Tag: Buddhist Practice

Sociopathy versus truth

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This video* is fascinating. It shows a deluded martial arts master in Japan being summarily defeated by a real MMA (mixed martial arts) expert.

The first part of this video shows some footage of the deluded master’s students being thrown around by his “ki” alone, without being physically touched. To me it appears that the student are in a sort of “sociological hypnotic state” in that they want so much to believe in their master’s abilities, they will consciously or not fake being impacted by his ki. The students and the master are all self-deluding; they are all in concert deluding each other.

The next part of the video shows an MMA expert coming to fight the master, who has made a public bet of $5,000 thatt he can beat any MMA expert in the world. This shows that the delusion of the master’s students has fully reinforced his own delusions to the point that he believes he can beat anyone in the world.

The next part of the video shows the master being badly beaten by the MMA expert. In their first exchange, the MMA expert lands a blow to the master’s face and then politely, respectfully asks him if he wants to quit. The referee repeats the offer, giving the master a chance to bow out. He chooses not to and is more seriously beaten in the next part of the video.

The fight proves decisively that the master and his students were deluded.

I want to coin a new word here. We all know that a psychopath is an individual who lacks empathy and reasonable behavior toward others. The word sociopath is often used as a synonym. I want to repurpose the word sociopath to mean any group of people that lacks empathy toward other groups, or that lacks a rational basis for their behavior. In this sense, the master and his students are sociopaths—their beliefs are not true and can lead to their members or members of other groups being harmed.

If you were in the master’s group before the fight shown in the video and if you had said that you thought his ki powers were bull and continued to argue the point, you would have been rejected by the group. In psychological terms, that group would have branded you as someone with antisocial personality disorder (ASPD). The truth, of course, would have been that you were right and the master’s group was wrong. They were actually suffering from what might be called antisocial sociology disorder (ASSD) because their sociology was based on harmful lies.

This distinction can be found all over the world. Throughout history most groups have had ASSD. That is, most groups are selfish and harmful. Their core beliefs cannot be justified in an objective way and their core positions cannot, to them, be falsified. In short, most groups in history do not adhere to a Rawlsian ehtical position.

I do not see any other rational, ethical or reasonably justifiable foundation for any group of people except a Rawlsian one. Only a Rawlsian social basis can be reasonably called rational, objective, and falsifiable.

The kiai master in the video above was confident or foolish enough to have his position falsified, but most groups do not have such simple positions and few of them will openly permit anyone to falsify their fundamental tenets.

To take this one step further—I want to propose that any group that does not take a Rawlsian position vis-a-vis other groups is sociopathic, as defined above. The very basis of their group cohesion is harmful to other groups as well as their own members, and therefore other groups and/or outlying individuals have moral license, if not a moral duty, to oppose them in equal measure to the degree that they are sociopathic.

This is easy to see if we are talking about the sociopathy of North Korea, but harder to see if we are talking about the sociopathy of groups closer to home. If any group (and this means almost all of them) bases its existence on unfalsifiable beliefs that are harmful to others, it is a sociopathic group.

Most people in the world are members of scociopathic groups.

It is my belief that the core meaning of delusion in the Buddha’s teachings is not different from what has been said above. If any person believes that their allegiance to a socoiopathic group is justified or necessary, they are deluded.

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*In case the link is lost, it’s title is Kiai Master vs MMA and you may be able to find it through a search on YouTube.

Semiotics

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Biology is the study of living organisms. Yet we also use this term to talk about the biology of the foot, say.

Psychology is the study of the mental functions, behaviors, and emotions. Yet we also use this term to talk about the psychology of employees, say.

In like manner, semiotics is the study signs, symbols, meaning, and communication. Yet we can also talk about the semiotics of automobiles, say. When we do this we mean all the signs, symbols, semantics, pragmatics, psychologies, and so on that can be meaningfully and significantly understood in terms of semiotics.

When we use the term semiotics in this way, we find that we can say interesting things about how people communicate, or fail to communicate. We can invent a term like “semiotic bundle” to indicate the rather messy tangle of signs, symbols, feelings, words, and so on that comprise some identifiable class or type of “meaning.” As in the example above, we can talk about the semiotic bundles that involve automobiles—racing cars, motorcycles, electric cars, small cars, trucks, etc. Each of these entities is a semiotic bundle that has identifiable clusters of meanings and psychologies associated with it.

You can study any semiotic bundle in great detail or you can move the whole mass around in your head in a way similar to how you may move the semiotic bundle of Chinese history around in your head. In Buddhist terms a semiotic bundle is empty, dependently originated, dependent on conditions, impermanent, and subject to delusion.

A problem with semiotic bundles is we become caught in them and can’t escape from them, especially on interpersonal levels. And this happens because the words we speak are always referring to one or more semiotic bundles; they are always right next to semiotic bundles, are generated out of semiotics bundles.

If I am not able to get you to explain what the semiotic bundle that underlies your words is, then I cannot know your meaning reliably. I have to guess. Go ahead and ask your partner or friend a question about the semiotic bundles underlying their words. You will almost always find their their semiotic bundle was not what you had thought. Your guess was wrong. In interpersonal/emotionally-charged communications, this is a crucial mistake.

Even if your guess is only sometimes wrong, it can produce big problems. If your interpersonal communications are not cleared of wrong guesses (mistakes), you will begin to have interpersonal problems based on those mistakes.

It follows, then, that clearing up mistakes as quickly as possible is of vital importance to a successful interpersonal relationship. If we don’t clear up the mistakes quickly enough (usually within a few seconds), we will forget the origin of the mistake. By ignoring small interpersonal mistakes, we force ourselves to depend on unexamined semiotic bundles. These bundles may be public (known to many people) or private (known only to you). Either way, if they are mistaken, the interpersonal relationship in question will become less true, more deluded, less satisfying, more dangerous.

There is no way around this because this is how language and semiotics actually work. They don’t work in some other way.

Science, Buddhism, and FIML

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In some ways FIML practice is a science.

Partners seek the best data available to determine what is being said and/or how they are communicating with each other. Their communication becomes highly objective in the sense that each partner trusts the other’s description of what they said more than their own subjective/emotional impression of what they think they heard. Based on this data, partners are able to continuously upgrade their understandings of each other.

FIML uses an extrinsic formula—the rules of FIML practice—to make this happen, and in this it also resembles science. FIML has an objective, clearly stateable and testable method or procedure for attaining its results. FIML results are also objective in that great satisfaction and better communication are measurable. FIML can be falsified by having many partners do it and not get good results, and in this it is also scientific.

In some ways, though, FIML is turned 180 degrees away from science. This is so because FIML does not have any extrinsic belief or value system that requires submission of the intrinsic, individual, unique mind of either partner. Partners who do FIML can only look to themselves to free themselves from the constraints of extrinsic beliefs, values, semiotics, behaviors, ideas, concepts, and so on. (This does not mean abandon the extrinsic, but rather become free of the constraints of the extrinsic. FIML practice, by paying close attention to speech moments, will help partners do this because they will see precisely where the rubber of extrinsic values meets the road of their self expression and/or listening.)

The FIML method gives partners the tools they need to perceive what Buddhists call the thusness of their unique individualities. The thusness or suchness of being cannot be apprehended through extrinsic semiotics, but can only be experienced by the individual.

Science, in general, does not give us insight into our suchness. Yet FIML practice and Buddhist practice, by using methods that are similar to those of general science, can. FIML differs from science in that it does not make any claims about what is objectively true “out there.” But FIML does claim that partners will vastly improve their communication with each other, and following that vastly improve their understanding of their existence, the  suchness of their unique being.

FIML may constitute an improvement on traditional Buddhist practices because FIML uses objective rules to unite two people in the pursuit of truthful communication. It is different from the traditional practice of one person pursuing “truth” alone in that FIML provides the means for each partner to constantly check his or her work against the other partner. An individual alone is easily subject to fantasy and illusion. FIML is also different from traditional group practices where a group is led by a master or guru. In these practices, the master may be subject to the limitations of solitary practice while the group may be misled by that. Additionally group members will have a very strong tendency to base their understanding on extrinsic semiotics provided by the master, not the true suchness of their individual being.

Repost: How greed is mirrored in social groups

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In my last post, I introduced the idea of mirroring to FIML terminology. Language, semiotics, and mirroring (LSM) can be thought of as a fairly simple set of factors that can help us understand social situations.

Several studies done at UC Berkeley (Unethical Behavior More Prevalent In The Upper Classes According To New Study) have shown that upper-class individuals tend to behave less ethically than others. Of course, any good historian knows this is the history of the world–privileged classes always become locked in a self-referential world that gradually moves far from the reality of the societies that support them.

Continue reading…

Repost: Being misunderstood

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One of the worst things about being misunderstood is that very often the more you try to be understood, the worse the problem grows.

Most societies have strong proscriptions against too much talking, and Buddhism is no exception.

I want to discuss three people to whom I have tried to explain FIML with little or no success—a close friend, a Buddhist nun, and a close relative.

Continue reading…

Ask your partner

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What do you want/need/expect from communication with me?

After they answer, ask them to answer again: What do you want/need/expect from communication with me when our communication is:

  • at its best
  • normal/average
  • below average
  • something you cannot put up with?

Then ask: What do you want/need/expect me to want/need/expect from you?

Then ask this question in the context of the four bullet points above.

Then ask them: How do you signal what you want/need/expect?

Then ask them: How do they think you signal what you want/need/expect?

Ask: How much or what sort/level of detail do they want in their communication with you?

What sort of detail do you want?

Try to figure out what both of your core motivations for communication are. How do those motivations help you communicate? How can you optimize your communication?

Being normal is boring?

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An interesting Swedish study (described here: Creativity ‘closely entwined with mental illness’) found not that creative people have higher incidences of mental illness, but rather that they are more likely to be related to someone with mental illness.

As a Buddhist, I am inclined to think most people are deluded, crazy if you will. From my practice of FIML, I am certain that most people suffer significant interpersonal stress due to ambiguities in language/communication that are rarely if ever dealt with in a satisfactory manner.

Repost: More thoughts on “Empathy”

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Edit: We are moving, vacationing, very busy right now, so we have less time to write new posts. Please look through our archives for more posts about FIML and Buddhism. Thanks. ABN

It seems that many individuals who self-describe as “empathetic” think of empathy as a talent they have for “reading people”, or knowing what others are thinking without having to ask. I think this is a huge mistake that can actually lead such people to have less empathy over time. To me it seems much more appropriate to think of empathy not as a talent one possesses but as a desire to understand other people. If we think of it this way then the ever-problematic “I know” becomes “I want to know.”

If empathy is conceived as an interest or desire, it is more likely to be developed and pursued. If, however, it is conceived as a static quality or talent, it will be taken for granted, misapplied, and probably warped into just another form of hubris.

Continue reading…

Repost: The human operating system

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Traditional human operating systems include a standardized language, standardized semiotics, and a “personality,” which is generally understood to be a measure of how the individual has adapted to the standardized language and semiotics of their time-period.

Standardized in this context means that the language the individual uses is some version of a recognizable dialect, while their semiotics is some version of a recognizable subculture, which may include such elements as clothing styles, beliefs, goals, expectations, education, mannerisms, and so on.

Continue reading…

How to evaluate something you don’t know

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A fascinating post by Robin Hanson—We Add Near, Average Far—describes some of the difficulty of presenting an idea like FIML to an Internet audience.

The problem is lots of detail and many bits of evidence make it difficult for people to evaluate the overall worth of a complex idea because people tend to evaluate information of that type by averaging the data rather than adding it up.

Should we just say that FIML will make you and your partner smarter and happier? Maybe we should when discussing it online, though of course, we won’t do that.

In person, we have found people quite receptive, but that is probably due to the same effect—in person we focus on one or two results of FIML practice and we only do that if people show interest.

I think Buddhism probably has a similar problem getting it’s message across through books or film. You really have to go to a temple or spend time with people who understand the Dharma to fully comprehend Buddhism as a way of thinking or living. This is why Buddhism is called a “mind-to-mind” teaching.

Up close and personal, most of us realize that we live in a very complex world and that our capacities for understanding our conditions cannot be taken for granted. But when it comes to learning how to hone or augment our skills for dealing with speech and symbolic communication, we tend to look for simple answers, or abstract ones, that do not include the kinds of detail we must pay attention to. Broad extrinsic theories that provide a general picture without essential detail—and these are everywhere in psychology, religion, sociology, the humanities—simply cannot do for you what a technique like FIML can because FIML is entirely based on the actual data of your actual life, and there is a great deal of that.

I do understand why it is hard to see this. At the same time, I wonder why it is so obvious in the physical sciences and engineering that we can’t do anything properly if we don’t make sure of our data.

Why should the humanities be different? We simply cannot communicate well or understand ourselves well without good data. FIML provides good data.

How semiotics can help us understand ourselves

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Why are people greedy?

Besides the usual answers, a succinct and very useful answer to this question is that greed is part of a semiotic system, a signalling system. Having a lot of money lets people buy good things—houses, cars, clothes, memberships, etc.—and these things send a basic signal to other people that is easy to understand. If you have a nice house, car, and good clothes people will tend to see you as being reliable, “normal,” familiar, worth knowing.

Why do people hate?

People hate those who do not accept their semiotic system. If someone is sending most of the same signals as you are, there is no way you will hate them unless they make you jealous, in which case they are probably just signalling better than you. If someone harms you, thus earning your ire, if not hate, it is often due to their jealousy.

Why do people have egos?

We need to signal to others. To communicate we must send a coherent semiotic package to the people we know. This need to send a neat package forms the basis of our ego, our biographical-actorial “self.” Depending on conditions, we internalize those standards that we think exemplify what we want others to think of us. Of course, the ego always gets mixed up with greed, hate and/or pride to make the picture more complex. But if you look at the signalling systems—the semiotics—much of it can be teased apart.

Why do people have personalities?

Or do we? “Personality traits” can be described in much the same way as we described the ego above. Sometimes people’s personalities seem to me to be something they have imagined, a standard they have adopted like an astrological sign or a pumped-up allegiance to a fantasized ethnic or religious “identity.”

What is “identity”?

It’s a semiotic system, often a system we have consciously chosen for ourselves. Identity compliments ego and personality, allowing the individual to take on ready-made feelings, a history, customs, and behaviors that send powerful signals to other people. When many people identify with the same symbols, they often gain political power; this is “identity politics.” Identity signals to others and to ourselves that we belong to something, are part of something. Identities are powerful group signals and they often can become violent or aggressive.

What is suspicion?

Suspicion is fundamentally not being sure what someone means. Since we all know how hard it is to know what others mean, it is no wonder that there is so much suspicion in the world.

You can go one and on like this. Many human behaviors and ways of “understanding” ourselves and others can be neatly analyzed as semiotic systems, signalling systems, that have recognizable signs and symbols that are often surprisingly simple.

Look around you—everything is signalling. Insects in the trees, hormones in your blood, road signs, clothing, and on and on. The sun signals the earth with gravity.

Human beings are complex signalling systems. To communicate with each other, we streamline and make static most of our signals. This is good and necessary in many situations, but it is not you.

In many ways, we can say that delusion, as defined by the Buddha, means to believe that a signalling system is completely “real,” that it is all that there is. Liberation from delusion begins with understanding how semiotics—signs, symbols, signals, and their meanings—actually work in our minds.

Consciousness, Big Data, and FIML

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Modern neuroscience does not see humans as having a discrete consciousness located in a specific part of the brain. Rather, as Michael S. Gazzaniga says:

The view in neuroscience today is that consciousness does not constitute a single, generalized process. It involves a multitude of widely distributed specialized systems and disunited processes, the products of which are integrated by the interpreter module. (Source)

Computer and Big Data-driven sociology sees something similar. According to Alex Pentland:

While it may be useful to reason about the averages, social phenomena are really made up of millions of small transactions between individuals. There are patterns in those individual transactions that are not just averages, they’re the things that are responsible for the flash crash and the Arab spring. You need to get down into these new patterns, these micro-patterns, because they don’t just average out to the classical way of understanding society. We’re entering a new era of social physics, where it’s the details of all the particles—the you and me—that actually determine the outcome.  (Source)

Buddhists may recognize in these insights close similarities to core teachings of the Buddha—that we do not have a self; that all things arise out of complex conditions that are impermanent and changeable; that the lion’s share of “reality” for any individual lies in being attentive to the moment.

Notice how similar Pentland’s insights are to Gazzaniga’s—the whole, or the common generalities (of society), can be far better understood if we can account for the details that comprise them. Is an individual mind a fractal of society? Do these complex systems—societies and minds—both use similar organizational processes?

I am not completely sure how to answer those questions, but I am certain that most people are using similar sorts of “average” or general semiotics to communicate and think about both minds and societies. If we stick with general averages, we won’t see very much. Class, self, markets, personalities don’t give us information as sophisticated as the detailed analyses proposed by Gazzaniga and Pentland.

Well then, how can individuals cognize Gazzaniga’s “multitude of widely distributed specialized systems and disunited processes” in their minds? And how can they understand how “the products” of those processes are actually “integrated” into a functional “interpreter module”?

And if individuals can cognize the “disunited processes” that “integrate” into a conscious “interpreter,” how will they understand traditional psychological analyses of the self, personality, identity, biography, behavior?

I would maintain that our understanding of what it is to be a human will change deeply if we can learn to observe with reliable clarity the “disunited processes” that “integrate” into a conscious “interpreter.” That is, we will arrive at a completely new understanding of being that will replace the “self” that truly does not exist in the ways most societies (and people) understand it.

FIML practice shows partners how to observe with great clarity the “disunited processes” that “integrate” into a conscious “interpreter.” Once these process are observed in detail and for a long enough period of time, partners will realize that it is no longer necessary to understand themselves in the “average” terms of self, personality, identity, biography, behavior, and so on.

Partners will come to understand that these terms denote only a more detailed version of a naive, static view of what a person is. Most psychology is largely a more detailed version of a naive, static view of what a person is.

We see this in Gazzaniga and Pentland’s findings that are derived from complex analyses of what is actually happening in the brain or in the multitude of real transactions that actually comprise a society. We can also see very similar insights in the Buddha’s teachings.

It is my contention that FIML practice will show partners the same things—that their actual minds and actual interactions are much more complex (and interesting) than the general semiotic averages we normally use to understand them.

From a Buddhist point of view, when we “liberate” ourselves from “attachment” to “delusive” semiotic generalities and averages and are truly “mindful” of the “thusness” of the ways our minds actually work, we will free ourselves from “suffering,” from the “ignorance” that characterizes the First Noble Truth.

What conversation are we in?

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In a large sense—macrocosmically—are we engaged in a Buddhist conversation? In a semiotic one? A psychological one? An anthropological one? An uncategorizable, open, Internet one?

In a small sense—microcosmically—we would do well to ask ourselves this question every time we interact with anyone. Points to consider in these cases are: how much time do we have; what factors are we considering and how are we weighing them; are we understanding each other well; why are we talking at all, and so on?

The URL of this site is americanbuddhist.net, so I suppose we are engaging in a Buddhist conversation. With American characteristics, whatever that means.

We’ve had this site for a few years, and in the early days got so many comments about how there is no such thing as “American Buddhism” that I felt the need to define it as a largely geographical term.

Most “modern Buddhists” living outside of traditional Buddhist areas would probably agree that Buddhism itself is really a conversation, an ongoing research project, a way of actively thinking, a participatory tradition that is not written in stone and never has been written in stone.

This is surely the position of American Buddhist Net and I am all but certain the Buddha himself would agree with us. Maybe he would not agree with the specifics of everything we say, but he would surely support our wish to think for ourselves and apply the Dharma to the world and lives we are now living.

So, I suppose this is largely a Buddhist-oriented, open Internet conversation that often brings up semiotics and, to a lesser degree, psychology and anthropology. The more I think about semiotics, the more I see it as a very valuable modern angle on Buddhism. More on that in a moment.

The more I think about Buddhism and semiotics, the less I seem to think about psychology. For example, I hardly use the term personality anymore because it just doesn’t say much from either a Buddhist or a semiotic point of view. In the first place, from a Buddhist point of view, anything we might call personality is always changing; it’s impermanent, empty, transformable. True, Buddhism does recognize “persistent traits,” but this term is not used often and it is rarely, if ever, used to define someone in the way our current sense of personality defines people.

FIML practice will show partners fairly quickly how much of their thinking about each other is based on unsupportable notions concerning personalities and what they are and how they function.

From a semiotic point of view, especially one informed by Buddhism, we can see much the same thing—as soon as you try to say what someone’s personality is, you will generate a new sign that needs further analysis, and so on ad infinitum. The fact that we will be faced with an “infinite interpretation,” an “infinite continuum,” where we will never be able to find an “absolute individual” very much recalls Buddhist thinking on emptiness.

I first encountered the idea that semiotics shows us that there are no “absolute individuals” in Umberto Eco’s excellent The Limits of Interpretation, which I recommend.

In place of personality, I now see individuals as more or less manifesting cultural or anthropological characteristics which they communicate as semiotic signs, symbols, and “meanings.”

When you talk to close friends or partners, you have to do a good job at microcosmic, real-time, semiotic analysis. If you don’t, you will make many mistakes and soon come to feel estranged from your friends and/or be forced to relate to them in static ways. If you don’t do FIML or something very much like it, you will be all but forced to cling to static semiotics. FIML could be defined as “microcosmic, real-time, semiotic analysis” between friends.

So far, in my readings on semiotics, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, or Buddhism, I have not seen anything that asks people to engage in “microcosmic, real-time, semiotic analyses” with each other. Nothing like FIML.

Maybe there is something, but I haven’t seen it. That’s the reason I started this post the way I did. What kind of conversation are we having? Is it possible for one person to read that widely in so many subjects? I don’t think it is. I probably know more about Buddhism, or have read more widely and thought more about it, than the other subjects. So, for me, this conversation is centered in Buddhism more than the other subjects. I like the way Buddhism is grounded in morality, so that’s another reason.

Semioticians tend to talk a lot about philosophy and literature, while Buddhism centers us more in the lives we are living as we perceive them, however fallibly.

Here are a few terms from semiotics that will be helpful to Buddhists: fallibilism, synechism, vaugeness or indeterminacy.

Fallibilism is the philosophical principle that human beings could be wrong about their beliefs, expectations, or their understanding of the world.

Synechism holds that the essential feature in philosophic speculation is continuity. It denies that all is merely ideas, likewise that all is merely matter, and mind-matter dualism. To my understanding, synechism denies in principle the “absolute individual,” or in Buddhist terms the “own being” of anything, which is another way of saying all things are empty.

Vagueness or indeterminacy, especially with regard to speech acts, mean that we can never be completely certain of what others mean or what we are hearing.

Semiotics is at the center of some other modern major innovations in how we think, such a deconstructionism, relative frames theory, and the vague, propositional indeterminacy that underlies multiculturalism. I often wonder how much semioticians and modern philosophers have been influenced by Buddhist ideas.

Taken together, the study of semiotics and Buddhism deeply changes the way we see the world and live our lives. They affect how we understand what it is to be human, how we communicate, and what we communicate. Buddhism is an excellent foundation for semiotics, while semiotics can extend Buddhist concepts into a more detailed, modern idiom.