Proper Use and Maintenance of Electric Monks

A 16th century clockwork monk.

The Electric Monk was a labor-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder.  Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.
- Douglas Adams, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

There is a certain irony in the number of posts that spread across social media that decry the various pitfalls of social media:  A video or comic exaggerating the tendency for no one to look away from the perpetual onslaught of glowing screens we are surrounded by, often by our own choice.  Mockery of and "How Not To" lists about all the inane posts on the trivial details of our lives that contain neither interesting nor useful information, adding to the overwhelming trend toward white noise in the content of social media.  And, as Facebook adds and enhances an algorithm to filter through the clutter of content to attempt to deliver us the cream of the social media crop (while also giving Facebook an excuse to demand money for delivering content to fans), growing concern mounts that Facebook will devolve into an echo chamber, delivering us only the content that conforms to our existing preferences, feeding back into our biases, and failing to provide challenges to our ideas or intellects.

Although it is certainly a possibility that Facebook's filters will exacerbate our existing biases, pointing fingers at Facebook only serves to distract us from the fact that these biases exist anyway, and that without addressing our own fallacies (such as blaming external factors like websites for our failures) we will continue to find the same faults reproduced in whatever media we use.  Similarly, complaints about the noise on social media and the tendency to prefer even this noise to direct, personal interaction is like blaming a hammer for not pounding the nail in properly — the tool is only as useful as our use of it.  Certainly, tools can be faulty, but even then if we continue to use them instead of replacing them, then we forfeit our right to reasonably complain.

"Truth be told, if you're looking for the guilty you need only look into a mirror."

Social media, like any form of communication, is only as useful as the messages we use it for.  Being social creatures by nature, it is only natural that we desire to communicate.  Moreover, as is a recurring theme in my writing, communication is our most effective tool for combining our efforts with those around us, expanding our influence and growing ourselves.  The thing we need to remember, though, whether using social media or speaking with someone directly, is that communication is important, but so is having something worth communicating.

The tendencies toward self-gratification and reinforcement and a preference towards shallow, low-risk interactions seem plenty prevalent in person; social media just tends to amplify our noise.  Small talk prevails and discussion of deeper matters such as religion and politics is often taboo.  We avoid offending each other because we are so easily offended ourselves, seemingly incapable of fathoming that anyone might have and even adhere to an opposing point of view, or that we could tolerate such differences in people.

Often we see the opposing view not as a passing disagreement but as an affront on beliefs we hold dear.  Other times, we seek validation because we do not believe others see us the way we see ourselves, or because we fear we are not living up to our own expectations.  As with much of our lives, problems arise because of the disparity between what we expect to be and what is, often because what we think should be is what we think we deserve.  Problems arise because we fail to challenge our own beliefs — we fail to determine how much our beliefs reflect actual truths, and moreover we fail to examine how much these beliefs actually matter.

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When I first read Adams' description of the Electric Monk, I thought the idea a comical exaggeration of tendencies towards gratification for minimal effort, shirking the intellectual responsibility of actually having to believe anything or consider whether any of our beliefs were objectively true or otherwise worth adhering to.  I imagine this was at least part of the intended tone, considering that in another book, Adams described humans as "ape-descended life forms...so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea."

Yet, surrounded by both our own beliefs and those of others, it becomes difficult to remove ourselves from the context of such beliefs to consider their efficacy.  Perhaps, like social media, the Electric Monk as a tool reflects its wielder.  Granted, the Electric Monk is so far purely a construct of science fiction, but the important use of the tool is not that it believes things for us, but it frees us from having to believe those things.  Why could we not, then, simply take a moment every now and then to stop believe anything, to simply observe, and to determine what beliefs arise from what we can ourselves determine?

"If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things." - René Descartes

How far, then, can we doubt our beliefs?  Should we believe in our own existence?  Surely, cogito, ergo sum.  What about others?  We can witness their behavior, and it certainly seems intelligent, at least sometimes.  But what about our perceptions?  Can we not believe we observe something that is not there or fail to observe something that is?  Whether or not we believe what we perceive, we have no other evidence to act upon besides our perception, so we might as well use what we have.  Object permanence seems a safe enough belief, but it is still only a belief.  However, until evidence starts to suggest that there is a flaw to my assumption of object permanence, I am comfortable believing in it.  It certainly so far seems a useful assumption that things continue to exist when they are not in my immediate perception.

Easy enough so far.  What about the real challenges?  How can we attribute our emotional responses to the world when our emotions are purely in our own heads?  What are we doing with our lives, and why?  Is there a God?  If there is, what then?  If there is no God, what then?  I do not know what you believe, and, moreover, telling you what to believe would defeat the purpose of suggesting the pursuit of our own individual understandings grounded in truth instead of derived from logical fallacies or the dictates of others.  If you are curious as to my beliefs, you will find many of them in my writing, and moreover I welcome anyone to further explore their curiosity by leaving a comment.

Eventually, though, we inevitably encounter questions we cannot answer and beliefs we cannot prove with pure objectivity, observation, and reasoning.  The first things we must ask is what happens if our belief is wrong?  I have been lead to believe by various articles that water has been found on Mars.  However, I have not visited Mars, nor do I ever expect to, and therein will likely never have direct proof of whether there is water on Mars.  Yet, if there turns out to be no water on Mars, I doubt my life will be significantly altered.  I might have to change my beliefs slightly, and I imagine the nature of the scientific articles I read will change.  What about more immediate things?  I have never seen an atom, for instance, not even by using any sort of electron microscope — the workings of which I would in turn have to have some faith in.  Yet what I know about chemistry is supported by the evidence I encounter in my life, and therein, like object permanence, so long as that holds true, I am comfortable accepting such beliefs.

What of beliefs we cannot prove and questions we cannot find answers to, even through evidence provided by others?  The first thing we must do is ensure that the beliefs do not contradict evidence, even if neither evidence does fully justify them.  Secondly, we must consider alternative possibilities and weigh why any one holds more merit than others.  Lastly, we must consider the consequences of a belief.

Is there a God?  As I have said before, I am agnostic, lacking even context for a definition of what a god is to begin assessing available evidence. Nevertheless, I can examine the question: Does the belief in God or the absence of God contradict available evidence?  If we maintain a belief in young-Earth creationism, perhaps.  Otherwise, the nature of a possible God is so arcane and abstract that it can easily be defined to be supported by or contradictory to available evidence, depending on our desired endgame.  Similarly, alternative possibilities are difficult to consider when we do not know which ones play into the definition of God.

What then, of the consequences of the belief, one way or another?  Morality and meaning can be found outside of the context of a God — a pursuit I have devoted much of my thought to.  On the matter of an afterlife, all I know is that if my destiny postmortem is determined so decisively by my answer to an unanswerable question, it is done so by a deity I do not wish to follow.  I hope that, if there is a God, He is as merciful as dictated in some sources, and that my efforts to seek and share truth are as valuable to Him as they have been to me.  If, somehow, I am wrong, then in the end I hope to be less worried about myself and more worried about the good I have done for others.  Indeed, there is probably more use trying to do good in Hell than Heaven.

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Not long after we are introduced to Adams' Electric Monk in Dirk Gently, we find that it had already begun to malfunction, specifically believing all sorts of unusual things:

The Monk currently believed that the valley and everything in the valley and around it, including the Monk itself and the Monk's horse, was a uniform shade of pale pink.  This made for a certain difficulty in distinguishing any one thing from any other thing, and therefore made doing anything or going anywhere impossible, or at least difficult and dangerous.

Yet whether we believe in the existence or nonexistence of God or in uniformly pink mountains and valleys, problems arise when we fail to consider whether available evidence supports or contradicts our beliefs.  Moreover, when these beliefs dictate our actions, we can be hindered ourselves or even led to hinder others.  We cannot let our perspectives of ourselves be determined by our or others' beliefs, nor can we let those beliefs alone dictate our actions, whether on social media or anywhere else in life.  Neither can we dictate the beliefs of others; we can only hope to point out the same truths we have discovered, but it is up to others to discover these truths for themselves.  Moreover, when they point elsewhere, we must be willing to accept the possibility that we are the ones in error and consider the possibilities they present.  Even if we find we are correct, we may find that their view is just the truth from a separate perspective.  Otherwise, should they err, we are best able to help them by leading them from where they are, not by shouting at them from across a gap.  And, most of all, never forget that we must occasionally put aside our beliefs and question, as far as possible, all things.

A Few Words on Words

Kyogen Oshō said, "It is like a man in a tree, hanging from a branch with his mouth; his hands grasp no bough, his feet rest on no limb.  Someone appears under the tree and asks him, 'What is the meaning of bodhidarma's coming from the West?'  If he does not answer, he fails to respond to the question.  If he does answer, he will lose his life.  What would you do in such a situation?"

- Mumonkan by Mumon Ekai, translated by Katsuki Sekida

Words carry power.  Through words, we can — with some luck — communicate our stories and thoughts across thousands of miles and over thousands of years.  The Norse considered the power of their alphabet supernatural, attributing magic to their runes.  Their runic alphabet is even said to originate from their chief god, Odin, after a period of sacrificial contemplation (often told as him impaling himself to Yggdrasil, the tree whose roots bind together the realms of the universe, for days).  Väinämöinen, a chief god in Finnish mythology, was said to have a magical voice, able to command supernatural effects.  In Jewish mythology, the Hebrew language holds power, even able to bestow life to a lifeless statue to create a golem.

Yet words hold no inherent power; simply telling a stone to move does not make it do so.  An understanding observer is necessary to draw out the power of words, but similarly, without words, that same intelligent observer is limited to their own understanding, cut off from shared experiences that cannot be immediately observed.  Words, instead, allow us to learn from the experiences of others — even those far removed by distance or time — and to share our experiences in turn.

Yet to find an individual who is completely understanding is more than any of us can hope.  Our interpretation of words is guided by our own experiences, and these are unique to each of us.  Yet, if we were ever to find an individual who completely understood the nuances of what we had to say exactly as we did ourselves, then we would have someone who was either an echo of ourselves or contextually omniscient, and either way the words would be a pointless redundancy to them.  We could, perhaps, try to establish formal definitions for every word and an infallible syntax structure, but it is difficult to pin down formalized notions for such things as "nostalgia" or "beauty", and too often already do so many debates devolve into arguments over semantics instead efforts to find truths.  Moreover, as the mathematician Kurt Gödel demonstrated, no sufficiently expressive system is not without its paradoxes, but that is a discussion for another post if not another author.

Taoist and Zen teachings both maintain the limitations of words.  The Tao Te Ching begins:

The way that can be articulately described is not the Unchanging Way.

The name that can be said out loud is not the Unchanging Name.

This seems like a rather counterintuitive way to start out a book, announcing the author's intention to put into words that which cannot be put into words.  Yet both the philosophies of Zen and Tao have at their core a pursuit of thought patterns at cognitive levels other than surface thoughts — ways of thinking that therein cannot be reached purely through the mere reading of words without deeper consideration.  Because of the inherent limitations of interpersonal communication, we can encourage patterns of thinking with words, but cannot guarantee them.  Opening the Tao Te Ching by announcing that the concepts within it cannot be fully articulated is simply to warn the reader that they must not be simply a reader but a student, not simply receiving the words but considering them more thoroughly, or else their actual meaning would be lost on the reader.

As Sekida tells it, Kyogen, while a student of Zen, encountered the limitations of words.  He had studied the teachings of Zen thoroughly, but knowing the words and reaching the mindset they described were two very different things.  Seeing that the words hindered Kyogen, his master, Isan, proposed a question to him that he knew he would not find an answer to in his texts.  After attempting to answer and begging for an explanation, Isan replied, "What I say belongs to my own understanding.  How can that benefit your mind's eye?"

Frustrated and defeated, Kyogen burnt his books and abandoned his study, declaring "You cannot fill an empty stomach with paintings of rice cakes."  Leaving his school and his master, humbled if not humiliated, he went to take up the lowly job of grave-keeper.  However, it was this acceptance of insignificance that allowed him to abandon his ego and begin his path to Zen enlightenment.

It is not lost on me that one of the most significant moments of my own life was when I, too, was feeling insignificant.  More importantly, though, was not that I felt insignificant, but that I decided to accept insignificance.  I found that it is not whether or not one's self is significant that is itself significant.  The consideration of the self should not be purely of the self, but of one's place in the world, even in a purely literal, physical, causal sense.  The egocentricity we possess imposes our beliefs upon the world and muddles the truth.  The disparity between what really is and what we believe should be — often what we believe we deserve — is the source of despair, anger, greed, etc.  Our habits of comparing ourselves with others furthers this disparity and alienates those others from us, creating jealousy and conflict when we could be cooperating to combine our efforts into something more.

Shuzan held out his short staff and said: "If you call this a short staff, you oppose its reality. If you do not call it a short staff, you ignore the fact. Now, what do you wish to call this?"

The short staff is what it is, but considered only unto itself and not within the context it exists, we know nothing about its reality.  Similarly we should consider ourselves, not as isolated individuals, but as parts of the universe we exist in.  We should strive for the abandonment of ego; not only is that part of the path to Zen enlightenment, but the Christians, too, teach "Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth."

The Zen moreover teach the pursuit of awareness as a tool to find one's place in one's environment — for considering oneself in the context of everything else.  For Kyogen Oshō, pure awareness was said to have been achieved when, while sweeping, he heard a stone strike bamboo, and the sound was considered not simply as a categorized and semantic piece of experience as we tend to approach everything but in its pure form as it truly was, resonating and echoing, and stilling of Kyogen's thoughts.  For me, the first time I encountered my true, contextual self was when my thoughts were similarly arrested by a thunderstorm, and its immensity as well as my recent life experiences left me humbled, yet led me to discover that I could do far more as part of the universe than as an isolated individual.

Words, like ourselves, short staves, and everything else, should therein be considered in context.  We should know both their power and their limitations.  Relying purely on words leaves us in a situation like the man hanging from a tree by his mouth, doomed to fail whether he answers or not.  Yet we are not capable of telepathy or Vulcan mind melds; words are in many cases the most effective tool we have in communicating our thoughts, and therein participating in this pursuit of acting in context with the rest of the universe — acting with those others capable of receiving our words.

Abandonment of ego, it seems to me, is only the first step.  Exploring the potential of the larger patterns we are part of is the natural logical progression.  Yet to fully do this, we are often left with little more than words to share our thoughts and experiences.  It is through words that we can extend our intellectual essence into others, and allow their words to build us up — being careful not to simply stare at paintings of rice cakes, considering words at their surface and neglecting to explore deeper truths.  Words may often be all we have, but, then, it is a good thing that words carry power.

The Speck in the Storm

Photo by Renee A. Pflughaupt

July 19, 2011.  I arrived home at that ambiguous hour between late at night and early in the morning as the winds were conjuring a thunderstorm across the horizon.  The clouds had yet to unleash their torrent upon the lands below, but the sky was already flooded with lightning; it was lit as much as not, and the echoing thunder of each bolt would still be rolling through the hills when the next struck.  At times, the lightning lit the heavens so brightly I could not help but shield my eyes, yet I found the beauty of the storm overwhelming, and neither could I look away.

Within the past month or so before that night, I had seen the end of a seven-year-long relationship, moved back into my parents' house, and received the offer to renew my graduate teaching assistantship in Morgantown only a week after I had left the city.  I wasn't even sure if I had lost my path in life, or if I had simply given it up.  I only knew whatever it was I lost, it was the result of having lost hope — I had over time grown increasingly disillusioned with society and humanity on a whole, and the turns my own life had taken did nothing to restore any hope to me.

Yet here I paused to simply watch the storm, its majesty overwhelming.  Its beauty and power left me in awe as I watched the immense force of lightning being tossed about whimsically by nature.  With each bolt burning hotter than the surface of the sun, unleashing thunder that shook the hills for miles, I came to realize how small and powerless I was compared to even a single lightning bolt, and here the sky swarmed with them.  How much more insignificant, then, is a single person when compared to the grandeur of the universe, when our planet is but a speck of mud orbiting one small star at the outer reaches of a galaxy so vast that it takes light hundreds of thousands of years to cross it — a galaxy which in turn is just one of hundreds of billions in the observable universe.  And these stars that populate this immense universe live their life cycles over the course of millions if not billions of years, and each of these lives is but a tick of the clock that drives the galaxies.  We are but the tiniest of particles struggling in vain to leave an imperceptible mark on the universe within the briefest of fractions of a blink of the cosmological eye in which we live.  ...And here I was wasting time worrying about how I didn't have a job or a girlfriend.

A sense of absolute insignificance flooded over me.  Yet, in the midst of setbacks and stumbles, I didn't find it threatening or insulting.  I found myself neither disheartened nor defiant, but relieved if not liberated.  Everything I was — the music I had played, the pictures I had doodled, the programs I had coded, all my greatest accomplishments faded away into nothing amongst the echoing thunder, but so too did all my failures, my mistakes, my incomplete projects, student loans, and lost relationships.  The universe did not judge me, neither good nor bad.  In the end, whatever would be would be.

In retrospect, the difference between being at odds with this nearly nihilistic rumination and accepting it had nothing to do with how significant I previously thought I was, but how significant I thought I should be — how significant I thought I deserved to be.  When I lost hope, I had not found myself lamenting that I had neither found my place in the world nor left my mark upon it, but only the disparity between the actions of humanity and what little of the truth I had come to understand having pursued objectivity and reason for a number of years.  Still seeking the same objective truth, I found no reason to fight the truth I was now confronted with — even that of my own insignificance.

Yet as my mind wandered through these concepts, the storm raged on, still demanding my attention.  After all, why would I bother thinking about myself when I knew how small of a thing I was?  And so my thoughts continued to roam freely throughout the storm, until eventually I found myself contemplating the mechanisms underlying the formation of lightning — the tiny ice crystals that collide midair, exchanging even tinier electrons, until at last they push the electrical charge of the atmosphere far enough out of balance that it snaps back into place suddenly and violently — striking as a lightning bolt.  All the awesome power of lightning that inspired my feelings of insignificance had at its core insignificant specks of ice exchanging even more insignificant particles until enough of their efforts combined to shake both heaven and earth.

Why, then, could it not be true of people?  Surely I was still insignificant, but if I were to combine my efforts with other insignificant individuals, together we could achieve something truly significant.  And unlike the storm, my influence was not limited to immediate physical interactions — through language we are capable of communicating across expanses of both space and time.  Moreover, I realized I need not be an unaware pawn in a greater game of chess when the human capacity for abstraction should grant me the necessary tools to consider the whole that I was a part of.

I knew I had realized something significant, but it would take me years to begin to appreciate what in particular that was.  The most immediate truth of that night — that we should, whenever possible, aspire to combine with others into something greater than our individual selves, choosing whenever possible cooperation over conflict — has remained unchanged.  Yet as I set down that road, I never would have predicted how far it would lead, and I dare not speculate how much further I can wander down it.