The Loop and the Wheel
Buddhist psychology meets systems analysis
It strikes me that this exchange clarifies what I mean by the loop, and how I arrived at that metaphor for the structure of experience:
Robert, your ideas are written so clearly and thoughtfully, and I am a big fan. I loved “The 21st Century Self” and purchased “The Ten Thousand Things,” which I plan on reading next.
My question is, how do you see the Buddhist concept of Dependent Arising/Causes and Conditions as they relate to “free will” and the loop? This has been on my mind recently, and I would so appreciate your take on it. Thank you!
Thank you, Marilyn. I’m happy to hear that you enjoy my work.
Dependent Arising and what I call the loop point to the same structure: everything appears through interdependence.
The Buddhist account of causes and conditions describes interdependence through imagery—chains of birth and death, karma ripening, wheels turning, the perfectly enlightened, radiant Buddha. It frames the interdependent process mythically so it can be grasped intuitively.
When I call it mythical, I mean that the doctrine functions as a poetic explanation rather than a mechanical description. It’s a way of pointing to the same pattern a systems theorist or neuroscientist might call recursion, feedback, or dynamic coupling. The insight is real; the framing is symbolic.
When you read “The Ten Thousand Things,” which I wrote ten years ago, you’ll see these ideas discussed in a way closer to poetic than my present style, which is influenced by my “psychoanalysis” of a chatbot in “Understanding Claude.”
In that work, anatta became apparent to me in a new way. Although the chatbot has no “self”—it’s only software running on hardware—we feel that we are conversing with an actual entity. That illusion arises because we humans evolved to see “selves” wherever there is coherent behavior. We do the same kind of projection when we observe our own behaviors; we immediately feel that there is a sovereign entity monitoring and controlling them. That is an illusion, and it’s the same illusion that Buddhist psychology points out, just in different words.
Books By Robert:
The Ten Thousand Things
Depending On No-Thing
Understanding Claude
The 21st Century Self
Hard to believe that 10K things was ten years ago! I thoroughly enjoyed the 21st century Self, a masterpiece by Robert.
AI to me is an illusion “twice removed” - an illusion within an illusion. It “imitates” human thought without it actually being a spontaneously occurring “thought”. It does make me question how spontaneous “my” thoughts are in comparison?
The difference seems to be that a mind is capable of producing entirely new understanding, even if it is based on previous knowledge. As well as the total lack of any capacity for empathy/emotion by AI.
That said, If my opinion of AI was only based on my conversations with it, without knowing who or what is on the other end, I’d be hard pressed to distinguish AI from a human being. (Depending on the nature of the conversation, of course) It is easy to see how people use AI in attempt to fill the void in actual human interaction.