Cold Weather Redux

I am sure I have written about "Cold Weather" before. It's a Mumblecore-Sherlock Holmes hybrid of a gem. Ever since I saw it a few years ago, the movie has stayed with me, tickling the back of my mind, planting a little curiosity for the Oregon coast.

Apparently you can rent it on YouTube for 3 bucks. I highly recommend it and, upon seeing it again, the yearning to see the Oregon coast is stirring again. It has officially gone on my bucket list. Hope to go soon.

The Dangerous Gita (Mahabharata Notes #8)

My friend Eugene made an interesting comparison between the advice from Bhagavad Gita and Wagner's ring cycle and noted that it can be easily used to justify bad things. "Go forth and do what you must. Renounce the fruit (or consequences) of your actions."*

Indeed, this advice is completely morally neutral. It is neither good nor bad, neither kind nor cruel. It tells you to do. It does not tell you what to do.

It can be used by Gandhi to unite his people of different factions for win independence and by Hitler to rally youths to fight and kill for the Third Reich. It can encourage a wavering and fearful pre-criminal to rob a bank and an insecure lover to declare his commitment to an object of his affection.

It is merely a call for action, but it gives one no guarantee or protection from the consequences of one's action. You alone will still have to face these consequences, which may be happy or sad, fabulous or terrible.

In other words, the Gita is not your mother or her substitute, your god. It is all about yourself. Therefore it is a bit of a stretch to call it religion.

Of course, Krishna also says victory accompanies dharma, which seems to be assurance of sort. If you are righteous, you will win. Ah, but there is a trap in this assurance. In Mahabharata, Krishna helped his cousins to victory in the war, in which pretty much everyone on either side was killed. Not only that, but four of the five Pandavas went to hell when they died. Some victory.

So it seems that the ancient Indian philosophers and storytellers had gone through the argument "But the world is clearly not fair or just" many, many rounds. They knew all too well that such a simple assurance means shit. Don't we all believe we are on the side of dharma? Don't we all believe our own morality and good intentions? Aren't we all convinced we are righteous and our competitors or enemies evil? The assurance is no assurance. The guarantee guarantees nothing. When we fail and fall, we do not think, "Oh, that's because we are on the wrong side of dharma." I can claim I know which side is right, but I am not so blind as to deny that everyone else, including those I find appalling and despicable, believes the same of themselves.

George W. Bush said, "We go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in the world."
The same line could have been uttered by Krishna himself when he egged on his cousins at Kurukshetra and by their Kaurava enemies, and by countless leaders throughout human history.

Yet the Gita says, go forth and choose and act. Just do it. As to choosing which and doing what in the world, you are on your own, baby! In the end it is still your decision and responsibility, and your mom (or god) is not going to feed you the answer. 

(*One could also argue that the advice encourages undue recklessness, but the what kind of reckless people would need advice in the first place?)

Poly and Mono (Mahabharata Notes #7)

No doubt about it. We want to believe the Just-World Hypothesis despite all evidence to the contrary. Perhaps justice is just an excuse. What we really, truly want is a world in which we get what we want, also despite all evidence to the contrary.

Rather than accepting reality, we invent supernatural powers to help us get what we want, even if only in our mind. Why can't we have what we want? Why do bad things happen to good people (ie, me and mine)? And, of course, the ultimate disappointment is that we are all going to die. There are several ways to deal with the problem ---

1. Polytheism explains the world nicely. Some gods are for you and others against you. Yet it is also unsatisfying, for your victory against your enemy lies in the victory of the gods on your side over those on their side. Who is to guarantee that my gods are "better"?

2. Monotheism. It provides the much desired assurance to believers, with no "bad" gods to spoil your fortune. But its logic and congruence with reality have to weaken. If a person and his enemy pray to the same god, how can he know for sure that god is on his side?

To explain all the bad things in the world that make us unhappy and disappointed, one can further expand the possibilities:

A. The god(s) is benevolent.

B. The god(s) is indifferent.

C. The god(s) is malevolent.

D. The god(s) is fickle and/or unreliable.

Ah, herein lies the problem. Even if we are convinced of our own righteousness and worthiness over our enemies, we have to be blind to deny the reality of the world that does not go along with a predictable and consistent single deity. Clearly he/she/it is neither for or against one all the time. Yet we don't like polytheism either. How is one to go on living without despair? Where does one find the protection and assurance to brave the storms of life?

The people of Indian region came up with a unique and rather brilliant solution to the problem. All the logical explanations for bad things, good things, bad people, good people, bad deeds, good deeds, and problems with just reward and punishment can be kicked like a can down the road. The world is a mess? There is no evidence of consistent and reliable justice? All the problems dissolve within the system of cyclic incarnations. All sins are punished and all virtues are rewarded ... eventually.

The only problem with this system, of course, is that nobody remembers the past lives. It takes a leap of faith to accept. The advantage, however, is that it kind of takes away the persistent and nagging question of "Why?" Why do random injustices happen? The system both satisfies the innate need for justice and makes peace with its apparent absence (not always, but frequent enough) in the world.

Of course, the simplest explanation is that justice does not exist outside of our mind. No one but we need and want it. But that's a deeply unsatisfying answer to the question. It is so unpleasant that we dream up elaborate systems and theories just to run away from the indifferent universe. Therefore, a system that can relieve the tension between reality and dream and nudge people to move on --- because it doesn't matter in this life --- has its appeals.

The Hard Problem

Tom Stoppard is tackling "the hard problem" of consciousness. The play has just opened on National Theatre in London last month. I have not seen any reviews and am curious to see it at some point.

The last time I saw his "Arcadia," in which he dramatized the Second Law of Thermodynamics, I did not love it. It was clever but kind of lacked emotional impact. Well, I guess it is too difficult to be touched and moved by the inevitable rise of entropy in a closed system ...

Oliver Burkeman at The Guardian recently wrote a fairly comprehensive introduction about the current debate among neuroscientists over "the hard problem." I dunno. From where I sit, there is no convincing logic or evidence to suggest that a physical and material consciousness is impossible. I don't understand this insistence that consciousness is immaterial. Why can't it be as material as the electrochemical signaling system that runs breathing and heartbeats, sends commands to muscle contractions, processes visual and other stimuli, and stores and retrieves memory, etc., etc., etc.? If we are to believe that memory is not elusive but rather material (and we have pretty good evidence now that it is), what makes you believe that consciousness is fundamentally different from memory?

The romantic notion that consciousness is immaterial and therefore unknowable is, in my opinion, just a reincarnation of our past romantic notion of the soul, which itself was a variation of beliefs in one or more supernatural powers (ie, gods) and an afterlife. We are just unwilling to let go of the immaterial concepts, so we transfer this wish from god to soul to consciousness, keeping the romance alive!

I don't know if Stoppard is going with the romantic or the kill-joy approach in "The Hard Problem."

Post Script: From a review of the play, I suppose I should adjust my expectations accordingly. Yeah, I know, I am being difficult here. Is it ever possible to be both scientific and emotionally appealing and resonating? Well ... the answer seems to be no. The truth is usually pretty unappealing to us.

Good vs Bad Guys in Stories (Mahabharata Notes #6)

More than a few times, I have heard American voters complain that the kind of leaders who should win elections are exactly those who do not want to be in politics in the first place. What they mean is that they want their communities or state or nation be run by people with no ambitions or are incapable of deception and manipulation. Of course, that's impossible, not to mention probably wrong anyway. Nevertheless, one could find quite the same sentiment described in Mahabharata, despite its time and political system way back when and where. In the ancient story, the rightful emperor to rule the Empire was Yudhishtir, the son of the god representing dharma itself, a man of impeccable personal and public morality and integrity. He is supposed to be every bit the ideal king/leader for average people across different cultures (if one could overlook a minor vice involving gambling).

What is the essential quality of such an ideal king/emperor/president/governor/head of the school board that everyone dreams of? He does not want it. Yes, such is the paradox. We want the assurance that he is doing this not for himself, but for you all! Oh isn't that sweet and lovely? Except this is neither human nor natural. People have to lie to be so saintly. Even if some are occasionally sincere in their selflessness, as we can see in Yudhishtir, such selflessness can be dangerous.

Memory and Future (Mahabharata Notes 5)

I have just got to the point where the wandering poet Narada sat in the Emperor's crowning party and saw, in his mind's eye, all these great kings and warriors sitting there celebrating and laughing at the moment, would soon die on the Kurukshetra, some with their heads cut off and others with arrows sticking out of their bodies. The earth was soaked in rivers of blood. It was the future that he saw. He drank and said nothing.

The obsession of seeing --- seeing the future --- haunts us. I am quite sure this is but an illusion. When we look back in time at the defining traumatic event in our lives, the mind could not remember its obliviousness in the moment before that. Rather, the memory of itself before and after becomes hopelessly mingled and we can no longer clearly remember what we knew when. We want to believe that we had known and seen before it all happened. It is a trick of the memory because ...

Because memory is a palimpsest. Because we have only one copy of the memory of the past, and every time we take it out to remember, we rewrite it, and write over it, with whatever we feel and want to believe now. There never will be a faithful original copy hidden somewhere up there, unlike the cyberspace. Enough research has shown that. We may think we have access the past (unlike the future), but this access is very unreliable.

Yet, the mind may have unknowingly grasped something about the nature of the fourth dimension. Imagine, you are driving on a highway at a constant speed. Five miles ahead, a wreck is blocking the road. You can't see it, yet, but it is sitting there, waiting, existing with you in the same universe, but you will not know it until you get there, face to face, nose to nose, with the wreck. The fact that you are moving forward and cannot yet see the wreck ahead, does not mean it is there, waiting for you to arrive. And arrive you will, because, as they say, "It is written." Like it's written in the last hundred pages of the book, but you are reading in order and cannot flip to the end without finishing all the previous pages.

I imagine that, at some point, the sages or  philosophers or yogis realized the possibility of this analogy, and began to suspect time is a fully written book that we have to live through page by page. Just because our senses cannot skip ahead, it does not mean the later chapters have not been written. One day, when we look back, do we see the past as a series of free choices scribbled on blank pages or predestined, already-printed text?

Consequences and Mahabharata (4)

The ending of Mahabharata is very interesting. After the war at Kurukshetra, millions were killed, including most of the Kuru Dynasty's royal family. The five Pandava brothers and their wives, who all along were described as representing the good side who had defeated the evil side, were left to pick up the pieces and rebuild their nation. Some years later, they left the throne to a son (grandson?) and went on to the Himalayas. One by one they died on the road, leaving only the oldest brother Yudhishtira, who represented righteousness, and his dog (it's a long story). Yudhishtira went to heaven and was shocked to find his cousins there who were on the side of evil and had been slain by the Pandavas. He demanded to see his brothers and was led to hell where his brothers were being punished. Yudhishtira asked angrily, Who decided this? Why are they punished? I want to say here with them.

Note: I'm going with Peter Brook's stage adaptation of Mahabharata, as I have not read the ending of the book to get all the details.

So the meaning of this ending is curious. One's instinct is that this is contradictory. If the Pandavas were the good guys, surely they would have gone to heaven, no? And one would think so because this is how it works in our collective consciousness --- If you do good in life, you will go to heaven. Or, more precisely, do good in life because you want to go to heaven after you die. Therefore, heaven is the cause and good deeds is the effect. Here we can see how cause and effect are flipped temporally. The cause/motive is the future, and the effect/action is the present (or past). Our current behaviors and choices at least appear to be driven by the promise of an afterlife in heaven. Obviously.

Yet this paradigm does not work in Mahabharata. If the Pandavas had known that they would go to hell, would they have chosen the good side and wage war against their cousins? Yet Krishna, who was an avatar of the god Vishnu, clearly and firmly goaded them on. This was the course that had to take place. The way of righteousness must be paved by this war and the death of their evil cousins. Is this a trap? Or, worse, a joke played by the gods on humans? To do this thing is good and necessary, but it will send you to hell. This is obviously contradictory, isn't it?

Then I discovered that the contradiction stems from my assumptions steeped in the Christian culture. Heaven and hell have a different meaning in Hinduism. They are temporary. People are sent to heaven and hell after death to pay for the debts (or spend the surplus, I guess) they incur in life, such as killings any kind of lives. Once your debts are paid, you are released from heaven or hell and go into the next incarnation cycle. The process is not entirely free of moral judgment, but the judgment is far less stringent or definite than Christian judgment because of its lack of permanence. In other words, being sent to hell isn't a permanent conviction of guilt on the Pandavas' choice to wage war against their cousins. Being born as a kshatriya (warrior caste) dictates one's duty to fight and kill in life, but anyone who kills has to pay the debt eventually. Seems like a pretty hopeless trap, but it is somehow more forgiving than the Christian system because it is not permanent or fundamentally damning on a person's identity and worth.

So, regardless of whether one does good or evil, one still has to face the consequences of their actions, which are not always fair or logical. Killing for good does not spare one from the consequences. Future consequences cannot be controlled or calculated by individual choices at present. This seems fundamentally different between Hinduism and the logic I am familiar with.

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I first started thinking about this issue while reading ASOIAF. Some readers argued that Ned Stark is a bad guy because he is a key piece in the chain of events leading to the War of Five Kings, or that Catelyn Stark is a bad woman because she affects a couple of links (kidnapping Tyrion in Book 1 and releasing Jaime Lannister in Book 2) in the events. (ASOIAF is a pretty good proximation for history, at which I am no good.) Yet I find this line of reasoning disturbing, because none of the characters, not even Joffrey, had the benefit of hindsight like readers do. To what extent can one blame a person for future occurrences that are (in part) caused by his past choices, if the consequences are not foreseeable?

One of the similarities between ASOIAF and Mahabharata is the complex Web of causes and effects. Minor events (or oaths, curses, and prophecies) become catalysts or triggers of snowballed crises and disasters in the future. Assigning blame and moral judgment on characters become exceedingly difficult as shit hits the fan and body counts rise ... But isn't that exactly the problem we face when we look at history and try to pass judgment of various characters involved? We have the benefit of hindsight, but they did not. What if the United States split after the Civil War? Would we be judging Lincoln differently? Is the problem his or ours?

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Of course, all this is not just about moral judgment of historical or fictional people, but rather about regret --- regret over past actions and choices, and fear of regret for present choices and future consequences.

Again, we are back to the advice from Bhagavad Gita: Go forth and do your duty. Detach from the outcome.  In some ways, Krishna has something very Albert Ellis about him (or maybe it's the other way around).