ALTENBERG@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA (Lee Altenberg) (03/02/86)
I thought Ailist readers might be interested in the following excerpt from "Oriental Omnipotence" in THE ESSENTIAL ALAN WATTS: We must begin by showing the difference between Western and Eastern ideas of omniscience and omnipotence. A Chinese Buddhist poem says: You may wish to ask where the flowers come from, But even the God of Spring doesn't know. A Westerner would expect that, of all people, the God of Spring would know exactly how flowers are made. But if he doesn't know, how can he possibly make them? A buddhist would answer that the question itself is misleading since flowers are grown, not made. Things which are made are either assemblages of formerly separate parts (like houses) or constructed by cutting and shaping from without inwards (like pots of clay or images). But things which are grown formulate their own structure and differentiate their own parts from within outwards. ... If, then, the God of Spring does not make the flowers, how does he produce them? The answer is that he does so in the same way that you and I grow our hair, beat our hearts, structure our bones and nerves, and move our limbs. To us, this seems a very odd statement because we do not ordinarily think of ourselves as actively growing our hair in the same way that we move our limbs. But the difference vanishes when we ask ourselves just HOW we raise a hand, or just how we make a mental decision to raise a hand. For we do not know-- or, more corectly, we do know but we cannot describe how it is done in words. To be more exact: the process is so innate and so SIMPLE that it cannot be conveyed by anything so complicated and cumbersome as human language, which has to describe everything in terms of a linear series of fixed signs. This cumbersome way of making communicable representations of the world makes the description of certain events as complicated as trying to drink water with a fork. It is not that these actions or events are complicated in themselves: the complexity lies in trying to fit them into the clumsy instrumentality of language, which can deal only with one thing (or "think") at a time. Now the Western mind identifies what it knows with what it can describe and communicate in some system of symbols, whether linguistic or mathematical-- that is, with what it can think about. Knowledge is thus primarily the content of thought, of a system of symbols which make up a very approximate model or representation of reality. In somewhat the same way, a newspaper photograph is a repesentation of a natural scene in terms of a fine screen of dots. But as the actual scene is not a lot of dots, so the real world is not in fact a lot of things or "thinks". The Oriental mind uses the term KNOWLEDGE in another sense besides this-- in the sense of knowing how to do actions which cannot be explained . In this sense, we know how to breathe and how to walk, and even how to grow hair, because that is just what we do! -------
zrm@GCC-MILO.UUCP (Zigurd R. Mednieks) (03/08/86)
The excerpt from Alan Watts is instructive. Like many who do not have the patience to look into their own examples, he claims the source of his hair is unfathomable and so the source of our thoughts is equally out of our reach. He should speak only for himself. I know, to a certain extent, how my hair grows. Even worse, Watts clouds the issue. There is a valid point in that even though I know how it is that I have hair, I can't alter the way it grows. Similarly, even if I knew in great detail the causes of my thoughts and ideas, I might not be able to alter their course. Perhaps Zen just isn't relevent to AI. -Zigurd
neumann@INRIA.UUCP (Pierre Louis Neumann) (03/12/86)
forgive my english!
there is an intellectual knowledge (more typically western) and a corporal
one . One must "find " his proper way and place (in between) in order to
KNOW.
This place is the "dawn" or the "twilight"gcj%qmc-ori.uucp@CS.UCL.AC.UK (03/12/86)
> From AIList Vol 4 # 50
``Perhaps Zen just isn't relevent to AI.''
It's not relevant to motorcycle maintenance either.
Gordon Joly
aka
The Joka
ARPA: gcj%qmc-ori@ucl-cs.arpa
UUCP: ...!ukc!qmc-cs!qmc-ori!gcj