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From: ALTENBERG@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA (Lee Altenberg)
Newsgroups: mod.ai
Subject: Alan Watts on AI
Message-ID: <12187381242.43.ALTENBERG@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
Date: Sat, 1-Mar-86 23:04:39 EST
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Posted: Sat Mar  1 23:04:39 1986
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	I thought Ailist readers might be interested in the following 
excerpt from "Oriental Omnipotence" in THE ESSENTIAL ALAN WATTS:

	We must begin by showing the difference between Western and
Eastern ideas of omniscience and omnipotence.  A Chinese Buddhist poem
says:
	You may wish to ask where the flowers come from,
	But even the God of Spring doesn't know.

A Westerner would expect that, of all people, the God of Spring would
know exactly how flowers are made.  But if he doesn't know, how can he
possibly make them?  A buddhist would answer that the question itself is
misleading since flowers are grown, not made.  Things which are made are
either assemblages of formerly separate parts (like houses) or
constructed by cutting and shaping from without inwards (like pots of
clay or images).  But things which are grown formulate their own
structure and differentiate their own parts from within outwards. ...
	 If, then, the God of Spring does not make the flowers, how does
he produce them?  The answer is that he does so in the same way that you
and I grow our hair, beat our hearts, structure our bones and nerves,
and move our limbs.  To us, this seems a very odd statement because we
do not ordinarily think of ourselves as actively growing our hair in the
same way that we move our limbs.  But the difference vanishes when we
ask ourselves just HOW we raise a hand, or just how we make a mental
decision to raise a hand.  For we do not know-- or, more corectly, we do
know but we cannot describe how it is done in words.
	To be more exact:  the process is so innate and so SIMPLE that
it cannot be conveyed by anything so complicated and cumbersome as human
language, which has to describe everything in terms of a linear series
of fixed signs.  This cumbersome way of making communicable
representations of the world makes the description of certain events as
complicated as trying to drink water with a fork.  It is not that these
actions or events are complicated in themselves:  the complexity lies in
trying to fit them into the clumsy instrumentality of language, which
can deal only with one thing (or "think") at a time.
	Now the Western mind identifies what it knows with what it can
describe and communicate in some system of symbols, whether linguistic
or mathematical-- that is, with what it can think about.  Knowledge is
thus primarily the content of thought, of a system of symbols which make
up a very approximate model or representation of reality.  In somewhat
the same way, a newspaper photograph is a repesentation of a natural
scene in terms of a fine screen of dots.  But as the actual scene is not
a lot of dots, so the real world is not in fact a lot of things or
"thinks".
	The Oriental mind uses the term KNOWLEDGE in another sense
besides this-- in the sense of knowing how to do actions which cannot be
explained .  In this sense, we know how to breathe and how to walk, and
even how to grow hair, because that is just what we do!
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