A Buddhist Model for the Informational Person

A Buddhist theory of information comports with the recent notion of information ethics wherein information may be included within skillful means (upāya). Buddhists reject epistemological-ontological dualism: the conceptual and the non-conceptual are not distinct sources of knowledge. The act of cognition and the cognized object are momentary-together. Any category including information as a substance or as a relation is constructed and as such cannot capture a transcending reality. Information Ethics recognizes a minimalist mental and non-physical ontological commitment, without substance or relations, and a beneficent moral role for humanity. On this conventional level, the informational “entity” includes persons as well as nonpersons. Practitioners explore this entity as a contingent construction, in particular under analysis, so as to better understand the products of conceptualization and to thus transform the mind in a virtuous direction. The ramifications of information as skillful means are that we appear as an information entity to others, as they do to us; information entities may appear to be persons, even if they are not; actual persons may be treated as non-personal information entities. Thus, the informational person is the ethical person in this system of onto-ethics. Liu (2004) identifies Leibniz as the most promising point of departure for a Western understanding of the model concept of information, one in which the information entity or object surpasses Cartesian dualism and the limitations of the axiomatic concept. Information in the model concept is an abstract particular, or trope, following Leibniz’ transitional understanding of the monad from an individual substance to a relational force. This holographic principle of the monad as “living mirror” joined in logic is analogous to the Neo-Confucian concept li as an internal order codetermining the nature and content of ch’i. In my proposed computational Buddhism, the key metaphor is between hardwaresoftware and dharmas-samskaras. Momentariness is an information structure in which the metaphor takes the shape of experience. The result is a description of simulation as problem-solving sessions in which inner speech conducts a critical rational analysis of reality through the manipulation of information about