Systems Theory and Buddhist Emptiness

Part of the art of effective communication is to take a subject or proposition that is unfamiliar to the listener and guide them step by step from the familiar to the unfamiliar. The same could be said of presenting the unacceptable. Unfortunately the present essay deals with the two relatively unfamiliar ideas, and its goal is to show the relationship between them. This is a more dangeous quest because it is easier either to accept or to reject the relationship simply based on a lack of familiarity with the subjects, rather than based on a sound conviction that the subjects have something to say about each other.

This relationship came to mind from a particular passage in a Buddhist text. It is actually quite a well known passage, much used in the basic teaching of Buddhism:

"Just as if a skilled butcher or butcher's apprentice, having killed a cow, were to carve it up with a sharp carving knife so that -- without damaging the substance of the inner flesh, without damaging the substance of the outer hide -- he would cut, sever, & detach only the skin muscles, connective tissues, & attachments in between. Having cut, severed, & detached the outer skin, and then covering the cow again with that very skin, if he were to say that the cow was joined to the skin just as it had been: would he be speaking rightly?"

What struck me about this was its similarity to 'partitioning' in systems theory. 'Partitioning' is the process of decomposing a system into relatively self-contained subsystems, such that interactions between subsystems are less or narrower (in a certain sense) that within the subsystems themselves. To give a simple example, suppose you have two people in conversation. Those two people could be viewed as a system. One obvious, intuitive partition would be to view each person as a subsystem and their communication as the flow or interaction between them. This decomposition is natural and appealling, especially since we already have words and concepts to label the parts of the decomposed picture ('person', 'communication'). Each person is already viewed as an independent entity. They can move apart without any damage to their integrity. However this is just one of the infinitely many partitions we could create. We could just as well decompose the couple based on their chemical, radiational and vibrational subsystems. Certainly this would be less intuitive but it might also be more revealing in that it is looking at the familiar from an unfamiliar angle.

I originally became interested in systems theory from the angle of statistical queuing theory. Statistical queuing theory often talks of arrivals processes and servers processes. If this sounds too abstract just think of it like this: think of the checkout queue at your local supermarket, the till and operator (considered together) is the server process and the intermittent flow of people joining the queue is the arrivals process. The point at which systems thinking has a bearing is this: the divide between server process and arrivals process is arbitrary and contained in the mind of the analyst. So you may ask: "is the standing queue part of the server or of the arrivals?" The answer is that it doesn't matter, so long as the same definition is retained throughout the analysis. It might matter in terms of ease and tractability of the mathematical queuing problems, but that is a question of tactical ease, not ontology. How many people would be happy saying that one analysis is 'true' and other 'false' simply because the 'true' one is mathematically tractable? (Perhaps some kind of Platonist Theist with mathematical leanings, but I suspect that is a rare breed).

Consequently a queuing system can be split into a chain of concatenated queuing subsystems with the input ('arrivals process') of one subsystem being determined by the server process of the preceeding subsystem in the chain. The fundamental point is that partitioning will be done in a way to suit analysis, and so long as the 'counting' (ie maths) is done in a consistent way, the partition chosen does not change the characteristics of the system. The partition might well change our ability to analyze and predict the characteristics, but will not change the answers. (In fact a measure of whether a partition has been correctly performed is that it does produce the same answers).

Just as a system can be partitioned into subsystems with interfaces, so a system itself can be viewed as subsystem within an encompassing supersystem. So a system might be characterized as having certain inputs and outputs, but within the context of the supersystem the outputs might be related to the inputs by virtue of their effect on the context within which the system is embedded.

In essence the mind of the analyst/observer creates the partitioning. Sometimes this is explicity as when a mathematical model is established to analyse and predict behaviour. Sometimes it is implicit as when a human learns to turn its sensory input into objects with labels.

To return to the other strand of this essay, what is 'Buddhist emptiness'? 'Emptiness' is the conventional translation of the term 'sunyata'. This term is also translated as 'voidness'. The 'emptiness' in questions is an emptiness of inherent existence. What this means is that the things with which we find the universe populated (everything from galaxies to garters) are mental constructs. This is not to say that 'galaxies (to take just one example) are simply imaginary or made up (like the the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow). There is a base of sensory evidence on which we can reliably build the construct 'galaxy'. The point is that this attribution is neither absolute on the one hand, nor arbitrary on the other. It is convenient. However that convenient construct does not imply that before galaxies formed there was a 'soul' of a galaxy, or an 'archetype' of a galaxy trying to find expression. It simply means there is an aggregate of phenomena which it is convenient for us as humans to give a name to. There was no essence trying to become a galaxy but there were forces which shaped a relatively stable pattern.

A galaxy is a useful case to consider because it is so clearly a grouping of active objects within a bounded region of space. It is perhaps easier to see as a construct than a human being (for instance). This idea of emptiness directly relates to partitioning in systems thinking. We partition for convenience and in like manner we impute 'objectness' for convenience. The clear difference is that in systems thinking the partitioning is explicit whereas with imputation it is generally implicit.

So Buddhist emptiness teaching would have us reflect on the nature of existence and see our own role as observer in the process of object creation. We encode in the process of object creation. We encode what we perceived but then we project the encoding onto the world and believe we are see our mental encoding in the world around us.

Just to finish on a controversial thought. The process of imputation onto a base seems to be exactly what the start of Genesis is talking about. In the beginning all was chaos and without form - and then the 'creator' within the mind imposed form and gave birth to conceptual thought.