The "Tech" In Zen Tech

 

For me, the experience is the essence of Zen. It is a mistake to wander beyond actual experience, for example, into theology and paraphysics. For me, computer technology has provided a wide variety of experiences that are not shared by the general public.

Especially in the 2010's computer systems designs was dominated by "Object Oriented Analysis". The kind of "objects" that appear in even a simple system design can be surprisingly rich. One such object is the "interface".  To someone familiar with the old ways of thinking, an interface is the description of a function, stripped of any information about the "internals" of the function.

We are all familiar with interfaces now. The icons on our phones behave in useful ways that bear some remote resemblance to a "desktop". They hide the immense complexity of what is going on beneath the surface. Icons on an Android phone behave in very similar ways to icons on an iPhone.

Lately, philosophers have started to talk about our conscious experience as an interface with the underlying reality. What we perceive has evolved through the millennia to present the world in a useful way - hiding the complexity. Thinking this way, we come to accept our experience and our ignorance of what is "really going on". It's also true that each person has a somewhat different view of reality. We need not worry too much about such differences, since they are all personal interfaces to the underlying reality.

In Zen we accept the reality both of "experience" and of the "world". Traditional Zen does not explain the relationship between the two. Imperfect perception of the world is written off as "illusion". This goes to far. Our experience is a hallucination created by the brain, but that hallucination depends deeply on the real signals coming in from the world.

The "interface" is just one entity that is familiar to the modern analyst. We look back on centuries of speculation that lacked the terminology we now take for granted. Just as we now understand heat is not a fluid and space is not a "thing", we are free to understand life as a process, not some kind of animal entity in an unseen dimension. We see DNA as design, separate from the protein it specifies. We see language as an agreed-upon set of signals, separate from what is signified. We are free from magic thinking about words.

An educated layman has access to a sweeping variety of information from other "tech" fields, such as neuroscience, cosmology and biology. We are also passingly familiar with the centuries of debates that succeeded the "masters', as well as having the ability to compare and contrast different world views.

Much more on this later ...