not dead; david lynch

[zwol]

It has been a very long time since I posted anything here, so allow me to assure you that I'm not dead.

I am now living in San Diego. There's still a depressing pile of move-related paperwork to get through, but all the unpacking is done. I wasn't able to find a place as close to campus as I would like, it's an hour away on the bus. This does encourage me to go home at a reasonable hour, though.

Most of my fears regarding life in Southern California have not materialized. There have only been two or three days when it was too hot, and I am using my car about once a week, which is about the same as it was when I was up north. I do miss all my friends and many of the other good things about San Francisco, though.

I haven't been able to plunge into research as I had kinda hoped. Instead, I'm taking the firehose-style introductory course sequence (which is good, since I am severely deficient in background) and making notes which may someday turn into a research project if I ever get the time. School chews up just about all of my productive hours; so far I've resisted the temptation to hack on free software in my spare time, tho largely because I come home too wiped out.

I've made a good number of new friends; sadly, no romantic prospects at present.

And now, I shall babble about the evening talk I attended earlier tonight.

Famous movie director David Lynch and two professors from the Maharishi University of Management came to UCSD today. Lynch did not give any prepared remarks, instead soliciting questions from the audience on any topic whatsoever; the professors gave a brief rundown on Transcendental Meditation and its alleged connection to string theory. Or possibly vice versa.

When asked questions about his films, Lynch was voluble, coherent, and interesting. Some of the things he said were standard creator responses: saying that it was not necessary to know what he was like in order to understand his works, for instance. Others were more surprising: he admitted to making disturbing movies that not everyone would or should like, and when asked which of his movies he liked best he said that he preferred not to pick favorites among his "children"—but then went on to say "If you had a child like Dune, though, you might say that you liked it least." I left regretting not having seen any of his work.

However, when asked questions about TM and related topics, he displayed considerable skill at evading the actual question, coupled with an unfortunate inability to put the TM experience into words. It is quite understandable that it be difficult to describe an altered state of consciousness, especially one which is supposed to be transcendent; but to a lot of his audience I suspect he made it sound like nothing special, and himself incoherent. I don't understand why he was evading questions, considering what softballs the audience was throwing. He did get one hard question, from a young man who spoke of the very real material plight of billions of people outside the "developed world," and asked whether food and stable government were not more important for them than meditation? This one he actually tried to answer: he said that the problems these people have are mere symptoms, and that treating them will not cure the real problem; TM, however, could "water the tree" and solve the deeper underlying problem, causing the symptoms to evaporate. I gotta give him credit for faith on that one, but I think it fell flat. He could have done better; he could have, say, claimed that these problems weren't going to be permanently solved as long as greed and corruption were endemic everywhere, and that getting everyone to practice TM could fix that.

The Maharishi University professors were not all that impressive either. One of them was John Hagelin, who was at one time highly respected in the field of string theory, but is nowadays better known for running for President on the Natural Law ticket and promoting TM. He attempted to draw not merely an analogy, but a direct equivalence, between TM's "unified field of consciousness" and string theory's unification of the four fundamental forces (gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear forces). This was just plain lame. Ignoring the question of whether string theory has actually succeeded in that goal, a unified theory of the four forces has nothing more to say about phenomena at the level where consciousness arises than what we already know from chemistry.

The other professor, Dr. Fred Travis, was somewhat less wacko. He brought a guy up on stage with an EEG skullcap on, projected the traces for everyone to see, and had the guy alternate between normal waking consciousness and meditation. There were obvious differences, which Travis described as the entire brain synchronizing on an alpha-wave pattern in meditation. He then talked a bunch about the proven benefits of this kind of synchrony. I don't know enough about neuropsych (yet) to evaluate either the demo or the claims. I am a little peeved that it had the feeling of a rigged demo: Travis was talking very fast, not letting the guy stay in either state very long, and displaying only two traces but making claims about the entire brain.

I come away from all this feeling annoyed with all three of them not so much for being True Believers in this fringe thing, as for being so very inept at proselytizing. This is because I have some experience with meditation and with altered states of consciousness myself. I know that it does genuinely help with creativity and with getting things done. I would not be surprised if it were, as Lynch is advocating, a useful thing to teach to children in grade school. And, for a practicing scientist, I have relatively high priors for "paranormal" phenomena: I'm not going to dismiss out of hand claims such as "many people practicing meditation in an area causes a reduction in the crime rate," though I will be skeptical and look for other causes [this claim was in fact made at the talk]. So I'd kinda like to see TM taken seriously enough that some of those more out-there claims can get properly tested. But I don't think this sort of sloppy presentation is going to do it. I rather think I could have given a more convincing and more factually accurate presentation on the same subject, and it's never a good thing when you leave a talk thinking that.

I might also point out that I don't think the TM folks are doing their cause any good by charging US$2500 for a one-week course. It means people will put them in the same box as the Scientologists (who are far worse). And that's a ridiculous amount of money to charge for what they're teaching, which is to my mind rather less than what you will learn from a good yoga instructor for $20 a session. (I'm not talking about the Bikram crap here.)