Dogs Don’t Fucking Clap

Famous buddhist thought experiment: what is the sound of one hand clapping? 

This is an experiment meant to show us how the linguistic biases we attach to ideas that guide us away from thinking abstractly and force us, for the sake of survival and getting along in the world, to think pragmatically, and often in a way that serves the self and validates our very biased worldviews. 

“What is the sound of one hand clapping”. Buddhism wants us to think abstractly. If attempting to disregard our built-in human perspective, even the idea of “the hand” as an entity comes into question. The hand is just a bunch of meat and cells and shit that I really have no control over on anything but a macro level. If I really look at my hand and start to think even about how I’m typing this, it’s extremely clear to me, that our explanations and understanding of how things work is reductive and convenient. “Well I decided to move my hand and start typing”. Not wrong, just reductive. We learned to call this collection of billions of independent and interconnected organisms that I have the power to telekinetically control a “hand”—and that warps our perspective of what is happening not in a way that is wrong but in a way that beckons us to ignore more abstract methods of analysis and experience. 

Also built into this is the contradiction of “one hand”. The hand as an idea is both itself, me, millions of microscopic single-celled organisms, etc. Where does the clap begin and end in my body? Are my hands autonomous, separate entities? Well, no, they’re attached to my forearms-and biceps-and so on. They require my brain to give input if they are to be anything other than meat pendulums. Do I use my brain to clap or my hands? Both? My brain needs energy to survive, is that part of the clap? It’s not a closed system. Our own way of understanding our experiences in a “rational” way breaks down with some very basic scrutiny like “what the fuck even is a clap” when looked at more abstractly. 

Looking at things more human-centric: Clapping itself is an act that requires two things. Two human things, specifically. Dogs don’t fucking clap so don’t try me. But looking at the universe in a chronological and unbiased way, it is accurate to say that the entire universe and all of the events therein had to happen for that clap to happen. 

Carl Sagan said, “to make an apple pie from scratch you must first invent the universe”. Or something like that. He’s dead he can’t correct me. It was probably someone else, too.

It is very difficult to articulate these thoughts with language itself, because it is a human construct and each word carries with it the history of its language and the implications therein of human experience, development, and the transference of ideas. Language in and of itself is not unbiased description. But, we try our best.

I was very dogmatic about science when I was growing up without faith. Science offers the “I don’t know, but it can be explained” perspective, which I have always found humble, grounded, and accurate. But now as I find myself thinking more abstractly, and more about what I actually experience, I find that “explaining” the natural world and my life can only get us as far rationally as the level of ability we have to generate types of language that can express the inexpressible. Happened when we broke down where a clap begins and ends. I do not believe there is a Monotheistic god, or even a creator. Science and mathematics probably should be able to explain it all, I think that is reasonable. Not now, but maybe in the future if we keep our wits about us. But even if we knew what happened before the big bang, it wouldn’t really explain anything in a way that isn’t based in human storytelling, at least for everyday people. Knowing what happened before the Big Bang does nothing to illuminate or communicate the lived experience of an elephant shrew to me. Or another person. Even myself. Trying to get away from thinking like a human was built to think and experience as an animal may be impossible but it’s damn interesting to try.

So, scientifically, the sound of one hand clapping is non-existent. And that is completely correct. But also, finally, the answer to the problem. The ‘buddhist’ answer to the problem is one hand, extended outward. Touching the air. One hand touching the universe, we are the universe, so, one hand touching itself. The Dalai Llama walks into a pizza shop and says “make me one with everything”. The ‘Sound’ referring to the human interpretation of the event of two identical objects colliding, and interpreting the resulting audio as the event. I was reading up on this and they call it “the soundless sound”. The old adage: ‘if a tree falls in the woods’, the buddhist answer would be no, I think.

Looking at the concept of ‘sound’. The first single celled organism crawls out of the abortion bucket of the primordial ooze that will soon become Earth and some billions of years later we have humans smacking their palms together for some fucking reason in a ceremonial rite. Humans have ears with tiny, finely evolved and tuned hairs and cilia on the inner ear canal that are capable of translating air pressure into something understandable to our brains. After an event occurs, air pressure is generated, ear hair wiggles, brain says, “yep, that’s a sound”. So what is the sound? When does it actually happen and where? Is it the tree hitting the ground? Is it the air being wiggly? Is it the ear hair being wiggly? Is it the brain? Is it the space in consciousness where the sound is registered? Is it the whole thing? If that’s true, to what can we accurately attribute a cause? The tree in the woods being planted or the tree hitting the floor when no one is around? It’s pointless to break down the semantics because the question is posed as a thought experiment with no true answer. But for fun, “sound” itself is a human construct that we use to lump together a huge series of abstract inputs, outputs, and experiences in order to communicate with other people information about our lived experiences and acquired knowledge. And somehow I’ve made this illusion the focal piece of my life.