My mainstream friends and colleagues keep asking me why I am interested in the problem of consciousness. To some of them, showing an interest in this problem is symptomatic of a deeper psychological problem: for example, i) I could be a closet theist (heaven forbid) and am masking this by a philosophical masquerade, ii) I could be a vague new age/spiritual type (even worse) and trying to shore up some cred by feigning interest in philosophy or finally, iii) I am a mal-adjusted mathist/Platonist/transcendentalist who has failed to come to proper grips with the familiar tropes of neurobiology/evolution/emergence. In a nutshell: One is not supposed to begin thinking about consciousness until one solves the problem of the brain. In other words, we should all work on the brain and not on the mind for the next two hundred years or so or however long it takes to understand the brain as a complex, nonlinear chaotic dynamical system. And so much worse for society and culture at large where experiences, qualitative distinctions and choices obviously have value.

In response, I've decided to simplify my position a great deal. I came up with the following:

1. The universe is physical.
2. I am a part of the universe.
3. I have a mind.
4. Therefore the universe has a mind or mental properties in general.
   

The resulting discussions have been very amusing to say the least since I uncompromisingly push the mental=physical angle following items i) - iv) above. Strangely, it is the neuroscience type who is most troubled by where this is headed. Let me explain why.

The typical neuroscientist usually (unconsciously) assumes that mental properties are created by brain processes. What this does is relegate consciousness to that of epiphenomena in isolated brains. (And then you don't have to worry about it anymore.) When I go from point iii) to point iv) above, what I'm trying to do is to take mental properties and push them out into the universe instead of confining them (or locking them up) in isolated brains. When I do this, it immediately creates a problem for the neuroscientist because mental properties are now directly coupled to physical properties and the brain can get bypassed in the process. This is troubling, nay, threatening.

The usual response is dull and boring. The universe since the big bang has been evolving. We are the end products of evolution and mental properties have emerged full blown in us while being latent in primates and mammals (like cats and dogs). So the slide from iii) to iv) is non threatening since it is now temporally unpacked (with no mind in the universe until mammals or higher animals or somesuch).

You have to wait patiently until this tedious tirade winds its way to its turgid ending. And then, you innocuously slip in the haymaker. If minds emerged so late in evolution, how can you possibly know that this story of a trajectory from the big bang to present day man (with mind) is actually true? That is, the big bang to emergence of mind story is an inference from physical facts and one that is heavily biased by the a priori assumption (driven by Cartesian intuition) that mental experience is supervenient on physical brains. (It is one thing to seek to prove this relationship and a completely different thing to tacitly assume it from the start.)  Isn't it more likely (by the neuroscientist's own admission), that the true physical - whatever it is - may be beyond our reach exactly because of the neuroscientists' own theory that we are isolated minds in a physical universe. And if this is possible, couldn't the starting assumption that we are epiphenomenal isolated minds in a physical universe also be false?

The conversation breaks down at this point because from the neuroscientist's point of view, you are clearly a i) crackpot, ii) closet religious type, iii) postmodernist, iv) newage woolly headed type but thankfully not all of the above at least not at the same time :-)

We have to move beyond this kind of name calling if we are to make any progress whatsoever on the problem of accommodating experience in the natural order. The emergence trope has started regressing into a kind of religious belief (no doubt driven by the evolution versus intelligent design culture wars) with the people espousing it starting to close ranks of late.

And then the world changed. I look back at 2008 and see it as if it were a million years ago. We seem to have crossed over into something new - something frightening but new nevertheless.

I campaigned a little bit for Obama and endured epithets such as "I ain't votin' for no f**king terrorist" and again, this seems such a long time ago. The financial crisis tsunami hit, propelled Obama past the finish line, and now here we are.

There are too many commentaries worth recommending for how we got here. Two stand out. Nouriel Roubini's RGE Monitor for a daily dose of sobering reality and Michael Lind's "Obama and the dawn of the fourth republic." The second essay, while somewhat sophomoric in its adherence to numerology, draws an irresistable overarching pattern which is worth describing and distilling.

Lind claims that the US has had three republics: i) 1788-1860, ii) 1860-1932 and iii) 1932-2008. Each republic had a period of Hamiltonian infrastructure building and government consolidation followed by Jeffersonian free enterprise and de-regulation. And like the Matrix and Lagash, each republic ends in over-reach and hubris and has to be rebooted. If we accept Lind's pattern, we are about to enter the fourth republic of the US.

But consider: The US is not alone in facing a financial crisis at this point in time. The globalized world is going through many of the same problems and all advanced (UK, Western Europe), developed (Russia, Argentina, etc.) and advancing (China, India, Brazil) economies have been hit hard. It is now clear that all banking institutions are sitting on 50 trillion dollars of bad paper (mortgage securities, credit default swaps etc.) and all talks of a "bailout" are probably fundamentally flawed since we can't even sort out the good from the bad paper. It will take years to resolve this mess and meanwhile the real economies are going to contract with millions losing their jobs and others losing their way of life (which has been taken for granted for a loooong time).

What's the upside of all this? Every crisis presents opportunities for something new to emerge. Something new which could not have seen the light of day when the previous era was in full swing. And this possibility may allow us to break out of Michael Lind's Hamilton versus Jefferson deathmatch. Prior to 2008, when I discussed politics with someone, I typically got a knee jerk adolescent Ayn Rand libertarianism or a fairly standard social engineering liberalism - both of which are now dead. We don't need to ask "Who is John Galt?" or shout that "All that is solid melts into air". We need something new.

My very strong feeling is that Shared Spaces are the way out. If you look at the conflicted relationship between government and corporations, what stands out is the way both try and grind the ordinary citizen to dust. But in the information age that we are surely in, it is the second person, P2P, social networking or the shared space culture in general that is ascendant. Unfortunately, we are still technologically way behind the curve in terms of the user interface infrastructure necessary to foster the building of shared spaces - with the sorry state of virtual worlds and social networking sites (like this one) helping me buttress my opinion. And, we don't even know how we build up culture or the second person in general when you remove traditional structures such as family, tribe, church and team. This is likely to be a bigger stumbling block before we can realize that the space between public and private is vast and encompasses both.

In a previous blog entry, I explained my admiration for Strawson's target article (and followup in the same issue) on panpsychism in the Journal of Consciousness Studies (JCS). As previously explained, Strawson lays out the case for panpsychism, contrasts it with most forms of emergence, delves into arcane neutral monisms, rehabilitates Descartes as a dual-aspect theorist and finally tries to nail the case that physicalism entails panpsychism.

What's not to like, you may ask? After all, Strawson takes experience seriously (which I'm less inclined to grant to emergentists in my more uncharitable moments). He simultaneously resists the lure of full-bore idealism, mysticism and all forms of eliminativism and emergence. He ends up championing a robust physicalism and is forced (and it looks like he's being pulled kicking and screaming) to accept that physicalism entails panpsychism.

The trouble is - and I say this after numerous frustrating conversations with philosophers - most analytic philosophers don't understand theoretical physics at all.  Many of them continue to conceive of physics as a kind of a dynamical system - which it is not. Or they have a causal network like description in mind - A caused B which caused C - and this is also not supported by physics. I don't think it is wrong to state outright that most analytic philosophers just don't understand that one of the basic problems in theoretical physics today is the unification of quantum mechanics with general relativity - which in a vast oversimplification can be recast as a problem of how a quantum measure changes without specifying a fixed background spacetime.

In other words, in a completed theory of quantum gravity, you cannot assume spacetime as basic. You have to show how it emerges from something more fundamental.

Contrast this with Strawson who writes (JCS, 13:10-11, page 9, 2007)  "(3) the universe is spatio-temporal in its fundamental nature" to which he attaches a footnote "Note that if temporality goes, i.e. not just spacetime(TM) but temporality in any form, then experience also goes, given that experience requires time. One of the fine consequences of this is that there has never been any suffering. But no theory of reality can be right that has the consequence that there has never been any suffering." OK, that's obviously a joke, but a very revealing one.

It is obvious (to me at any rate) that Strawson is fighting a battle on two fronts, both of which he could well lose. On the one hand, he champions spacetime as basic and we have already seen that it is highly unlikely that theoretical physics will uphold that position. He also champions experience as basic - and hence the slide from physicalism to panpsychism - but ignores critics like Foucault who do not consider experience (phenomenology) to be basic. Isn't it more likely that we'll attempt to understand experience as a physical event wherein one "portion" of the universe separates itself (momentarily) from the rest and the resulting separation causes physical events to happen both at the boundary (behavior) and in the interior (experience)? Surely, this separation act which creates an experience is more fundamental than the experience itself, no?

In any case, given the restrictive first principles assumptions that Strawson stakes out - spacetime as basic etc. - it should be straightforward to go post-panpsychist. The price of admission is a non-reductive physicalism which - face it - is going to be pretty bizarre. It is going to have experience produced by momentary "subjects" separating themselves from everything else which is a far cry from the particles and fields of present day physics. Luckily, present day physics is equally incomprehensible - in terms of a coherent picture - and this should give us the strength we need to complete the physicalist picture by accommodating experience.

I took advantage of a conference held in Anchorage, Alaska to put together a hiking trip in the Denali National Park and Preserve. Denali (the "tall one") is the Athabascan name for Mount McKinley, which at over 20,000 feet, not surprisingly dominates the park. Despite Alaska's reputation as being relatively under-developed, at least when compared to "the lower 48" states of the US, I found Denali National Park to be a bit too tourist friendly. Luckily, it was easy to escape the crowds.

Before I went to Denali, a few of us took a trip to Seward, AK to see some glaciers. We saw some sea lions on a boat ride amidst a fantastic backdrop of snow-capped mountains rising up from the sea.

I then took the train to Denali. (Most of the travel and accommodations were handled through Alaska Tour & Travel who were very helpful once you explain to them that you're not their typical tourist.)

    Denali National Park's showcase is the Alaskan range and it's jaw dropping spectacular. You can take a bus ride deep into the park and get to within 90 miles of Mount McKinley itself. (We could only glimpse "the tall one" at very brief intervals before the clouds kept descending.) Some of the best views are at Eielson Visitor Center and at Wonder Lake.

There are plenty of opportunities to see real wildlife in the park and we were fortunate enough to spot some brown bears trying to catch a squirrel. The bears seem used to homo sapiens and weren't too bothered by us clicking away.

The best part of the trip for me was a solitary hike into the wilderness. I took the Savage River trail and proceeded beyond the tourist trap point and immediately left everything behind me literally and metaphorically. There was not a soul in sight. While the "trail" was somewhat rough in places, it is perfectly suited for a not-very-demanding hike. (I was told that one could keep on going on this trail. I turned back after a few hours.)

To the person reading this, I hope you'll forgive some self-indulgent nature mysticism. What is it about these mountains that drives us to spend hours in solitude? Is it because the silently stoic ranges strike us dumb verbally and mentally? Why do we become completely insignificant in the face of such massive majesty? Why does that dazzling, shimmering river force us to keep flowing alongside with no regard for safe harbor? And, deep in the wilderness, there's this tangible feeling of solitude (and not loneliness) with the promise of renewal when we return.

In Denali, the saga of Christopher McCandless - a solitary hiker who died while braving the wilderness - tends to come up a lot. Quite a few tourists try to go partway up the Stampede trail which has become a pilgrimage after his death. Jon Krakauer popularized this story in "Into the Wild" (a book I haven't read but plan to pick up.) Regardless of the real story behind McCandless' tragedy, the appeal of the Alaskan wilderness is undeniable.

In a previous blog entry, I had lamented the fact that the US had seen it fit to deny habeas corpus to aliens who had been designated as "enemy combatants" by the president. Last week in a close 5-4 ruling, the Supreme Court reinstated habeas corpus for prisoners held in Guantanamo. With Kennedy writing the majority opinion and Roberts, Alito, Thomas and Scalia (RATS in short) dissenting, it is instructive to look at the actual opinion to try to figure out the fault lines on the court which are a mirror of some of the fault lines in present day US society.

The majority on the court based their opinion on the fact that some of the detainees at Guantanamo had not had charges filed against them in over six years of incarceration. They argue that the military tribunals set in place by the Detainee Treatment Act (DTA) have not been effective in granting due process to the detainees which is why the civil court option afforded by habeas corpus is now necessary.

And now to get to the main point of this blog entry: Scalia in a minority opinion disagrees (to put it mildly). He begins by stating that "Today, for the first time in our Nation’s history, the Court confers a constitutional right to habeas corpus on alien enemies detained abroad by our military forces in the course of an ongoing war." [page 110]. Note the framing. First, the detainees are "alien enemies",  second,  they have been detained "abroad" (Guantanamo) and we are in the midst of an "ongoing war." Considering that the US has bases in about 60 countries with about 250,000 soldiers and personnel deployed overseas, it is a de facto empire - though very different from the British Empire that immediately preceded it  - and speaking of an "ongoing war" is disingenuous at best. What I like about Scalia though is that he opens his mind to us even more by later stating that "The game of bait-and-switch that today’s opinion plays upon the Nation’s Commander in Chief will make the war harder on us. It will almost certainly cause more Americans to be killed." [page 111]

What's going on here? Why is one of the Supreme Court justices resorting to garden variety scare tactics in his criticism of his colleagues. And note the use of "Commander in Chief" and "the war" in framing the argument. I think it should be clear that Scalia - and the 25-30% of 9/11 traumatized Americans that he represents - inhabit a very different perspective from most of the folks on Gaia. And strangely, it is Scalia and his ilk who frequently employ the bait and switch game - unconsciously accepting that we (the US) are a de facto empire at times while retreating to the standard imagery of an ordinary nation seeking to defend itself at other times. (This explains the "Nation's Commander in Chief" portion above.)

I wonder if Scalia (and the millions that he represents) are fundamentally rooted in a rigidly authoritarian mindset which might explain why we can understand them but they can't understand us. Does that make us - assuming a consensus here of course and using a simple binary distinction - libertarian which has its own problems?  I don't think so. I have no problem bowing to authority when the situation demands it. But, I think the asymmetry is more telling. When one perspective can model another perspective, then it is meta to the other and is capable of running the argument, "If I looked at this from this other POV, I'd get this" etc. I would have no problem if someone who thinks like Scalia showed the ability to fully model a progressive/libertarian and there were avenues (Faux News etc.) where this ability was showcased. But we don't see this and that's the problem. To close with sorta a sermon (gack), we all need to go beyond just understanding the power of framing and the ability of running arguments from different POVs. In dialogue with someone like Scalia, we need to be able to employ rapid fire jiu-jitsu maneuvers to avoid being framed in an argument of the type "Are you for or against aiding the enemy in granting them habeas corpus?" This is going to take a lot of practice.

At the recently concluded Toward a Science of Consciousness conference, I presented a poster on a new physicalism that can accommodate experience. The reception was fast and furious from some and wacky and weird from others. I'll summarize after explaining what the poster was about.

Following Chalmers, Rosenberg, Stoljar and Nietzsche (via Hales and Wilber), I've been wondering for a while regarding a non-reductive physicalism that can accommodate experience. Since physicalism is still up for grabs (so to speak), the plan of action is simple: Expand physicalism so that experience is a natural by product. In particular, avoid assuming that experience is fundamental as the panpsychist, neutral monist or dual-aspect theorist typically does. if the result is panpsychism, at least it is a posteriori and not a priori.

You would think that this essentially simple idea would find plenty of supporters. Instead, it simply raised controversy among the attendees who came by the posters and others to whom I explained the basic idea. Below, I'll do a caricature and response to the questions:

1. Physicalism is really materialism and experience is a result of neural firings in the brain.

Response: There's an explanatory gap between neural firings and experience. Also, the brain is not a fundamental physical object. Furthermore, you're being Cartesian in correlating one subject to one brain.

2. Strawson has shown that physicalism entails panpsychism and if I had time I would destroy your position.

Response: This is an almost exact quote. It is extremely disturbing that some people are already driven to panpsychism as the one and only way out. In any case, the whole problem with panpsychism is that it posits intrinsic properties like experience as basic and doesn't tell us where the boundary came from to demarcate intrinsic from extrinsic. In other words, panpsychism takes objects in the world as unproblematic and this is precisely the problem in basic physics where there are currently no such boundaries. Unfortunately, Strawson's clout is such that it is quite likely that we'll start seeing panpsychism bigots and it's not a bad idea to start watching out for them from the start.

3. The universe is really quantum information processing and there are no such things as selves (subjects).

Response: Not sure what you're really trying to say. If the universe is really information, then information is physical (by my definition of physicalism). There will then be an explanatory gap between information and experience. In addition, information can be parsed as in-formation (as opposed to out-formation) and this implies a boundary of some sort with in-formation being contextualized relative to the boundary. In that case experience is information in-formation :-) [Sorry, but that's actually pretty cute. Perhaps, I'll make that the title of my next paper.]

4. The universe is really One without a second - a perfect unity in diversity with Love holding it all together.

Response: Mysticism is not a scientific option for me (despite its many benefits including love and compassion). If that statement is unpacked as idealist, then the burden of proof is on you to show why this particular opening in awareness with experiential content that exists right here and right now is actually Oneness of some kind.

5. Your approach of focusing on a momentary physical boundary that separates one "portion" of the universe from the rest can explain why experiences are private. It doesn't explain why experiences are qualitative.

Response: Kudos to the best question so far. It is quite likely that there are overlapping boundaries like the traditional Venn diagrams. Imagine that the overlapping aspect creates a shared language and this explains our verbalized thoughts which are usually expressed in some language. When there is no overlap, then there is no language of any kind and from this you can get the qualitative aspect of experience. This has to be carefully worked out obviously.

Overall, I was both elated and crushed. Elated that there were many people who saw the value in what was being presented, crushed that there weren't more in depth questions except from a small minority.

I just returned from Tucson, AZ from attending the 2008 edition of the Toward a Science of Consciousness conference. I'm now walking around campus with a huge smile on my face with my colleagues asking me what I'm on. Yes, it was that good. Almost like a retreat but very different.


While I've attended previous versions of this conference, I skipped the last two. ( I know: What was I thinking? ) It's not possible to summarize all the talks/posters, so I'll focus on the main trends and a few standouts.

First, panpsychism is no longer crazy - it's the norm. (I'll wait for you to pick yourself up off the floor.) Following in the footsteps of James, Fechner, Whitehead, Griffin, Sprigge, Chalmers, Seager, Rosenberg and Strawson, a triumphalist note of sorts was struck especially by Skrbina. Stubenberg contrasted panpsychism and neutral monism in a nice talk. What is starting to worry me - especially since I'm going post-panpsychist - is that panpsychism might become a drug that causes us to forget trying to nail down what an experience is and how it relates to the physical. If we blithely accept that experiences run all the way down, this could happen. Thankfully, the problem of awareness will, in all likelihood rear up in protest and we'll have a whole new argument on awareness thresholds, the emergence of awareness, the impossibility of the emergence of awareness, blah, blah, blah.

A plenary session on "Libet and the timing of conscious experience" was very illuminating. There's now a lot of evidence suggesting that conscious awareness of intention is behind the times. To put it crudely, our brains make up their minds about what to do before we become aware of its intention. (Sorry for being so Cartesian.) Please see this Wired article for more on this fascinating finding.

The "Sex and Consciousness" plenary focused on altered states and peak experiences during sex. Jenny Wade summarized the findings from her recent book "Transcendent Sex." The upshot is that you and your partner could be having a satori-like peak experience triggered by sex and you may not be sharing that with each other. What was especially amusing was Wade narrating the story of a woman who had a peak experience while having the same, boring (sorry, sorry) sex with her husband for the umpteenth time. She was waiting for it to get over and then BAM! - altered state.

When Wolf Singer started to give his talk on synchronization of oscillatory neural responses (gamma synchrony), I thought I'd be bored out of my mind (ouch). And I was. Neural synchrony doesn't really solve any problem. The computational neuroscientists are quick to tell you that the brain is really a high-dimensional spike producing chaotic dynamical system and that any reference to relaxation oscillations to solve a "binding problem" is pretty neanderthal. But Singer redeemed himself. When asked what was going on in deep meditative states he opined "I think they [the meditators] have found a way of being in an Aah Ha! state all the time" [inexact quote] essentially without needing an Einstein-like scientific discovery to generate the flash of insight that presumably produces that state.

The best session of the conference was on "Brain Imaging and Mind Reading." Adrian Owen demonstrated that a few vegetative subjects were capable of performing mental imagery tasks which could be detected by fMRI! [Umm, this means that they aren't really vegetative subjects.]  This to me was the Wow paper of the conference even though I hate fMRI with a passion since it's a glorified heatsink detector.

Finally, we had a parapsychology session. I've never been very interested in parapsychology because there are more basic problems of consciousness - like how "I" am typing this sentence - that need to be solved. Rupert Sheldrake gave an entertaining talk on "Alex" the parrot who could read the mind of his owner (when looking at images). He also showed a time-synced video of a woman and her dog with the dog being particularly adept at figuring out when she intended to come home. (Yes: "intended to come home") The dog would go the door/window and wait right after she decided to come home. [In this case, we have a curious incident of the dog but in daytime.]

In summary, I met some amazingly wonderful people (and Dave Chalmers has posted some pix here), had my happiness threshold breached on numerous occasions and am still having a post-conference afterglow. I'll check with Jenny Wade to see if people get into altered states after attending spectacular conferences like this one :-)

I've become a LOST junkie. Usually TV shows with science fiction (SF) themes are beyond horrid - yes they're THAT bad. The regression of Star Trek (though Star Trek:TNG showed some upswing) proves my point. Since the TV public is not very discerning about the differences between science fiction and fantasy, the former quickly regresses to the latter and we're back in a retro medieval costume saving damsels from dragons and all that crap.

And then there's LOST. The logical successor to a fine line of SF: Dr. Who, Brazil, Back to the Future, Star Trek's "Cause and Effect", Jacob's Ladder, Twelve Monkeys, The Third Policeman, Philip K. Dick's Valis, Groundhog Day, Dark City, The Matrix, Identity, Open Your Eyes, Pan's Labyrinth  and - dare I say it - even the recent Premonition. LOST freely borrows from 'em all. What sets LOST apart from all other TV shows and especially from the execrable Heroes with its übermensch is the central mystery the characters have to solve: "Where, when, why and who are we?"

Theories abound on the net. Are they all dead à la Jacob's Ladder? Is it a role playing game (RPG) crossed with Survivor? Perhaps the island has special powers and it sucks people to it on a regular basis. If so, how does this explain the deep connection between the people on the doomed Oceanic flight 815 before they even got to the island? Who is Jacob, why can't he be easily seen and why does his hut randomly move around the island? Why do some people quickly heal - Rose's disappearing cancer, Locke surviving a gunshot, Patchy mysteriously reappearing after being killed - while others die (Charlie, Ethan, Shannon, Boone, Ana-Lucia, Goodwin, Libby, Eko etc.) ? What is the nature of the smoke monster? What's up with the island's projection and sound system? It seemingly has the ability to apparate people and objects at will with the whispers heralding a new projection.



Besides its surreal landscape, LOST indulges in furious name dropping with some creative juxtapositioning: John Locke, Danielle Rousseau, Richard Alpert, Desmond David Hume, Charlotte Staples Lewis, Daniel Faraday, George Minkowski, Penelope Widmore, Mikhail Bakunin to name a few! What does all this add up to? The LOST writers are clearly head and shoulders better than most TV writers. By announcing that the show will end in three seasons, they've confidently started staking out the endgame. At the very end of season 3 and now in season 4, the show features flash-forwards which is a new dramatic device. Rather than be one possible future, the writers have indicated that it is THE future. This season is about how the Oceanic Six makes it off the island, the next season is about why they need to get back to the island and the final season is about what happens when they do get back - if it's even an island. Barring the obvious idea that it is all a simulation, I cannot see how the writers can resist a deus ex machina approach to story resolution. But I don't care. As long as it hangs together, treats the characters with respect and provides a plausible resolution, I'll be happy.

The best LOST recaps that I've found are by Fishbiscuit and J. Wood. The Lost and Philosophy book looks intriguing.

Hmm...haven't updated this blog in quite a while. I've seen many an abandoned blog on the web. Don't want this one to become a "Blog in a Bog" or a blog that has sunk in the morass of the web.

I traveled a helluva lot last year.

First, I went back to India - mainly Bangalore (now Bengaluru) - to spend a month and a half in a research lab. Once again, I ended up meeting a whole bunch of people in the Bangalore pubs and restaurants. Bangalore has plenty of young kids funded by NGOs crawling around. These kids are from all over the planet, they are bright, well educated and motivated to make a difference. I caught Aerosmith while I was there. I've never seen a stadium act in India at close quarters and it was quite an experience. I wrote about it here.

On the way back to the US, I stopped over in Dubai. Now, this was an unexpected treat. First, I want to mention the ease with which I could get a visa, hotel and desert adventure package booked - all from Bangalore. I merely went to the Emirates office, paid them some money and they took care of the rest. You're met at the airport, a taxi takes you to your hotel and you start the adventure tour after a short rest. The driver of the Toyota 4x4 - and this is mentioned for a reason - was from Syria and he had the disconcerting habit of playing a CD which alternated between Bollywood and "Western" tunes creating an odd juxtaposition in my mind since you don't often taste this brew in the US. After showing us the city, he proceeded to drive into the sand dunes, over the sand dunes, under the sand dunes, well you get the picture. A sand dune roller coaster ride - a first for me. And then we were introduced to dune buggies, sandboarding, some serious (ahem) hookah action, fantastic food topped off by a belly dancing lesson. Unfortunately, I don't remember too much of the late evening. I think I had a good time...

After that we took a trip to Guanajuato, Mexico. This is a very pretty town nestled in the middle of some hills. Has quite a bit of history too. This is where all the action took place in 1810-1811 when Miguel Hidalgo - widely considered to be the father of the Mexican independence movement - inspired many Mexicans to get up and fight. We took a tour of the neighboring towns including a narrated tour of Hidalgo's house which has been preserved as a museum. Again, I'm struck by the general friendliness in the air - in sharp and unpleasant contrast to arriving back in Houston to the sounds of an overbearing security guard bellowing instructions on the right way for us to get through the line.

Finally, Rio... A bizarre place. Imagine you are decked in your finest, sipping some fantastic wine and duelling at the same time. The duel is for real, the saber goes through you like butter, bright red blood oozes from the many wounds and you keep drinking and bleeding, drinking and bleeding...that's Rio in a nutshell. Four people from our conference group got mugged in broad daylight. I made eyecontact with at least three bums who got up from the side of the street to follow me and then abandoned the idea - with a smile - after I made eye contact. Never wear sunglasses in Rio. We went as a group to a nightclub and found that there were more women than men in the nightclub and quite possibly many a transgender as well. I was mercilessly hit on by numerous "women" who all turned out to be hookers. Now I know how women feel. And when I asked a woman to dance with me, she informed me that she wasn't for sale.  We got out of that place in a hurry...but certain body parts were black and blue. Again, Rio is a very friendly place once you get away from the strip. I don't think there's any race consciousness and the sensuality in the air has less machismo than in a former Spanish colony - Brazil having a Portuguese background. To know more about Rio, watch City of God. Shows a side of Rio's reality that you do not want to see.

Lately, I've been reading Jay L. Garfield's stunningly beautiful translation of  Nāgārjuna's Mūlamadhyamakakārikā or "The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way." It is very demanding reading but will pay off especially if you have an analytic philosophy background. Garfield's translation is rigorous and precise - hence the effort needed to comprehend it.

Rather than babble about emptiness (Śūnyatā in Sanskrit), I think it is better to let other more qualified people give a description. Emptiness refers to our innate ability to see forms, patterns, events, possibilities and perspectives as they are rather than the way we'd like to see them. Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche in "Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism" - another phenomenal book - describes emptiness as: "So form is empty. But empty of what? Form is empty of our preconceptions, empty of our judgments. If we do not evaluate and categorize the maple leaf falling and landing on the stream as opposed to the garbage heap in New York, then they are there, what is. They are empty of preconception. They are precisely, what they are, of course! Garbage is garbage, a maple leaf is a maple leaf, "what is" is "what is." Form is empty if we see it in the absence of our own personal interpretations of it." [page 188]

Unfortunately, and because of the subtlety of emptiness, we can be misled. Emptiness does not mean that we should see - let's say - a physical world for what it is rather than our preconceptions of it. The problem here is that the very notion of a physical world is a concept and obscures the real world. And it does not help to equate emptiness with a Buddhist no-self position either since the concept of no-self is, er, just another concept.

As Garfield's translation gathers pace, he writes "The root delusion---the fundamental cognitive error---is the confusion of merely conventional existence with inherent existence. The realization of emptiness eliminates that fabrication of essence, which eliminates grasping, contaminated action, and its pernicious consequences." [page 248]

And this is followed by,

Chapter 18:6