The Sayings of Chuang Chou

When I bought this used paperback I didn’t realize Chuang Chou was just another way of saying Chuang Tzu, the philosopher who wondered if he was a butterfly’s dream.  I thought it would be all new to me.  Since I hadn’t read Chuang Tzu in a decade or three, it was!

The Sayings of Chuang Chou translated by James R Ware

NY:  Mentor Classics, 1963

(page 16)  Lieh Yü-k’ou traveled by riding the wind, because he knew how to make himself light, and after a fortnight he returned.  Not many could attract good fortune as well as he.  Yet, even though he avoided travel in its normal form, there was still something that he needed for support, the wind.  If, however, he had ridden the correctness that is all nature’s and used for his driver the articulateness belonging to the six breaths (Yin, Yang, wind, rain, darkness, and light) to delight himself in Infinity, what else would he have needed?  Therefore, it is said, “Man in his highest form is selfless, gods (once men) take no interest in accomplishment, and a sage has no interest in renown.”

(23)  Labeling things right or wrong weakens God.

(25)  Words bring compartmentalization, by which I mean left, right, rules, propriety, analysis, argument, strife, and quarrels, which are called the Eight Perfections!

(33)  “You must concentrate and not listen with your ears but with your heart.  Then, without listening with the heart, do so with your breath.  The ear is limited to ordinary listening, the heart to the rational.  Listening with the breath, one awaits things uncommittedly.  It is God alone that gathers into the uncommitted, and that makes uncommittedness the fact of the heart and mind.”

(39)  Everybody knows about the usefulness of the useful, but nobody knows about the usefulness of the useless!

(56)  Why do you bother me about how the world is to be governed?

When he [T’ien Ken] put the question to him [an anonymous man] again, the answer came, “Let your heart and mind have an excursion in the objective and bring your breaths into combination with the vast and silent.  Render yourself obedient to Spontaneity and tolerate no subjectivity.  Then our world will be well governed, I promise you.”

(68)  The utter confusion brought upon our world by love of know-how is extreme.

(78)  When one’s will is no longer crushed by things, one is perfect.  

(87) The quietude of the sage is not the result of expertness.  He enjoys quietude because there is nothing in all creation that disturbs him.

…Now uncommittedness, quiet, rest, repose, silence, emptiness, perfect-freedom-action - these are all nature at the level;  they are God and perfect, natural behavior in their highest form.

(97)  eleococca - 桐 vernucosa or paulownia

(104)  Let life be a floating and death a resting.

[Autumn Flood]

(110)  “Things are infinite in the variety of their sizes and eternally varying;  throughout their course they retain nothing old. No particular lot is permanent.  Therefore, great wisdom has an eye to both the distant and the near;  it does not consider the small paltry nor the large important, for it knows there is no end to size.  Since it uses for witness both past and present, the past does not evoke longing, nor does the brevity of the present produce anxiety.  It knows that time is infinite.  Having examined the matter of fullness and emptiness, great wisdom does not rejoice on getting something and grieve on losing it, for it knows that no lot is permanent.  Understanding the path of contentment, it is not pleased by birth, nor does it think death as a disaster, because it is known that neither end nor beginning can be thought old.

(113)  "The presence of excellence is due to nature.  It is the function of man to understand nature, to base himself in nature, and to position himself in perfect, natural behavior.  Then, moving back and forth with hesitation, he will bend and stretch.  And now, having gotten to the essentials, I have nothing more to say.”

“What do you mean by nature?  What do you mean by man?”

“Buffalos and horses having four feet is nature.  Bridling a horse’s head and piercing a buffalo’s nose is man.  So I say, ‘The natural is not to be destroyed by the artificial, Fate is not to be destroyed by deliberation, and native excellence is not to be sacrificed to opinion.’  Observe these three injunctions carefully and omit none of them.  This is what is meant by return to God (The True)."

(116)  Chuang Chou was fishing in the P’u when the King of Ch’u sent two ambassadors to invite him, saying, “We desire to enmesh you in our state affairs.”  Still holding his rod, and without looking back, Chuang Chou replied, “I am told that there is a god-turtle in Ch’u that died at the age of three thousand years and that your king keeps it wrapped in a kerchief in the ancestral temple.  Now what do you think this turtle would prefer - to be dead and have its skeleton an object of veneration or to be alive and drag its tail in the mud?”

“The latter.”

“Go away, then.  I will keep dragging my tail in the mud.”

(119)  When Chuang Chou’s wife died, Hui Shih went to express his condolences.  Chuang Chou, seated on a mat, was singing and beating upon a basin, and Hui Shih said, “If one grows old and dies after living with a person and rearing his sons, not to mourn her is bad enough.  But isn’t beating upon a basin and singing going too far?”

“No.  If this were her initial death, how could I fail to be saddened?  If, however, we examine this question of beginnings, originally there was no birth.  Not only was there no birth but originally there was no body.  And not only was there no body but originally there was no breath.  All mixed up in the vastness and confusion, a change took place and there was breath.  This breath changed and body came into existence.   This body then changed and birth occurred.  Today another change has occurred, and she has reached death.  It is analogous to the progression of the four seasons, spring, autumn, winter, and summer.  This person, my wife, is resting peacefully in the largest of abodes, but if I were to mourn her with a lot of sobbing, I should feel that I did not understand Fate.  That is why I desist.”

[end of Autumn Flood]

(124)  “When shooting where the wager is tiles, a man is skillful.  When the wager is buckles, he is nervous.  When shooting for gold, he is quite beside himself.  In  all these cases the skill is the same, but when the emotions are involved, value is placed on externals.  And this always disturbs internally.”

(130)  One moment up and at another moment down, he considers harmony the only measure.  Floating along in the Ancestor of All Creation (God), he passes from thing to thing but does not particularize among them.

(136)  Do things of the highest type, but avoid thinking of yourselves as being of the highest type.  Then were will you go and not be loved?

(138)  There is nothing sadder than the death of a mind.  Even the death of an individual is secondary.

(140)  As the relation of water to its sounds is perfectly natural when there is no interference, so the relation of man in his highest form to perfect, natural behavior is such that he cannot as a creature separate himself from it as long as he does not try to improve it.

(144)  The man concerned with God diminishes his artificialities more and more every day.

(145)  There are many fine things about Nature, but it does no talking.

(153)  I was taught that man in his highest form dwells quietly in an abode whose circuit is fifty feet, but the people in general rush madly about without knowing where they are going.

(159)  A word on these four topics:  Removing disturbances to our wills, loosening the bonds upon our hearts, removing enmeshments to excellence, and piercing the roadblocks to God.

These six - riches, honors, distinction, austerity, renown, and profit - disturb our wills.

These six - countenances, movements, complexions, situations, attitudes, and thoughts - bind hearts.

These six - dislike, desire, joy, anger, grief, and pleasure - enmesh our natural excellence.

These six - quitting, arriving, taking, giving, know-hows, and technical competence - are roadblocks to God.

If these four are not rampant in our breast, everything is all right.  If everything is all right, we are calm;  if calm, understanding;  if understanding, uncommitted;  if uncommitted, we act with perfect freedom, and everything proceeds as it should.

God is what is respected in perfect, natural action.

(166)  Alas, I pity those among men who lose their own true selves.  I also pity those who pity others.  I even pity those who pity the pitiers.  But all that was a long time ago.

(169)  Yao understands the good that a superior person can do, but he does not understand how such a person turns the world to thievery.  Only those who are beyond the restrictions of superiority understand this.

(172 - 173)  The sage understands the bundle that is this universe and thinks that the whole of it is one body.  Yet, he does not know the reason.  That is in the nature of things. Acting in full compliance with his orders, he recognizes nature as master.  And men in turn call him their master.

(173)  Lao Tan’s [Lao Tzu’s] teacher, Jung Ch’eng [容成氏, keeper of King Mu’s archives, Yellow Emperor’s annalist and original historian, possibly expert in governing chi by accumlating semen]

(178)  If we counted things today, we would not stop with ten thousand - but by convention we do speak of the ten thousand things (all nature) to indicate large quantity.  In the same way, we use the expression Sky and Earth to denote hugeness in shape.  We use Yin and Yang for greatness of the breaths.  God is what is common to all these, and it is all right to use that name because of the magnitude involved.  But now that you have this term will you look for something to compare with God?  Dialectic of that type compares dogs and horses!

(179)  Those with an eye to God do not pursue God to a vanishing point nor try to trace God to a source, for God is the point where discussion ceases.

…Neither speech nor silence, however, are sufficient for giving the whole story of God and created thigns.  It is perfect freedom of speech and silence that discusses them in all their fullness.

(184 - 185)  A fish trap is a means for catching fish, but once we get the fish, the trap is forgotten  The snare is a means for catching hares, but once we get the hare, the snare is forgotten.  Similarly, words are a means for catching ideas, but when the idea has been grasped, the words are forgotten.  Where can I get a man who forgets about the words that I may talk with him?`

(187)  Where there is concern with life, there is death.  Give yourself, then, to the universal view.  Remember that death has a cause, but that the living Yang is free from cause.  Can you really accept that?  Then you will be completely indifferent to whatever happens.

(191)  Today, however, all who occupy high office and esteem titles feel that the most weighty problem is that they might lose them.  With a view to profit, they treat lightly the loss of their bodies.  Isn’t it stupid?

(192)  I sum it up this way:  “The true function of God is the better ordering of ourselves.  Some of God may go to governing the family or the state;  and God’s refuse is for the better ordering of the world.”

(196)  Where God is understood, both the bad situation and prosperity become a succession comparable to cold, heat, wind, and rain.

(215)  The True (God) is quintessence and sincerity in their highest forms.  Non-quintessence and non-sincerity cannot influence people.  Accordingly, he who forces his mourning feels no grief, though he may be sad.  He who forces himself to anger may be stern, but he inspires no awe.  Forced friendliness is not congenial, though it may be smiling.  True sadness grieves noiselessly.  True anger overawes before it reveals itself.  True friendliness proves congenial before there are any smiles.  The True is something within us that our interior gods make external.  We value the True because it is useful to the human order.  When it serves parents, there is kindness and filial affection.  When it serves the sovereign, there is loyalty and sincerity.  At celebrations it causes joy, in mournings sadness and grief.  The principal ingredient in loyalty and sincerity is service, in celebration joy, in mournings grief, and in serving parents appropriateness.

(218)  Chuang Chou:  “To understand God is easy;  to obey the injunction not to put God into words is difficult.  By understanding and yet not putting into words, one attains Nature.  By understanding and putting into words, one attains artificiality.  The Ancients were natural, not artificial.”

(231)  It is better to embrace things globally.  The rarer our talk, the closer to God.

Honeybee Democracy

Honeybee Democracy by Thomas D. Seeley

Princeton, NJ:  Princeton Univ Press, 2010

ISBN 978-0-691-14721-5

(5)  So the mother queen is not the workers' boss.  Indeed, there is no all-knowing central planner supervising the thousands and thousands of worker bees in a colony.  The work of a hive is instead governed collectively by the workers themselves, each one an alert individual making tours of inspection looking for things to do and acting on her own to serve the community.

(11)  The duration of the waggle run - made conspicuous despite the darkness by the dancer audibly buzzing her wings while waggling her body - is directly proportional to the length of the outward journey.  On average, one second of the combined body-waggling/wing-buzzing represents some 1,000 meters (six-tenths of a mile) of flight.  And the angle of the waggle run, relative to straight up on the vertical comb, represents the angle of the outward journey relative to the direction of the sun.  

(35)  In the mid-1970s, for three years I followed the fates of several dozen feral honeybee colonies living in trees and houses around Ithaca, and I found that less than 25 percent of the "founder" colonies (ones newly started by swarms) would be alive the following spring.  In contrast, almost 80 percent of the "established" colonies (ones already in residence for at least a year) would survive winter, no doubt because they hadn't had to start from scratch the previous summer.  Beekeepers describe the time and energy crunch faced by swarms in a rather grim, three-line rhyme:  "A swarm of bees in May is worth a load of hay, a swarm of bees in June is worth a silver spoon, a swarm in July isn't worth a fly."

(54)  The bees had revealed to me that they prefer a nest entrance that is rather small, faces south, is high off the ground, and opens into the bottom of the nest cavity.

(75)  But it is always a "friendly" competition;  the scout bees agree on what makes an ideal homesite, they are united in the goal of choosing the best available site, they share their information with full honesty, and ultimately they reach a complete agreement about their new residence.  One valuable lesson that we can learn from the bees is that holding an open and fair competition of ideas is a smart solution to the problem of making a decision based on a pool of information dispersed across a group of individuals.

(86)  This is a different sort of collective choice, for whereas a homeless swarm makes a "consensus decision" about which _single options_ (candidate nest site) it will choose, a foraging colony makes a "combined decision" about how to allocate its foragers among _multiple options_ (candidate food sources).

(91)  Main features of bees' decision-making process:

First, they showed that the bees' debates tend to start slowly with an information accumulation phase during which scout bees put a sizable number of widely scattered alternatives "on the table" for discussion. 

(92)  Second, the plots of the dance records showed that the shout bees' debates end with all or nearly all of the dancing bees advocating just one site, that is, showing a consensus....

Third, our analysis showed that the bees' decision-making process is a highly distributed and thus a democratic one, involving dozens or hundreds of individuals.

(95)  These findings support the idea that scouts come largely, if not entirely, form the ranks of a colony's foragers.  Both scouts and foragers make long-distance excursions from a central location (swarm or hive) and then must find their way home, so it is easy to imagine that bees with foraging experience make the best scouts.

(98)  I find it extremely suggestive that Lindauer started seeing some of his labeled foragers exploring his nest sites, not exploiting his feeder, a few days after he started noticing most of his previously active foragers sitting around idly, either in some quiet spot outside the hive or in the "beard" of bees hanging outside the entrance.  Anecdotal observations like these are the perfect springboard for an experimental investigation designed to test conclusively whether it is a persistently full stomach per se, or something else associated with forced indolence, that informs foragers to become scouts.

(101)  Given that humans and other animals usually make decisions by drawing on a toolbox of heuristics, it is remarkable that a honeybee swarm does not use these shortcut methods of decision making and instead selects its new living quarters by taking a broad and deep look at the bee housing market.  As we have seen in chapter 4, a swarm makes its decision only after its scout bees have discovered numerous alternative nest sites and have performed a multifaceted inspection of each size...  And as we have seen in chapter 3, each candidate site is evaluated with respect to at least six attributes (e.g., cavity volume, entrance height, and entrance size).  Thus a honeybee swarm pursues an unusually sophisticated strategy of decision making, one that involves nearly all of the information relevant to the problem of choosing the best place to build its new nest...  A swarm is able to be so thorough in choosing its home because its democratic organization enables it to harness the power of many individuals working together to perform collectively the two fundamental parts of the decision-making process:  acquiring information about the alternatives and processing this information to make a choice.  We will now look at the evidence that honeybee democracy does indeed achieve nearly optimal decision making.

(123)  In short, the richer the nectar source, the stronger the waggle dance.  We had also figured out how a dancing bee adjusts the number of dance circuits that she produces in relation to nectar-source richness.  She does so by adjusting two aspects of her dancing:  the _rate_ of dance circuit production (R, in dance circuits per second) and the _duration_ of dance circuit produced (C, in dance circuits) in a dancing bee's advertisement is the product of the rate and duration of her dancing (C=R x D).  So, richer nectar sources elicit livelier (higher R) and longer-lasting (greater D) dances than do poorer nectar sources.  

(140-142)  One strong possibility is that the bees were driven to retire from advertising the losing sites by an internal, neurophysiological process that causes every scout to gradually and automatically lose her motivation to dance for a site, even one that is high in quality.  Such a process would foster consensus building among the scouts, for automatic fading of each bee's dancing would prevent the decision making from coming to a standstill with groups of unyielding dancers deadlocked over two or more sites.  It might also help the dancers reach unanimity more quickly than they would otherwise, for endowing each bee with an automatic tendency to lose interest in any given site would make each bee a highly flexible participant in the decision-making process.

(143)  The drop in dance strength per trip (about 15 dance circuits) appears to be a constant, regardless of series length.

NB:  Town meeting rules by which one member can't speak a second time on an issue until everyone else who wishes to be heard has a chance to speak.

(144)  Both bees and humans need a group's members to avoid stubbornly supporting their first view, but whereas we humans will usually (and sensibly) give up on a position only after we have learned of a better one, the bees will stop supporting a position automatically.

(165)  "Ritualization" is the name biologists have given to the process whereby some incidental action of an animal becomes modified over evolutionary time into an intentional signal.

(166)  If the hypothesis of scout bees as mobile temperature sensors, information integrators, and group activators proves correct, then the mechanisms mediating the initiation of takeoffs by honeybee swarms present us with an intriguing system of behavioral control within a large group.  It is one in which a small minority of individuals actively poll the group to collect information about its global state and then, when the group reaches a critical state, these individuals produce a signal that triggers an appropriate action by the whole group.  

(199)  Instead, in both swarms and brains, the decision-making process is broadly diffused among an ensemble of relatively simple information-processing units, each of which possesses only a tiny fraction of the total pool of information used to make a collective judgment.  We will see that natural selection has organized honeybee swarms and primate brains in intriguingly similar ways to build a first-rate decision-making group from a collection of rather poorly informed and cognitively limited individuals.  These similarities point to general principles for building a sophisticated cognitive unit out of far simpler parts.

(203)  First, a sensory transformation converts the information about the external world that has been registered by the animal's sensory organs into a "sensory representation," which makes the information available for further processing within the animal's brain.  This is what the MY neurons do in the monkey's motion-detection task.  Second, a decision transformation converts the sensory representation into a set of probabilities for adopting the alternative courses of action.  In the monkey's brain, this transformation is implemented by the LIP neurons, as they convert the sensory representation of visual motion into a set of "evidence accumulations," specifically the set of firing rates of the integrators representing different motion directions.  The level of firing in a particular integrator population determines the animal's relative probability of choosing the alternative represented by this population.  Third, an "action transformation" converts this set of probabilities into a specific behavioral act.  This final process of action implementation is performed in the monkey's brains by motor neurons in the FEF and SC regions when they are activated by the population of LIP neurons whose firing rates have reached a threshold level.

(210)  Indeed, another shared design feature of the integrators in monkey brains and honeybee swarms is that they are leaky.  In other words, in both systems, the accumulation of evidence in any given integrator declines unless additional evidence flows into it.

NB:  In bees and synapses "zombie lies" die out

(214)  This design [in brains and swarms] has five critical elements:

1.  A population of sensory units (S) that provides input about the alternatives.  Each sensor reports (noisily) on just one alternative, and each sensor's strength is proportional to the quality of its alternative.

2.  A population of integrator units (I) that integrate the sensory information over time and over sensory units.  Each integrator accumulates evidence in support of just one alternative.

3.  Mutual inhibition among the integrators, so the growth in evidence in one suppresses with increasing strength the growth of evidence in the others.

4.  Leakage of the integrators, so the growth of evidence in an integrator requires sustained input of sensory evidence supporting its alternative.

5.  Threshold sensing by the integrators, such that the decision falls to the alternative whose integrator first accumulates a threshold level of evidence.

(220)  Lesson 1:  Compose the decision-making group of individuals with shared interests and mutual respect

(221)  Lesson 2:  Minimize the leader's influence on the group's thinking

(224)  Lesson 3:  Seek diverse solutions to the problem

(226)  Lesson 4:  Aggregate the group's knowledge through debate

(227)  No scout bee, not even one that has encountered a wildly exuberant dancer, will blindly follow another scout's opinion by dancing for a site she has not inspected.

(228)  How can humans use what the bees have demonstrated about aggregating the knowledge and opinions of a group's members to make good choices for the group as a whole?  I suggest three things.  First, we use the power of an open and fair competition of ideas, in the form of a frank debate, to integrate the information that is dispersed among the group/s members.  Second, we foster good communication within the debating group, recognizing that this is how valuable information that is uncovered by one member will quickly reach the other members.  And third, we recognize that while it is important for a group's members to listen to what everyone else is saying, it is essential that they listen critically, form their own opinions about the options being discussed, and register their views independently.

(230)  Lesson 5:  Use quorum responses for cohesion, accuracy, and speed

(231)  E pluribus unum through quorum responses?  Yes, but do so carefully, using a quorum that is sufficiently large to ensure accurate decision making by the community.

(234)  Thus, the house-hunting bees remind us that the leader in a democratic group serves mainly to shape the process, not the product, of the group's deliberations.  The bees also demonstrate that a democratic group can function perfectly well without a leader if the group's members agree on the problems they face and on the protocol they will use to make their decisions.

(236)  The election's outcome is biased strongly in favor of the best site because this site's supporters will produce the strongest dance advertisements and so will gain converts the most rapidly, and because the best site's supporters will revert to neutral-voter status the most slowly.  Ultimately, the bees supporting one of the sites - usually the best one - dominate the competition so completely that every scout bee supports just one site....

Some have said that honeybees are messengers sent by the gods to show us how we ought to live:  in sweetness and in beauty and in peacefulness.

(262)  Frank Bryan, professor of political science at the University of Vermont and world authority on New England town meetings, has taught me much about his specialty and introduced me to Larry Coffin, long-standing moderator of the annual town meeting in Bradford, Vermont...  Michael Mauboussin, chief investment strategist at Legg Mason Capital Management, has showed me the connections between the search comittees of bees and the investment committees of humans and kindly allowed me to borrow from one of his Consilient Observer essays the title for my final chapter, "Swarm Smarts."