The Real Tao
Warning: This post contains more speculative bullshit than (most) of the others. The reader is encouraged not to take it too seriously. It's a meditation on an idea I've long regarded as fundamentally important: the Tao and how the idea lines up with what we think "science" is telling us.
The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao
"Tao" is an elusive concept in the Tao Te Ching. Our physical laws borrow their appearance of solid reality from the reality they describe. The famous saying above (which lead me to become a part-time Taoist) points out the profound difference between a description and the thing itself *. I had earlier learned the same hard lesson in Physics 101, when the instructor firmly insisted that all science does is describe, not "explain".
A "description" is a system of statements "about" the "real world" out there. One particular kind of description I discuss here is a "program" that describes an organism, the organism's environment and a strategy for the organism to survive and thrive in that environment.
What kind of a "thing" is a program? As Medieval philosophers would have asked: what is its substance? Well, a program is made up of information. War and Peace is the same "thing" whether written on paper, carved in stone, transmitted as an e-book or memorized by a professor of Russian Literature. It can even survive translation to the silver screen as a bad movie. The medium is not essential to what it is. If only I could have explained this to the philosophers in 1200 I would have been famous. Or burned at the stake ...
It is worth noting that "information" is in the eye of the beholder. While a carbon atom is a carbon atom anywhere in the Universe, a bound copy of "War and Peace" is not information if it floats inaccessibly between galaxies. "Information" seems to be bound directly or indirectly to living things, although Stephen Hawking might strenuously disagree, but he was talking a different kind of information - the opposite of entropy. For the geeks, I'm talking about information the way Shannon described it. Explicit inclusion of the observer (mind) in the idea of information follows an interesting pattern we see in relativity and quantum physics. We can't take ourselves out of our theories about reality.
The wonderful thing about the simplest form of life I consider here - proto-life - is that its design "stores" the "program" of proto-life in the medium of reality itself. Lao Tsu would perhaps say it emerges directly from the Tao. He might also agree that all life emerges in the same way. But I wonder what he would say if he knew about the language of DNA. DNA fits my idea of a program - a "description" that is obviously not "written" in the same medium as that which it describes.
We see that there is something about life that insists on making a wider and wider gap between the medium of description and the what the organism is made of in the world itself.
It is fashionable these days for any book on perception or the mind to point out that the description of the world we hold "in our heads" is operational - more or less what we require to survive and limited to what evolution has handed us. This may describe the world-view of a dog, but not a human. The human "mind" is shared with 7 billion others on the planet and many millions now dead. It includes quite a few things that are hardly good for our survival (such as how to make an H-bomb as big as we like), nor relevant to our survival, such as the excruciating detail we know about the Big Bang.
But, for all its glory, human knowledge is still a description, not the thing itself.
Zen claims that there are two "brute facts" that must simply be accepted, not "explained". They are consciousness and the world. It is exciting to imagine that there is only one brute fact. For some reason, mystics have leaned toward this being "mind" but the more "scientific" bet is "the world". Or maybe there is "world" and we (or minds) are "information about the world". It so happens that information must be recorded in some kind of "real" medium, whether it's booked, stone tablets, electrical signals or patterns of neurons firing in a brain - in other words, no extra "world" is needed.
None of this is central to the topic of this blog, except that it's only fair to note that this is the way I imagine the world to be - it's always in the back of my mind. Perhaps you need to see the world this way for any of this to make sense.
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* I am aware of the other way "Tao" is used to refer to the "way", both the way we should live and the "way" of nature-nature itself. Words can mean more than one thing. Tao is a word that means all kinds of things at the same time. But this "way" idea strays perilously close to being a description of nature which is to be avoided. Indeed, "followers" of the "way" (and Zen) are told to do so without talking about it. These guys love paradox. One might say that the paradox is created by ancient Chinese farmers tackling the mysteries of language without proper training in computer programming. There should be no confusion between a thing and a reference to a thing. I digress ...
The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao
"Tao" is an elusive concept in the Tao Te Ching. Our physical laws borrow their appearance of solid reality from the reality they describe. The famous saying above (which lead me to become a part-time Taoist) points out the profound difference between a description and the thing itself *. I had earlier learned the same hard lesson in Physics 101, when the instructor firmly insisted that all science does is describe, not "explain".
A "description" is a system of statements "about" the "real world" out there. One particular kind of description I discuss here is a "program" that describes an organism, the organism's environment and a strategy for the organism to survive and thrive in that environment.
What kind of a "thing" is a program? As Medieval philosophers would have asked: what is its substance? Well, a program is made up of information. War and Peace is the same "thing" whether written on paper, carved in stone, transmitted as an e-book or memorized by a professor of Russian Literature. It can even survive translation to the silver screen as a bad movie. The medium is not essential to what it is. If only I could have explained this to the philosophers in 1200 I would have been famous. Or burned at the stake ...
It is worth noting that "information" is in the eye of the beholder. While a carbon atom is a carbon atom anywhere in the Universe, a bound copy of "War and Peace" is not information if it floats inaccessibly between galaxies. "Information" seems to be bound directly or indirectly to living things, although Stephen Hawking might strenuously disagree, but he was talking a different kind of information - the opposite of entropy. For the geeks, I'm talking about information the way Shannon described it. Explicit inclusion of the observer (mind) in the idea of information follows an interesting pattern we see in relativity and quantum physics. We can't take ourselves out of our theories about reality.
The wonderful thing about the simplest form of life I consider here - proto-life - is that its design "stores" the "program" of proto-life in the medium of reality itself. Lao Tsu would perhaps say it emerges directly from the Tao. He might also agree that all life emerges in the same way. But I wonder what he would say if he knew about the language of DNA. DNA fits my idea of a program - a "description" that is obviously not "written" in the same medium as that which it describes.
We see that there is something about life that insists on making a wider and wider gap between the medium of description and the what the organism is made of in the world itself.
It is fashionable these days for any book on perception or the mind to point out that the description of the world we hold "in our heads" is operational - more or less what we require to survive and limited to what evolution has handed us. This may describe the world-view of a dog, but not a human. The human "mind" is shared with 7 billion others on the planet and many millions now dead. It includes quite a few things that are hardly good for our survival (such as how to make an H-bomb as big as we like), nor relevant to our survival, such as the excruciating detail we know about the Big Bang.
But, for all its glory, human knowledge is still a description, not the thing itself.
Zen claims that there are two "brute facts" that must simply be accepted, not "explained". They are consciousness and the world. It is exciting to imagine that there is only one brute fact. For some reason, mystics have leaned toward this being "mind" but the more "scientific" bet is "the world". Or maybe there is "world" and we (or minds) are "information about the world". It so happens that information must be recorded in some kind of "real" medium, whether it's booked, stone tablets, electrical signals or patterns of neurons firing in a brain - in other words, no extra "world" is needed.
None of this is central to the topic of this blog, except that it's only fair to note that this is the way I imagine the world to be - it's always in the back of my mind. Perhaps you need to see the world this way for any of this to make sense.
---------
* I am aware of the other way "Tao" is used to refer to the "way", both the way we should live and the "way" of nature-nature itself. Words can mean more than one thing. Tao is a word that means all kinds of things at the same time. But this "way" idea strays perilously close to being a description of nature which is to be avoided. Indeed, "followers" of the "way" (and Zen) are told to do so without talking about it. These guys love paradox. One might say that the paradox is created by ancient Chinese farmers tackling the mysteries of language without proper training in computer programming. There should be no confusion between a thing and a reference to a thing. I digress ...
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