Category Archives: Animal cognition

Entangled Lives

Posted on by under Animal cognition, Buddhism, ecology, Science

This is a post about a science book titled “Entangled Life”.

We are so entangled that we are all one is manifest very obviously to many who didn’t quite see it before. We all suffer if there is injustice. We all have to make hard choices in a pandemic. We are all involved, if not equally so. If anything, I have to watch being critical of those who seem to be waking up to this because the suffering and need to sacrifice  is more in their face now, including some spiritual types and even some spiritual teachers! Injustice and suffering, in the US and around the world, is not new. And for many it is and has been a whole lot worse than most of us face most of the time, even now.

So back to the book, “Entangled Life” by Merlin Sheldrake.

It is fantastic. It is about fungi. We wouldn’t survive now, and for that matter, life on land would never have evolved, without fungi.

While the book only covers some of these examples, as it is about fungi, it is clear that life is full of deep entanglements tht cant be untangled. Coral and algae. Algae or photosynthetic bacteria and fungi (lichens, which are surprisingly common). Fungi and plant roots. Animals and plants  their microbiome. Critical parts of your very cells were originally bacteria. Our cells, and so complex multicellular life,  couldn’t exist without them, they no longer can be free living outside our cells. Mitochondria in all animal and plant and fungal cells and photosynthetic plastids in plants, for example.

Read the book if you like biology, science, or just want to be inspired by the beauty and ubiquity and amazing being of fungi. It is my one of favorite not professional/technical biology books along with “I contain Multitudes” from a few years ago, also about entangled lives, though there are many other excellent non technical biology about pants (e.g. What a Plant Knows) and animal cognition. I like these two because they remind us of the deep, intimate connections in our lives and bodies with entities most of us rarely think about and both are full of great examples and opened up and filled in my knowledge of the nuts and bolts of nature that weren’t part of my professional expertise as a medical researcher and physician specialist in inflammatory eye disease.

How is that relevant to what I started this post with?

It reminds us we are not the crown of creation, it gives us perspective to appreciate that life is one on any and every level you can think of.

These books say don’t just see your own suffering, or for that matter, your own glory.

Don’t think your limited viewpoint is worth all that much.

Look deeper and wider.

Straw Men and Gaps

Posted on by under Animal cognition, autobiographical, Buddhism, Science

In my last post about evolution I may have not been quite on target on a couple of things.

First, I don’t want to set up natural selection as a straw man. If you look at a modern textbook on evolution you will find many much more subtle mechanisms for evolution in which natural selection may play a small or even no role at all (genetic drift, for example). Selection is still generally thought to be a final arbiter in most scenarios, but that is a given. If some change, no matter the mechanism, doesn’t allow for successful multigenerational reproduction at higher rate than what is already in play, of course it won’t result in change, and change, movement, transmuting energy into new form and function, is what evolution, is what life in the realm of the six senses, is all about. It’s such a given, so inherent in its formulation, that I referred to it as a tautology, out of respect, not as a criticism.

Second, I may have opened up a sense of awe and wonder of the “Gaps.” Like a God of the gaps, it is weak to the point of meaninglessness. Wonder and awe, deep inspiration, spiritual insight, samadhi, are not made more or less authentic and part of your life by gaps in some other view or metaphysical stance, including current scientific data or dogma. It is not a matter of using the gaps in science to create openings for anything else or to justify your practice or beliefs. Of course you can fit whatever fantasy or delusion you care for in those gaps, and fundamentalists do, but hopefully your world view is more coherent and doesn’t rely on gaps.

Science will never have no gaps. A gap is important in directing where scientists need to look to learn more. However, our approach to measuring the universe through extensions of our six senses is finite, internal to what we are measuring, and so has limits.  The limits of science will likely include our finite monkey brain with a certain number of synapses that evolved to survive in a given time and space or our technology which doesn’t have the oomph to explore the realms we dream up with our math and the implications of current scientific understanding of basic, fundamental physics. Many gaps, of course, will be filled IF our species survives and thrives. Science has a really good track record of surprising gap filling!

I watched a wonderful lecture series on particle physics from the Great Courses called “The Theory of Everything” given by Don Lincoln. If you want to know what is current thinking in physics, including where the gaps are, this is the series for you. But that isn’t its real strength. If you want to see how a working experimental physicist approaches the matter of matter and energy, this is the best out there. Now, it doesn’t go as much as you might like into the gee whiz stuff of quantum (a bit of course; has to!) and makes no real effort at “deeper meaning,” but that’s what I loved about it. Just what scientists think they know and what they think they don’t know about particles and forces.

One thing he points out: we can already describe the transformations of energy in all the realm of the six senses by a series of equations that would fit on a tee shirt. Problem is they are disconnected and don’t fit well together and require constants, numbers empirically derived, that we have no theoretical basis for. Lanza and Berman also discuss this in “Biocentrism”. A real gap in physics that these are experimentally derived, often approximated, and not derived from some single number and first principles. A very recent book that goes into that in detail about this is Lewis and Barnes “A Fortunate Universe Life in a Finely Tuned universe.” While I liked their detailed exposition of the situation, I wasn’t as enthralled by the philosophical discussion at the end; too dualistic.

There are gaps that I think will remain in science. One is any ultimate “explanation,” mostly because explanation past a mechanistic story or mathematical description will always be an attempt to take observations and fit them into a more sophisticated story that works on our human scale and perspective. Why should that work? We are primates! Why should the Universe, Truth, be primate friendly, understandable and graspable in its entirety by primate intellectual constructions?

Buddha famously warned against speculative metaphysics. He seems to have said something like: yeah I know a bunch of stuff, and so can you, but don’t get distracted. Take care of your world on fire. There will be understanding, but don’t get greedy, first things first.

Another gap I believe will be a scientific theory of consciousness. Lets say scientists can show exactly the neurologic correlates of consciousness to an exquisite and intellectually satisfying level of detail, way beyond what is known now. That will happen to one degree or another and is happening now in neuroscience. I am not as enthralled with neuroscience as an adjunct to my practice as some seem to be in the Buddhist community. I am currently enjoying “Behave” by a primatologist Robert Sapolsky. But, while I’m not through yet, this is not a metaphysical book, it explores how we function as human primates, as the subtitle says “the biology of humans at our best and worst.” Interesting stuff, so far a great read, but not about consciousness per se, but about our contingent biologic programming. Anyway, even if our scientific understanding of consciousness goes deep, deep, deep into quantum effects on the mind and in neurology  and  complex brain level activity, and grasps the role in our consciousness of inputs from the endocrine system, the immune system and the gut etc., and shows how it all fits together, will that be any different from describing the science of light (energy, electromagnetic waves, photons and quantum field theory) and perception (eyes, optic nerve, brain pathways) to a blind person and expect them to experience the color yellow? Heck, we sighted people with the usual kinds of photoreceptors (i.e. not color blind) don’t have yellow receptors in our eyes, yet we see yellow, as a story, a projection.

The universe is energy transformations. That changes in, and perhaps defines, our experience of time and space. That is what evolution is and it is of the nature of movement. The question is: what is the basis of these transformations, and whether consciousness, Mind, is fundamental, foundational? The most given of givens. The irreducible.

So, let there be no straw men or spirituality, awe or consciousness of the gaps. We don’t need no stinkin’ gaps or straw men to bolster our practice, to be compassionate, for samadhi, to be.

Brain Chauvinism: Do Thoughts Exist?

Posted on by under Animal cognition, Buddhism, Science

I have been reading “Beyond Words” by Carl Safina, one of many wonderful books out there on animal cognition. I highly recommend it on many levels to anybody and everybody, but it is particularly relevant to Zen practitioners, and I’ll tell you why. It forces the question: what is intelligence, at its most basic level? Is intelligence defined by having a brain or some semblance of free will? It is easy for us to relate to elephants in mourning as a sympathetic show of an emotional intelligence, a clear cognition and awareness, in a very different species, one we have not shared an ancestor with for tens and tens of millions of years, and so has evolved very complex brains quite independently of how our evolutionary path. The same goes for dolphins and wolves. Apes are of course our cousins, so maybe we are less surprised at their brainpower.

But what about living beings that aren’t mammals, that aren’t even vertebrates? We can easily see the intelligence of an octopus when it solves problems without a vertebrate brain. What about plants? There are a couple of books I have enjoyed on plant intelligence: “What a Plant Knows” by Daniel Chamovitz and “Brilliant Green” by Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola. There is clearly a kind of group mind cognition in social insects. Is there bacterial or protist intelligence? Certainly there is a staggeringly complex integration of a range of stimuli and response requiring a balancing act of inputs and outputs even in single celled organisms.

Why should a brain be necessary for awareness? After all, one can argue our bodies and brains are made of cells, and that these cells employ mechanisms that respond to input signals with responses that are not substantially different from the mechanisms used by single cell organisms. All such cellular mechanisms involve energy stimuli resulting in energy responses, as conditioned by biology and interactions with different energy inputs (colloquially called the “past” or “experience” or “the environment”).

Is free will needed for intelligence? It may be that our apparent free will is only a story we tell ourselves about these stimuli and responses as a survival mechanism. Maybe that’s part of why we developed language, to dress up our stories about our cognition, our responses, to better assuage us that we have some privilege, some substance that we don’t really have! It was once suggested to me the only free will we have may be the free will of attention, of, in Buddhist parlance, of waking up.

The view of some scientists is that the complexity of brains allows for ”emergent phenomena” like “true” cognition and awareness. That is certainly the case for awareness and cognition as we experience it with our brains, or insects or elephants and dolphins experience with their very different brains, but maybe that’s only because we are brain chauvinists. I am not convinced it is essential that there be brains involved for cognition, for awareness to occur. Do you have any idea of the complexity of signals, fluctuations of energy in molecules, changes in cell membrane electrical potential, the generation of new molecules and molecular conformations, required to get a paramecium or E. coli to move in response to light or nutrients, or for a plant to turn to the sun or release chemicals that signal danger to other plants? Are these really acting any differently than brains in a fundamental or substantial way? Clearly these behaviors of bacteria and roses are complex emergent phenomena.

Whether you buy the awareness and intelligence of the staph infecting your ingrown toenail, we have another prejudice besides brain chauvinism that is closer to home. It is the belief in the need for words to embody or create our thoughts, that the words in our heads are thoughts. Actually they are just our explanations, our stories about our responses to the energy state we find ourselves in at any given moment. That is why the title of the book “Beyond words” is so apt. Our mammalian cousins, with intelligence so much like our intelligence, do not use words to craft complex thoughts, communications and emotions.

Studies in human cognition show that much of what we interpret as our thoughts occurs well after the thought registers as brain activity. We dress up our brain’s perceptions and our brain’s responses with words, almost as an afterthought, as it were, to explain to ourselves, really to justify to ourselves, what we are doing, and why we are doing it.

Words are a supplement, a special skill we have, but it doesn’t mean that they always serve us well. Look at what we have used this tool for: greed and anger and the resulting hate and violence. Compassion and caring and anger and fear don’t require words. Look at our animal cousins! It may be that our word-filled brains are a failed evolutionary experiment. Perhaps we big-brained wordy mammals, as a corner of the universe unfolding, have unfolded in an evolutionary dead end. The universe is not sentimental. Mind will persist with our without hairless monkeys on the third rock from the sun.

Perhaps awareness is the true nature of being, foundational in a way that brains are not.

Minimally it behooves us as citizens of earth to open our minds to the minds of our living cousins. Perhaps more to the point we should understand the words in our heads are not our thoughts, just the story we tell ourselves about them. We need not attach to them and give them power over us.

I am not even sure that most of what we think of, or maybe any of what we think of, as thoughts has any substance at all. When is a thought a thought? When the MRI or EEG says so, when enough cell membranes depolarize in a specific pattern, before you are conscious of it, or when it becomes words in your head? Why is any of that “thought” other than we defined it that way out of convenience or arrogance? Out of a neurotic need to justify and reassure ourselves to ourselves?

If you are walking and take the next step without instructing yourself to do so with words, is that less of a thought than when you take it with words about that step in your head? What about the next breath you take? You can use words about breathing and you can control the rate and depth of your breathing, but you don’t have to. You will take a next breath either way. Is one breath more a thought than the other just because you clothed it in words and altered it?

Yasutani Roshi says in the book “The Three Pillars of Zen” that it’s all “makyo.” Makyo is a Japanese word used for hallucinations or other manifest delusional processes that are released during intense meditation. They can be frank sensory hallucinations, emotions, or complex delusional worlds we conjure up. They can be positive or negative. Indeed, then, perhaps the whole of samsara, the manifest universe, is makyo as Yasutani suggests. Perhaps all thoughts, all experience, all existence that occurs in the world of the six senses, are makyo as Yasutani Roshi suggests.

The complexity of our brains, the words that appear in our heads, is just a set of chemical reactions, of the energy fluctuations that form the substance of our perceived reality, the universe, even of awareness itself. But awareness doesn’t need our “big boy words.” We are brain and thought addicts. That is not only true for intellectuals and nerds. What we define as a thought is the brain chauvinistic tip of the iceberg of a vast web of energy transformations. Do we really need to privilege thoughts over awareness, or is that the essence of delusion? do we need to believe our stories about our thoughts?

What do you think?