So, my experiences with Buddhism and Emergence theory (beginning, interestingly enough, simultaneously) converged to a point at which I began to consider determinism as a possible overarching structure to the universe. Emergence theory, as I learned about it, is the idea that simple rules lead to complex interactions (see examples at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langton's_ant or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_Game_of_Life). The idea, then, is that from the moment of the creation of the universe (assuming the big bang theory), a sequence of events occurred based on very simple rules governing the interaction of objects in the universe that produced everything as we know it today- all the complex and glorious forms of life and non-life we see today. This idea of determinism, however, precludes the idea of free will (though, imho, to operate under the assumption that we do not have free will is potentially fatal, lol). It also removes blame from any one person and instantly creates a form of fate. Like the answer to a mathematical equation, this deterministic universe cannot be predicted - you must run through the iterations, through each "time-step" before you can know what is to have happened. by that time, the future becomes hindsight and everything makes sense. But (and I think, though correct me if I'm wrong, this is where Heisenberg's uncertainty principle comes in) we can never know all the pieces and thus can never go through the iterations on paper before they occur in real life.

Now, I'm not one to believe in something devoutly without leaving the door open to changing my mind, but I love this idea - I readily challenge any and all to defeat this notion of fate via determinism that I've worked up. I throw it at my friends who rigidly insist that their MUST be free will, though they never actually poke holes in my argument so much as dance around it. And so, for a few years, this determinism has stuck with me as the current "working theory" on the universe.

Enter Alan Watts. I was blown away the other day when reading Watts' "The Book" - it was as though he was speaking to me directly:

"A similar solution aplies to the ancient problem of cause and effect. We believe that every thing and every event must have a cause, that is, some OTHER thing(s) or event(s), and that it will in its turn be the cause of other effects. So how does a cause lead to an effect? To make it much worse, if all that I think or do is a set of effects, there must be causes for all of them going back into an indefinite past. If so, I can't help what I do. I am simply a puppet pulled by strings that go back into times far beyond my vision

Again, this is a problem which comes from asking the wrong question. Here is someone who has never seen a cat. He is looking through a narrow sit in a fence, and, on the other side, a cat walks by. He sees first the head, then the less distinctly shaped furry trunk, and then the tail. Extraordinary! The cat turns round and walks back, and again he sees the head, and a little later, the tail. This sequence begins to look like something regular and reliable. Yet again, the cat turns round, and he witnesses the same regular sequence: first the head, and later the tail. Thereupon he reasons that the event HEAD is the invariable and necessary cause of the event TAIL, which is the head's effect. This absurd and confusing gobbledygook comes from his failure to see that head and tail go together; they are all one cat.

The cat wasn't born as a head which, sometime later, caused a tail; it was born all of a piece, a head-tailed cat. Our observer's trouble was that he was watching it through a narrow slit, and couldn't see the whole cat at once.

The narrow slit in the fence is much like the way in which we look at life by conscious attnetion, for when we attend to something we ignore everything else. Attention is narrowed perception. It is a way of looking at life bit by bit, using memory to sting the bits together - as when examining a dark room with a flashlight having a very narrow beam. Perceotion thus narrowed has the advantage of being sharp and bright, but is has to focus on one area of the world after another, and one feature after another. And where there are no features, only space or uniform surfaces, it somehow gets bored and searches about for more features. Attention is therefore something like a scanning mechanism in radar or television, and Norbert Wiener and his colleagues found some evidence that there is a similar process in the brain.

But a scanning process that observes the world bit by bit soon persuades its user that the world IS a great collection of bits, and these he calls separate things or events. We often say that you can only think of one thing at a time. The truth is that in looking at the world bit by bit we convince ourselves that it consists of separate things, and so give ourselves the problemof how these things are connected and how they cause and effect each other. The problem would never have arisen if we had been aware that it was just our way of looking at the world which had chopped it up into separate bits, things, events, causes, and effects. We do not see that the world is all of a piece like the head-tailed cat."


So what does everyone think about this?

I often considered Karma a sort of cause and effect, though perhaps a little more mysterious given the "oneness" of the universe etc., but if the world and all events are one and extant all at once, how does this play into karma?

I'm intellectualizing this too much and not "just sitting" enough, heh, but these kinds of logic-of-the-universe puzzles fascinate me, and, personally, I think they help me reach a better understanding the more cryptic, dense texts within Buddhism, though they don't speak, necessarily, to the heart of practice.