Your Meditation Guide Blog

When you hang out with medical students, you find yourself privy to all sorts of behind-the-scenes secrets of the profession, some of which make you feel like a savvy insider and others of which make you nervous about ever ending up in the care of a doctor. Somewhere between the former and the latter lies the following fun fact: When a doctor diagnoses you with an "idiopathic" illness, you might assume that implies he understands what's making you sick -- until you look up the definition of "idiopathic," and discover that it means "arising from unknown causes." That's right: when a doctor tells you that you have an "idiopathic T-cell deficiency," he's actually saying, "We have no idea why your T-cells are low." And if you doubt me, please allow me to direct you to the 1966 edition of Stedman's Medical Dictionary, which, to my immense amusement, describes the word idiopathic as "A high-flown term to conceal ignorance."

Having an official-sounding explanation that stands for "we have no freakin' clue" is just one particularly stark example of what I'm coming to see is a ubiquitous phenomenon: our tendency to believe we've resolved our ignorance when all we've really done is relabel it. Putting a name on the gaps in our knowledge gives us the feeling of knowing more, and if we don't think about it too hard, we might not notice that feeling is illusory.

Put another way, what feels like a solution to a mystery is often just a re-statement of the mystery itself. French playwright Moliere famously lampooned this phenomenon in his 1673 play La Malade Imaginaire, in which a character wonders why opium puts you to sleep, and the parody of a doctor explains that it is because the drug contains a "dormitive potency."

Actually, it's barely a parody. There's a rich tradition in the history of science of people attempting to explain a mysterious phenomenon by proposing a mysterious substance as its cause. For example, what causes life? The "theory" used to be that it was generated by a substance called élan vital (literally, "life force".) Saying "Life is caused by élan vital" felt more like a real explanation than saying "We don't know what causes life," even though we couldn't say anything else about élan vital other than the fact that it causes life. As evolutionary biologist Julian Huxley dryly remarked, "To say that a biological process is explained by élan vital is to say that the movement of a train is 'explained' by an élan locomotif of the engine."

There's nothing inherently wrong with using placeholders for what we don't know. "Dark matter" and "dark energy" play this role in astrophysics today. "Dark matter" is our label for whatever unknown substance is making stars orbit faster than we expected; "Dark energy" refers to whatever is causing the universe to expand faster than we expected. Physicists are well aware that "dark matter" and "dark energy" are placeholder terms, and they're actively trying to pin down what's really going on so that we won't need them anymore.

But placeholders become a problem when they fool you into thinking that you're finished with your explanation. And even though science as a whole may not forget that the phrase "dark energy" doesn't actually explain anything, I think individual people fall for this phenomenon all the time. We feel like we've explained something when we know the word for it, even if we don't know anything beyond the fact that this word is the "right" answer. When a kid asks, "Why does stuff fall down?" and his parents say "gravity", they think they've answered the question. But if someone asks them what "gravity" means, can they give an answer beyond "Uh... it's what makes things fall"? Knowing the right buzzword isn't the same as understanding.

Of course, any explanation you give for what gravity is ("an attraction between objects that is proportional to the product of their masses") immediately raises more questions ("What causes the attraction? Why did our universe have to work that way?"). No matter how much you understand about the world, you can keep asking "Why?" and you eventually have to fall back on "That's just the way things are" or "We have no idea." But being able to understand how a phenomenon is entailed by the natural laws of the universe, even if you can't explain why those particular natural laws exist, is a huge step up from merely knowing which label describes the phenomenon.

I'd venture a guess that our tendency not to recognize placeholders for what they are has its roots in the way our schools are structured, in the way we learn to learn. In school you get points for knowing the right answer, for writing the correct phrase on the test, and you learn to recognize that question X goes with response Y. What we come to think of as "learning" is often little more than a sorry blend of rote memorization and call-and-response; is it any wonder that we think merely knowing "gravity" is the word for "why things fall down" means we understand what's going on?

Then there's that mother of all placeholders, "God." In "The Perimeter of Ignorance," one of the essays in his book Death by Black Hole: And Other Cosmic Quandaries, Neil deGrasse Tyson recounts how even the sharpest scientific minds throughout history have invoked divine providence when they reached the limits of their ability to explain the world. When Isaac Newton hit a stumbling block in his Principia -- why do all the gravitational forces between the objects in our solar system balance out to produce stable orbits? -- he concluded, "This most beautiful System of the Sun, Planets and Comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being." And 17th-century Dutch scientist Christiaan Huygens explains the planets' motion and composition in great detail in his Celestial Worlds Discover'd, but falls back on God when he gets to less-understood phenomena, like the mystery of life: "I suppose no body will deny but that there's somewhat more of Contrivance, somewhat more of Miracle in the production and growth of Plants and Animals than in lifeless heaps of inanimate Bodies," he writes.

Of course, unless you can say something about how God created life, you haven't explained anything; you've just relabeled your ignorance. Which is not, in and of itself, harmful. The danger lies in forgetting that questions like the origin of life are still open questions, ripe for the solving -- and in clinging to your placeholder rather than gladly replacing it with a real explanation when one comes along.

The Public Broadcasting Service here in America was kind enough to send me an advanced copy of the documentary, "The Buddha" by David Grubin, which is set to air on April 7th (check your local listings). It tells the story of the life of Buddha and the teaches he shared that would bloom into one of the largest religions of the world. As I watched it noticed I noticed that it was very similar to Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh's book, "Old Path, White Clouds." It is a book that is very thick and somewhat tedious to read in parts but it is probably the best book I've read on the details of Buddha's life as we know them. If you don't have the time to read such a large book then I highly suggest watching this documentary if you can.

The imagery used in this documentary is as beautiful as it is inspiring. The fields and villages shown look as though they probably did back in Buddha's time, which helps the viewers realize the timelessness to Buddha and his teachings. I found this documentary to be very intimate in that it portrays Buddha in such a humble light. Some documentaries laud him to the point of godhood, which I think the awakened one would caution against. The music blended nicely with the storyline and carried us from scene to scene as if it were Buddha's hand itself guiding us along. In a sense, this documentary not only tells his story but our own as well. After all, the point of his story is to open the door to the path he followed, for ourselves. It is not just a bedtime story but rather a map that explains life itself.

* Massimo debates Mike Treder over at bloggingheadstv on the questions of immortality and technological optimism.

Dear Readers and Followers,

I want to talk about love. But in order to do that, I have to first talk about strep throat.

If you have certain symptoms, like a sore throat and fever, you can guess that you might have strep. And you'll either be right or wrong; either the streptococcus bacteria are present in your body or they're not, and luckily you can go to a doctor to get a strep culture and find out the answer.

Now let's look at another health problem. (I promise I'll get to love eventually.) You can be diagnosed with "Narcissistic Personality Disorder" (NPD) if you meet at least five of a list of criteria specified by the American Psychiatric Association, including "requires excessive admiration," "lacks empathy," "shows arrogant, haughty behaviors," and so on. In other words, NPD is the name that we give to a loose cluster of related traits. With strep, your symptoms suggest the presence of the underlying condition; with NPD, your symptoms are the condition.

The reason all this is relevant to love is that I think most people consider love to be analogous to strep throat. People observe their symptoms -- attraction, obsession, dependence, contentment, admiration, and so on -- and wonder whether they are "really" in love, the same way you might observe symptoms like a sore throat and fever and wonder whether you really have a streptococcus infection. Unfortunately there's no conclusive test for whether you're in love the way there is for strep, but many people are still convinced that there is a right answer even if they can't be sure of what it is -- sort of like an invisible Love switch that's either flipped to ON or OFF.

I think this is all fundamentally misguided. Instead, I'd argue that love is actually more analogous to NPD: it's a word we use to refer to some collection of properties. "Love" isn't the underlying condition of which those properties are symptoms, as with strep; "love" is the name we give to those properties, as with NPD.

(You might be tempted to ask how I can claim love isn't a distinct underlying condition, but I think the burden of proof is on those who claim it is. We all agree on the existence of the feelings of attraction, obsession, dependence, and so on, but to posit the existence of an additional underlying property causing those feelings is to add a hypothesis with no explanatory power.)

How did the American Psychiatric Association pick the particular criteria required for an NPD diagnosis? Partly, the reason is that those traits tend to appear in combination with each other (if you "lack empathy," you're more likely than the average person to also "show arrogant, haughty behaviors"). But picking that particular list of traits and picking "five" as the magic number needed for a diagnosis was really somewhat arbitrary; we just needed some cutoff to standardize our use of the word.

Of course, there is no official checklist specifying which feelings need to be present in order for something to qualify as "love." People use the word in vastly different ways, even within the context of romantic love. Some people might use it to refer to a feeling that other people would instead describe as a crush or an infatuation. Some people would use the word love to describe a feeling that other people would call possessiveness (i.e., "That's not love because he doesn't care whether she's happy, he just wants to control her"). And some people might use the word love where others would say "No, that's not love -- that's codependence." Given the wildly contradictory "checklists" we are all carrying around in our heads, it's no wonder that most disagreements over "Is this love?" boil down to people using different definitions of the word.

If this line of reasoning is starting to sound familiar, it should. My previous post discussed how different people use totally different criteria for deciding what counts as art, and that when people disagree about whether a particular object "is art," they're really just arguing about the definition of the word. For any given case, you can usually find definitions of art that would include your case, as well as definitions that would exclude it. And the same is true with the question "Is this love?"

But if you're wondering whether you're in love, and someone shrugs and says, "Depends how you define love," that probably won't feel like an answer. I suspect that's because "Is this love?" is really a disguised query just like "Is this art?": people associate various characteristics with the idea of being in love -- i.e., love lasts forever, or love is the ultimate emotion, or anything is worth sacrificing in the name of love -- so what they're really wondering is whether their situation shares those characteristics. So, "Is this love?" could be a way of asking "Is what I'm feeling going to last?" or "Would it be possible for me to be happier in another relationship?" And of course, those are important questions. But you're not getting any closer to answering them by deciding whether to affix the label "love" to what you're experiencing.

(Does all this make it sound like I "don't believe" in love? I sure hope not, because judging from the movies, the girl who "doesn't believe in love" is inevitably forced to admit the error of her ways after enduring a brutally cheesy montage involving snowball fights, paddleboating and/or impromptu karaoke. So, please: don't tell Hollywood I said this.)

I was recently sent an advanced copy of an upcoming documentary on PBS titled, "Unmistaken Child." It follows the journey of a young monk in Nepal looking for the reincarnation of a great lama who also happens to be beloved friend. This documentary was as much about finding the courage to believe in yourself as much as it was about finding the reincarnated Rinpoche.

As a Zen Buddhist, I try not to follow my mind down the rabbit hole into the realm of what happens after death too much because it is keeps me from staying in the "now," which is really the only moment available to us. It is where our practice takes place. So I have been taught that if I concentrate too much upon what might happen I miss what is happening. However, for the sake of conservation I have no problem with the idea of death and dying. I also have no problem with the idea of rebirth and suspect that it happens. Likewise I have no problem with the possibility that nothing happens after you die.

However, reincarnation of a specific person or "soul" seems counter to what the Buddha taught but I'm no expert. As a skeptic of the Tibetan Buddhist tradition of reincarnating lamas I must admit though that this documentary really makes me reconsider the possibility again. I truly marveled at how accurate the process was. Look for a cameo from the Dalai Lama.

It truly was remarkable to follow the journey of the young monk seeking his reincarnated teacher and watching his struggles, his triumphs, courage and undying patience and respect for his mentor. The documentary did a wonderful job in showing us the intimate process of testing children to reveal the new body of this master. The dialogue was minimal, which seemed fitting for such a sacred and serious mission. I didn't realize how intricate the process was for finding a reincarnated lama. I had some idea from the movie "Kundun" as to how the Dalai Lama was found but I didn't know that the process involved divination of the ashes of the cremated teacher, astrological charts and dream interpretation.

It was fascinating to discover just how deep Tibetan Buddhism is intertwined with the metaphysical. After watching this movie and getting even more insight into the heavily ritualized nature of Tibetan Buddhism, it really does seem like its own branch of Buddhism. So instead of the traditional recognition of only two main branches of Buddhism, Theravada and Mahayana, it makes sense that some say there is a third--Vajrayana, because Tibetan Buddhism is so unique. While there is some overlap with Mahayana schools, Tibetan Buddhism has such a distinct nature, which is probably due to its development in such an isolated region of Asia.

Anyway, the documentary was enthralling, inspiring, educational and revealing. The scenery of the Nepalese highlands is stunning and worth viewing this film for that alone. The high mystical peaks seem so very fitting for such a otherworldly exploration. I highly recommend you watch it when it airs on PBS (Public Broadcasting Service) here in America on April 7th at 10p.m. (check your local listings).

The next episode of Rationally Speaking, the podcast, will be on instances of “fluffy thinking.” I have written a bit about it recently in my entry on Krista Tippet and her new book, 'Einstein's God'. There I quoted not only Tippett herself, but eminent physicists Paul Davies and Freeman Dyson. Another example would be author Karen Armstrong, who recently published 'The Case for God'.

What I claim all these - and many others - have in common is a peculiar type of uncritical thinking, which I refer to as “fluffy.” This is distinct from downright irrational positions, like creationism, for instance, or fundamentalist religious beliefs, or the belief that vaccines cause autism, or that homeopathy can possibly work. In all of these cases one can point either to clear empirical evidence (vaccines do not cause autism, homeopathy does not work, the earth is much more than a few thousand years old), or to the sheer incoherence of the belief (if you read the Bible literally, which of the two distinct stories of creation do you believe?).

The problem with fluffy thinking is that it sounds much more sophisticated, and it is next to impossible to criticize frontally both because it barely has anything to do with empirical evidence, and because it is hard to articulate what, exactly, these people are saying. So, for instance, when Freeman Dyson - who is a really smart guy - says things like “Science is full of mysteries. Every time we discover something, we find two more questions to ask, and so that there’s no end of mysteries in science. That’s what it’s all about. And the same’s true of religion,” what are we supposed to do with that? Besides the trivial observation that the one-for-two ratio is entirely made up (sometimes science does settle questions, and that’s the end of the line), in what sense could this possibly be like religion?

Or when Paul Davies, another guy who ain’t exactly an intellectual lightweight, states “Augustine was onto this already in the fifth century because he was addressing the question that all small children like to ask, which is, What was God doing before he created the universe?,” can we ask Prof. Davies on what, exactly, was Augustine “on”? Certainly not on Einstein’s conception of time (which is the context of this quote), and more likely on nothing at all, since god is a human made construct, and therefore it is rather silly to ask what he was doing “before.”

Or consider Tippett herself: “From a religious perspective, there’s something intriguing, though, in how these ideas of physics might seem to echo spiritual notions that you can find in Eastern and Western religious thought.” No there isn’t. This reminds me of one of the most awful “documentaries” in the history of humankind, “What the Bleep Do We Know?” a mushy concoction - not unlike pretty much every episode of Tippett’s National Public Radio show, Speaking of Faith, where scientific notions are distorted and mixed up with barely intelligible mystical “insights” that are put forward as profound truths.

The question we will be tackling in the podcast is not only the obvious one of whether there is anything interesting in what these people are saying (there isn’t), but rather the much more difficult issue of why it is that smart individuals, who make their living thinking and writing about science and philosophy, are attracted by fluffy thinking. And moreover, why is it that this sort of thing appeals to so many listeners and readers on the grounds that it seems to strike a “balance” between obvious bunk and “cold” reason? Your opinion?