concern.  Rather, a Daoist would simply advance a general skepticism, looking straight into the eyes of the person advancing stem cell research and asking: why? 

The Tao of Personal Genomics

When I saw the cover story in the Sunday Times Magazine by Steven Pinker, "My Genome, My Self,"  I was ready to pounce.  I thought: here comes a biological determinist trying to assert that we can understand personal identity and psychology by a rather simple reference to genetics.  I was pleasantly surprised to the contrary, however.  Pinker lays out a sophisticated and nuanced analysis of the interaction of genetics and environment, which sounds about right to me.  So, even though I was gearing up a Confucian counterargument on the social (as opposed to the genetic) construction of the self, I found myself thinking about the Taoist resonances in passages like this:

Even when the effect of some gene is indubitable, the sheer complexity of the self will mean that it will not serve as an oracle on what the person will do. The gene that lets me taste propyl­thiouracil ... might make me dislike tonic water, coffee and dark beer. Unlike the tenuous genes linked to personality or intelligence, this one codes for a single taste-bud receptor, and I don’t doubt that it lets me taste the bitterness. So why hasn’t it stopped me from enjoying those drinks? Presumably it’s because adults get a sophisticated pleasure from administering controlled doses of aversive stimuli to themselves. I’ve acquired a taste for Beck’s Dark; others enjoy saunas, rock-climbing, thrillers or dissonant music. Similarly, why don’t I conform to type and exploit those fast-twitch muscle fibers (thanks, ACTN3 genes!) in squash or basketball, rather than wasting them on hiking? A lack of coordination, a love of the outdoors, an inclination to daydream, all of the above? The self is a byzantine bureaucracy, and no gene can push the buttons of behavior by itself. You can attribute the ability to defy our genotypes to free will, whatever that means, but you can also attribute it to the fact that in a hundred-trillion-synapse human brain, any single influence can be outweighed by the product of all of the others.

Yes: Way (Tao) is vast, complex beyond our comprehension.  Pinker, as a scientist, probably would not go that far (does he hope for comprehension some day?) but he is bowing to complexity here, not trying to assert a singular interpretation that captures all of human development.  Peering into a genome, which personal genomics allows individuals now to do, will not tell you all you need to know about an individual.  Context matters, environment matters, will matters, culture matters, as Pinker recognizes.  The uniqueness of each thing in Way, the Te (Integrity) of each thing, cannot be reduced to genetics.  Genes are a part of one's Te, but they are not determinative of it.

Indeed, will is a interesting problem for Taoism.  It is obviously a natural part of the human experience, and thus wholly within Way, but it can also lead, at least as suggested by the Tao Te Ching, to human actions that seem to contradict the natural unfolding of Way.  Humans are, then, both within, but capable of acting against, Way.  This is captured in this excerpt from passage 77:

The Way of heaven takes away where there's abundance and restores where there's want, but the Way of humankind isn't like that: it takes away where there's want and gives where there's abundance.

The Way of humankind  can contradict the Way of heaven, and the latter comes close to Way generally.  In a way(!), this also captures Pinker's point: the natural unfolding of any particular human being, as expressed genetically, can be transformed and turned by will or experience or environment.  People are complex that way(!).

A Confucian might have more trouble with personal genomics. The science suggests that our hard wiring creates certain social and psychological tendencies for an individual.  This would suggest the possibility of a genetically-based barrier, not insurmountable but significant, against the enactment of Duty according to Ritual.  Some people may have personalities that distract them from their social duties, making it harder for them to do the right Confucian thing.  While this does not fundamentally subvert the Confucian optimism regarding perfectibility, it at least suggests that some people will be less susceptible to humanizing behavior than others.  Or, to put it another way, Mencius might be wrong when he says: "Everyone has a heart that can't bear to see others suffer." (3.6)  Maybe such a heart/mind is heritable.  Not everyone has it to the same degree.  Conversely, maybe the geneticists just haven't found the Mencian good heart/mind gene yet.

It would seem that Taoists would have an easier time absorbing Pinker's conclusions than Confucians.  The article is a confirmation of the vastness of Way, the existence of observable patterns of natural development simultaneously existing with spontaneous, context-created variations and particularities.

And it was nice to see Pinker warding off those who want to jump to undue generalizations about genetics and intelligence:

Still other genes have been associated with trust and commitment, or with a tendency to antisocial outbursts. It’s still a messy science, with plenty of false alarms, contradictory results and tiny effects. But consumers will probably learn of genes linked to personality before they see any that are reliably connected to intelligence.

If the face of such messiness, we cannot be confident in our general statements.