Fifty Degrees Below - Kim Stanley Robinson [160]
So an excess of reason was indeed a form of madness! Just as Rudra Cakrin had said in his lecture. It was something the Buddhist tradition had discovered early on, by way of introspection and analysis alone. A kind of science, a natural history.
Which was impressive, but Frank found himself comforted to have the assertion backed by scientific research and a neurological explanation. Or some first hypotheses concerning explanations. For one thing it was a chance to come at the problem in a fresh way, with new data. Buddhist thinkers, and those in the Western philosophical tradition who used introspection and logic alone to postulate “how the mind works,” had been mulling over the same data for five thousand years, and now seemed caught up in preconceptions, distinctions, and semantic hairsplitting of all kinds. Introspection did not give them the means to investigate unconscious thought; and unconscious thought was proving to be crucial. Even consciousness, standing there in the mirror to be looked at (maybe)—even what could be introspected or deduced was so extremely complex, and distributed through so many different parts of the parcellated brain, that you could not think your way through it. It needed a group effort, working on the physical action inside the object itself. It needed science.
And now science was using new tools to move beyond its first achievements in taxonomy and basic function; it was getting into analysis of evidence collected from living minds, from brains both healthy and damaged. It was a huge effort, involving many labs and scientists, and still involved in the process of paradigm construction. Some academic philosophers cast scorn on the simplicity of these researchers’ early models, but to Frank it was better than continuing to elaborate theories generated by the evidence of introspection alone. Obviously there was still far to go, but until you took the first steps you would never be on the way.
It was noticeable that the Dalai Lama always welcomed the new results from brain science. It would help Buddhists to refine their own beliefs, he said; it was the obvious thing to do. And it was true that many academic philosophers interested in consciousness also welcomed the new findings.
Welcomed or not, all the papers from the new body of work were accumulating on the net. And so Frank lay there in bed, reading them on his laptop, unable to figure out what he felt, or what he should do next, or if he might have a physical problem. Damasio, a leader in this new research: “The system is so complex and multilayered that it operates with some degree of freedom.” Oh yes, he was free, no doubt of that—but was he damaged? What did he feel? What was this feeling, like oceans of clouds in his chest? And what should he do next?
THE KHEMBALI HOUSE IN ARLINGTON WAS just as crowded as Frank had thought it would be, maybe even more so. It was a big house, perhaps built to be a boarding house from the start, with a ground floor of big public rooms and three floors of bedrooms above, many of them off long central hallways, and an extensive basement. But as a good percentage of the Khembali populace was being housed in these rooms, all of them were overflowing.
Clearly it would be best if he continued to live out of his van, using the bathrooms at NSF and Optimodal. But his Khembali friends were adamant