Two Research Papers on Religious Experience and Artificial Intelligence

I have just drafted two papers: How might Artificial Intelligence be Approached for Research in Religious Experience? (available on Academia or on my own website), and How might Artificial Intelligence Support Research in Religious Experience? (also available on Academia or on my own website).

These papers came about after the Journal for the Study of Religious Experience  put out a call for papers for a special issue on AI. I was initially reluctant to respond as I had (and still have) reservations about the list of topics and areas. However, I was urged to apply by a member of the Alister Hardy Trust, who pointed out that I have studied both computer science and religion. So, I sent off an enquiry, establishing that this was to be the first issue to treat AI.

After a bit of further thought, I submitted the following abstract for consideration:

This paper explores the subject of Artificial Intelligence with a view to enhancing research activities in religious experience.  It starts with a broad examination of AI from a historical perspective as an evolution in notions of computation and in the development of machines, with comparisons made between machine and human intelligence. Further evaluation is carried out on the nature of the systems and theories, using a Buddhist lens, focusing especially on intention, agency and creativity, with references from the Theravada canon.  Observations on stillness draw out profound distinctions, providing indications of what is or is not appropriate in terms of AI expectations and engagement.  From these considerations, a practical application of AI emerges in terms of augmenting human intellect, along the lines envisaged by Douglas Engelbart, a pioneer in the field. Accordingly, initial indications are provided of how the work of RERC may be enhanced by the analysis of its archive of personal testimonies using machine learning to implement techniques in natural language processing.  These may include topic analysis of, for example, subject matter and circumstances; and sentiment analysis of emotional states induced, thereby helping to corroborate and extend existing findings.

The journal’s editorial team accepted the proposal, indicating that they were particularly interested in the possibility of AI assisting with the database of accounts at the Alister Hardy Religious Experience Research Centre (RERC). So I subsequently registered for database access, chose a theme (stillness) as a basis for comparing human and machine intelligence, and proceeded to draft a paper, which I managed to submit by the deadline.

My submission was reviewed and after a few weeks I received some feedback. This made me pause to reconsider and after a few days deliberating I decided to withdraw my submission. I shan’t go much into the reasons, but evidently, I had not conveyed clearly enough the main argument, expressed in the opening pages, plus the various applications of AI drew attention away from this argument to the affordances that AI offers. That is what I wanted to avoid. So, the paper needed to be split into two (the argument followed by the application), whilst keeping the existing order. After the split, I expanded the first paper a little to add a key message: scholars and practitioners of spiritual and religious experience should become more involved in the evaluation of AI especially because they have a fuller understanding of what it means to be human.

It is becoming common for universities to address this question (a Google search over the Oxford University domain), quite often in interdisciplinary panels, but I find they do little to affect the general direction of travel, which continues with rapid extensions and expansion of development, albeit with some regulatory hurdles? One of the underlying problems is the repeated pairing of human intelligence and machine intelligence, as though they are comparable side by side. Other terms have built up and established anthropomorphic language (machine learning, deep learning, and so on), which compounds the issue and leads to tacit acceptance.  

There are, in my view, more suitable alternatives. Whilst working on the KEPLAIR project, I was made more aware of the contrast between neural networks as a ‘black box’ technique and transparent techniques based on logical reasoning. In this connection, I was introduced to Douglas Engelbart’s work on Augmenting Human Intellect. Rather than frame questions around AI, we frame them in terms of enhancing humanity.  Accordingly, this framework underpins the second paper, which is more conventional in that it makes suggestions of machine learning applications to support research into religious experience, particularly the RERC accounts. This is largely in the area of hermeneutics (for which Voyant Tools is well-suited), though the requirements on data protection encourage more unusual possibilities.

The papers are currently unpublished drafts. I’d welcome suggestions for open access publication.

Commitment to Research for Human Flourishing

In March 2011 Japan suffered a catastrophe with a massive earthquake off its East coast. A chain of events led to the Fukushima nuclear power plan disaster with the release of massive amounts of toxic radiation. I visited Tokyo a few months later, in July, when the city's population seemed subdued and fearful in a similar way to how many people have been with the Covid-19 pandemic.

I was hosted by Professor Yukari Shirota at Gakushuin University. In response to what happened, Professor Shirota made an emphatic statement, which I paraphrase: “Japan does not have much in the way of natural resources, only human resources. I therefore commit my life to research.”

Research is fundamental to human resourcefulness and is an activity that I would like to develop more effectively. Whilst research is a natural aptitude and I’ve long nurtured an interdisciplinary approach, I have only a very limited publication record despite having spent decades in academia; to earn a living I have served mainly in a technical support capacity.  I originate ideas quite easily, some expressed on this blog, but I have found it exceedingly difficult to gain traction for them.

Reasoning that I needed to devote more time to my endeavours, in July 2020 I decided not to accept an offer a 12-month contract extension to my post as Digital Projects Officer at the History of Science Museum (HSM).  Instead, I would work full-time on my research activities. However, I shall retain a connection following the award by Museum of the (unpaid) position of Honorary Research Fellow, which was approved by the Board of Visitors at their meeting last November.

There are several strands to my research that might benefit HSM. The most immediate concerns any digital aspects, particularly online communications, an area I have explored for a while and about which I will touch on below. There are other, broader aspects. In 2024 the Museum will be celebrating the centenary of its founding and I’ve already outlined some visionary ideas. I may take the opportunity to expand on them.

A number of my research strands have concerned aspect of science and religion, a broad theme whose historical development took a major turn in the 17th century, the century in which the original Ashmolean Museum was founded. The building now houses HSM, but it is still formally referred to as the ‘Old Ashmolean’. This was a period that saw the rapid rise of rationality; indeed, we denote this period as the Age of Reason. The consequences have been far-reaching, most especially in the increasing emphasis on materiality, which has pervaded notions of science and research in general.

I talk briefly about that development in Buddhism and Computing, the first tangible fruit of my research. A contribution to the ‘Mud Pie Slices’ series, it offers more than a slice of my thoughts from the past decade on critical issues around computer-based technology, particularly as manifest on the Internet. It has been a considerable challenge to squeeze in a wide range of topics without undermining the overall flow, but the issues are urgent and I wish to facilitate better access to them.

Buddhism and Computing summarises and ties together some of the main strands of my ideas in response to challenges facing humanity, concerning the freedom to think and act autonomously, the quality of awareness and so on. I conceived the Sigala project in sustainable online social networking as the primary deliverable in response to these challenges, but until recently I kept my research notes in local documents. I have now set up a website for the main body of research, research.siga.la.

Thus far the part-time efforts of one person, it has large gaps, is rough around the edges, out of date in details, lacks marketing (Why so few images? Where’s the explainer video? Etc.), yet it seeks to offer a coherent and humane vision. I’m hoping that once word gets around, the thesis will gain acceptance and the presentation strengthen, and so on.

For me the process started in November 2007 when I started to reflect on what friendship truly means and how best to support it online. Initially, I conceived this in educational terms, but very quickly saw that its scope was universal.

Having been introduced to the Internet in the early ‘90s in the context of research, I have been strongly averse to the way the Internet, particularly the Web, has been commercialised.  Browsing the Web today with its numerous interruptions, whether for legal consents or advertising, do not make for an aesthetic experience.  Furthermore, changes in search indices and results generation, favours organisations, particularly corporates, and has diminished the voice of individuals; all told, it has generally become harder to find high quality and truly diverse materials.  

Nevertheless, we need viable economic models and I see great potential in applying the work of Avner Offer, who recognised a spectrum from the gift to the market in his theory of the 'economy of regard'.  I’d like to incorporate this in Sigala.

I will elaborate on the substance of the project in future blog posts. For now, I just mention in passing that the website is a kind of knowledge base, whose process is ongoing. As explained, I author and manage the content on my laptop at home using a locally installed WordPress, a web content management system whose popularity is due in no small part to the fact that it is open source software.

Using this setup has yielded the first technical fruit. Running to a few dozen pages, the site is not large or complex, but there is a lot of text, so it may take some while to browse to find something specific. So, as with most websites, a search facility is provided. However, I’ve taken an existing search plugin, WP Static Search, and modified it to work offline, i.e. without an Internet connection or web server. I’m only an occasional coder, but have uploaded my changes to Github and submitted a pull request. This means you can download the entire site onto a memory stick and browse and search it there. (Just one tip: when downloading the zip file from Github, the plugin folder should be renamed back to ‘wp-static-search’ before deployment.)

However the research proceeds, I shall always be looking for opportunities to innovate!

Pause for Thought: The Use of Interventions in Social Networking Sites

The ‘attention economy’ has become a way large organisations view our use of the Internet; to maximise revenues, systems are designed to retain and nurture our attention, to keep us in front of screens and to steer us in particular directions, usually feeding some form of consumerism.

Perhaps because of the novelty in social media, Web 2.0, etc. and the undoubted benefits of connecting people irrespective of their location, mainstream publicity has for many years been generally positive and upbeat, and it is only belatedly that concerns expressed about the impact on one’s mental state and well-being (and hence for society as a whole) have started to be taken seriously.  However, these concerns are growing, especially evident among those behind such technological developments, who, as parents, are instructing nannies to prevent their children from having access to such devices.

Figure: The supramarginal gyrus (shaded in yellow), which has been found to be associated with empathy.


In this introductory post (the first of probably two or three) I’ll try and articulate some of the underlying issues and indicate how I am developing a cognitive approach, extending previous work from a social sciences perspective. My interest in cognitive aspects of behaviour in online environments was sparked whilst leading the RAMBLE project in mobile blogging, 2004-5. Ostensibly a software development project, I noticed that the content being authored had a special reflective quality, as remarked in an article for Ariadne.

Although I don’t have empirical data to show this, I’m quite sure that cognitively what was essential to the depth and range of student reflection was dis-engagement, allowing the mind to relax and unbind and to come to a natural position of rest before reasoning and evaluating with greater clarity. (Note I used “unbind” deliberately, because the meaning of engagement has a sense of binding.)

Definition

I am going to take the principles of engagement and disengagement to explore a particular facet in design: the intervention. This word is derived from two Latin words: inter, which means ‘between’ and venire, a verb meaning ‘to come’. (See the entry on the online etymology dictionary.)

So an intervention is an act of coming between someone on an existing course or path and the continuation of that path. That ‘act’ could be a natural phenomenon, as in “bad weather intervened in the rescue operation”, but, more usually, when it involves people, there is some intention behind the intervention with a view to modifying the outcome.

The Problem: Interventions and Attention Deprivation

At first I thought that the concept of intervention was confined largely to medical sciences, e.g. to help someone who suffers from dyslexia improve the accuracy of their reading. However, as I explored I realized that its use is not restricted to any particular subject or field of application: regarding software and the Internet, there are numerous kinds of interventions or, rather, micro-interventions, in the design of social networking sites, but they are not usually so helpful when repeated!

Here are a few examples:

• a web page pop-up prompting us to check the site cookies policy or sign up to a newsletter
• regular and frequent e-mails conveying selected network updates. Typically they convey only summary information and require clicks to their site to see anything really useful. Some of these will link to pages requiring a paid subscription.
• Similarly, 1-1 messages may come via e-mail from a contact, but replying to the e-mail requires logging into the network.

The intention behind these designs is mainly to retain and extend the usage of their platforms.  Design is deliberate, not accidental, so such technology is not neutral.

Does that matter? What is the human impact? In the short term (for example, in the immediate mental functioning) and in the long term (for example, in emotional development)? Evidently, the prompts above are designed to hold on to and retain attention, i.e. keep the user engaged, just for a few more moments. A handful of such prompts are easily dealt with, but what about the cumulative effect of dozens, hundreds, or thousands … ?

Recently there have been candid remarks from a number of prominent figures that indicate that the cognitive and emotional effects are deleterious. Most notably, perhaps, was the reference to a so-called ‘dopamine hit’, by Sean Parker, former President of Facebook, when interviewed for Axios. The design of social networking sites (SNS) and social media technology is by and large making attention an increasingly scarce resource and it thereby is often removing control; malware often spreads when a usually vigilant person is in a hurry to clear their desk and in their haste they click on the wrong link. We tend to think of succumbing to malware in terms of software viruses causing damage to our daily working routines or finances, but Parker has made it clear that badly designed SNS can exploit “human vulnerability” in a similar way by facilitating harmful speech in status updates and accepting ‘friend’ connections without any thought.

Response: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Well-being

So how do we respond? Vociferous campaigns, such as the petition to Facebook from the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood to withdraw Messenger Kids, advocate banning certain new software service developments. However, once released somewhere in the world, technology generally can’t be uninvented, so unless it's clearly illegal then without major societal change it’s little more than a stalling tactic.  Other responses are needed.  Teaching mindfulness and skilfulness in attending to (and abstinence from) Internet use, as advocated by Ravi Chandra M.D., is a valuable tool that increases our capability and capacity to deal skilfully in such scenarios.  It is certainly to be encouraged, but again, just as it’s recognised that certain physical environments are not conducive to well-being and merely leaving them as-is is not desirable, the same applies online.

I think we need also to be constructive, by proposing alternative technological designs: as Rohan Gunatillake, creator of the Buddhify app, has argued, this requires that practitioners and academics embrace the digital.
  Design shouldn’t be left to a small demographic of young technically-savvy coders. Rohan advocates ‘compassionate’ elements to gradually improve the quality of existing designs, which can include softening current interventions (such as replacing an unhelpful alert ‘You’ve got 10,000 messages in your InBox’ with colour saturations for new messages). However, whilst such measures offer some help I see them as minor concessions, which will be insufficient to deal with fundamental flaws (to borrow a biblical image, this is like “pouring new wine into old wineskins”).

Seeing the need to start afresh, I have for some time been focusing on the theme of well-being rooted in teachings of the Buddha, whilst drawing on a wide range of scholarly disciplines. Previously I explored the architecture of relationship networks from social science perspectives, resulting in ‘Supporting Kalyāṇamittatā Online: New Architectures for Sustainable Social Networking’ (paper and slides on the siga.la project). The conference where that paper was given had three strands: Buddhism and Social Science, Buddhism and Cognitive Science, and Buddhism and Natural Science.

The social science perspective has been helpful in providing some background and general parameters for the design.  Indeed, much of the foundational work has already been established concerning notions of friendship, well-being and human welfare, though research tends to drift in particular directions, neglecting others. In social sciences, a central term is ‘social capital’, which rather vaguely attributes value to the various ways of being sociable — a Wikipedia article seems to cover this quite well.  Alejandro Portes attempted to provide a firmer footing (in Social Capital: Its Origins and Applications in Modern Sociology) and made an important observation that there’s been a gradual shift in how it’s viewed, moving away from small-scale family (kinship) relationships, the original focus for Durkheim, to large-scale societal views. Since that paper, now 20 years old, many SNS studies have reflected that tendency by dwelling on the collective paradigm.

This has arguably resulted in ethics being a casualty because discussion in this area has been more in terms of personal data and privacy and far less about behaviour.  It partly explains how Janet Sternberg’s thesis from 2001 (almost a prehistoric age in Web terms) about misbehaviour in cyber places can be republished in 2012 for, as she explains, there still remains a dearth in literature about behaviour (as well as showing that the principles of community remain largely the same). By introducing normative Buddhist ethics (above) I have tried to highlight how this is the case, but haven't yet got so far in applying this practically to software development.  I have been exploring more at a theoretical level the synergies with social science and whilst findings from social sciences, particularly around patterns of human networking, have influenced designs (with research often commissioned by larger tech companies), they are generally not affecting the basic structure.

For more fundamental aspects concerning the system architecture and user interfaces, further and perhaps deeper insights may be gained by appeal to cognitive science.  Social sciences is effective in showing how just as the physical environment impacts our ability to grow socially, so too the online environment, in terms of types of networks and relationships; cognitive science is more focused on the individual person and, like a microscope, potentially able to illuminate the basic qualities and degree of cognitive processing involved at every step.  An interdisciplinary approach will be more fruitful, as shown by the work in evolutionary anthropology by Robin Dunbar around the "social brain hypothesis", popularly headlined by Dunbar's Number.  This has even spawned social networking services such as the Path app, as featured on Wired, with network size limited by that number.

The Solution? Restoring Attention through Intervention

Long before Parker's confession, concerns had been raised among various researchers, especially by practitioners in children’s education focused on individual development over the long term. Some of the earliest empirical studies that addressed specifically emotional development among adolescents were carried out by Mary Helen Immordino-Yang et al at the University of Southern California, in interdisciplinary work that brought together experts in education and neuroscience. In an important paper, Neural Correlates of Admiration and Compassion, they described experiments to foster qualities of virtue such as compassion and observed:

“In order for emotions about the psychological situations of others to be induced and experienced, additional time may be needed for the introspective processing of culturally shaped social knowledge. The rapidity and parallel processing of attention requiring information, which hallmark the digital age, might reduce the frequency of full experience.”

In other words, there is at the basic level of cerebral functioning, a certain minimum duration required to absorb and process. I suspect that minimum is for survival and if this exposure were sustained for a long time, then perhaps more neural connections would be established, a kind of adaptation that ensured continuation in terms of essential biological functioning. In the context of behaviour online, it means that the brain can develop ways to cope with the barrage of interventions, but what about the overall health and what would that mean in terms of more refined human qualities?

The team subsequently emphasized that time was of the essence. Interviewed for USC News, Noble Instincts Take Time, Immordino-Yang remarked:

“For some kinds of thought, especially moral decision-making about other people’s social and psychological situations, we need to allow for adequate time and reflection...”

I take that as a cue for designing interventions in a new, wholesome way.  But it will takes more than one "magic number" to foster a radically new approach to system and interaction that could provide an alternative to the most popular systems in use.

So let’s see if we can show how the use of new kinds of interventions as an aspect of design in SNS can enhance the quality of attention and decision-making. Can we in particular deploy interventions to enable users to take more time for reflection and evaluation online? Can we do this especially with a view to the cultivation of virtue, which will aid in our personal development and the fostering of healthy relationships?

Our efforts should pay more attention to individual behaviour, especially on how to make choices more skilfully; this is where interventions can be introduced. Friendship is a pertinent focus because it applies to many scenarios where one’s actions have some impact on the quality of one’s relationship with others. Actually, many kinds of interventions can be specified to enhance friendship with various spheres of impact, amply demonstrated in a valuable reference paper by Adams and Blieszner, Resources for Friendship Intervention.  Their investigations reveal their intricate nature and considerable variety; they are sensitive to how effects can be unpredictable. They also discuss how cognitive processes can be uplifting (page 162):

“Intervention thus centers on identifying irrational beliefs and sources of inappropriate schemas; analyzing the emotional and behavioral outcomes of holding those beliefs and schemas; and replacing them with more realistic, accurate, and positive ways of thinking about the self, others, and relationships.”

There is a section devoted to 1-1 (dyadic) relationships, which is discussed in terms of marital partnerships, but even in that context it is recognised that:

“it is equally important that partners maintain a degree of autonomy or self-determination … rather than responding to each other only on the basis of anxiety or other emotions.”

Think about the online context — how much autonomy do we really have and what is our emotional state in our interactions?

It needs pause for thought, and in the next post I'll show how interventions can help.

Research Visit to Gakushuin University

Located towards the northwest of central Tokyo, Gakushuin is a private academic corporation that comprises schools and colleges as well as a university that currently has 9000 students. It is famous in Japan because of its historical connections with the Imperial Court. When I arrived a couple of weeks ago, I found the Mejiro campus spacious and verdent, surprisingly so given its centrality; I was informed that among the universities inside the JR Yamanote loop, it's the second largest after the University of Tokyo.

The present campus, like much of Tokyo, has seen many changes, but among the modern blocks there still remain a few of the older buildings, a little over 100 years old:



The modern multi-storey block on the right (East building no. 1?) obviously offers more capacity, but in the distance are some well-maintained old classrooms, cherished by staff and students even today. To the left is the former library building, now housing the Museum of History, graced by a venerable old tree in front of a small pool and foundation:


However, I wasn't here to be a tourist (although during my week's stay I did have a chance to wander), but rather to explore aspects of e-learning. The opportunity had arisen following earlier exchanges of ideas in the UK: in 2005, Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS) received a visit from Professor Yukari Shirota of the Department of Management, Faculty Economics, Gakushuin University. I arranged for her to give a presentation on some interactive software she had developed that guided students through the study of some topics in mathematics. The system's architecture was based on solution plans to word problems and delivered using an intelligent agent (animated by the Microsoft wizard).

Prof. Shirota is a computer scientist of long-standing - for instance, she co-authored an introduction to UNIX in 1984. During the past decade, Prof. Shirota has been developing e-learning systems to aid in the teaching of mathematics to her Management students. Inspired by George Pólya, her research has been focused on problem solving, invoking techniques in A.I. and especially visualisation, to help make sense of how the formulae and equations are used in word problems in Economics. I was particularly struck by her idea that A.I. might be able replicate the rhythm of instruction from teacher to pupil, quite similar perhaps to the rhythm of communication between a mother and baby. I hadn't come across anything like this thinking in the UK.

More recently, Prof. Shirota's research has concerned the provision of integrated tools that enable academic staff to create a range of online materials to direct students step by step in tackling certain types of questions, particularly in the field of bond mathematics. These systems are typically Web applications with scripts that invoke computer algebra systems such as Maple and Maxima to deliver step by step instructions. Some recent examples of this work are evident in overview of activities for 2011.

With regard to the financial mathematics, Prof. Shirota and her colleagues have used a conceptual approach based on entity-relationship diagrams to relate variables to formulae and equations. So the tasks of understanding may be characterised by being able to visualise and understand this map and its relations. How may that process be best aided online? In its entirety, the complete diagram is too extensive and detailed to show all at once, so any online implementation will need navigation - to focus on particular formulae and relations, but also to 'zoom out' and see the model as a whole. So does this suggest navigating it like, say, Google Earth or some other way based more closely on the relationships?

It's in addressing these considerations that I have been offering some input with my background in mathematics, somewhat distant now, and more recently e-learning and Web development, gained mainly whilst in the Learning Technologies Group at OUCS. Determining effective solutions is a multi-faceted task: its design, especially in terms of user interface, should be soundly rooted in principles of cognition. As I am not trained in educational psychology, I have to deal more with the nuts and bolts of the learning context itself, primarily in terms of the current and emerging technologies. In this regard, I'd say that whilst the emphases in pedagogy vary from country to country, the predominance of personally own computing devices has presented new variables to factor into the education at all levels. It's particularly this phenomenon, which I tend to call mobile and ubiquitous computing, that I was encouraged to explore ahead of my visit in the form of a survey paper on e-learning systems for mathematics, with particular reference to business and economics.

To give some structure in this rather broad landscape, I initially made reference to some recent features of e-learning in the UK. There's a strong focus on learner-centred education; within that I'm particularly interested in processes of deep reflection, stemming from the RAMBLE project I led in mobile blogging and learning environments. I'm not sure about the merits of focusing so much on individual predispositions, but I felt that the work on open educational resources and podcasting as a delivery mechanism was a useful vehicle to illustrate how learning has emerged from being concentrated in a classroom or workshop and flowed out into less formal environments. It was with this image in mind that I developed a thread to show how computer assisted learning for mathematics has similarly emerged from the laboratory into the open and is now squarely aiming at handheld tablet and multi-touch devices.

The paper, whose full title is 'Ubiquitous e-Learning: Designing Web Systems for Economics and Business Mathematics', has been published in Gakushuin Economic papers and is now available online - in HTML and PDF formats.

Lucy Dunlap and the Founding of Satriwithaya School

Whilst it is very well known that Somdet Ya, the Princess Mother was educated at Satriwithaya School (see also the Wikipedia entry, which Google can help a bit to translate), much less is known about its founder. Shortly after I came across the information in the Srinagarindra Museum that enabled me to establish that my grandmother had been a pupil there, I came across an article about the history of the school in the Education section of the Bangkok Post. It makes brief reference to its founding and then proceeds to offer a perspective that combines tradition with careful adaptation. I can see that the school is still highly regarded and a popular choice among parents.

But what piqued my interest was the very brief reference to the fact that it had a “Thai-American founder, Miss Lucy Dunlap, or ``Ma'am See'', who, we are informed, subsequently handed over the school to the Education Department. Who was Lucy Dunlap?

Once again I consulted Mr. Google, but there were very few matches returned. It seemed initially that there was no information available, but then I came across a link to the Wheaton College archives. The College contains in particular the Margaret and Kenneth P. Landon Papers. Margaret Landon is the author of Anna and the King of Siam, a work of fiction that has long been regarded in Thailand with some notoriety, but I won’t explain here.

As far as I can tell, all the authors in this archive were Presbyterian missionaries in SE Asia. Among the works (Box 196, Folder 17) is The Story of Lucy Dunlap by Margaret McCord. I had no idea about its format, publication status etc.; I then tried to search for this title in various library catalogues, but this was the only place I could see it referenced. So I filled in their online contact form, explained my interest from my grandmother's connection to the school and expected to come away empty handed ... Within a week, I received an email with an attachment – an archivist had very kindly scanned the document and sent me a PDF. It wasn’t very long, but I was still impressed at the service.

The document is a typed manuscript, 12 pages in length, dated August 1945, with a few corrections in ink. It starts with the heading Lucy Dunlap (Born 1869) and proceeds to describe in narrative form how the author came to meet Miss Dunlap in person and find out her story from missionaries. There’s a mixture of travelogue and second hand reports, laced with the author’s own interpretations, but the accounts of some key episodes sound true. One of these concerns the unusual circumstance’s behind the birth. Margaret McCord writes that a Dr. E. P. Dunlap was evangelising in Thailand (presumably in the late 1860s) and in the course of this missionary work came across a woman in prison, who was about to give birth. He asked for the woman to be released temporarily so the birth could take place with better care. When she gave birth to a girl, he and his wife subsequently offered to the mother to adopt her daughter, to which she agreed. Dr. and Mrs. Dunlap named the girl, Lucy.

We are informed that when Lucy was 9 years old she was taken to the U.S., where she continued her schooling, with training as a missionary, though it was not formally completed. She subsequently returned to Thailand in the 1890s and we learn that she was initially a teacher at Wang Lang School, but that didn’t work out. However, “next she was seen in charge of a small government school. However, this school did not continue long.” Since Lucy Dunlap’s subsequent work was in nursing and given the date, I guess this is a reference to Satriwithaya School.

I think this story is significant because it shows among other things the influence of Christian missionaries in the Thai education system, particularly in the 19th Century, a period in which the Thai monarchy consciously sought rapprochement with the various Western powers so as to ensure as best as they could the survival of Siam’s independence and furthermore prosperity, through the broadening of its culture. I think the story behind the founding of Satriwithaya School’s could be seen as indicative of the curious interplay that was taking place in those times. I wonder how much these undercurrents would have affected my grandmother and how much my mother knew about them...

Master's Dissertation on Buddhism: On the Fifth Precept as Avoiding Heedlessness

สวัสดี ปี ใหม่! Even if you don't read Thai, I think you can guess this annual greeting. :-)

The customary celebrations have been accompanied by the usual over-celebrations with adverse consequences reported in familiar headlines such as Rising alcohol addiction costs 'could cripple the NHS'. So it may be an appropriate time to share some research into the Fifth Precept in Buddhism, which I undertook as part of my Master's in the Study of Religion.

Observing this precept is an undertaking to avoid intoxicants. So what was the original meaning of this precept? How is it interpreted today, particularly in social contexts? Do practitioners from different traditions have the same attitudes or are there variations? I explored these and other issues in my Master's dissertation on Avoiding pamāda: An analysis of the Fifth Precept as Social Protection in Contemporary Contexts with reference to the early Buddhist teachings. The exploration is essentially concerned with just the one Pali word, pamāda, which can be translated as 'heedlessness.'

As with my essays in Christianity, I was being a bit ambitious, perhaps trying to bite off more than I could properly chew. It's commonly known that there are variations, but I'm not aware of research that has shown this empirically. So I've made a little step in this direction by carrying out a survey, looking at people's understanding of the precept in theory and how they put it into practice in particular social scenarios. I wrote this up as a separate piece of work as it was too big to fit into the dissertation (but since all Master's work was marked anonymously, I had to make cryptic references so that the author of the dissertation wasn't made explicit).

I was able to establish with reasonable confidence that there were indeed variations in attitudes among practitioners in different traditions, so how did the variations arise? In my background reading I made use of quite a few Mahāyāna texts, especially those relating to the Bodhisattva ideal. Along the way, Graeme MacQueen's fascinating study of Buddhavacana prompted some reflections. Again, owing to space limitations, I couldn't write much about this in the dissertation, but at least there are some notes that I could write up at a later date.

Just one other observation. Although pamāda is most commonly connected with alcohol and mind-altering drugs, the Buddha indicated a more general scope in his guidance to avoid the intoxicated mind. I found this in the early texts when I came across the compound, jūtappamādaṭṭhānānuyoga, which I've translated as 'gambling, a yoke that is the cause of heedlessness.' I think it's apt to point to this now as I think it is this mentality that has contributed in no small measure to the global financial crisis where trading on the financial markets has been - as far as I can tell - a kind of gambling. The more I explore the texts, the more I see how fundamental heedfulness is to developing one's practice.

I hope the dissertation is interesting and helpful. Any feedback - comments, suggestions, critiques - would be welcome, either by email or as comments to this blog. I think there's a lot more research that could be pursued in this area, especially in relation to physical and mental health.

Recalling Memories through Pictures (using multimedia tools)

The processes of contact, feelings, perception and memory are closely interlinked. They are mediated through our senses and for most people the sense that usually predominates is sight. So in trying to put together the early life of my mother, the late Fuengsin Trafford, it's been helpful to carry out interviews based on sets of photographs. I haven't done much planning really, but rather have made things up as I've gone along, working intuitively; it's only now I can see more of the methodology that I've actually followed! I'll report here on that methodology and also on some of the technical tools that I've used to assist me.

My mother left hundreds of photos, which I've tried to arrange in sets according to distinct periods: early childhood, University days, her first years of teaching and so on. I created an index for each set and have pencilled in an incrementing number on the back of each photo, so that they are uniquely identified and there's some order to them, though (as I later would frequently find out) it's not chronological! I then scanned in the photos at a fairly high resolution (on an HP Scanjet 5370C, quite old now) and saved the files using the index as part of the file name. Having done this for a fair proportion of the collection, I've put copies in many places - on laptop hard drives, an external backup disk and memory sticks.

However, merely creating an archive without any descriptions is not much use! For some while I had intended to ask relatives and friends of my mother to enlighten me as to the context and details concerning the photos. I was finally able to set off for my mini fieldwork earlier this month (December), with a copy of the photos on my netbook, an Eee PC. When I met the 'interviewees' in Thailand I recorded the conversations using a digital voice recorder, saving copies of the recordings as files on the netbook.

It was the first time I had properly used such a recording device and my experience of conducting interviews was minimal (though I once did an interview with a Big Issue seller as part of a one day digital video course). So earlier this year I explored the world of digital audio recorders (a process that's familiar for me as I've purchased quite a lot of electronic devices :-) I settled on an Olympus WS-110, which is a compact device, somewhat smaller and lighter than e.g. a Nokia 8210 mobile phone. I chose it based on reviews of its audio quality - good microphone and high quality sampling (see e.g. reviews on Amazon); file format wasn't a concern for me. These devices are evolving rapidly and already Olympus lists this as an archived product, which means you should be able to find it new at a very good price on ebay (which is where I purchased it). Operating the device was very simple.

Then the netbook would serve as a digital lightbox and a basic means of navigation - for a given photo set all the photos would be the same folder and I'd run a slideshow using the wonderful Irfanview! The major handicap with the netbook is the relatively small screen - in many cases I needed to zoom in (my audio recording has a lot of tapping sounds!) When I was in conversation, I'd start with a preamble about what I was intending to do and asked for permission (it's worth confirming this afterwards as well). Although sometimes you know that everyone is happy, it's a good habit to get into in case I go on to do academic fieldwork, which is something I am deliberating. My main role felt like being a catalyst, with some general encouragement and a few questions sprinkled here and there, to elicit a few more details. There's no doubt a large swathe of literature on conducting such interviews, but I didn't read any.

On my return to the UK it was time to transcribe what had been said. To facilitate this, I wanted to associate the audio with the respective pictures (a tradeoff of using a separate recording device rather than doing the recording directly on the netbook). The intended result would be a video consisting of the photos that I had shown with each photo accompanied by the respective audio commentary, i.e. the comments from friends and relatives.

The solution I adopted was to use a video editing tool, Windows Movie Maker (WMM for short), which comes part of the Windows operating system. I guess it is similar in functionality, if not in elegance, with Apple's iMovie. My familiarity with WMM is very limited, so it's probably best if I summarise. The basic idea is to create one WMM file for each interview (WMM only provides a single audio track) so that in any given interview when playing back you know what was said about a particular picture. Here's a screenshot:

There are basically three areas: top left is the collection of files that I used to create the composition - this is where you import the photos and the audio and in this case I could import audio straightaway without conversion as it was in WMA format. Top right is the playback for the composition as a whole. However, the work is carried out below in the storyboard/timeline, which consists of parallel tracks. All I used was the Video and Audio tracks, dragging and dropping photos from the collection area, moving them about until there was approximate synchronisation.

However, in writing a biography I need words as well as pictures! The next step in the process is thus transcription. The method I'm using here is to create a large table with the first column containing the photos, one photo per row. Each of the other columns are to record the transcription from a particular interview. With reference to the WMM files I'm transcribing what was said about a particular photo in the corresponding cell of the table. Again I'm not being particularly sophisticated about the implementation - it's one mammoth table in a MS Word document. As long as it works, it is okay. For a formal research project I expect this would be better implemented in a database.

Handwriting bonus!

There have been some nice extras in undertaking this exercise. My mother has penned in Thai many documents, including a diary over several years. It's one thing to learn how to read the printed word, but a further step to decipher Thai handwriting! With these compositions I have some samples here that have been read out (and with the aid of a dictionary I can slowly spell them out myself). To be systematic, for each letter I can build up a set of samples that I can use later on.

For a few hours of recording, there are many more in organising and interpreting, but I find it fun to do and along the way I learn a little more about Thai history generally. For anyone contemplating learning more about their own family history, I'd recommend this as a stimulating and informative exercise.

Acknowledgements

I mustn't forget to thank everyone who has kindly provided information in the December interviews, including: Pah Vasana, Khun Jamras, Pah Umpai, P' Laem, P' Darunee & her mother, Khun Chaiwat, P' Yui, P' Ead, Na Tewee, Na Tun, and Pah Jah. If I could contact all those my mother knew well, this list would be very long ...

RAMBLE Project blog - hiatus and archival

This post concerns a work-related blog I have been maintaining, which disappeared off the radar for a couple of weeks or so. This is to explain what has happened.

From Autumn 2004 until Spring 2005 I managed a small externally-funded project in mobile learning called RAMBLE, which concerned blogging on PDAs and other handheld devices and linking them with institutional learning environments. A readable overview was published in an online journal called Ariadne.

As part of the process, I maintained a project blog and the budget included all the hosting needs, but once the project had finished - as so often happens - the blog could only be maintained on good will and very mimimal resources. Even so, the blog server software, Pebble weblog, impressed several colleagues and even the Director hosted his blog there... But alas we were hit by spam, which escalated in magnitude, and it was decided to remove the service and I don't think it will come back online :-(

For a while none of the blogs were available at all, but I've found a way of creating an archive that, all being well, preserves the orginal addresses of the posts, i.e. the permalinks. Pebble stores everything to do with each blog in flat files, so I simply copied the files across to a fresh local installation of Pebble and ran a spidering tool (wget) to grab a static snapshot, and then the sys admin could copy these files to the server. As I type there's a wget-generated archive available at the moment, but it's not yet complete and retains options for posting comments etc.

Another blog, pault@LTG, has suffered the same problems, and I need to find a replacement; I'm thinking of setting up on Educause as I'm registered member, due to attend the 2006 conference in Dallas in October.

A Research Genealogy Project? (2)

I circulated the idea of a Research Genealogy Project among a few colleagues, who have offered some comments, giving me a bit more to ponder, particularly the basic question of what is this is really for? What purpose does it serve?

My tentative response to this at the moment is that the long term goal is to understand about higher levels of knowledge, understanding and insight and how they can propagate, flourish and advance. At a more mundane level, it might offer clues into the kinds of conditions that are more likely to lead to successful research activities based on a large body of genealogy data, perhaps useful for funding bodies.

In terms of a genealogy project based on formal research qualifications, I would focus initially on the relationships rather than the objects. There are many kinds of relationships and a standard each-way link without any meaning is usually not appropriate: the existing Maths Genealogy project already has some a sense of ordering or direction in which the Professor generally is the one who imparts to the student until the student absorbs and understands.

There are other inputs that could be modelled: ranging from formal instruction to collaboration, to influence. Looking back at my own Ph.D. (Use of Formal Methods for Safety-critical Systems), apart from my supervisor, I was given guidance by a few other staff and learnt from quite a number of researchers in the field. For instance, at the start I had to learn from those who had developed the formal theoretical foundations (e.g. the theory of testing equivalences of processes), whilst others provided certain contextual background (the application domain of medical device communications). When it came to applying some new theory, I used some methodologies (that applied safety analysis techniques) that adapted or built on the work of contemporary Ph.D students. All these informed and influenced me in my own research, but in different ways.

I corresponded with some of these by email, but although it might be interesting to model correspondence between researchers (nice graph theory applications), I can't see how you can dig into these emails in practice and in any case they were just a small proportion of authors that influenced my work.

It's going to be easier if you can work with what has been freely published, which brings us back to the thesis. What if they could be marked up in such a way that you can extract meaning? So you could know in a particular thesis whose work had provided the foundations, who was doing similar work. This is a task for experts in knowledge representation, retrieval and analysis. Patterns might emerge that show coalesence among some theses, where a lot of researchers tackle a popular topic and related issues; further some theses may show a lot of interconnectivity not only within subject areas but across subject areas, which might suggest making more explicit particular areas for co-operation and joint conferences. On the other hand, some research may be shown to go off on a limb and have little to do with others. Some nice visuals will make this much easier to see!

Notes on 'Wholeness and the implicate order: Ch.1 Fragmentation and Wholeness '.

In this chapter Bohm asserts very strongly the need for a whole view in which knowledge and experience are as one. Without this perspective, thought is fragmented and hence the world. It's not a common view among Western scientists, at least not one generally espoused. I had read that Bohm was influenced by Krishnamurti and this is evident if you look at the end of the Appendix, in which he pays glowing tribute to the approach of Krishnamurti and distinguishes approaches and attitudes to measurable and immeasurable that he has encountered between West and East (especially India). The appendix might have been put at the beginning because the perspective offered seems to flow from the observations there.

Overall, I think the views offer valuable coherence and I want to learn more, but there seems to be a denial of the transcendent potential of human beings; that the absolute reality can be attained:

Actually, there are no direct and positive things that man can do to get in touch with the immeasurable, for this must be immensely beyond anything that man can grasp with his mind or accomplish with his hands or instruments.

I find this ultimately pessimistic, unnecessarily so. I guess if someone comes from a Western background it can be difficult to not equate a human being with the biological organism, but the biological organism cannot of itself transcend. In insisting on wholeness of the thinking and content, to include the biological [conditioned] self, and nothing beyond would imply being stuck. Actually, isn't this argument in itself relativistic?

My conviction is that the first journey is to explore what it is to be human and that alone - if carried out properly - will refute the above statement. Indeed the Buddha taught a different way of viewing, a subtle way, which contrasts the conditioned sphere as subject to dukkha (suffering/unsatisfactoriness), anicca (impermanence/flux), anatta (not-self), with lokuttara dhamma - reality that transcends the conditioned, as recorded in Udana VIII.3: Nibbana Sutta

There is, bhikkhus, a not-born, a not-brought-to-being, a not-made, a not-conditioned. If, bhikkhus, there were no not-born, not-brought-to-being, not-made, not-conditioned, no escape would be discerned from what is born, brought-to-being, made, conditioned. But since there is a not-born, a not-brought-to-being, a not-made, a not-conditioned, therefore an escape is discerned from what is born, brought-to-being, made, conditioned.

In the appendix, there's similarly another bone of contention:

It is of course impossible to go back to a state of wholeness that may have been present before the split between East and West developed...

Personally, as someone who is half Caucasian and half Oriental, I would like to suggest this is possible, particularly if you are mixed race (East/West) and have appropriate karmic background and a supportive environment in which to develop ... as it happens, my research and professional work is in science and technology, whilst my personal interests are in religion and philosophy. :-)

And a bit further on he adds another 'of course':

Of course, we have to be cognisant of the teachings of the past, both Western and Eastern, but to imitate these teachings or to try to conform to them would have little value.

Is that so? The Buddha often used the exhortation of "Ehipassiko!" as an invitation to "Come and see!" which meant following Magga, the path leading ultimately to nibbana. I think if you were to ask a Bhikkhu (monk), they would say that the Buddha's teaching is as relevant today as it was 2500 years ago and the vinaya and suttas contain instructions that if followed can be found effective guidance for the Path.

There's a lot of attention to the divided nature of the world and critical issues, with implications for how one lives within society and not separate from it. That's evident even in monastic societies, e.g. the Buddhist Sangha and lay supporters are operating in a kind of ecosystem, supporting each other in complementary ways. However, at the same time, a bhikkhu formally renounces the world, society and all its endless comings and goings.

Something I found odd is that there's no discussion of ethics or values tied in with actions. Maybe I've missed something. But then, that aspect is not pronounced even in some Eastern traditions, with more emphasis on carrying out rituals and duty. However, it is fundamental to the Buddhist perspective - indeed, karma in the Buddhist sense is ethical, as the previous quote from the Dhammapada shows.

Nevertheless, I find it apt that he attributes great importance to how we cultivate views, how we think. I considered this issue as a prelude to some writing in the past and even took a quick look, as it happens, at the word 'rational,' but I had a narrower impression in my mind of its definition, viz as being fundamentally an activity of the brain, adding as a footnote the example of soldiers thinking/considering their battle plans. I was undoubtedly strongly influenced by lessons I received at school, which at the time of writing was not so long ago. However, Bohm conveys a deeper sense of 'measure' with a very nice discussion of how it underlies many words that have developed rather separate meanings. So I see my view was unnecessarily limited and perhaps a more accurate translation for the soldier's deliberations might be weighing up!

I considered these issues in a long series of reflections that eventually led to a book. The process of authoring that book was perhaps unusual - I would occasionally jot down on scraps of paper reflections and realisations. I had no intention at the start to write a book - I had only the will to write and reflect. Then later on there was the wish to order the notes; still later on the observation that there was sufficient to compose a book. It might appear that here was a book made up of tiny disparate fragments and thus fundamentally fragmented. But perhaps these fragments came out from the same whole and reflect that whole - unable to represent that whole in even a number of reflective writings, this was a process of unfolding over time. I wonder if merely the intention to understand was what Bohm refers to as the formative cause in this process, where the book is implicit from the intentions, or we might say that in the book there was the flow of conditions that had cause in intentions.

A Research Genealogy Project?

The Mathematics Genealogy project provides a field to categorise dissertations according to the Math Subject Class. Seeing how the selection is very broad, e.g. covering computer science, I was prompted to wonder what about genealogy projects for other subjects? There appear to be a few ideas and initiatives, including Thomas Witten's proposal for a Physics PhD Genealogy project, the High Energy Physics directory, the Software Engineering Academic Genealogy, the Theoretical Computer Science Genealogy and the Notre Dame University academic genealogy, that covers current members of its departments of Chemistry & Biochemistry and Physics.

It's a very fragmented picture, with independently developed systems, very partial coverage of researchers and yet already some duplication. It will become even more so as subject disciplines keep growing...

So it makes sense to me to take a fundamentally more integrated view that incorporates research in any field, one that can also have a richer model, taking into account different kinds of research qualifications, not just PhDs; and different kinds of relationships, not just formal supervisor-student; thereby responding to issues raised in the Mathematics PhD in the United Kingdom.

The findings yielded on this broader base will be fascinating, showing among other things how disciplines evolve over the generations, shedding light on questions such as: What happened to descendants of those who studied classics? What did the ancestors of computer scientists research? Many trends can be observed. There's a lot of talk in the UK about lifelong learning, so how about considering lifelong and generational research?

Another aspect that needs attention is the quality of entries. It's a tall order for just one central team responsible for verifying information received and compiling the database, which is the current arrangement at the Mathematics Genealogy Project. It would be better to distribute the workload and make use wherever possible of local expert knowledge, suitably authorised to update data in the areas with which they are familiar, whilst allowing for as wide public participation as possible.

So what's the solution?

I'm quite sure that the biggest consideration is organisational, not technical. It's probably a workflow problem and perhaps can be addressed by appealing to other international networks, most likely business networks. The quality control needs to rest with academic departments and it seems sensible that they should deal with information relating first to their department, then their institution and then neighbouring institutions. So I envisage an international network of genealogy research nodes where public contributions would be submitted though their nearest research node rather like, "contact your nearest reseller."

A few days ago I attended a presentation by someone who has done work for the World Wide Web consortium and he re-iterated the point that if there's one technical issue affecting software above all others it's scalability. So any proposal probably ought to design and develop a system that distributes the processing (cpu and resources) as well as the administration, though the computing power need not be distibuted per site (big companies typically use a few data centres containing large numbers of rack-mounted PCs). This suggests an application for a parallel computing grid.

I don't know what the implementation itself should look like: it could well be underpinned by a relational database or might even be a special kind of wiki (thinking about how that can really grow rapidly). However, the data model should certainly be given careful consideration. How to deploy it on the Internet? How to authenticate and authorise? Lots of questions will pop up if one investigates further!

Mathematics Genealogy

I recently came across the Mathematics Genealogy project, which offers a fascinating view of how guidance in doctoral research in maths is passed down from supervisor to student. It's a service currently hosted by North Dakota State University and supported by the Clay Foundation. It's quite a simple idea that can reveal fascinating details about the evolution of subjects studied and 'lineages' of famous mathematicians.

I have an entry, but it's wrong! I did indeed submit a thesis with that long title and study under the guidance of the late Prof. Robert Odoni, but only obtained an M.Sc., having decided after about a year not to continue for the doctorate. The Prof's record is far from complete - he was previously at Exeter University for quite a few years, so I expect he would have had doctoral students there. Also not there yet: he was supervised mainly by Harold Davenport and then towards the end by Alan Baker, both distinguished number theorists.

I do have a Ph.D. in theoretical computer science on 'The Use of Formal Methods for Safety-critical Systems,' for which my supervisor was Dr Kate Norrie, but there's no link shown. That lineage goes through Frobenius, whose work was fundamental to my M.Sc. and before him Gauss, one of the most prolific mathematicians known, and as I write almost 1/3 of all people in the database are his descendants!

It's noticeable that via Odoni, one traces back a UK line of researchers that only goes back as far as the 20th Century, whereas the line via Norrie is mainly German and goes back to the 17th Century. This apparently reflects the fact that in the UK, PhDs were only introduced in the 20th Century. This means that British mathematicians are poorly represented in the genealogy project as it stands, a situation discussed at length in 'The Mathematics PhD in the United Kingdom'. (Incidentally nice to see T. M. Fred Smith mentioned - he kindly acted as my main personal tutor for my B.Sc. at Southampton, even after I later changed my registration and dropped stats in favour of pure maths!)

I've filled in update forms over a week ago, but as yet there have been no changes in the entries of my supervisors or myself. So I'm wondering about improvements...

Notes on reading 'Wholeness and the implicate order': Introduction (3).

Still more notes in response to the intro (with more baggage that I bring). Although these are presented as notes jotted as I read, in practice, I usually tap away and later on do some tidying up. Most entries are prepared offline, on a handheld computer (HP Jornada 720, as usual :-) It allows for me to sit on a comfy chair, edit to my heart's content, whilst using only modest amounts of electricity (or battery power).

[p. xi] Thought and reality: for the Buddha, the reality he was primarily concerned with was dukkha, typically translated as 'suffering' or 'unsatisfactoriness' concerning which he taught a lot about subtle processes (e.g. the dependent chain of contact, feeling, perception and so on, yet the essence is expressed in a simple connection, in the first two verses of the Dhammapada:

1. Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with an impure mind a person speaks or acts suffering follows him like the wheel that follows the foot of the ox.

2. Mind precedes all mental states. Mind is their chief; they are all mind-wrought. If with a pure mind a person speaks or acts happiness follows him like his never-departing shadow.

[p. xv - xviii] Bohm continues to summarise what lies in the chapters ahead, and comes to the later chapters. He is looking for a holistic theory that takes a wold view that includes consciousness and evidently is not content with the discontinuities at the sub-atomic level, in which results given are in terms of statistical aggregates. I find it interesting that research is oriented to concrete predictions, that are applicable: indeed even 25+ years later, even though physicists are well-versed in wave/particle duality, I tend to hear about funding for particle accelerators or measurements concerning sub-atomic particles, such as the MINOS project .

However, it may be that it's the level of aggregates where we need to work. Again, the Buddha gave many teachings on khandas, which translate as 'heaps' or 'aggregates', and the processes surrounding them. But, as expressed e.g. in the Parivatta Sutta, the key requirement is direct personal observation.

This is what I was trying to get at in my first foray in this area, when on the basis of little more than intuition and reading an article in Scientific American, I posted a perhaps overly bold (and, now it seems arrogant) message to Usenet, entitled 'Quantum Theory and Meditation,' especially as it was my first proper posting! I received a flame within 3 days and more vitriole followed, yet there also flowed some rich dialogue and friendship. The main point I was trying to make is that the most interesting results depend upon's one own observation and not that of any instruments set up to do the observations for you.

I touched on just special relativity at school, when I read and wrote an essay on some of Bertrand Russell's 'The ABC of Relativity,' but that's about 20 years ago and so I have very little detailed knowledge.

So that's my baggage, so I look forward to reading what Bohm presents concerning quantum theory and relativity, and his new approaches.

Already though the book conveys the sense that there's a lot of feeling one's way for research directions. There's a kind of sustained balance or tension between wholeness and division, to which I can relate to intuitively from the period I spent doing a bit of research in number theory, in that the object of my research was to elicit the integer values of the determinant of a certain kind of matrix, which is a problem worked mainly in the field of algebraic number theory, but actually the main result was in terms of densities, saying "most values of 'the right type' are integer values of the determinant," and thus a result of analytic number theory.

So what? Well, many mathematicians like simplicity, symmetry, wholeness and completeness, wherein they can find great beauty. For some, it evidently meant so much, among whom Kronecker is well known among mathematicians for his remark:

God created the integers, all else is the work of man.

But, on reading a summary of his life, it sounds that this strongly held belief led to immense friction.

This reminds me of the conflict in views dismissed by the Buddha in the Tittha Sutta in the Udana. All in all it's best that I have no expectation about any absolute answers concerning the cosmos; rather, my goal should remain to learn something that may improve my understanding of the composition of the Buddha's teachings.

Structure and Flow - an example in XML editing

Carrying on with the balance of structure and flow, although I left formal methods research a long time ago, I still come across it as a recurring theme in IT work.

At my present workplace, as a software developer I found myself with the task of extending a web-based system to allow anyone to use the web to edit some data encoded in XML. XML (short for 'eXtensible Markup Language) is a hot topic that promises the recording of meaningful information, its long term preservation and wonderful exchange and interoperability among software systems (e.g., because it's stored in a text file, so you can read an XML file in Notepad). An XML file is a data file, basically a hierarchical structure of tags and content. It's structure and data in one.

So where's the flow? That comes in the editing, because to edit the documents I devised a system that used a functional programming language called XSLT [well, it looks like it should be functional, though proof "by example" doesn't look like proof!]. Every change to an XML document is carried out in terms of XSLT, i.e. suppose we have XMLDOC1, then apply an XSLT stylesheet xslt1 to get XMLDOC2; and then apply xslt2 to get to XMLDOC2 and so on. In practice, each stylesheet defines a slight change in the document, with all else remaining the same. The operative verbs are simply: add, delete, and update. Perhaps you could use the word 'perturbation' for this?

As it happens, an XSLT stylesheet is actually an XML document, so again it has all those nice qualities described above, which means that using this system not only allows you to have a convenient text-based history of the documents, but also of the transformations and I can not only share data, but the transformations needed to carry out changes. There's a walkthrough illustrating what I mean through a number of screenshots.

Now there's an irony in using XSLT for change because as instances are XML documents it means that the transformations are themselves data and structure. So in one sense we have a sequence of data structures - where data and the way it changes is in the same format. But what I haven't addressed is how you actually generate and carry out the transformations. This requires a processor!

I've grown to appreciate this system for it gives me a sense of holism - a stream of documents and transformations in one flow. It certainly intrigued one of my colleagues, for whom XML and XSLT are very much his bread and butter!

Notes on reading 'Wholeness and the implicate order': Introduction.

A copy of Bohm's book (Routledge Classics 2002) arrived last week, conveniently just before I set off for a few days' holiday, staying at my father's house. It looks fascinating, so I'll jot down some responses, though at this stage I don't know how far I'll take this. In any case, I should say I can be a very slow reader!

The introduction develops some rationale for Bohm's new perspective, which appears to have emerged from deep personal observation, a state of absorption, as well as his considerable experience as a physicist.

When I thought of 'wholeness' and 'reality,' what came first to mind were the elements, especially depicted in the dhammakaya meditation tradition as a sphere - the four elements of earth, fire, air and water at cardinal points surrounding the space element at the centre and within that the element of consciousness.

Things can be observed at different levels, on different scales. My impression is that at any given scale, science is familiar with progress/movement through stages and has developed laws of motion that model this accurately. However, what laws or models are there for movements between scales? What about the flow between levels of abstraction? I raise this because in the bit of literature I encounter, there seem to be different models for macro and micro, so what is happening on the journey from macro to micro?

The tensions between/balance of structure and flow can be found in many disciplines. I came across it whilst doing research in the field of [concurrent] formal methods in computer science, in which mathematical techniques are used to specify and analyse software systems. You can make a crude division in terms of orientation: one is 'structure' based, viz the so-called 'axiomatic' techniques of VDM, Z etc.that are oriented around sets; the other is 'flow'-based, which is the emphasis in process algebras - how systems are defined in terms of the actions that can be carried out from state to state rather than descriptions of the states per se and hence action-based or operational semantics. This was brought home to me by a very valuable survey of formal methods by Jonathan Ostroff [Formal Methods for the Specification and Design of Real-Time Safety Critical Systems", The Journal of Systems and Software, Vol. 18, No. 1, pp 33-60, Elsevier Scienc Publishing Co. Inc., New-York, April 1992.]

[p. xii] The content of consciousness to be 'reality as a whole'? It's quite an assumption that there can be consciousness of whole reality - is that possible? I'm glad Bohm emphasises the importance of view - it affects everything!

In the introductory class on Buddhist texts that I attended in Spring, Richard Gombrich explained how the Buddha always taught about consciousness of... [and the teachings state that viññana (translated as consciousness) is one of the 5 heaps that are not part of deathless nibbana].

[p. xiii] I can see that this work is very much contraflow vs prevailing views that have become entrenched since the so-called 'Age of Reason.' A process-oriented view was something the Buddha expounded 2500 years ago, expressed succinctly in Pali as sabbe sankhara anicca... - "all conditioned formations are impermanent." The growing interest in the Buddha's teachings presents a veritable challenge to those who separate subject from object and take a materialistic view, which seems the predominant characteristic of European thought during the past few hundred years.

[p. xiv] A language with verbal emphasis. Again, the Buddha focused teachings a great deal on processes of mind: indeed the path to Enlightenment, the Eightfold Noble Path is expressed in terms of verbs, starting with 'Right View' and detailed modes of practice themselves as expressed in e.g. the Satipatthana Sutta describe exercises through the four modes of mindfuless (body, feelings, mind, mental qualities) - that are always working with change; magga is a flow/process of going through stages and something that may be worth noting is that what also occurs is a subtle progression in the nature of observation.

We can go further with emphasising verbs and one of the most striking example can be found in the Buddha's instruction to Bahiya (see previous entry), "in the seeing, just the seen; in the hearing, just the heard, ..." But this is for a very very advanced practitioner, on the brink of full final attainment. So conventionally the subject-object paradigm is often more practical ... I wonder what Bohm's 'rheomodes' is all about and how far this language can be taken...?

Tuning in to Dhamma with the 3D Crystal Radio

The Dhamma has been made clear in many ways by Master Gotama, as though he were righting the overthrown, revealing the hidden, showing the way to one who is lost, or holding up a lamp in the dark for those with eyesight to see forms...

[MN. 7, Vatthupama Sutta]

I'm going to try to develop further the ideas expressed in the previous entry and have a feeling that there could emerge a few strands of research.

There's no known contemporary written account of the Buddha's teachings - it was very much an oral traditon. So when we say the Buddha "taught," what gets recorded in written form as his "teachings" certainly loses a great deal. So this term probably needs lots of qualification along the lines of, say, the Buddha "transmitted" and it is worth paying special attention to the commonly used term applied to his disciples of "Savakas," the "listeners" or "receivers".

So, I'm taking 'Savakas' as my cue or prompt. My previous entry introduced briefly an analogy with holography. Just to use a bit more of the terminology, I was comparing the teachings with the interference patterns (hologram) produced on a special film when a light (called a reference beam) is shone at and interferes with light from the object to be 'recorded' (called the object beam). Shining the right light (the reference beam) at the hologram generates the light from the original object (i.e. the object beam) thereby providing a faithful 3D semblance. At least, that's my beginner's understanding of the process, just paraphrasing a Wikipedia article.

The main points I wish to highlight are that there are two components necessary to reproduce a faithful reproduction of the original whole - the appropriate recording (on film) and the right light shone onto the film.

Now to take the comparison further, it is as thought the Buddha possessed the reference beam and for someone to understand they too need the reference beam to reconstruct the original 3D object, the Dhamma object, as it were.

How do they generate the reference beam? In considering how the 'right light' (or reference beam) is produced by the mind, it's easier for me to try working with another analogy in which we may liken the mind somewhat to a crystal radio set. The crystal lies at the heart of the set because it acts as the detector, converting radio waves into sound that is meaningful to us.

The ability to interpret a signal depends upon the kind of crystal and also its size and quality. So it seems to me that it can be likened to the inner treasure of paramis, perfections accrued through meritorious actions over many lives, specially as a crystal itself takes a very long time to form. In practice, for radios, it's relatively easy to find the right kind of crystal that can do a good enough job, so the analogy is partial. However, we may also say that a radio's ability to tune in to different stations is similar to the way people can tune in to different kinds of teachings.

So what's the significance of the holography analogy? At the moment, what I'm presenting are probably just a few pieces of a jigsaw. Even so, I think some research could analyse the Buddha's teachings using the latest findings in physics and psychology to explore new kinds of mental maps. It would mean putting to one side many of the assumptions currently used in linguistic and textual analysis so there is space to allow for aspects hitherto considered irrelevant or dull, such as repetition. I think it would be instructive to provide different ways of looking at the Tipitaka through a variety of visual representations and mappings - linear and nonlinear.

One particular interest is abstraction or, looking the other way, expansion or reification: which teachings expand on others? Are these teachings characteristics of interference patterns? Is there something analogous to concentric rings to be drawn, where the inner core is the teaching at its most abstract, as in the Bahiya Sutta, and where the outer circles containing the inner core are supporting details, as in the Malunkyaputta sutta?

I think holography could be useful in casting light on how the mind perceives and processes. Also pertinent are studies in physics - particularly quantum theory - and the implication that these studies have on the study of mind.

I know little about holography or physics, let alone how they may relate to mind, so have just ordered Wholeness and the implicate order by David Bohm, and The Holographic Universe by Michael Talbot, which was a bundle offered by Amazon.

[Quote at beginning of article added on 4 December 2008]

Holographic teachings from the Buddha?

When you read the texts that relate the teachings of the Buddha, you find some very short passages. They can seem fragmentary and it can be tempting to doubt their authenticity. However, I've long felt that the Buddha taught very precisely to his audience knowing that they could tune in so effectively that a few choice words sufficed to prompt progress to Enlightenment, whereas if read conventionally out of context they would appear odd and make little impact. So I wrote a short essay [with a long title of]: Observations on how kamma affects listeners and its implication for interpreting the Buddha's teachings.

In that essay I thought intuitively of holography as a good analogy for how one can recover the whole from fragments: just as a certain beam of light shone against the fringe pattern on a photographic film can reconstruct a faithful 3D representation of the original object, so the Buddha knew that the listener could penetrate the specially recorded words of the Dhamma teachings and reconstruct the essence of Enlightenment by tuning in (or 'shining the right beam').

Sorry if this is expressed clumsily.