At Baycon today and tomorrow. Physics series resumes tomorrow.
Meanwhile, here's a link to a page of Broken Koans and other Zen debris I ran across, which should amuse fans of ancient Eastern wisdom; and a koan of my own:
Two monks were arguing about a flag. One said, "The flag is moving."
The other said, "The wind is moving."
Julian Barbour happened to be passing by. He told them, "Not the wind, not the flag."
The first monk said, "Is the mind moving?"
Barbour replied, "Not even mind is moving."
The second monk said, "Is time moving?"
Barbour said, "There is no time. You could say that it is mu-ving."
"Then why do we think that flags flap, and wind blows, and minds change, and time moves?" inquired the first monk.
Barbour thought, and said, "Because you remember."
This love affair of modern rationalist materialists for Buddhism's metaphysical negations is peculiar in that the superficial similarities derive from completely different trains of thought. In a nutshell, as I understand it, the Buddhist argument (or a very prominent version) reduces all things to mind, by noticing the subjective element in all experience, and then reduces mind itself to ineffable formlessness by turning the argument on itself. By contrast, modern materialism in effect proceeds by substituting mathematics for subjectivity at every turn, until it reaches the point of saying that there is no subjectivity, only number (or whatever abstract category forms the basis of the preferred formalism).
I suppose the two approaches genuinely are potentially complementary, in that a Buddhist procedure could serve to make the scientific ontology subjectively plausible. But two wrongs don't make a right. We don't just think that time moves or that we are conscious; they are both quite real. At most it may be the case that the former is internal to the latter. But that is metaphysical idealism, not materialism or Buddhist relativism.
I think the basic appeal is that both are designed to structurally demonstrate the unreliableness of our basic assumptions, and Zen koans have a proven track record at succeeding.
Also, some people may be attached to the original principally through the AI Koans.