Condoleezza Rice testified before the 9/11 commission and it was her (I think) who used the phrase “hair on fire” to describe the level of urgency the intelligence community felt during the summer of 2001 about the domestic terrorism threat. “Hair on fire” will undoubtedly become one of the most popular phrases of the year.

A well-known Zen aphorism (coming from where?) also uses this phrase, telling us to “meditate as if your hair was on fire.” When I first heard this, I automatically assumed that it referred, in the same sense that Condi used it, to the level of urgency with which you should practice. But that seems kind of strange—meditating urgently. Eventually I came to the conclusion that “head on fire” in Zen probably means something quite different: namely that you should meditate in such as a way as to make your head feel like it is on fire.

A type of illusion or misperception involving a vague or obscure stimulus being perceived as something clear and distinct. For example, in the discolorations of a burnt tortilla one sees the face of Jesus Christ. Or one sees the image of Mother Theresa or Ronald Reagan in a cinnamon bun or the face of a man in the moon.

From the Skeptic’s Dictionary. Original post at Language Hat.

This phenomenon is discussed in Atran’s “In Gods We Trust”.

I’ve put up my translation of Dogen’s Uji in MS Word, HTML, and PDF formats. In English it’s called “Some Moments”. This is Dogen’s exploration of what time is.

I’ve spent a great deal of time on this over the last several months, but still don’t feel the level of confidence that I do about my other translations. Something is just not clicking. Basically, this essay is hard. I feel that this translation is somewhat in the nature of a draft. I hope that I can come back to it sometime with a deeper understanding and do a final translation.

At the same time, I think my translation may be more accessible and convey more than previous translations which is why I’m taking the libery of putting it up.

Introduction to Bob’s translations of Dogen.

In What is Thought, Eric B. Baum claims that thinking is like a computer program running. Or, that humans are like computer programs. Or something like that, or maybe not, since it’s impossible to tell what he is really saying, or what he thinks “thought” is to start with.

One real good argument Baum has is that many computer scientists think the mind is like a computer. Well, I have a gardener who thinks that the mind is like a garden. Actually, sometimes he thinks it’s like a rake, he tells me.

Baum starts off saying that Turing’s model of computing was intended to capture the essence of thought, so that proves that humans are like computers, since Turing is God. Except that even Baum later admits that Turing was at best trying to model human theorem-proving behavior; certainly “thought” is more than just that.

I’m going to come back to some specific topical comments I have about this book, but first of all I just wanted to mention that reading this book I was seriously scared that my brain was going to rot away. That’s why I actually didn’t read the whole book. I worried that if I did the damage might have been too much to undo. For instance, take the following sentence, right in the first section where he’s laying out his basic ideas: “The execution of a computer program is always equivalent to pure syntax.” This isn’t merely stupid—-it goes beyond that to just being completely meaningless. “Mind typically produces a computer program capable of behaving.” Huh??? Is mind producing the program, or is it the program, or what? “The mind exploits its understanding of the world in order to reason.” Except, apparently, in the writing of this book. “Mind is essentially inherent in the DNA, in some sense.” Yes, in a sense that we will never understand from this gibberish.

Baum’s writing gives new meaning to the word “circular”. He asserts that the mind has “subroutines”, and then that proves that it’s like a computer program. I guess he’s a few decades behind in his computer science, or else he would have said the mind is “object-oriented.” “Awareness is awareness of meaningful quantities.”

In a book like this, the author of course could not omit a discussion of neural networks. Baum thinks that neural networks are a “model of brain circuits”, which by the way is wrong—-they’re a computing model vaguely inspired by brain physiology. He’s right when he says the collection of weights generated by training a neural network is in general completely opaque—humans cannot figure out how the neural network works. Nothing in a trained neural network corresponds to a “human” understanding of the problem the net has learned to solve. So if the brain is a neural network, how does this correspond to the “semantics” he talks about? If the mind is composed of subroutines, and evolution is a neural network training process, how does a neural network generate subroutines? More critically, a neural network has its initial topology defined by a human; is he saying that evolution can also evolve the appropriate network structure? He says “it is impossible to…evolve…code unless it is modular.” But trained neural networks are precisely not modular.

“Neural circuitry is akin to an executable. The DNA is more like the source code.” A cute analogy, which might work real well in the term paper the sophomore at MIT who took philosophy for his one required humanities course had to write. But what does this mean? Is the DNA what is being created by evolution? In that case, what is the equivalent of the compiler?

Baum doesn’t do much better with basic philosophy. He asks the big question: What are objects? Are they just in your mind or is there an outside physical reality to them? He then imagines he is somehow addressing this question by jumping to the question of how we know a cup is something to hold by its handle and then drink a liquid from. Sorry, Eric, saying that “the mind is an evolved program” (using a subroutine for the cup problem, of course) does not answer any questions about the nature of reality.

Baum goes on to talk about the process of individual humans learning as being the acquisition of new subroutines. This is weird. We have some built-in subroutines coming from our DNA or something and then we learn new subroutines? Are these subroutines we learn encoded in the same “language” as the ones coming from our DNA? How do they interface with them?

Now we take a big jump, to an agent-based model. There are lots of little agents running around each with their own agendas and utility functions. This model is sort of proved to be right by the fact that it’s also a model which can describe market economies. Taking a sudden right-wing detour, Baum posits that the agents work so well because they have “property rights” and try to conserve money. The agents compete and cooperate. But who set up the system within which these agents (which are also subroutines, I suppose) operate?

“Evolution has learned to search in semantically meaningful directions.” So now we have not only a learning process embodied within evolution, but a meta-learning process governing the process of evolution itself. Evolution evolves!

I’m a go player, and well-versed in the issues facing computer go. So I was particularly interested in Baum’s thoughts on this topic. I found them to be shallow, poorly informed, and lacking insight. Besides getting basic information, such as who developed what program, wrong, always a bad sign, he offers tautologies such as “Go masters play remarkably strong Go.” First, he says that we have a pre-evolved “program” for “causal” analysis. Then, he says we have a large number of “computational modules…that may very well be directly coded into the human genome”, including topological concepts like “connected”, “surrounding”, and “inside”. Besides the problem that these supposed pre-programmed modules have no connection with “causality”, the fundamental point that these modules being wired deep into our DNA, compared to computer programs which have to calculate the same concepts in a “computationally expensive way”, accounts for human strength at Go is, frankly, absurd. If Baum cannot come to a more sophisticated understanding of the complexity of go, he should not write about it at all.

I’m having a very hard time understanding why people who should know better, like Nathan Myhrvold the former Microsoft executive, would put their names on the back of this book.

Of course, we also need a theory of language. Baum has the answers here as well. Language is just “attaching labels to computational modules”. I see! He sums up his insights succinctly: “All that is needed is to attach a label to a computational module, and the particular module indicated will often be quite salient, because we share inherited inductive biases in the form of modular structure.”

“Evolution thus designed the mind for the purpose of making decisions leading to propagation of the DNA.” “I suggest that this picture will…qualitatively explain everything about our consciousness and our experience of living.” Thank God, I was afraid no-one was ever going to figure that out.

And a last bit of good news: Baum has also solved the age-old paradox concerning whether or not humans have free will. The answer is simple: DNA has evolved a mind which has free-will subroutines!

This note is an introduction to my translations of Dogen. For those who don’t know, Dogen was a medieval Zen teacher who founded the Soto school in Japan, as well as writing prolifically.

The main page is here.

I’ve translated three “fascicles”, as they’re called, of his major work, called “Shobo Genzo”:

1. Genjo Koan (“The Present Issue”), available here in HTML format
2. Bendowa (“Dialog on the Path of Devotion”), available here in PDF format, here in MS Word format, and here in HTML without footnotes
3. Uji (“Some Moments”), available here in MS Word format, here in HTML format without footnotes, and here in PDF

What qualifies me to translate Dogen, even though I have no training in medieval Japanese? First, I am a translator with long years of experience in the fundamentals of translation: understand the original to the maximum extent possible, including what it says between the lines; then take great care in creating the most fluid possible target-language rendering. I know modern Japanese thoroughly, and have studied medieval Japanese. And then there’s the fact that I’m willing to spend excessive amounts of time working on a single paragraph or sentence, if necessary.

So what’s the problem with all the existing translations of Dogen into English, of which there are many, often up to half a dozen for the more popular fascicles, often authored by revered Zen masters and learned scholars? Well, when I started reading Dogen, in English translation, I found I simply could not figure out what they were trying to say. They just didn’t make any sense. It seemed to me less like a problem with my ability to understand what Dogen was saying, and more the fact that the English words just didn’t really seem to mean anything sitting there on the page, disconnected.

So I started translating Dogen by accident, when in my frustration I got my hands on a book containing the original text as well as a modern Japanese translation. Then I started playing around—what would be the best way to translate that? Before I knew it, I was on my way to translating “Genjo Koan”.

Translating is an art, and a balancing act; there is no single “correct” or even “best” translation. The majority of existing translations have leaned heavily towards the “faithful” or “literal”. For example, one translation advertises itself as “adher[ing] closely to the original Japanese”. The same author (Nishijima) says “”I like the translation from which Master Dogen’s Japanese can be guessed”. But wait a minute—a native English speaker is never going to be able to guess Master Dogen’s Japanese, right? In theory, the “literal” approach reduces the risk that the translation will end up being something that the translator just invented, and lets the reader connect the dots. In practice, it’s often just an abdication of responsibility to figure out what the original text really means, or to work with the English until it reaches a point of actual readability, or, in most cases, both. The result is often mechanical and fragmented.

Someday, Dogen should be translated into colloquial English. My approach, however, is to maintain a relatively formal tone, retain most (not all) of the Buddhist imagery and terminology, but put great emphasis on clean, flowing English.

I hope you enjoy my translations. Please show your support for them by donating.

It’s impossible to miss Christoph Bull in the organ scene here in Los Angeles. I think I first heard him play at one of the weekly concerts at First Congregational Church, which lays claim to having the largest church organ in the world—actually, three organs controlled through a single console. After playing some of my favorite Bach and Reger pieces in his clean, powerful style, he asked the audience for a theme to improvise on, and ended up choosing mine: “Michelle”, on which he did a great job. That reminds me: he promised to send me the recording on a CD and never got around to doing that. He also played a concert at the new organ in the Catholic cathedral here.

Last week Sakiko and I went to a concert at UCLA’s Royce Hall that he called “Organica 2004”. I was surprised at the huge turnout for an organ concert; that was probably due both to the popularity of UCLA’s music series, and Bull’s mastery of the e-mail medium: he’s the Howard Dean of the organ world, complete with his own website, although he doesn’t have a blog yet.

The organ console was down at the bottom of the orchestra pit and then raised dramatically, facing forward, to the level of the stage, spotlighted, as the concert began. On the screen behind the console were projected huge images ranging from shots of the actual pipes producing the sounds we were hearing above the ceiling, to real-time shots of his hands on the manuals and feet on the pedalboard, to abstract kaleidoscopic images.

Bull is trying to pull the organ into the 21st century with his Organica series. In addition to solid renditions of the classics, and performances of his own compositions, he did a beautiful duet with an electronic violin, and in the final piece, Toccata and Fugue in D minor which we’ve actually all heard a bit too often, he pulled off the amazing stunt of playing the organ at the same time as a synthesizer placed to his side.

You may be thinking that this sounds too weird and contrived to really be any good. But actually the effect was glorious and exhiliterating. And there’s more: Bull was actually singing some of the songs. He has an excellent voice, and his rendition of Lennon and McCartney’s Blackbird was ethereal. He turned half around, facing the audience, playing the organ with one hand and one foot, and sang to us.

Some may find this all contrived, but I it worked wonderfully. Christoph Bull is our new Virgil Fox.

We visited an exhibition of the sculpture of Isamu Noguchi at the Japanese-American Museum.

These sculptures really spoke to me. Many of them dealt with the concepts of “space” and “container”. “Container” is something wired deep into our evolutionary minds. Thinking about containers is fun, and helps us understand the mind with which we go about everyday life. Noguchi’s sculptures help us think about containers, such as his simple brown container with holes poked into it and funny legs.

Noguchi was a “haafu”, who mainly worked in NY (where his atelier has been turned into a museum that I’d love to visit). In addition to sculptures, he designed public spaces, lamps, and stage sets. There’s a bit of a personal connection here: he was born in Los Angeles, and spent a year in Kita-Kamakura; he was also exhibited early in his career at the Kamakura Museum of Modern Art.

For more information on Noguchi, I recommend visiting the Noguchi page on artsy.net, which provides visitors with Noguchi’s bio, over 70 of his works, exclusive articles, and up-to-date Noguchi exhibition listings.

I visited the Japanese-American National Museum, in the middle of LA’s Little Tokyo, and was very impressed by their permanent exhibit focused on the detention of Japanese-Americans during World War II. We had walked by it dozens of time but never bothered to go inside.

I had never heard the sad fact that when the US let the detainees out in 1944 they then immediately proceeded to draft all of the eligible males.

My article Japanese for Nerds has posted to the front page of Kuro5hin, the second one to do so.

Ladder Days is a movie about Mormonism and being gay, set right here in our very own West Hollywood. It’s a little predictable and formulaic, but also funny and touching. I especially liked the part where the gay missionary’s own dad is the church official in charge of the church “court” where the missionary is booted out of the church.

Definitely worth watching. I also loved the soundtrack. Steve Sandvoss is especially good as the missionary, the New York Times praising him as “…giv[ing] Aaron a dignity, sweetness and humor that do a great deal to redeem the clichés built into his character.” IMDB gave this movie a rating of 6.8, but that was biased downward by a lot of “1” (lowest) ratings, presumably by Mormon homophobes, who are predictably bashing the movie without having even seen it.