I'll bite! I read a book recently that struck me as very Buddhist in spirit: it's called
Mathematica, by David Bessis, and it's basically a combination of mathematician's memoir, and an argument that we're teaching math all wrong, based on a misunderstanding of how mathematicians actually do math. It was a very annoying book in many ways (one of those books that could have been a solid 30,000 word essay) but it has changed my approach to math, and educating my daughter, and really to learning in general, so I guess I can't complain, I got my money's worth.
His basic argument is that math isn't conducted the way we imagine, as a series of constrained manipulations of rigid logical structures. That's how
mathematics books are written, but not how math is actually done. Actual math is done as a series of creative intuitive leaps based on mental models that the mathematician has built up over years of doing math. Solving most math problems involves finding the right mental model — models typically consist of metaphors rooted in physical/sensory reality — and once that's been found the solution becomes more or less obvious to our intuition.
He talks about how these mental models are built up, which is where the material started to sound familiar: disconnecting the ego from any particular approach, getting the "self" out of the way, building up intuitive models based on repeated close observation of actual problems and their resolution. Recognizing that all mentals models are "wrong" in a fundamental sense, that at the most they can be useful, and that they should be worn lightly and discarded easily. All very Three Characteristics.
He specifically references meditation when talking about how these models are updated: not through rigorous logical testing, but through relevant practice, and consideration of the problem at hand, and then entering a mental state where practical observation is gently offered up to existing conceptual models, and the two are allowed to coexist side by side in the mind, and swirl around and inform one another, while we ourselves stay patiently out of the way and allow our subconscious to do its thing.
He describes several famous mathematicians (Grothendieck, Einstein, Descartes) as being rabidly interested in the discarding and updating of their mental models, and nearly egoless within that narrow realm.
There are the obligatory references to machine learning, in the sense that new data is used to update models, making them better at recognizing new kinds of patterns. I guess as a mathematician Bessis stands a better chance of employing ML metaphors in a meaningful way than your average pop-sci author, but I didn't find this all that enlightening.
But in general it was fascinating to read, and I think it's great to see a science book acknowledging the fundamentally psychological nature of the practice of science.
There's my contribution!
