Just finished this book, which is about the relationship between (largely Buddhist) spirituality and the world of science, and have some thoughts.

The thing that impresses me the most about the Dalai Lama is his willingness to eschew Buddhist “orthodoxy” (if it can be called that) when he feels it is necessary. Specifically, Buddhist texts, like all sacred scriptures, make scientifically testable claims about nature, human development, etc. Over and over and over again in this book, “his holiness” repeats his claim that if science proves an element of Buddhist thought wrong, then he favors just getting rid of that element. He makes light of ancient speculations about the evolution of humans and the size of the atom and speaks with relatively great understanding about and respect for Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, Evolution- ideas that have enormous amounts of empirical evidence and wide-ranging implications but not a lot of public understanding or acceptance.

To me, in an age when many religious people are becoming defensive and fundamentalist in the face of societal and scientific changes, the Dalai Lama’s courage indicates some serious brass balls. In return, he asks us to acknowledge that the fact that science is successful only with the objective, material world indicates not that the Universe is purely objective and material but that science is methodologically limited.

The second thing that impressed me about the Dalai Lama was his appreciation for the problem of consciousness or sentience. He does a great job describing the issue- in short, even if we isolate the neuron for the color green, and we verify that this neuron when triggered creates a sense of greenness, we might never be able to explain HOW triggering it creates the subjective experience of greenness. The behavior of particles and atoms and molecules and cells- the whole of the universe can all be described in terms of mathematics- Given enough time and knowledge we could mathematically model an entire brain. But the SENSATION of green or pain or pleasure can never be modeled by math. So something must be missing in that model of the Universe. Anyhow this is something I’m really interested in so it gets me going.