I’m trying to balance this with more responsible and productive things, but as a huge nerd, I’m having a tough time. Expect spats of hiatus until mid December, maybe. Heh.

Zen and the traditions it draws from are about correcting an availability bias we have toward conventional knowledge that leads us to overestimate its importance and power relative to tacit knowledge. Most of the tacit stuff is hidden from reflective consciousness because of the need-to-know basis that brain subsystems tend to operate on — you can only really think about one thing at a time, so most of what goes on in your nervous system never percolates up to the level of awareness, let alone symbolic reasoning. So just like how you’d think the world was full of bright people if you only ever hung out with 130+ IQ individuals, at the reflective level we have a very overinflated intuition of the role of conventional knowledge.

Satori is the shock to the system you get when your symbolic reasoning faculties STFU, and you stop getting in your own way and realize just how much of what you know just ain’t so. Past and present vanish, as do subject and object, and you “remember” what it was like before the Fall. But where I think the usual interpretation of this experience goes wrong is this: the lesson to draw there isn’t that you’re experiencing reality without boundaries — after all you’re still perceiving edges and shades and tones and smells, which are discriminations your brain automatically makes because that’s just what it does — but rather that the discriminations you make are generated by *you*. (This is the clue to shih shih wu ai, but that’s far off the path so nevermind.)

Anyway, I think “the knife can’t cut itself” retains its usefulness as a metaphor even after you incorporate a more scientifically informed model of the mind as a hodgepodge of modules rather than a seamlessly unified whole; you can still only use one part of it to “cut” another, but never itself.

BTW, so far as the real neurological workings go, I suggest anything by Joseph LeDoux and/or Antonio Damasio, if you haven’t read either already.