Zen, the "Z" Meme

In spite of its official contempt for merely human ideas, Zen encompasses a wide variety of ideas. The most important one is inherited from Buddhism: the idea that the mind itself is an illusion. I'm calling this particular idea from Zen the "Z" meme, with due recognition that there is more to Zen than this meme. In fact, Zen meditation is particularly valuable in allowing the practitioner to sharpen his skills in self-reflection: the first step in answering the question, What am I. The Z meme purports to answer this question in a particular way (answer: nothing).

I think this idea arises from fundamental errors of categorization and imagination. We are no longer required to think of the mind as a special kind of "stuff" (as Descartes did). We now routinely speak of "things" like processes and structures which are clearly real - not "illusions". Of course, there is usually some kind of old-fashioned "stuff" involved, but you can't understand a process by studying the "stuff" involved. For example, knowledge of electronics won't help you understand your word processor.

Hofstader provides a different way to think about thinking, which depends in many ways on our modern experience with computers - "Thinking Machines". Roughly speaking, the "mind" is a self-referential, recursive structure of "memes". This structure is as real is anything can be - it's what we define as consciousness. This view specifically provides for the phenomenon that Zen masters have such a problem with, If you let go of the mind, what is it that knows you have let go? Recursiveness and self-reflection are very modern ideas. Any computer programmer learns to deal with them comfortably. Obviously, the Buddha was no computer programmer.