It Is My Karma To Be Born In A Digital Age

"It is my Karma to be born in a digital age, so I should make the best of it" is from Prof (emeritus) Lewis Lancaster's Burke lecture on Religion and Society at the University of California, Berkeley, earlier this year.

The title of the talk was "Buddhism in a global age of technology".

The video is available online at youtube.
It is almost one hour long, and very fascinating to watch.

Prof Lancaster started with why Buddhism is portable, how East and West influenced each other cultures. For example cremation is from the East, the early Buddhist statues were Greek, and our modern day campuses were originally Buddhist monasteries.

Then we are taken on a trip from perception, consciousness, neuroscience, causality, why Buddhists don't believe in a first cause, chain of causation, Karma and unpredictability (in analogy with cellular automata), and multiverses.

I find his notion of a multiverse, consisting of one universe inside another universe, and continued ad infinitum (fractal structure) very intriguing. It is highly unlikely that this can ever be proved, but it makes sense in the light of physicist Sean M. Carroll's interview, where he stated that "We're part of a bigger structure".
Our universe, including the big bang is part of a bigger structure. Otherwise the low entropy state condition for the big bang is hard to rationalize.

My above summary does not do justice to the lecture, please watch the recorded video. It is certainly one of best lectures on Buddhism and science and technology.