What I Learned from Bill the Buddhist

Whatever the endeavor:

"If you practice, you will improve"
"People get bored"
"People are impulsive"
"People think half thoughts"

A guy is going 90 MPH in his car.
He opens the door and says, "I'm going to jump out".
He thinks a half thought.
He doesn't think about what will happen when he jumps.
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I met Bill the Buddhist while walking around the Forest Heights track. I was melancholy and decided to start a conversation to distract myself.

I pointed out that the track, open to the public all year round,
was surrounded by barbed wire - an interesting contradiction.

Then I observed, "Isn't it interesting how people who don't know each other never walk or drive side by side. One will speed up, the other slows down. They space themselves apart as far as possible."

Bill the Buddhist then told me a blue-haired woman pulled up  beside a friend of his in her car. "Like Marge Simpson" I said. "Yes", he replied going on, "She looked at his friend in his car, looked at her door and promptly, assertively, locked her doors. His friend then looked down at his door and pushed HIS lock down, locking his own doors." We agreed this was funny.

Bill had more stories such as "Feral children". "If you don't get to them by the time they are seven, they never socialize." I thought rescuing feral children was an interesting and under discussed topic.

He talked about "same substance", that people are all the same, male, female, old, young, etc. "All flesh" he said. I said, "Yes, but if the flesh is the body, they have different drivers."

He talked about social norms and people and how people are affected by the norms of other people. When people are isolated they become feral again and will do strange things.

He talked about how he went to live in Japan for a year and a half. He said, "You don't really learn a culture in that time,
but it opens your eyes on your own culture." I asked him, "How so?". He said something profound but I forgot it.

Then he talked about how they drive on the "wrong" side of the street in Japan. "Like in Britain" I asked? "Yes" he replied.
He thought it profound that they chose left and we chose right.
I did not. I thought it was arbitrary and insignificant and said so.

Then we started talking about bifurcations.
Bifurcations are where a choice has to be made and 
one culture chooses one way, and another chooses the other way.
Like which side of the road to drive on, which affects
on which side the steering wheel is. Bifurcations are everywhere.
Your liver is on the right, but it could have just as well been on the left, and so on.

We talked about language bifurcations.
How Egypt had a language based on pictures and we had one based on the sound of words. Picture languages are great for nouns and bad for verbs. We talked about the Babylonians, the Rosetta Stone, the Indo-Europeans and things that could have gone either way and did, or did not.

Then we started talking about communication. I told him, "Communication is symmetric if A can talk to B and B to A."
Before that we talked about Godel and undecidability and how Godel starved himself to death when his wife left and couldn't fix him dinner.

Before that he said the inner part of a person is infinite.
I told him, "I don't feel infinite on the inside, I keep bumping up against the stops."

Then I mentioned that communication is reflexive if you can talk to yourself. We mixed this in with perception, which is a kind of self-talk. He lamented the incompleteness of communication and mentioned Iran as an example. I said communication is very complete if you do it properly.

Then we made up a game. A bifurcation game.
Each of us writes down one of two symbols, and gives it to the other person. The other person then writes down their symbol and gives it to the other...
The person is not obligated to read the symbol they received before they transmit their symbol. This special case is called "Not listening".

Then Bill the Buddhist said these are his principles:

Whatever the endeavor:
"If you practice, you will improve"
"People get bored"
"People are impulsive"
"People think half thoughts"
A guy is going 90 MPH in his car.
He opens the door and says, "I'm going to jump out".
He thinks a half thought.
He doesn't think about what will happen when he jumps.


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I met Bill the Buddhist while walking around the Forest Heights track. I was melancholy and decided to start a conversation to distract myself...