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Reprise of Zen

August 11, 2005 09:40 AM

The archives by now are loaded with 153 entries and I suspect many readers would enjoy looking over these earlier entries. After all, they do not go out of date the way items on a news-related blog might do.

This entry about Zen is just a way to show what is part of the archives. What amazed me about this entry is that it had the all-time highest readership at over 20,000 hits the day it came out. Perhaps just a coincidence, maybe not.

All You Need to Know About Zen

I was once a philosophy major, but I got bored with it. Only a few philosophers seem to know or care a lot about science and many love paradoxes and infinite set problems that are mostly just a confusion. I do admire the work of Dennet, the Churchlands, Popper and my friend and former colleaque Bryan Skyrms who uses game theory to study the dynamics of deliberation

I did read a fair amount about Zen and the Tao. Wonderful imagery and poetry, but the core of the knowledge in them is easily put in terms of complex systems theory and Bayesian inference.

Here is all you need to know about both.

The Tao is algorithmically incompressible.

To reproduce the information contained in a life sequence requires no less information than is contained in the sequence itself. There is no algorithm that is capable of reducing the information in a life sequence to a shorter statement. Each sequence is unique unto itself.

This means you cannot predict which among many possible stochastic paths originating from this point in time and space your life will move onto.

You can know something of the ensemble of paths and how your actions may condition the likelihoods of these paths. Your only moment of power is NOW, the moment when you can take actions that influence the distribution of future outcomes.

You learn of the possibilities from your experience with no regrets and you make your choices in the Now with the knowledge that they do not determine the outcomes only the possible paths on which your life may evolve. Thus you do not fear the outcomes or attempt to control things you cannot. Be a good Bayesian who uses evidence from your past to form expectations of the possibilities of the future and make choices that influence the distribution of possible outcomes in your favor. Never expect a distinct outcome to result from your actions.

All you can do is to try to influence the distribution of possibilities. You can never set the particular path or outcome that will be yours from this time forward. And, if you think you can look back and see some cause of events, you are probably suffering hindsight bias.

· Everything

Comments

Posted by: Flower Online [TypeKey Profile Page] at September 27, 2006 8:45 AM

CJ. That research was done some time ago and I read it in the journals. Don't know the book. If it is at odds with the evolution of the human species then it is not grounded in the most fundamental of the biological sciences.

This kind of epidemological study is deeply flawed and not reproducable. There are many small, isolated populations living in odd or insular ways that manifest various kinds of health outcomes. Is it their genes, their diet, their stress, their activity patterns, the cold climate, or what? Nobody knows. None of these factors are adequately controlled in statistical studies.

If you want a small population to mimic, try the Okinawans or the Cretes. Both live very long and healthy lives. Maybe it is because they live on an island. Just kidding. Nobody knows. But, at least their diets are compatible with the evolutionary evidence as it is known. The focus on macronutrients and diet to the exclusion of activity and countless other things is irresponsible in a book purportedly dealing with health.

There is no credible diet book. They pay passing homage to exercise and that is it. You cannot eat your way to good health. What and how much you eat is less than half of the equation. And it is fundamentally the wrong way to address the problem. And living on a diet is a joyless way to live.

China for centuries was known as The Great Starving Place. This produces strong gene selection. Crop failures devastated the population time after time. It is such an atypical country and so strongly hierarchical that it fails to serve as a model of healthful life.

There are so many of these kinds of books floating around that I find it to be a waste of time to comment on them. And I certainly don't want to go chasing around reading studies for my readers and commenting on them. I just happened to know this study from the journal.

Peter. I dealt with that in my Four or More Meals a Day post. No one knows how much you should eat to gain muscle. You can gain muscle without extra calories, you just have to redirect energy from fat to spare the protein in your diet for muscle remodeling.

Posted by: Art [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 12, 2005 2:03 PM

Dr. DeVany, do you have any comments on a recent book by Colin Campbell entitled "The China Study...". There is a recent article on Clarence Bass' webpage; the book certainly appears to be at odds with the nutritional thoughts surrounding evolutionary fitness.
thanks
CJ

Posted by: cj [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 11, 2005 6:37 PM

very zen!

Posted by: Chris H [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 11, 2005 2:47 PM

I posted this comment on an earlier entry but it must have gotten overlooked.

When you are trying to gain muscle, how do you make sure that you actually do gain muscle, not just maintain? Shouldn't you have to eat a certain amount?

Posted by: Peter [TypeKey Profile Page] at August 11, 2005 1:25 PM

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