Your Meditation Guide Blog

If you live in New York and like to feel a part of the local intelligentsia, you simply have to read the New Yorker. Which I do, regularly, every week. I can't get through the whole thing, so I usually concentrate on the short essays of "The Talk of the Town" (gotta read that!), browse "The Critics" (about the latest in theater, books, movies and sometimes music), and always skip poetry and fiction (sorry, I've got better sources for the latter and I don't care too much for the former). The "Reporting & Essays" section is the real tough nut to crack: the articles there are very long and in-depth, and usually only one of the 4-5 published in each issue really grabs me. This week it was an essay penned by Nicholson Baker, about the Kindle, the Amazon e-book device that readers of this blog know very well I absolutely love. Ok, I was bracing myself for an irritating experience, as surely an essayist for the New Yorker would be too sophisticated not to complain about the Kindle.

I was not disappointed. Baker does give the reader a good description of how the e-ink technology works, and some background on how the idea of it (and therefore of the Kindle, the Sony Reader and several other e-reading devices) came about. But he immediately started complaining about problems that are, frankly, quite obvious even to aficionados such as myself. Oh, there are no color pictures, because the Kindle2 only manages 16 shades of gray (an improvement over the Kindle1, with four shades). Oh, there are "only" 300,000 titles available! And he starts listing a number of must-read books that cannot (currently) be found on the Kindle catalog. Oh, the resolution of the images is not up to print standards (duh!). Oh, there are occasional missing articles from e-versions of the New York Times! (The other thing you simply have to read if you live in New York.) Oh, there are no page numbers, replaced instead by "locations" (really, what's the difference?). And so on and so forth.

Now, let's imagine for a moment that we are back in the 15th century, to be precise just shortly after 1439, when Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg invented movable type printing. I can only imagine the complaints that Baker would have uttered in the local paper (which was, of course, copied by hand from the original dictation). What? Only one title on the catalog? (The Bible.) Oh, and the fonts are sooo boring compared to handwriting. And no colors! And the quality of the drawings, simply unacceptable. This movable type printing thing will never ever replace the amanuenses, it will simply die as yet another "modern invention" and things will keep being just the same as they have been throughout what they at the time didn't yet call the Middle Ages.

All right, let us be serious for a moment. Of course the current iteration of e-ink has limitations (but they are working on sharpening the definition and adding color). Of course the Kindle itself can be improved in a variety of ways, from its ergonomics to its resolution to its background (which is gray rather than white like in a real book). And yes we need more titles, both in the books department and for magazines and newspapers. Most importantly, there is quite a bit to complain about regarding Amazon's policies and business strategies, including the fact that one cannot share books with other people, or resell them, not to mention the recent incident about the recall of the Kindle edition of - of all titles! - Orwell's "1984," which showed Amazon's disturbing ability to simply erase your content remotely.

But it is hard not to think that Mr. Baker is taking his readers for a ride and can't possibly be serious about his evaluation of the Kindle. He actually strongly advises people to read books on an iTouch or iPhone, rather than on the K2. I happen to own an iPhone (of course), and yes I do have the Kindle free app for it, and yes I occasionally read books on the tiny backlit (but high-res and in color!) screen. So I can compare the two experiences, and the K2 beats the iP hands down as a dedicated reading device. As Amazon's Jeff Bezos put it, "We think reading is an important enough activity that it deserves a purpose-built device." Indeed.

A more reasoned position to take is that the current woes of the Kindle and similar tools will be fixed in the usual manner, by a mixture of competition from other companies (the New Yorker article lists seven other e-devices on the market now) and of legislation passed because of increasing pressure from consumer protection organizations. That's the way new technologies are introduced and quickly evolve or go extinct. But the Kindle, and more broadly e-reading, is the best bet for the future of both the book and the newspaper industries. People read more books when they own a Kindle (that's been my experience, as well as the experience of countless other users who commented on both the K1 and K2). And people's interest in newspapers and magazines just might be rekindled, so to speak, if they were available instantaneously and without having to kill trees (I am paying for K2 subscriptions to the New York Times, though it's available for free online, and the Huffington Post blog conglomerate, partly because they both update themselves automatically several times a day and I can read them at home, on the subway or at the restaurant). So, give it some time, Mr. Baker, and get back to us in a few years.

Oh, and of course, the irony of my own experience of reading Baker's article is that I was doing it, needless to say, on the Kindle.

Those of you who know or follow me surely realize that I'm not exactly a guy with a lot of spare time on his hands. Yet, I just launched a second blog devoted to short entries (mostly a paragraph with an accompanying link) to document the fact that gullibility is bad for your health.

I’m reviewing a book by philosopher of science Peter Godfrey-Smith entitled “Darwinian Populations and Natural Selection.” (This is not the book review, forthcoming.) Godfrey-Smith makes an excellent argument at some point in the book (chapter 7, on the gene’s eye view) that genes are not at all the sort of things Richard Dawkins and some other biologists think they are. For instance, contrary to the standard view, genes are not “unities of heredity” (and therefore do not last as “individuals”) for the simple reason that crossing-overs (the molecular processes that shuffle bits and pieces of genetic material, the real reason for sex) do not respect gene’s boundaries, but rather cut genes into pieces and shuffle them. Indeed, as Godfrey-Smith points out, for this and other reasons, sophisticated theoretical biologists are abandoning talk of “genes” altogether, referring instead to the more diffuse concept of “genetic material.” As PGS puts it, this is “a stuff, not a discrete unit.”

The interested reader will have to read PGS’s book or wait for my review (forthcoming in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews) to learn more about the issue of the nature of genes. But what struck me toward the end of that chapter is Godfrey-Smith’s unusual (and, I think, rather compelling) argument that talk of selfish genes (and memes) is one example of a broader “agent-positing” discourse that is shared by, of all people, some evolutionary biologists (though by all means not all, yours truly being one of many exceptions) and theologians!

Here is how PGS himself has characterizes the phenomenon: “Two explanatory schemata can be distinguished within the general agent-positing category ... The first is a paternalist schema. Here we posit a large, benevolent agent, who intends that all is ultimately for the best. This category includes various gods, the Hegelian ‘World Spirit’ in philosophy, and stronger forms of the ‘Gaia’ hypothesis according to which the whole earth is a living system. The second schema is a paranoid one. Now we posit a hidden collection of agents pursuing agendas that cross-cut or oppose our interests. Examples include demonic possessions narratives, the sub-personal creatures of Freud’s psychology (superego, ego, id), and selfish genes and memes.”

I must say that I am rarely struck by a novel enough idea that my first reaction is “wow.” This is one of those instances. There is something profoundly intellectually satisfactory in suddenly seeing disparate phenomena like Augustine’s god and Dawkins’ memes as different aspects of an all-too human tendency to project agency where there is none. Not to mention, of course, the admittedly wicked pleasure I’m getting from imagining Dawkins cringing at the comparison.

Godfrey-Smith refers his readers to another author, Richard Francis, who talked specifically about “Darwinian paranoia” in his 2004 “Why Men Won’t Ask for Directions: The Seductions of Sociobiology,” and points out that there are other ways of thinking about natural phenomena that do not require what Daniel Dennett called the intentional stance. Quoting Dennett: “Here is how it works: first you decide to treat the object whose behavior is to be predicted as a rational agent; then you figure out what beliefs that agent ought to have, given its place in the world and its purpose. Then you figure out what desires it ought to have, on the same considerations, and finally you predict that this rational agent will act to further its goals in the light of its beliefs. A little practical reasoning from the chosen set of beliefs and desires will in most instances yield a decision about what the agent ought to do; that is what you predict the agent will do.”

The intentional stance works well when it comes to predicting what people might do (and in fact is at the basis of Dennett’s work on free will and consciousness), but it is treacherous when applied to things that do not have (conscious) agency. Again Godfrey-Smith on how to pursue research in biology while bypassing Darwinian paranoia altogether: “This is the kind of investigation where someone asks: suppose a population was like this, and such-and-such a mutation appeared, what would happen to it? Thinking this way does not require the idea that genes are ‘ultimate beneficiaries’ of anything.” And, I might add, would save us from a lot of unnecessary misunderstandings and acrimony generated by people who use agent-centered language much too easily and way too loosely.

Recently American President Barack Obama traveled to Russia and with the help of his Russian counterpart negotiated a deal to reduce nuclear weapons between the two countries. For too long America has seen itself as the only important country in the world, which has bred the three poisons with alarming but predictable speed: Greed, hatred and delusion. Thankfully America now has a leader that better understands how interconnected the world is and just how destructive and counterproductive the "us vs. them" mentality can be. I thought this quote from Obama about interconnection in world affairs was refreshing talk for a political leader because politics is all too often used to exploit people, money and power:

There is sometimes a sense that old ways of thinking must prevail; a conception of power that is rooted in the past rather than in the future... In 2009, a great power does not show strength by dominating or demonizing other countries... As I said in Cairo, given our interdependence, any world order that tries to elevate one nation or one group of people over an other will inevitably fail. The pursuit of power is no longer a zero-sum game - progress must be shared.

James: A verse from the Tao Te Ching comes to mind:

* I know, it's old news, but here is the best summary of the Sotomayor hearings.

I've been contemplating lately on the role of so-called, "Hermit monks" which can still be found in remote areas of the world. We know that monasteries are the traditional venue for Buddhist monks looking to further dedicate their lives to studying and living the Dharma but what of the role of hermit monks? Well I found an excellent documentary on the lives of Chinese Buddhist, mountain, hermit, monks titled, "Amongst White Clouds." It's about an hour and a half but so worth it:Traditionalists might argue that these monks are going "rogue" from the historic path for monks and are thus misguided. However, consider the quote from one of these hermit monks "There are many hearts in this world--the Buddha has a teaching for the heart of every being." This was spoken by a Buddhist Master said to be on the final leg of his liberation who resides in the Zhongnan mountains of China in near solitude.

The majority of these hermits appear to be well practiced in the Dharma and veterans of monasteries and thus able to better practice in a solitary environment. They are not aesthetics in the traditional, pre-Buddhist sense of total denial of food, etc., which Buddha advised against. They eat just enough to remain healthy like most monks, maintain a shelter and do from time to time visit other hermit monks to bolster each other's practice. I hesitate to say that this path is for the average Buddhist who isn't well practiced in the Dharma. For as one of the hermit monks on the mountain states, "Most of the monks here already understand the practice methods, they don't make mistakes. But you must understand the practice. If you don't, you make mistakes and that's nothing but torture."

These hermit monks seem to have reached a point in their practice where they really can't help but wander off into the woods. Historically it was quite common in Buddhist traditions (especially Tibetan Buddhism and Chinese Ch'an or Zen) for monks to wander off to a cave or isolated hut for long periods of deep contemplation. In some branches of Tibetan Buddhism this occurs, however, after about a decade of traditional, monastic Buddhist practice. In some branches of Tibetan Buddhism it is required of monks to do solo retreat for three years and three months.

There are rare cases, however, where younger monks have been recognized as unique in their knowledge, karma and practice of the Dharma to where monastery life is not much of a challenge. In some rare cases it is a distraction for them to further their practice. So sometimes the abbots of those temples send them off to do a solo retreat. This usually is done with an older hermit monk at first but just long enough to get acclimated to the environment/way of life and then they're on their own. Thus the quote about Buddha having a teaching for the heart of every being whether they are an abbot, a senior hermit monk, a younger hermit monk, a novice monk or a lay person.

These men (and one woman--a nun) in this documentary have come to the place where solitude is required to enable their level of near constant meditation and mindful living. Isolation is a very strict, strong and effective teacher in that it forces one to confront that in the end you can't rely upon anyone else for your liberation. Even your fellow monks and practitioners. In practicing the Dharma in isolation one is forced to be with one's thoughts with nothing much to distract oneself from them day and night. The neurotic mind has little to manipulate out of the hermit monks life as silence and raw, naked, confrontation of nature exposes it's futility. Everyday actions take on new meaning when one has no one or no thing to rely upon to distract one from not just practicing Buddhism in general but total, complete, consuming submersion in mindfulness.

Some say they they wander off because they are near enlightenment and therefore where ever they go they are where they need to be. The lessons of mindfulness, of total immersion into mindfulness have carried them outside the monastery walls to reside in the monasteries of old--the forests and mountains. These locations are Earth's first sacred sites and some of the most pure, inspiring and liberating places. It was under a tree, in solo retreat after all where Buddha finally realized liberation.

For these practitioners the spirit of the monastery/sangha travels with them where ever they go. The monastery is everywhere to them including deep in nature where birds, monkeys and other animals are their teachers and fellow practitioners. As well as the trees, caves, waterfalls and rivers. And from time to time many of these hermit monks meet up with one or more other hermit monks in the area to discuss their practice with each other and stay on track. In this documentary the monks in these Chinese mountains are roughly an hour and a half to one day's hike away from each other.

I don't see them as radicals, rebels, misfits or heretics but rather as highly evolved spiritual beings who have reached the point of no return in their quest for final liberation. They seem to have come to the conclusion that monasteries can sometimes become havens for stagnation where it can be easy for some to become lulled into a state of spiritual materialism and spiritual laziness. Not unlike the tendency for some students at universities to stay in school for the socializing and status instead of the learning and growing aspects. So It's as if monasteries are universities for Buddhism where most monks are working on their undergraduate degree.

Whereas hermit monks are doing graduate and post-doctoral work, which is often undertaken independently that usually involves study outside of said universities, in the field so to speak and that means these "students" don't interact with the undergraduate students as much. I would venture to guess that a good majority of these hermit monks come back down after a few years of solitary practice to teach at a monastery. Not unlike a post-doctoral graduate returning to their university to teach undergraduates as a professor. Some, however, have been up their for numerous decades are will most likely die on those mountains and in doing so merge into parinirvana.

In "Amongst White Clouds" I really was inspired and educated by the hermit nun up on the mountain who quoted the Lengyan Scripture, which says in part, "Though there are words to speak, none of these are real. Talk and talk, like flowers falling from heaven--It's all worthless. So there is really nothing to say." This was an appropriate statement because it seemed many of the hermit monks didn't have much to say but their shining eyes and broad smiles sure did. One monk said after the camera man asked another question (and I'm paraphrasing a bit) "I've been talking all day with you and still you want more words?"

This same nun said, "All of the great masters, if they hadn't endured some hardship they wouldn't have opened their wisdom gate." I really connected with that particular insight as my hardship with mental illness is in large part what led me to Buddhism. Of course I'm not a Buddhist master but either way there is great wisdom to be adopted by all who follow the Dharma in that statement. No creation, no destruction.

Finally, consider these thoughts from the man [Red Pine] who wrote the book on these hermit monks, which inspired another man to do this documentary, "Amongst White Clouds":

I’ve never heard of any great master who has not spent some time as a hermit. The hermit tradition separates the men from the boys. If you’ve never spent time in solitude, you’ve really never mastered your practice. If you’ve never been alone with you practice, you’ve never swallowed it and made it yours. If you don’t spend time in solitude, you don’t have either profundity or understanding — you’ve just carried on somebody else’s tradition.

Yes, yes, the title of this column is obviously partisan. But you have to wonder at what exactly the Republicans are doing in the midst of the health care reform debate. RNC Chairman and token black Michael Steele recently characterized, again, the Obama administration effort as socialism. I bet the guy hasn’t even bothered to look up the meaning of the word on Wikipedia. If one understands socialism broadly as a society in which the government both owns the means of production and has control over the distribution of goods, then no Western country is a socialist state. But of course all Western countries, including the US, feature a partial involvement of the state in the economy (see bailouts, which started under W.) and as a guarantor of services (including those obviously un-American things like social security and the maintenance of the national highway system).

Steele complained that “this is unprecedented government intrusion into the private sector.” Well, I don’t know about unprecedented, but Republicans don’t seem to have noticed that the almighty private sector has recently managed to bankrupt the country because of its endless (but not mindless, these people ain’t stupid) pursuit of greed. Steele added, again flagrantly demonstrating either his viciousness or his stupidity, that the current plan means “more debt our children will have to pay because this reckless administration has an unrestrainable urge to splurge.” This is rich coming from the chairperson of the very same party that has acted on its unrestrainable urge to splurge on open ended war efforts that have significantly decreased national and international security, or to waste money in huge tax cuts for the richest few in the country. Tax cuts whose cost is comparable to several of the initiatives that Obama wants to pursue with the rather different objective of making our lives a little better. Compassionate conservatism my ass.

Do the Republicans at least have a credible alternative to the much despised Democratic plans? Of course not. When asked directly at a recent press conference, Steele’s flippant reaction was: “Look I don't do policy, I'm not a legislator. My point in coming here was to establish a tone.” Right, and that tone included stating that he hopes health care reform is going to be Obama’s Waterloo. Bipartisanship my ass.

Ok, now that I got that rant out of my system, let’s briefly discuss two of the most common (and ridiculous) arguments the Republicans have been putting forth against health care reform: a) the “public option” favored by Obama means unfair competition against the private sector; b) Obama and the Dems want to “put a bureaucrat between you and your doctor.” Both objections are, to keep with my main theme, either outrageously disingenuous or (equally outrageously) stupid.

Let us start with the public vs. private straw man. First of all, Republicans seem to forget that health care is about the welfare of people, not about profit. So even if it were true that a public option were unfair competition for private insurers, who gives a hoot, if that results in better health care for more people? Secondly, since part of the Republican creed is that the private sector always does things infinitely better than the public one, then what are they worried about? Surely the perennially wise “market” will soon make clear for all to see who’s got what it takes to run national health care, no? Thirdly, what keeps being underestimated here is the simple and indisputable fact that we already have a public health care system, it comes in the two varieties of Medicare and Medicaid. The first one is an example of the much dreaded single-payer system, run by the federal government, and which kicks in when people are over 65. The second one aids poor people throughout the country, it is funded by both the federal and state governments and run by the latter. Guess what? These public programs are much more efficient in terms of costs and overheads than any available private option, and they deliver one of the highest quality health care systems in the world. Indeed, I do not understand why Obama and the Dems aren’t simply going for the obvious solution, expand Medicare/Medicaid to the entire nation and be done with it. Oh, and next time you hear a Republican making the stupid pronouncement that government-run programs are by definition bad, ask him why he is so darn proud of our largest government-run program: the US military.

Now for this business of putting a bureaucrat between us and our doctors. Perhaps Steele and his colleagues haven’t noticed, but we already have plenty of bureaucrats between us and our doctors. They are the administrators of HMO’s (so-called “Health Maintenance Organizations”) and other private health providers who do precisely what Republicans dread a federal middleman might do: judge whether you have “pre-existing conditions” (and can therefore be turned down from any benefit whatsoever), or if your doctor wants to apply a treatment that is judged to be too costly to the insurance company (regardless of whether it may benefit your health or save your life), and so on. The difference is that a federal employee will not have the same motivation to increase at all costs the already fat bank account of the insurance companies at the expense of your health. Incidentally, what Republicans and some Democrats want to deny you is precisely the sort of high-quality public health care that they regularly enjoy as members of Congress. Now, how disingenuous and hypocritical is that?

Look, I am not being naive here. I do not think that the government is the solution to all our problems, and I certainly do not think that the private sector is intrinsically bad. There are plenty of things that are best left to entrepreneurs (though I don’t think we should allow any private operation to become “too big to fail,” but that’s another story). I simply think that health care is one of those fundamental conditions that ought to be in place to allow us our constitutionally guaranteed pursuit of happiness (second section of the Declaration of Independence, adopted on July 4th, 1776). For one of the richest and most powerful countries in the world to allow 50 million of its people to go completely uninsured, and for many millions of others to risk bankruptcy every time their families might be hit by a catastrophic illness is immoral. Serious health care reform including a public option is the decent thing to do, and Republicans are acting viciously by opposing it. It really is as simple as that.

* Oprah is not only a purveyor of pseudomedicine, apparently she has quite regressive views on sex as well.

I just finished reading an interesting book review by physicist Martin Blume in a recent issue of Nature. Blume was reviewing Eugenie Samuel Reich’s provocative book “Plastic Fantastic: How the Biggest Fraud in Physics Shook the Scientific World,” and the whole thing prompted some further thoughts about scientific misconduct, objectivity, and the peer review system that is crucial to the advancement of science.

Reich’s book is apparently very well researched (I take Blume’s word for it, since material physics is not my field), but she draws exactly the wrong conclusion from the case study she so thoroughly investigated. The biggest fraud that shook the scientific world wasn’t really the biggest (I would argue that Piltdown man, the fake missing link “discovered” in England in 1912 was much bigger), nor did it really shake the scientific world that much (I am a scientist, and I first read about this case through Blume’s book review). Still, it is an intriguing story in which a postdoc at Bell Laboratories, Jan Hendrik Schön, fabricated data concerning the properties of certain types of plastic (hence the title of Reich’s book) and got away with publishing papers in prestigious journals, including Nature itself, Science and several journals sponsored by the American Physical Society.

Reich, who is a journalist with a background in both science and philosophy, takes the moral of the story to be that “It seems like little more than blind faith to insist that all activity carried out in the name of science will always be self-correcting.” Well, yes, but as Blume points out, no serious scientist (or philosopher, for that matter) actually believes that.

The peer review process that is at the core of science’s ability for self-correction consists of two phases. The first one is the rather institutionalized practice that every editor of a scientific (or other scholarly) journal follows: when an author submits a paper for publication, the editor reads it and sends it out to a minimum of two reviewers who are chosen because they are experts in the particular field to which the paper is pertinent. The reviewers (who are anonymous to the author) send more or less detailed comments to the editor who then makes a judgment as to the suitability of the paper for publication.

But it is the second, more informal and open-ended, component of peer review that is really crucial. The first step relies on the expert advice of a small number of people (the editor and the reviewers), and it is subjected to conflict of interests (maybe one of the reviewers knows the author and dislikes her on personal grounds; or they have been in direct competition for grants, so that the reviewer has an interest in keeping the author from publishing). But after the paper is out everyone in the scientific community can read it, cite it (or not), and criticize it at meetings or in print. This second part of the peer review process is what really matters, because fraudulent papers in the long run end up in one of two categories: they are either completely forgotten because they didn’t really address an important topic at all (in which case the author gets away with the fraud, but there is no lasting damage to the scientific enterprise), or they are discovered because other people tried to replicate or build on the results and failed.

This is exactly what happened with Schön’s papers: they slipped through the first step of the review process, but spectacularly failed to pass muster during the second step. The failure of formal peer review in cases of fraud is not really that surprising, since the system is based on the assumption that authors are not just making stuff up. The aim of peer review is to reject or correct papers that are deficient in their methodology, data analysis, or in how well the author’s conclusions are substantiated by the empirical findings. Making stuff up doesn’t fall into any of those categories. Indeed, the real culprits there are Schön’s senior co-authors, who should have paid more attention to what they were signing off on, especially considering that some of the claims made by Schön were groundbreaking (like the discovery of superconductivity in plastic!).

Yet, contrary to Reich’s conclusion, these stories actually validate the scientific enterprise as particularly effective at uncovering fraud, when it really matters (i.e., for contributions that make a difference to science, as opposed to just adding a line to the c.v. of an individual researcher). The scientific peer review process (both formal and particularly informal) therefore is a bit like what Winston Churchill said of democracy: it is far from being a perfect system, but it is a heck of a lot better than any of the alternatives. Whatever works, as Woody Allen would say.

* A delightfully naughty editorial by Maureen Dowd on, you guess it, Sarah Palin!