Reality is Connections

From my masters thesis in progress:

We’ve already seen that the Connectionist approach in Cognitive Science views knowledge as in some way made of connections. But the Buddhist negation of svabhava goes further than that – it sees reality itself as made of connections. Everything in this world is made of, dependent on, and actually is – other things. Reality is an interdependent, ever-changing, self-reflecting and echoing, infinitely self-referencing whole.

It is for this reason, fundamentally, that Buddhism suspects symbolic language: by its very nature language separates, defines, and confines — but in reality every reference is self-reference, every definition is incomplete or circular, every pointing finger points also at itself.

This is from a chapter I’m writing about building wisdom into artificially intelligent machines.