The Subjective Stance

First, a provisional definition of ontology, gleaned from the Oxford English dictionary and the website “ontology a resource guide”. Not that these sources are definitive, but they do seem to represent mainstream thinking about the subject. (A) Ontology is the theory of objects and their ties. The unfolding of ontology provides criteria for distinguishing various types of objects (concrete and abstract, existent and non-existent, real and ideal, independent and dependent) and their ties (relations, dependences and predication). (B) • noun Philosophy: the branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature of being. The good news is that ontologies are ambitious because they try to capture all of Being (One might ask, “what is Being?” For our purposes, we can assume “Being = Everything there is”). Therefore, ontologies are one way to grapple with Being as such, not just some domains of particular Beings. The bad news is that ontologies presuppose a distant observer who sees all of Being, a ...

Paradoxes have been used since the beginning of systematic philosophy ( Zeno 's paradox, for example) to signal problems where earlier generations might have seen none. The mark of an authentic paradox is the presence of two or more sources of intuition that seem obviously true on the one hand and collectively incompatible on the other. A careful look at paradoxes often prompts developments in science or mathematics - Zeno's paradox was addressed by the development of infinite series and the notions of limits and convergence. More recently, I have been looking at paradoxes that arise from vagueness , such as the sorities paradox. Many terms in natural languages are vague, such as TALL. When is a person tall? A tall Pygmy is probably a short Swede, so clearly tallness depends on the context. But context by itself is not enough to remove vagueness, because we can well imagine that there are people who are borderline cases of tall, whether in the Republic of Congo or Sweden...

Can the Real ever be understood directly, or are we human beings fated to a limited understanding, enfolding the Real in partial perspectives? The ancients, whether Indian or Greek , thought that the Real could be understood, even experienced directly. They always admitted the possibility of full and complete enlightenment. On the other hand, the world (Logos or Samsara) may have seemed to some ancients as being irredeemably fallen. We modern people invert this scheme on its head. In our worldview, the individual human/finite-being is central, whether in science or in literature or philosophy. Kant , for example, made explicit the modern idea that noumena, things as they truly are, are beyond the scope of the human intellect. We are confined to our prison. A biologist might add that this prison walls are determined by our genes and just as a dog cannot understand the Riemann Hypothesis, human beings cannot understand certain things because of the limits of our cognitive capacities. ...

I was walking across the Charles river in Cambridge on Massachusetts avenue. It is a beautiful walk, the bridge is about half a mile long, with a panoramic view of Boston and Cambridge. While I was walking across, I found myself looking at some of the boats in the river. When I was doing that, I noticed the railing on the bridge because it was blocking my view of some of the boats. There was something intriguing about the shift of focus, that I decided to treat the railing as an "object" while walking. The rest of the walk (on the bridge) must have lasted about three minutes. What I noticed was that if while in some sense the railing was one object, it definitely was experienced as many different objects depending on what I was doing. When I let my gaze rest on the portion of the railing immediately to my right there was no sense of it being an object at all -it was just a flow of regularly shaped bars. It was such a hypnotic feeling that I was completely absorbed, losing any...

Here is an exercise , suggested by my friend Piet Hut , followed by my report about the exercise. Feel free to perform it yourself and leave comments! The Exercise . Take a collection of objects in front of you. Become fully aware of your role as subject, observing/watching these objects. Then, reverse the subject and object roles, and let those objects watch you. Spend a few minutes doing this. What happens? What do you register? How do you feel while registering? Note: You may find the idea of an object watching you nonsensical or strange. Interpret these intructions in whichever way you feel comfortable. After doing this once, or a few times, you may try the following variation. Instead of a collection of things in front of you, do the same experiment with an thing behind you, preferably a large thing, such as the wall behind you. In what way does it make a difference working with an object that is present but not within your field of vision? Finally, you can try yet anot...

There are several ways in which one could approach the dialogue between science and contemplative traditions (meditation, yoga etc). I can think of three strategies myself: Use scientific methods to study contemplative traditions. In this camp we can club a variety of methods, such as the traditional (reductive) strategies that seek to explain contemplative traditions via psychological, anthropological or sociological means; attempts to map out the neurophysiological basis of yoga as well as recent attempts to get Buddhist yogis and neuroimaging people to collaborate with each other. The second approach is to say that the contemplative traditions have a knowledge of different worlds or states of reality that modern science does not know about and then to exhort science to expand in those directions. In this category one would include re-evaluating the limits of mental imagery after looking at the ability of certain Tibetan monks to visualize Mandalas , as well as radical breaks from c...

The relationship between "experience" and "knowledge" is one that crops up repeatedly, in conjunction with the issue of the relationship between "practice" and "principle". On this issue, I find quite different opinions in the (mostly western) Buddhist community and the classical Indian, both Hindu and Buddhist sources. I find the emphasis on technical practice in modern Buddhism similar to the emphasis on technicality in other domains, say, science and philosophy. While this emphasis is correct in many respects, because our beliefs about our world are rather mistaken, it seems to me that technical practice of any kind evolves quickly into its own world, one that on top of having the drawbacks of "conventional Samsara" is also disconnected from existential concerns and lived reality. I noticed this very clearly when I got exposed to abstract mathematics, which I thought was an entry into the absolute (I was ...

The ability to metaphorically project meaning from one sphere of experience to another is a very powerful tool that we human beings have. If it were merely a weak tool allowing us to make simple analogies but did not give us a real purchase on things we find important, it would not matter so much. But it has a very strong functional use. As cognitive science slowly moves from symbolic to embodied approaches, we still don’t understand the basic problem that metaphors are solving in some way. Where is it that concepts get the structure allowing them to map between more abstract things and less abstract things? We can even start by asking something much more basic: How is it that concepts are able to refer to the world at all? How is it that when I say “cup,” I mean cup? The utterance “cup,” is just a sound. How is it that a sound ever gets to a thing? Experientially a sound has an auditory dimension, and maybe it has a meaning dimension, but an object “cup” doesn’t have any of these...

Almost a lifetime ago, when it looked like the BJP was going to romp home in the 2004 elections and their NRI supporters were crying themselves hoarse about the perfidy of Muslims and other minorities as well as defending the deeds of the Narendra Modi government in Gujarat, there was another little battle being fought, a battle that occupied the mind of yours truly and other Indian academic types. That battle was about some NRI Hindus finding the behavior of certain American academics, such as Wendy Doniger and Jeffrey Kripal , insulting (perhaps heretical - if one could use that term in a Hindu religious context, but I believe that one can't). WD, JK and other Western scholars of Hinduism have written books about the sexual life of certain Hindu gods (Ganesha, for example) and religious figures (such as Ramakrishna), sometimes using psychoanalytic techniques to analyze the unconscious impulses behind these myths as well as the human beings who believe them. At the same time,...

I was lying in bed a few nights ago, unable to sleep when I had a flash of insight. I was thinking of the reality of the waking world and why it has such a powerful hold on our lives. We usually subordinate other forms of our experience to this world – for example, we tend to explain dreams as experiences that take place within the brain of an individual who in reality is sleeping in the real world. In this scheme, the world of the dream derives its reality from its grounding the awake world, so that, for example, dream experiences do not have real objects of their own unlike awake experiences. At the same time, we embody the assumption that awake experiences have the magical ability to touch reality. This assumption is prior to our perception of the external world or to organized forms of reality making (like science). Scientific theories derive their force from the belief that they makes contact with reality, an assumption that if you look closely, comes from an unconscious assumpt...

Let me start with a question: “What are our needs and how can we know them?” There is a famous saying of Gandhi to the effect that the world has enough for our needs but not enough for our greed, which of course prompts the retort, what is need and what is greed? Broadband internet? Cheap public transportation? Is acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran greed, while the development of nuclear weapons by the US need? To take this a bit further, one should also inquire, “who is asking this question and where are they coming from?” Viewpoints change continuously so that today’s need is yesterdays greed. We know that social consciousness changes over time – three hundred years ago, if someone were to say that a free-person would voluntarily submit themselves to someone else’s will for the better part of their waking life, 17th century human beings would find that extremely bizarre. Yet, that is what we do these days, white collar and blue collar workers alike. Yes, I know that life in those...

This is a long topic - but to give a one line slogan, what I would say is the following: " IS = OUGHT " In other words, reality does not distinguish between the way we live and the way things are. While one can make a distinction between the two, the separation between what is and what one should do is an abstraction (admittedly, one with a pragmatic value) that has no ultimate truth attached to it. From this slogan, it also follows that the abstract pursuit of knowledge (that academia stands for) is based on a fundamental metaphysical flaw, the flaw of the "objective stance", of individuals seeing the world as it supposedly is , but from afar. The obvious flaw, is that the objective stance is based on a theory of is , not what is actually IS . To use a Clintonian phrase, it all depends on what your definition of is is. The objective conception of is is just a conception, one from which the separation of is and ought follows. Not everyone agrees with this s...

A curious reader might wonder why I have juxtaposed Einstein and the Buddha in one phrase. After all, one is the legendary founder of a world religion and the other was a physicist. The kind of person who takes one seriously rarely take the other seriously, despite enormous amounts of new age ink spilled on the topic of science and religion, or for that matter, despite the Dalai Lama's interest in science. Which is a pity, but also a historical reality. By the way, if you want to read how the western fascination with the occult and para-science has been closely intertwined with the interest in Eastern Religions, you couldn't do better than Peter Washington's book, Blavatsky's Baboon , which shows that the quest to make religion more scientific is very much a part of the modern world - hence the attractiveness of Buddhism, which has been cast as a rational religion, grounded in experience, not dogma. That said, Einstein and the Buddha share many interesting traits, inclu...

If you need any further proof that the New York Times is incorrigibly racist when it comes to international affairs, look no further than today's (Saturday, December 10th, 2005) Times, here and here . On page 3, they have a rather patronizing (mixed with a teeny tiny hint of worry) review of Evo Morales's prospects as a Presidential canditate in Bolivia, which, if he wins, will make him the first Andean leader in South America in five hundred years. Then, in the opinion page, you have the usual diatribe against Hugo Chavez , the U.S's latest bete noire. In case you don't believe me, or have the time to read the original articles (or if the links are dead), here are a few quotes from the first article. Judge for yourself: "........Crowds of peasants amassed behind him, while a ceremonial escort of indigenous leaders led him across cobblestone streets to a field filled with thousands. There, Mr. Morales gave the kind of leftist speech that increasingly strikes a c...

By universalism , I mean the idea that there are some fundamental principles that are true of (or apply to) all individuals in some domain (my definition is more general than the wikipedia definition articulated in the article I have linked to). For example, Newton's laws of physics were thought to be universally valid until relativity theory and quantum theory supplanted them with other physical laws that are now considered to be universal as well. Another example is the universal declaration of human rights , which outlines certain rights that apply to all human beings. Ever since the discovery of universal physical laws by Galileo and co, scientists and others have assumed that universals capture the most fundamental aspects of the domain in question, its essence , so to speak. Proponents of string theory and other unified theories of physics will go to the extent of saying that certain universal laws constitute the essence of everything that exists. Therefore, univer...

I was thinking about Descartes ’ classic example of doubt . His attempts to identify the most secure form of knowledge lead him to his own consciousness as the unassailable ground of knowing. I agree with his assessment though I think it misses an essential point, namely, that there is an existential as well as a epistemic puzzle behind the normal lack of doubt about our own existence or consciousness. Of course this is not a reason to think that consciousness and existence are domains outside the scope of doubt, but it does suggest that the lack of doubt reveals an essential aspect of how we know our own existence. I think that the essence of how we experience and know ourselves is tangential to the kind doubt that concerns Descartes, who is after certainty. Doubt is the fundamental state of the scientist. He is always trying to reduce uncertainty to a minimum. Scientific knowing assumes a cognitive kind of doubt, as opposed to existential doubt, which is not about reducing uncertain...

I was reading Amartya Sen's " The Argumentative Indian " in which he has a chapter about India's decision to test nuclear weapons in 1998. Sen's piece is well reasoned and concludes (rightfully) that the Vajpayee government's decision was a mistaken one. Sen analyses the decision along two dimensions, ethical and pragmatic. The ethical question is whether it is morally defensible to have nuclear weapons, and as any reasonable person would conclude, the possession of genocidal arms of any kind is dubious (to say the very least). Despite the five big powers' - U.S, Russia, England, France and China- hypocrisy in this matter, their criminality doesn't make our decision right. The pragmatic question is whether the tests helped India's cause, to become a big power in its own right. Here, Sen's conclusions are less convincing. He argues that it lead to the perception of India and Pakistan as petulant children with dreadfully dangerous toys in their h...

A familiar sight in NRI Desi progressive circles is the yearly visit by an NGO dignitary, the Magsaysay award winners and their like. The visiting activist tours the US and Canada, lecturing to sold out crowds in university towns like Boston and Berkeley. Each event has a typical logic - it starts with a litany of complaints about the Indian political system (don't get me wrong, our system is incredibly corrupt and venal, but I am more interested in how this commonplace insight has been ritualized), and then how the activist and his fellow warriors have battled the forces of evil, followed by ritualized questions from the audience. Typical question: "How can we help while staying here?" As far as I am concerned, there is no difference between these ceremonies and more traditional religious events, where a Guru comes and lectures about life and people ask him (its mostly a him) questions about how they can make their life better. In Desi progressive circles, the whole ...