[Buddha-l] Views of Information & Knowledge (Culture & Religion)

[Barnaby Thieme]

Dear Malcolm,

As a fellow student of self-organziation and complexity theory, I share your 
interest in an information-theoretic reading of Buddhism. The "it-from-bit" 
interpretation of QM by John Wheeler appears in my eyes to be equivalent to 
the statement of the Sutra on the Ten Grounds that the three worlds are 
brought forth by mind, or the Prasangika-Madhyamaka tenet that all phenomena 
are dependent upon being posited by a conventionally-valid consciousness. 
When I read close, technical explanations of how these doctrines have been 
interpreted, such as Kensur Yeshe Thupden's magisterial "Path to the Middle" 
or Mipham Rinpoche's commentary on the Madhyamakavatara, I cannot doubt that 
the Copenhagen Interpretation of QM is recapitulating insights about the 
nature of experience that were deduced by Buddhist yogis centuries or 
millenia ago. At the ultimate level of analysis, the experience of a 
phenomenon is inseperable from experience itself, and attempts to abstract 
the subject out lead to incoherence.

I have seen some attempts to combine contemporary systems sciences and 
Buddhism, but most are not very good, with the notable exception of the work 
of Francisco Varela. His essay "Ethical Know-How" is one of the greatest 
exemplars of this kind of work.

All-too-often what I find is introductory works that attempt to serve as 
primers to both Buddhism and systems theory or physics, often doing a 
mediocre job at both, and paving no new ground. I'd be interested if you had 
any suggestions or references to material that deals with this issue in an 
intelligent way.

best,
Barnaby Thieme