A Substrate Independence Thought Experiment and Buddhist Technology

[elfs]

 

5. Buddhism is far & away the most rational religion but its very rationality should make us wary.
   
   
   — Jeet Heer (@HeerJeet) October 17, 2017

Jeet Heer called that an "unpopular opinion." I think he's right.

I'm going to do some intellectual violence to Buddhism here, but in doing so I hope to open up a couple of pointers and maybe open up a discussion about a central tenant of Buddhism. Buddhism is basically an entirel religion built around one essential insight: you are not your thoughts, and your thoughts arise for reasons over which you have very little control.

That's it. The rest of Buddhism is an attempt to make sense of this insight, and to use it fruitfully. The technology for doing so is meditation. ("technology: the means and knowledge used to provide for human sustenance and comfort" — oh, if only!) And there are only three subdisciplines of meditation that you have to master in order to acheive Buddha's essential insight.

Concentration

The very first skill of Buddhism is being able to focus and control your thoughts on demand. This is the infamous Breath Meditation, the one that bores everyone and is the first major hurdle to overcome. This is the time when you spend first five, then ten, then twenty, then longer, concentrating only on a single thing: your breath, a candle flame, a mantra, a thought, a feeling. That's it. It's a discipline.

And for someone like me, with mild ADHD, it's been incredibly useful.

Mindfulness

The second skill is mindfulness. You can't even begin to practice mindfulness until done concentration for a while. Mindfulness starts with being able to recognize when your mind has wandered off from concentration. Over the weeks and months of concentration practice, you develop a sense of mindfulness about your own mind. There are two subdisciplines of mindfulness: external and internal.

External is easier: you become mindful of what's going on around you. You pay attention to the world, to everything around you, labeling every stimuli accurately but not considering anything else about it: not its origin, not its disposition. You can do it with your eyes open, even.

Internal starts out simply enough: meditating on physical states, like what temperature is your big toe, how much pressure is being exerted by your knees, what angle are you carrying your head at. Eventually, though, mindfulness moves to emotions: what does it feel like to feel sad, or angry? Where in your body do you carry stress? Where in your body do you feel happiness?

Between these two, you develop a sense of the transience of all these feelings. Thoughts happen to distract you, you are not entirely, or even mostly, in control of them. The best you can do is keep them marshalled.

Insight

Insight is the hardest of all. It builds off mindfulness. Insight is the realization that those feelings you're having aren't you. You've already developed a sense that your feelings aren't under your control. The distraction to get up and get a drink, or turn away from whatever you're working on to watch YouTube or hit Facebook, is terrible, but that distraction either is you or isn't you, and there's not a whole lot of in-between.

Even more importantly, the border between "you" and the "world" gets a little fuzzy. Sure, it seems to be your skin, but the world comes in through eyes, ears, your nose and mouth. Your skin and the world are in a constant negotiation about the temperatures and pressures to which you're subject, its comfort and its texture: is your skin "you," or is it doing something without your "self" making decisions?

Now the point of insight is to chip away, mindful moment by moment, that maybe there is nothing at all that is you. There's nothing you can point to that's "you" in a coherent sense. There's a version of you that's hungry, and cranky, and happy, and joyful, but none of those is in a real sense "you," an incontrovertible noun that represents you-ness.

The Buddhists claim that those who have had the full insight, the moment when all of sense of yourself has been extinguished and you've fully embraced the idea that there's no coherent "you," you become ineffably aware of the fragility of everyone else, and in doing so become more compassionate and wise, an arahat.

The science fictional view

"The Transporter Paradox," which asks who you are if you're disassembled in one place and reassembled in another, complete and accurate down to the last quark, is a classic of modern science. I've played with it myself. My robots talk a lot (too much, maybe) about negotating that barrier between themselves and the world, about the nature of thought, even about the way we come up with narratives to explain why we act in certain ways. My brain uploads find that giving up the body has its own suite of challenges, and many opt for simulated bodies to keep the level of stimuli familiar and comforting.

But the one thing that brain uploads also challenge is the idea of reifying time. In the current world, we have these lovely tools called "time traveling debuggers," which record the state of the program as its running, and allow programmers to view the program's memory state as a graph of use-over-time, looking for spikes and strange behaviors and bugs. If we reified someone's brain state in the same way, would that be the "self" she claims as her own? It would be more concrete, it would wrap the Buddhist objections about "impermanence" in a malleable, permanent representation. It would, in fact, challenge Buddhism to treat time as a phenomenon that is part of, and not distinct from, the three-dimensional representation of the body.

On the other hand, it would also definitely reify the way "you" and "your world" are inseparable; just as a time travelling debugger makes no sense without both a program to run and a computer to run it on, a consciousness running on any substrate, be it meat or metal, requires a context in which to exist. So in one sense, we've found a thought experiment that solidifies one sense in which Buddhism's insights about human nature might not be true, and one in which they are even more true. "Impermanence" is itself an illusory effect of any one human being's inability to perceive more than a singular instant of time. And yet, "selfhood" itself becomes something without any independent existence at all; your "self" doesn't exist except as an illusion, like a seam of silver in the great mines of spacetime that can't be extracted without destroying both.