The Universe in a Single Atom

I picked up an interesting book yesterday. The Universe in a Single Atom, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama. It's quite a good read, and makes some interesting points. Basically, it's the Dalai Lama's attempt to explore the connections between science and spirituality. Because Buddhism takes a strongly empirical approach, there's a lot to connect.

There's a fascinating logical disproof of the existence of a theistic god (his terminology) as creator, according to the Buddhist way of thinking. As I understand it, it goes: (1) this god is immutable and unchanging; (2) to cause something to happen changes the one doing the causing; (3) therefore, no immutable god can be the cause of anything. This is actually a specific version of a more general Buddhist idea, that there are no distinct, separate entities in the universe. At least, not at the deepest level of analysis. For instance. I eat some yogurt. That yogurt was produced at a factory which received milk from a farm which bought feed for its cattle...the yogurt was in a plastic container, which came from a factory, which molded the plastic, which came from petroleum, which came from animals dead millions of years... Rather than seeing separate objects, this perspective sees entire processes, which seem to converge in an object, but that object is not permanent: it will eventually fade away. Some schools of thought take this to the extreme 'all is illusion' position, but that doesn't seem to be the Dalai Lama's take on it. Mainly, he wanted to show the absurdity of an entirely separate, unchangeable entity interacting with a distinct universe.

One place where I strongly agree with the Dalai Lama is in the area of cognitive research. Western Science has a tendency to stick measuring devices on everything and say they know everything there is to know. But they don't. They have no information on the subjective experience. There is a place for the purely empirical data, but it's of no practical use without some subjective information. The Dalai Lama suggests using Buddhist meditational techniques to explore states of mind (utilizing the empirical methods as well, to see what observable differences there are). One of the reviewers at Amazon criticized this as "vague," which is a bit ridiculous in a purely exploratory book. I can think of at least one precedent to the subjective approach to consciousness. A while back, I ran across a short article about a very articulate autistic person, who was able to report and describe what it was like to be autistic. From the outside, all we get is numbers and data. From the inside, we get information that we can relate to (and use to interpret those numbers and data).

The book's one shortcoming is that it does not go into any one topic with very much depth. There are brief overviews of each idea, a small amount of discussion, and then a new idea is explored. It does mean that there's probably something of interest to nearly everyone, but parts of it did feel...too brief. still, it's a good read, and I would recommend it.

One last idea that I'm still pondering. The way the Dalai Lama sees it, if altruistic behavior serves an evolutionary purpose, then it is not truly altruistic. So he seems to reject out of hand any evolutionary explanation for positive traits. It took me a few rereads of the section to figure out what he was trying to get at. I think I follow his thinking, but I'm not sure I agree with it. He has no quibble with evolution as an explanation for neutral or negative traits, however. *shrugs*