Ironically, the symposium was itself a multidisciplinary event that may reflect the recent acceptance of consciousness as bonafide topic of inquiry within the contemporary western tradition.

This newfound approval was brought home by the announcement that Columbia has just received a donation of more than $200 million, from the Dawn M. Green & Jerome L. Green Foundation, for the establishment of a Science Center to house the University’s new Mind, Brain, and Behavior Initiative.

According to President Bollinger, the center will “explore the causal relationship between gene function, brain wiring, and behavior. . . This will involve creating opportunities to find linkages among virtually all [academic] disciplines, since, at a profound level, we all study how the mind works.”

The center’s multidisciplinary approach is laid out clearly in diagram on their website that depicts Mind & Brain at the center with four distinct areas of research surrounding. Sound familiar?

Strangely enough, this diagram also happens to resemble the one used by B. Alan Wallace in his keynote address at Mind & Reality. Entitled “Knowledge Without Idols,” Wallace’s paradigm offers a non-hierarchical map for the Mind Sciences. Philosophy, Religion, Mathematics, & Science all surround Consciousness and are in reciprocal relationships to it.

Wallace argues that we’ve not treated mental phenomena with the “respect and seriousness” that we have given to the physical and biological sciences. He argues this is why we’ve not had any “revolutions” and asserts that what we need to do is synthesize first and third person methodologies into a single rigorous and scientific inquiry of mind.

Since the publication of his book, The Science of the Mind in 1984, philosopher and fellow keynote Owen Flanagan has also articulated the importance of both first and third person approaches to mind.

The question right now for Columbians such as myself is whether this new center will really take seriously the work we’re doing in the Humanities.ༀ

Web
• The NY Times,“Columbia to Recieve $200 Million”
• President Bollinger’s letter & video converage
• Columbia Spectator,“Columbia Receives $200 Million”
• Columbia Spectator,“Neuroscience Research Proposed for M’Ville”
• CU Center for Neurscience Initiatives
• Mind & Reality Website
• Santa Barbara Institute for Consciousness Studies

As dual keynotes at the upcoming Mind & Reality Symposium (Feb 25-26 at Columbia’s Low Memorial Library), Flanagan and Wallace both offer unique insights on the nature of consciousness and the role of Indo-Tibetan theories of mind in contemporary thought.

Flanagan’s presentation is slated for Saturday and is entitled “Science for Monks: Buddhism & Science” and will be based on one of the Templeton Lectures he is giving at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.

Wallace’s address is Sunday and is entitled “Naturalizing the Mind Sciences” and will largely be drawn from a chapter in his forthcoming book Contemplative Science: Where Science and Buddhism Converge (Columbia University Press, 2006).

※ And please visit the Mind & Reality website for details on the Symposium and audio webcast.

On Saturday February 25th, 2006, Georges B. J. Dreyfus will be visiting Columbia University to present the target essay for Panel I: Knowledge in the upcoming Mind & Reality Symposium on Human Consciousness. Joining him to discuss this essay will be Stephen H. Phillips (Hindu philosophy), Ned Block (philosophy of mind), and Susan Carey (developmental psychology). The goal of this opening panel will be to contrast recent research on cognition and perception with insights from the epistemological traditions of India and Tibet. Gary A. Tubb, Dharam Hinduja Senior Lecturer in Sanskrit Teaching and Indic Research at Columbia, will be the moderator for this opening discussion.ༀ

Panelist Essays & Presentations:
• Georges Dreyfus’ target essay.
• Ned Block’s PowerPoint presentation.
• Susan Carey’s PowerPoint presentation.
• Stephen Phillips’ response essay.

Web:
• Paul Hackett’s review of Dreyfus’ book.
• Seth Casana’s (Carnegie Mellon University) animated thesis project.

Blogs:
• Song of Myself,“Ned Block is a Bad Ass”
• Neuroeconomics,“Harvard MBB Series”
• The Multiverse According to Ben,“Cognitive Neuroscience. . .”
• Act Systems & Services,“Indian Philo – A Small Look”
• i am the winternet!“IS”

※ And please visit the Mind & Reality website for details on the Symposium and audio webcast.

Buddhist scholar William S. Waldron will open this panel with a presentation of his essay, “Buddhist Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Thinking about ‘Thoughts without a Thinker.’” Particular attention will be paid to the Experientialist School (Yogācāra) and their theory of a subliminal cognitive process called (ālaya-vijñāna), as well as the idea of “circular causality” (wherein the effects of former thoughts and actions provide the causal basis for future ones).

Evan Thompson (philosophy of mind), Joseph LeDoux (neuroscience), and Robert Van Gulick (philosophy of mind), will offer their reactions and thoughts on phenomenological theories for mind and embodied experience. Their discussion will be moderated by professor of philosophy Mark Siderits.ༀ

Panelist Essays & Presentations:
• William Waldron’s target essay.
(see also the extended online version here).
• Joseph LeDoux’s PowerPoint presentation.
• Evan Thompson’s response paper.

Web:
• “Mastery of Emotions” an interesting look at the work of Joseph LeDoux in Sci Am Mind.
• Read more on Yogacara in Buddhism—The E-book(scroll down)
• Thompson & Varela’s essay, “Radical Embodiment. . .”
• Van Gulick’s JCS commentary on Thompson & Noë’s essay, “Are There Neural Correlates of Consciousness?”
• Van Gulick’s entry on Consciousness in the SEP.
• Read Siderits’ review of Waldron’s book, The Buddhist Unconscious: The Alaya-vijana in the Context of Indian Buddhist Thought.
source: Philosophy East and West, April 1, 2005.
via: HighBeam™ Research

COPYRIGHT 2005 University of Hawaii Press

Blogs:
• Jeff’s Space and Time,“Unjust Causes”
• Cognitive Daily, “What Causes What? Depends on . . .”

※ And please visit the Mind & Reality website for details on the Symposium and audio webcast.

According to the Consequence (prāsaṅgika) school of thought, mind and all things are empty (śūnyata) with respect to any intrinsically identifiable reality—because they are relative. Buddhologist Robert A. F. Thurman refers to this as Nagarjuna’s “Royal Reason of Relativity,” and in this panel session will present an essay on how Buddhist nondualism offers an innovative way of approaching the “explanatory gap” in consciousness studies.

Panelists will include Piet Hut (astrophysics & physics), W. Teed Rockwell (philosophy), and Gary Tubb (Indic philosophy). The moderator for this discussion will be Paul Gailey (physics).ༀ

Panelist Essays & Presentations:
• Robert Thurman’s target essay.
• Teed Rockwell’s response essay.
• A transcription of Gary Tubb’s presentation.

Web:
• Paul Gailey’s “Is a Holistic Science Possible?”
• Nonduality in India & Tibetan Thought
• Denma Locho Rinpoche on the Two Truths
• Berzin’s“The Validity & Accuracy of Cognition of the Two Truths”
• Teed Rockwell’s Neither Brain Nor Ghost
• Garfield & Priest’s, “Nagarjuna and the Limits of Thought.”
source: Philosophy East and West, January 1, 2003.
via: HighBeam™ Research

COPYRIGHT 2003 University of Hawaii Press

Blogs:
MysWizard,“Nondualism”

※ And please visit the Mind & Reality website for details on the Symposium and audio webcast.

Scholars of contemplative traditions, such as Thubten Jinpa (Buddhism & Western philosophy) and Roger Jackson (Buddhism), will probe the inner workings and ideas behind practices like great seal (mahāmudra, rgya chen po), great perfection (rdzogs chen), and insight (vipaśyana) meditation. Participants like Dr. Joseph Loizzo, will share new findings and offer their thoughts on how these practices operate in terms of folk psychology, neuroscience, and philosophy. The moderator for the discussion in this panel will be Buddhist scholar Anne Klein from Rice University.ༀ

Panelist Essays & Presentations:
• Mark Siderits’ target essay.
• Roger Jackson’s response essay.
• Dr. Joseph Loizzo’s “Meditation, Self, Self-Correction, & Learning.”
• Thubten Jinpa’s essay.

Web:
• “Science Probes Spirituality” in SCIAM MIND.
• Nalanda Institute for Meditation & Healing
• Investigating the Mind 2005
(Click here to read coverage. See also “Dalai Lama in the House”&
“Convergence & Conflict”).
• Insight Meditation Online
• Mark Siderits’ “Buddhist reductionism”
source: Philosophy East and West, October 1, 1997.
via: HighBeam™ Research

COPYRIGHT 1997 University of Hawaii Press

Events:
• Don’t miss First Person Science with Dr. Craig Warren (Feb 17-19) @ Shambala Meditation Center NY.

※ And please visit the Mind & Reality website for details on the Symposium and audio webcast.

This session will build on earlier panel discussions to explore the intersection of theories of knowledge about the mind, practical modalities for engaging with the mind, and ethical questions about how conscious individuals can or should relate to each other. Ultimately, conscious individuals do not exist singly but rather in relationship and under conditions of interaction.

Bringing together scholars of science and ethics such as Robert Pollack (biology), Gareth Sparham (Buddhism), Edith Wyschogrod (philosophy), and target essayist Jay Garfield (philosophy & Buddhism), this final panel will consider both the cognitive and ethical implications of the relational dimension of reality.ༀ

Panelist Essays & Presentations:
• Jay Garfield’s target essay.
• Gareth Sparham’s response.
• Edith Wyschogrod’s essay.

Web:
• Religion & Ethics“The Dalai Lama”
• SfN News Release: “Dalai Lama Urges that Ethics be a Guide. . .”
• Dalai Lama Neurons/Mirror Neurons).
• Journal of Buddhist Ethics
• ETHICS UPDATES

※ And please visit the Mind & Reality website for details on the Symposium and audio webcast.

“Many of us brights,” (that’s a Dennett neologism for a nonbeliever. See his essay entitled “The Bright Stuff”), “have devoted considerable time and energy at some point in our lives to looking at the arguments for and against the existence of God. . . But not I,” says Dennet. “I decided some time ago that diminishing returns had set in on the arguments about God’s existence, and I doubt that any breakthroughs are in the offing, from either side. . . So what, then, is the point of religion?”

Dennett believes it is “high time that we subject religion as a global phenomenon to the most intensive multidisciplinary research we can muster, calling on our best minds on the planet. Why? Because religion is too important for us to remain ignorant about.” Ironically, the Dalai Lama has spearheaded a somewhat similar campaign on the religious side. Last month he kicked off a series of religious teachings by ordering Buddhist monks to question superstition and learn more about science.

Though Dennett neglects to specifically address Buddhism in his book, he’ll have ample opportunity to probe it with Professor Robert A. F. Thurman in a public conversation this February 13th at the Miller Theatre on the campus of Columbia University. This event is part of the Theatre of Ideas Lecture Series and is one of many talks Dennett will be delivering during his 2006 book tour which begins next week.ༀ

Event Coverage:
• Click here to hear an MP3 of what was said at Columbia.
• Click here to read a transcription (thanks Rob Hogendoorn!)
• Click here to see images on flickr.
• The Columbia Spectator: “Questions of Faith.”
• Science & Theology News had this to say.
• “The Case Against Religion,” by Spiros Antonopoulos.

Book Reviews:
• Leon Wieseltier’s “The God Genome” in the NYTBR.
• Rubert Sheldrake’s “The Unbearable Brightness of Being Right.”
• George Johnson’s book review in Scientific American.
• The San Francisco Chronicle’s review.
• The Guardian’s“Should we treat religion as a science?”
• Eliot Fintushel’s “A Religious Inquiry: But who’s listening?”

Responses to Wieseltier’s Review
• Dennett’s March 5th “Letter to the Editor.”
• Owen Flanagan’s response to Wieseltier in his “Letter to the Editor.”
• “Responses to the Review of ‘Breaking the Spell’”
• “Still Breaking the Spell.”
• “The Meme’s Eye View.”

Related News:
• Dennett’s interview in the NY Times Magazine.
• Dennett’s essay “Common-Sense Religion” in The Chronical Review.
• Dennett’s interview on meaningoflife.tv
• Dennet’s interview with BBC’s Jonathan Miller

Despite mine, and others’, outspoken criticism of George Johnson’s review of the Dalai Lama’s book The Universe in a Single Atom in The New York Times Book Review (see October 10th posting: “Is Karma Intelligent Design?”), I think Johnson’s intentions were to offer what he perceived as a “religious” alternative to the nation’s preoccupation with intelligent design and evolution.

Latching on to “hidden causality” as a surrogate for a theistic Creator, Johnson’s analysis tragically misconstrued Buddhism as superstitiously dualistic and neglected the Dalai Lama’s more provocative statements about mind and matter being “codependent” with ”no absolute division.” Instead he chose to focus on Tenzin Gyatso’s rejection of wholly materialist explanations for mind and gives no philosophical consideration to the metaphysical implications of his rationale—namely—that materialism does not seem to account for the ”subjective experience of the individual.”

I don’t blame Johnson for steering clear of this debate. The Dalai Lama himself has advised mind scientists to shelve their metaphysical conclusions in trying to reconcile consciousness and matter. Nevertheless, philosophy as an education is not so much about arriving at answers as it is about learning how to ask the really interesting questions. It was with this in mind that I recently posed a few questions to two of the foremost thinkers in contemporary consciousness studies: B. Alan Wallace (Buddhism) and Owen Flanagan (philosophy). Their dialogue contains insightful commentary on each other’s ideas as well as suggestions for further reading.ༀ

Click on the highlighted text to read their responses.
B. Alan Wallace: “Materialism of the Gaps”

Owen Flanagan: Response

(see also Flanagan’s “Subjective Realism and Phenomenal Consciousness”&“Reversing the Arrow of Explanation in the Relational Blockworld: Why Temporal Becoming, the Dynamical Brain and the External World are all “in the Mind.”)

B. Alan Wallace: Response

Owen Flanagan: Re: non-physical mental properties

B. Alan Wallace: Response

Please make note of their forthcoming books: The Attention Revolution by B. Alan Wallace (Wisdom Publications, 2006), and The Bodhisattva’s Brain: Neuroscience, Virtue & Happiness by Owen Flanagan (2006).

In 1994 Erik Davis authored an article for Wired Magazine entitled “Digital Dharma.” India at that time had just begun to take step towards becoming the outsourcing repository it is today. Most Indians—let alone cloistered monastics—had little to no contact with digital technology. Yet, amidst the cornfields of Southern India, Davis located a small band of Tibetan monks who were fast digitizatizing the Buddhist canon. “[I]f Buddhist philosophy is to survive and thrive in the 21st century,” Davis wrote, “the dharma must be reformatted for the future.” According to the then ACIP (The Asian Classics Input Project) director Michael Roach, that means not just digitalization, but creating powerful interfaces. “[T]he future of authorship in this tradition will rest with those who design the roadways through huge databases. If you have a hundred thousand pages online, it becomes overwhelming. What do you do with it? You need an interactive system.” To that end ACIP has launched an ambitious hypertexting project and is partnering in a joint multimedia venture called the Tibetan Knowledge Consortium. (For a listing of other Indo-Tibetan digital resources see the links on the sidebar of this blog).

The digitization of texts has most famously and ambitiously been taken up by Google—a full ten years after ACIP launched its initiatives. The announcement of their contract to scan the university libraries of Oxford, Harvard, Stanford, and Michigan, and the subsequent launch of Google Book has led to heated debates about copyright infringement (see Battle Over Books and Steven Johnson’s subsequent analysis), and pessimism about the future of printed matter (see “Science in the web age: The real death of print” in this week’s Nature).

The diversity and plethora of digital resources for Buddhist enthusiasts is astounding. On-line dictionaries(see THDL Collaborative Dictionaries), geographical maps(see THDL Geography Collection), rare artwork(see Himalayan Art Resources), web radio(see Lamrim radio), ancient manuscripts (see Gene Smith & TBRC), and more. The platforms are multifarious and are pushing the very limit of what is possible on the web today. In turn, or perhaps as a consequence of, Buddhist thought and culture is prospering in the West. In Tibet, however, technology seems to be having an opposite affect on indigenous Buddhist practice and culture.

According to a recent article in the Japanese newspaper The Asahi Shimbun (a subsidiary of The International Herald Tribune), increased availability of modern technology has jeopardized traditional Buddhist culture and religion. “In the midst of this rush to modernize,” says Kazuto Tsukamoto, “Tibetan Buddhism stands at a crossroads.” According the Tsukamoto, the number of senior Tibetan monks with a “geshe” degree (what might be considered a doctorate in Buddhist philosophy) is dropping below the already low post Cultural Revolution numbers. Informants in Tibet told Tsukamoto that finding a geshe in Tibet is as “difficult as finding a star in the daytime.” Conversely, the Tibetan exile community boasts literally thousands of monks studying for their Geshe degree at numerous monasteries all over the Indian subcontinent. In fact a handful of Westerners have recently graduated from the rigorous 15 year program and are currently teaching in the United States.

Despite Tibetan enthusiasm for increased availability of solar energy and novel services such as cellular text messaging in Tibetan, such technologies, the Dalai Lama says (see Charlie Rose interview below) are intentionally being used to disempower Buddhist culture and assimilate Tibetans into China’s Han population. In short: technology doesn’t kill Buddhism—people kill Buddhism.ༀ

Web:
• See this related news (originally reported in Reuters) about what recently happened at a peaceful sit-in at Drepung Monastery in Tibet.
• Don’t miss “Kung Fu Monks Go Modern” in the LA Times.

JAN UPDATE:
• Jack Romano, CEO of Simon & Schuster, weighed in with “The fine print in Google’s plan.”
• See also the NYTimes“China, Still Winning Against the Web.”

FEB UPDATE:

“So Long, Dalai Lama: Google Adapts to China”
“Google loses Internet users over Tibet”