Zen+ Symmetry and Compression - Better Versions of Old Questions

"Surfaces and Essences" teaches us about the importance of analogies - the key principle behind human thought. When looking at "Ancient Wisdom", we are struck by the poverty of analogies being used. This is not surprising since when these ideas originated, there were not a lot of "core" situations to rely on. Thus, for example, we wind up with theories that "explain" the world in terms of invisible people (Gods) with distinctly human motivations combined with powers that seem to be invented to fit the circumstance.

We can do better.

The Standard Model of Physics is the current "state of the art" when it comes to "explaining" what is going on in the Universe at the most basic level. The model can be boiled down to one equation or a few related ones, but the general idea is that everything that happens in the Universe must satisfy the equations of the Standard Model, which can be written down on a single 8x10 sheet of paper.

Beyond its direct application, there are a lot of interesting things to note about the Standard Model.

• It's an example of data compression. It summarizes a vast amount of direct experimental evidence and claims to apply to every situation in the Universe at all times and places.Of course, it takes a graduate education in physics to "unpack" the equation. This can be compared to the Bible, which many claim has all the lessons one needs for life in general but famously needs an expert to "unpack" and apply to any specific situation. Of course, the Standard Model and the Bible apply to totally different domains of human experience, but it's still true that the Standard Model does a much better job of compression than the Bible.
• The Standard Model is shot through with examples of symmetry of all kinds.It applies to any situation from the point of view of any observer. In any experiment, the time and place are not relevant, nor simple things like rotation of the frame of reference. Like compression, symmetry turns out to be a powerful idea in the sense that you get more out of it than you put into it. For example, many aspects of the Standard Model were deduced by assuming symmetry before they were verified by experiment.

In other words, Zen+ prefers ideas that are short and symmetric. This is probably a side effect of the way our brains work, but there is good evidence that the Universe itself somehow "prefers" simplicity and symmetry. 

You can see this preference in the Tao Te Ching, the "Bible" of Taoism, which can easily be read in an hour or two. The little book attempts to boil down its advice to seekers in an extended analogy with Nature itself - the key is to learn from Nature, especially the value of water and emptiness. The lessons of the Tao Te Ching apply in all times and places. We can see this attempt to simplify evaporate almost immediately in the commentary that is bound with most versions of the little book. We love simplicity but cannot resist the temptation to comment and elaborate endlessly.

You can see the same thing going on with the 10 commandments. Jesus apparently attempted to boil those down to one (The Golden Rule) but that obviously failed because most of the original 10 are left on the cutting room floor by the Golden Rule. The original 10 are open to interpretation too. What, exactly, does it mean to say "Thou shalt not kill?" Obviously, the history of Christianity is full of slaughter on a large scale. It seems that followers of all religions feel free to set aside their fundamental rules of conduct when it suits them (or when authority says they don't apply). All this hints at the possibility that rules of human conduct cannot be compressed into a short formula. It's not that we have the wrong formula. It's that such things resist compression. That's why we have lawyers and vastly complex rules of conduct that differ from country to country, time to time and situation to situation. It also means that Zen+ should steer clear of any attempt to formalize rules for human conduct. That's not to say we shouldn't have such rules, it's just that our rules are not likely to have the lovely symmetry and power of (for example) Standard Model, nor will they have the prestige of being rules set down by Universal law (whether you believe in a Universal Law Giver or not).

One of the guiding principles of Zen+ is the respect for what we know about ourselves, especially what we know about the brain, which is the instrument we are forced to use to figure out what is going on. Among its many amazing capabilities is the brain's ability to compress a vast amount of information into what is "relevant", along with its ability to detect "Change without change" - symmetry. These two capabilities are not unrelated and seem to be the job of cortical tissue in the brain. Compression and symmetry are already at work in what we see in the world. But this is not just a matter of how our brains work. The world itself seems to be based on generally applicable rules (we call them "laws of nature"). The "objects" that our senses present to us are, in a sense, real.

This insight contrasts to a certain extent with the Zen idea that objects are not real, that their reality depends on interpretation. I think of this as the wrong answer to a good question. The two ideas can be resolved by speaking more carefully about objects and sensations in the world, a long tradition of Western Philosophy. There is plenty of room for mistaken perception and even more when we pile theory on top of sensation, but we should not totally abandon the idea that the world is "out there" and we can, with care, determine a lot about what is happening. That is the assumption underlying science and when science challenges tradition, we must give way to science.

A thread of Zen thought is that there are two "brute facts" that we must accept: the reality of the observer and the reality of the world. We can quibble about the details, but we are probably wasting our time questioning either of these things. But this is not to say that we cannot learn a lot about both the observer (consciousness) and the world. We can be profoundly wrong about the nature of these two things. We can, for example, legitimately ask what it is like to be an ant or whether space and time are fundamentally real. Such questions are very un-Zen-like but are natural in Zen+.