Bits, Bytes and Profound Buddhist Emptiness

Bits, Bytes and Profound Buddhist Emptiness

This is an essay about how to come to some level of understanding of Buddhist emptiness (shunyata or sunyata) by reflecting on and grasping the nature of representation within the memory of a computer. The ideas presented here occurred to me quite some years ago, but since there was little point in explaining a difficult idea with one equally obscure I did not write about it then. Computers and digital representation have come a long way since then - even to the point where films like 'The Matrix' are accessible to the general public.

When you store a picture in a computer it is stored in digital form. That means it is stored, in the final analysis, in binary form i.e. as a sequence of zeroes and ones. Likewise with music, with information, fingerprints, maps and everything else that has entered the digital world. All these things can be represented as sequences of zeroes and ones. However their original quality (as picture, sound, information etc) is not inherent within the stream of bits. By this I am not referring to the debate about quality and degradation as an analogue signal is quantized into digital representation. What I am referring to is something far more fundamental. The sequence of zeroes and ones is no more than that unless a 'reader' of some kind can turn the encoding back into a form accessible to humans. Music must be heard as sound and a sequence of zeroes and ones is not sound. Some rather over-enthusiastic evangelists of the information revolution sometimes claim that all can be reduced to binary streams of zeroes and ones, but in so doing they forget an essential part of the process - the means of encoding and decoding. The code and the decoder are like the two parts of a symbiotic organism. They have separate identities but cannot live each without the other.

In the film 'The Matrix' the hero Neo eventually reaches the point where he can see the fictional world inside the Matrix as it really is. All the floors, walls, and bodies within the simulated world become visible to him simply as streams of computations. It is almost like us suddenly seeing the objects around us for their true nature, as restless packages of interacting energy. In the Matrix solid surfaces gave way to digits and symbols. In our world solid surfaces would give way to quanta and energy levels. But we must also see them as messages - they stimulate the decoder of our mind and from that we extract (or impose) sense from chaos. (To go off a slight tangent, you might see this as another interpretation of Genesis - before interpretation existence really is without form and void).

The encoding of objects, surfaces, movement and so on would be meaningless unless there existed a process for which encoding had meaning. To take a simple example, suppose you have two numbers. Those two numbers are sufficient to define any point on a surface, for instance on a map. So two numbers can be a grid reference on a map, or longitude and latude on a globe. Knowing what the system is the numbers have meaning. In the absence of that knowledge they are just numbers. Just as if you had a key but did not know the matching lock. However if all you have is two numbers without any further context, you have no idea that you even have a key (or even what a lock might look like). So the meaning given to the numbers depends not just on their values but on the context. In context you can find the right 'reader'. Without context you have an enigma.

A famous historical example of knowing only one half of such a puzzle is the decoding of Egyptian hieroglyphs and the finding of the Rossetta stone. At least in that case people were sure that the symbols constituted a language, but it was only with the finding of the Rossetta stone that it became possible to unravel the meaning of the language. A 'reader' was constructed i.e. an Egyptologist produced a vocabulatry, to interpret the code.

Let us now return to the computer. Computer memory is quantified in bytes. A byte is chunk of 8 bits of memory, so it can encode any value from 0 to 255. Even this interpretation requires decoding and it would be slightly more accurate to say that what be represented are 256 unique states. (To digress, computer memory was not always quantified so - the notion of a 'word' was predominant at one time and some computer companies insisted that a byte was 6 bits). If you looked at a sequence of bytes in the memory of your computer that held the encoding of a picture you would not see the picture. Equally (and perhaps even more obviously) if you examined the memory representing some music you wouldn't hear the music. It is said that some gifted musicians need only read a musical score to hear the music in their heads, but I have not heard of anyone who can (yet) read a sequence of computer memory and hear the music. Whether such a skill exists or not it does not change the fact that the music would only be 'heard' (albeit internally) only when the pattern was decoded by the 'reader'.

The binary pattern by itself is almost meaningless. It is only 'almost' because it would be possible to extract regularities from the data using certain mathematical techniques. There would be regularities because the encoding is designed by humans to be computationally convenient. We also design encodings which are deliberately not easy to 'read' and these we call encryptions. However, even in un-encrypted encodings the patterns are not usually obvious to human senses, and with ever more sophisticated encodings the representation becomes ever more opaque to human senses. Human senses are not best placed to directly read the significance with the data of computer memory, and they are not best placed to 'read' the underlying nature of existence. What we see is a reading within the vocabulary and language of our internal world.

Now it seems that this is a long way from Buddhism. Computers, binary encoding and bytes were unheard of notions when the historical Buddha, Shakyamuni, taught the dhamma (dharma). There were unheard of when Nagarjuna was developing and amplifying the understanding of profound emptiness (shunyata). When they were trying to convey emptiness and 'essencelessness' (anatta) they looked for examples familiar to those around them, and so they spoke of the qualities of the banana tree - no matter how many layers you go down you never find heart wood. The banana tree merely appears to be a tree. They also spoke of space - that aspect of the world around which contains all but is unmarked by it . Nagarjuna analytically demolished the common-sense notion of an entity (a 'thing') - showing that as commonly understood the notion of 'things' did not make much sense. I believe that by adopting the model of computer representation we have an entrance into the middle way.

So let us return to the computer memory. It contains so much when interpretted. It contains nothing otherwise - a meaningless sequence of zeros and ones (and even that is an interpretation). A mind comes along supported by sufficient computing power and meaning is extracted from (or imposed upon) the sequence. It is not really true to say 'imposed' because the sequence is not random, and if the sequence were changed, the extracted interpretation would be different. Equally so tyhe meaning is not inherent in, and extracted from, the sequence because without an interpreter fitted to the data, no valid extraction would take place. In this instance 'validity' can only be evaluated by reference to other activities of the 'reader' (broadly speaking, does the interpretation make some kind of consistent sense in view of other readings). So the data and reader go hand-in-hand. Yet it is possible for there to be different readers making different, but valid, interpretations of the data.

Shunyata (sunyata), Buddhist emptiness (voidness), is rather like this. The whole of existence is like the computer's memory. It neither contains 'things' nor is it devoid of them. It has signs which guide the interpreter, but they are only signs by virtue of the interpreter. In existence there is no dichotomy between the signs and the reader. Likewise in the computer. The 'reader' (as software) resides in memory also as a sequence of zeroes and ones, but this sequence has meaning to to yet another reader. At some point all analogies breakdown or cost more than they repay. So it is with the digital analogy, and I believe that point has been reached.

Understanding the nature of encoding within a computer provides a profound model for 'shunyata'. Perhaps it is an accessible model for a world now familiar with CGI, video games and the 'The Matrix'. The world of conventional reality is simply one representation of the underlying perpetual creation of existence - a world of change where there are no things and nothing changes.