Fair Taxation

We all inter-are [as Thích Nhất Hạnh famously teaches] and as Elizabeth Warren eloquently demonstrates in an impromptu talk in an amateur's video of her on the campaign trail for a Massachusetts senate seat now held by Scott Brown.

The viddy was kiped from Buddhist_philosopher's solo blog American Buddhist Perspective.

Confessions of a Skyhooks Buddhist

A Skyhooks Buddhist insists that there is something pulling us upward. It is all not just that we are pushing up from the soil. [Pic is of a 56-foot-high statue in Trafford Park, in the metropolis of Greater Manchester, England.]

The Buddha famously instructed that we not waylay our practice by engaging in vain speculations about matters metaphysical, which can endlessly, pointlessly spin the wheels in our heads.

But people are a curious lot, who nose into everything. And a lot of progress has been made in the two-dozen-plus centuries since Buddha walked the rocky soil. We have absolute understanding, today, about things Buddha, if it had been his inclination, could not have guessed about. Matters abstruse have a way of yielding under the microscope of an eons’-long gaze. Data accumulates. Facts fall into our laps like ripe apples loosed from trees. We chip away at the mountain of things hither-to-now unknown and add precious stone to the pile of that which we have become certain.

Still, our very existence, and matters surrounding it, remain a peculiar and near-absolute mystery. Why are we here and how is life even possible?

The reductionist and the physicalists are now having their day. We are getting ever-better at understanding molecules and their behaviors, the keys to chemical reactions and what manifests from many “phrases” in our DNA. It’s as if the puzzle pieces are beginning to fit to explain life as a wholly physical process. We are all just these soft, squishy replicating robots that sprang up from the ground From a bounty of mistakes and seeming flaws we became ever better at sustaining ourselves and replicating ourselves until we, pretty much, have taken over the earth. And here we now are: Billions of buttheads, the winners of a grand interspecies game of King of the Hill.

But I abstain from accepting that ready conclusion. There is something else; I don’t know what.

Perhaps it is somewhere in altruism at fullest bloom -- when some of us act discordantly with the rush of self interest that supposedly propels our species -- where something other, better, higher can be found. The latest RSA viddy has Oren Harman talking about Radical Altruism in other species and in us.



There is also the mystery of consciousness. The physicalists think that the brain is the mind; that that hunk of cheese in our skull is of such amazing capability that it creates our world for us -- or the connection with the world outside.

But for me, and for the Dalai Lama, there is the puzzle of color to contend with and other matters of what we experience that must be "something else." We know -- we think we know, anyway -- that color is just wavelength that we interpret as a field of hues. But if color isn't color outside of us, where does it come from? How does the hunk of cheese stir red -- or any other color -- into being?

Philosopher Frank Jackson made an argument that is famous in the 'philosophy of mind.' He supposed there was this woman, Mary, who had never experienced the color red. She's fully brilliant; experiences everything else, but is "locked out" of knowing "red." Indeed, she becomes a pre-eminent neurologist and comes to know everything knowable about the physical side of what there is in the world. Suddenly, the doors of perception are flung open and red is made available to Mary. Doesn't this show that red is outside of the physical world and is pure perception, or qualia as it's called -- something of a different order of existence/experience/being.

Indeed, I would say that Jackson is right. I "buy" this demonstration/proof of dualism. Hooray, Frank Jackson -- only, Jackson, the creator of "What Mary Knew" has come to disagree with his proof and has, now, fallen in with the damn materialists/physicalists/reductionist bastards!!

You can hear Jackson, interviewed by the boys of Philosophy Bites, in a fifteen-minute audio podcast, explaining "What Mary Knew" and why he has abandoned dear dualism: "Philosophy Bites: Frank Jackson on What Mary Knew."

Despite the frustrations, I know -- I just KNOW -- there is something UP there. Something vaster and meaningful. We are greatness, that added extra to our hunk of cheese.

Tom Armstrong lives in Sacramento, California, where he is a member of the homeless community there, roots for the River Cats and blogs the counter-revolutionary Sacramento Homeless blog.