Reddit mentions of The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why

This is a thorough answer to your question. But the short answer is that you're wrong. Culture exists and it changes the way people think.

Not specific to Japan, but The Geography of Thought covers many differences in perception between Asian and Western ways of thinking. I have found it to be both amazingly accurate and enlightening.

This Henry Rosemont quote may help clarify :

"there can be no me in isolation, to be considered abstractly: I am the totality of roles I live in relation to specific others. I do not play or perform these roles; I am these roles. When they have all been specified I have been defined uniquely, fully, and altogether, with no
remainder with which to piece together a free, autonomous self."

[The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently...and Why] (http://www.amazon.com/Geography-Thought-Asians-Westerners-Differently/dp/0743255356/) will probably be helpful too, especially page 5 onwards.

> There's no such thing as "western science". The scientific method has no particular nationality or culture to it.

Disagree. (A bit of digression, but an interesting side-debate nevertheless; skip this paragraph to go to the topic of the OP.) Cultural beliefs do actually influence ways of thought, scientific method included. A well-known pyschological experiment, for example, puts two objects on a table: a cork cylinder and a plastic pyramid. Participants are given a third item, a cork pyramid, and asked to which group does it belong to. Westerners disproportionately associate it with the plastic pyramid, while easterners disproportionately associate it with the cork cylinder. This (and other variations) show that westerners tend to focus more on object labels while easterners tend to focus more on substances and the environment. So, this and related experiments reveal there ARE trends indicative of differences in how easterners and westerners interpret knowledge. Westerners tend to rely more on formal logic and insist on correctness of one belief over another when investigating conflicting opinions or theories, while easterners consider all the interacting environmental relationships, even if they give conflicting answers (this has implications for the importance easterners place on causality, for example). So yes, cultural traditions CAN influence how you interpret science. When I said the (admittedly vague) phrase "western science", I was referring to the western tradition of highly logical and categorical induction. One can even argue the Scientific Method is actually an invention of the western tradition, but that doesn't mean other cultures don't approach the same issues from different ways. Anyways, I digress from the topic at hand... TL;DR: read something like [The Geography of Thought] (http://www.amazon.com/The-Geography-Thought-Westerners-Differently/dp/0743255356/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1344027939&sr=8-1&keywords=geography+of+thought) for intriguing trends in how your Asian lab partner interprets data differently from you.

>Yes, there's a lot of New Age bullshit books out there, trying to claim that physics legitimizes one particular philosophy or religion or another.

Difference being Goswami was a quantum physics professor who wrote respected college textbooks on the matter before he turned to mysticism. I picked the book up because the most interesting advances in human knowledge have been when science has collided head-on with religion/philosophy. You won't find Jesus mentioning anything about quantum physics, but reading about a physicist who turns mystic based on his interprettation is an interesting cross between science and religion. My background is not in quantum physics, but sooner or later you guys will have to (you should?) reconcile your understanding of reality with how different cultural traditions interpret reality. Historically, that has meant offering a more convincing, evidence-based view of reality (e.g. Galileo, etc.). So I thank you for your detailed responses... I was trying only to understand why Goswami's interpretation is not considered appropriate by mainstream physicists rather than trying to assert any particular philosophy.

> Electrons do not have Bohr-style 'orbits', nor do they move between them instantaneously. We know for a fact that they don't.

My understanding was that electrons orbit in fuzzy probability clouds rather than nice planetery-like orbits, but light is emitted when they acquire/lose enough energy to move from one to the next. Furthermore, the jump is discontinuous in that the electron is never in any orbit not defined by one of the probability clouds. Can you please point me to a more accurate description?

> A 'measurement' in quantum mechanics is an interaction (of a particular kind) with the system. The fact that manipulating an object in a different way will give a different outcome is not very surprising, and not what's interesting about the delayed-choice experiment.

What is the interesting part of the delayed-choice experiment then if it's not that what we observe depends on how we measure it?

> It appears as if one particle affects the other instantaneously, which makes it appear as if there is some faster-than-light interaction between them. That does not mean this is how it works. It's not known how it works. No such interaction is known to actually exist, and as far as I know, there's no popular hypothesis giving such a mechanism. [emphasis mine.]

> While if you can't distinguish interpretations of quantum physics from quantum physics, and science from philosophy you've failed to understand all the above.

And therein lies the crux of my original post: the most interesting scientific discoveries come when interpretations of science and philosophy butt up against each other. In the case of Aspect's Bell Test, it appears that a non-local signal (that is, a deliberate faster-than-light transmission) is impossible, but yet, it shows that there is at least some non-local correlated behavior. Goswami's interpretation resorts to a non-local unitary consciousness (which he later calls "god"; the personal diety aspect of the term being unfortunate cultural baggage). The point being, when does an interpretation become theory? When you can test it and do something useful with it. So if the unitary, non-local consciousness interpretation is not helpful, what other more plausible interpretations are there? Help me understand reality as you interpret it.

There are many studies on the topic of the difference between west and east this book explains well or you can search on youtube

I have experienced people from different cultures seeing colors differently.. In South Korea I was confused when someone I was hiking with referred to the 'blue mountains' which were covered with trees, then we realized that he saw them as blue and I saw them as green. This super interesting book also discusses how cognitive testing shows that people from different cultures actually see things differently. The Geography of Thought

I'll just ignore your patronising assumptions about me, but thanks for the thoughts.

Anyway - of course we're the same underneath, it's all gravy, tinsel and gristle. It's the 'cultural overlay' that makes us different.

>The psychology and emotions of Chinese people are exactly the same as all other humans.

Emotions - well, of course they get happy, sad, bored and lonely like everyone else but psychology is something else.

Try reading The Geography of Thought - although Nisbett perhaps goes a little too far in trying to extrapolate the data from experiments into all-encompassing generalisations, there is quite a lot to show that we are not 'all the same'. Not worse or better than each other, just different.

EDIT: added author's name