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

[Erik Hoogcarspel]

Barnaby Thieme schreef:

> 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

This view is very modern, it's based on the logocentric view that the world is based on eternal selfevident principles. I think this is wrong, because I never could find such a thing. What something is, is determined by its function and the way people deal with it. QM is something typical for our time, it could not be comprehended by yogis in ancient India. Pythagoras theorem today (valid for an infinite number of dimensions) is incomparable to what Pythagoras had in mind.

Erik


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