I have been finding this book to be extremely interesting. Reading about a person's love of learning warms me. Seeing that person reflect upon the ideas and actually wrestle with them instills both happiness and bitterness in my mind. This makes me realize I have much to learn about teaching, for I am not achieving the love of learning from my students. Enough emotional hour - let's get to the content.
The Dalai Lama attempts to explain the relationship between the scientific concepts of the big bang and Darwin's theory of evolution to Buddhism. One of these I agree with him, the other I do not. If you have read my other blog posts, you should be able to guess which one is which!
From this reading, I am assuming only the popularly held scientific ideas were discussed at the Mind and Life conferences (which I would love to attend). The big bang theory being discussed in this book contains the idea of a singularity point. This point signifies a beginning; supposedly there would be no laws of the universe within the singularity point, meaning everything (matter, laws of physics, etc.) would need to be "born" from this point. Both the Dalai Lama and I dislike this idea on very similar philosophical reasons. I defend my logic by concluding there would be no reason to unbalance; the singularity point would be in perfect harmony and would never break that perfect harmony. The Dalai Lama defends the notion that a singularity point would require a god, which would turn into circular questioning of where did the god(s) come from. Not only are those answers unattainable scientifically, but metaphysically. A very interesting point the Dalai Lama brought up is how these questions do not achieve the goal of Buddhism: happiness. He made the analogy of how someone impaled with an arrow would not want to know all the facts of the attack (bow type, string type, method of the arrow's creation, etc.) before the arrow could be removed to understanding the origin of the universe before one "continues" living. Thoughts of these kind would consume the person's mind, thus not allowing the potential of happiness to be achieved. An interesting view on the question, How did the universe begin?, if I do say so myself.
Evolution in the popular view is so wrongly held. I can tell it was explained accurately to the Dalai Lama, but I sadly predict his discussions with other religious scholars have skewed his views on the subject. The most widely held misconception is that evolution explains the origin of life; it does no such thing. What disgusted me was the admittance by the Dalai Lama of this fact, but the choice to ignore it. His choice may lay in the difference in the scientific definition of life and the Buddhist definition of life. The distinction lies in consciousness; plants are not thought to be conscious if viewed through the lens of Buddhism, thus plants are not considered living. So possibly the biggest argument by the Dalai Lama is the inability, currently, to explain consciousness scientifically. I am going to leave consciousness for another post, but I do want to highlight the fact plants are not considered alive; I need to research Buddhist thought on "nonliving" life.
The Dalai Lama attacked the wording of the theory of evolution by natural selection which I need to defend. He argued life changes by impacts other than competition; one such impact is altruism. He disagrees that the current explanation of altruistic behavior, for example the pea aphid sacrificing itself for the offspring, belongs under the heading of competition. I disagree whole-heartily, as losing one versus losing all potential offspring is clearly advantageous and is a "winning" action if one wants to refer back to evolution being a competition.
What about human altruism? We have no competition. There are some extremely nice people that neither have children nor plan to (I put myself in this category, though that may be egotistical of me). How is that explained in terms of evolution? I believe people need to want to live in order to live happily (I had to include happily because I do not want to get sidetracked into the what if game). By being altruistic, it gives people self-worth. A community of some sort is required for this to happen; if I am the only altruistic being and I try to be nice to a murdering psychopath, then I probably would not continue to be alive. Thus, I think it is fair to argue that altruism, even in the smallest form, is a necessity for any community to exist. In fact, I would argue altruism is inherent in life, for reproducing in any way is a net loss of personal resources. Funny. I was going to explain altruism as a requirement for maximum happiness, but now I just find it inherent in nature.
Inherent altruism makes sense according to the second law of thermodynamics. Large groups have the greater potential to cause entropy and you acquire large groups by being altruistic. Thought experiment time! Say we never got past our barbaric history of fighting over territories. We would be spending much more time fighting than learning other things. This would impede on advances in technology, which we can argue would avoid any worries about global warming (due to that technology causing it not existing). So if we would have continued fighting, our planet would be in a more stable state. So one might argue that altruism is inherent in nature, for our altruistic behaviors have led to a planet with greater entropy.
I realize I just argued that being nice increases the rate of our demise. Too bad being happy is far too enjoyable - sorry species! :)
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