Scott Snibbe Paths to Here Interview

Artist, Technologist, Buddhist

Scott Snibbe is a new media artist, author, and host of the meditation podcast A Skeptic’s Path to Enlightenment. We began our decades long friendship and collaboration when I met Scott at his studio in San Francisco in the early 2000’s. We commissioned a couple of pieces from him for a major exhibition at the New York Hall of Science. You can learn more about him, his upcoming book How to Train a Happy Mind, his artwork, and other projects here.

This interview was conducted on December 29, 2023.

What are your principal passions and activities now?

I used to joke that I was a part-time Buddhist. Now I'm a full-time Buddhist. I’ve been a Tibetan Buddhist for 25 years and created a non-profit organization called A Skeptic's Path to Enlightenment. Its purpose is to teach what's called analytical meditation, a form of meditation that uses story, thought, emotion, and critical thinking. It’s almost the opposite of what most people think meditation is: emptying your mind and focusing on something like the breath. The purpose of meditation in Tibetan Buddhism is to bring out your best qualities, what we might call character. Bring out qualities like kindness, integrity, honesty, compassion, patience, and generosity. There's a sequence of meditations in that tradition that orders the Buddhist teachings succinctly into eight to twelve topics. So that's mainly what I'm doing, I started with a weekly podcast, then developed an online educational program and a book called How to Train a Happy Mind that's coming out in March 2024. 

I continue to do digital art. Most of my artwork has a Buddhist grounding in the concept of interdependence or emptiness. But I've been working explicitly with Buddhist imagery in my latest work around the way that we draw what you might call deities, like the historical Buddha and so on, paintings called thangkas that I'm reinterpreting geometrically. It turns out there's a geometric grid that you lay underneath a thangka before you paint it, and it's unique to every single type of deity. So I'm doing artwork based on that.

I know you've put a lot of energy and devotion into your child as well. Can you talk a little bit about how you're thinking about that.

Well, that's a big part of life. I had a surprising turn in my career, becoming an entrepreneur and founding four companies. The last one was acquired by Facebook. I was at Facebook for about three years and being there helped me realize I was not meant to work for anybody else. But also that commute massively sucked up my time. I left Facebook so I could spend a lot of time with my daughter, which I've been doing since 2019. We spend a ton of time together, often five, six hours a day. Everyone loves their kids, but not everyone is friends with them. She and I are like soulmates, our minds are very harmonious, she wakes up in the morning and comes and meditates with me and then she makes art. It's a fortunate time for me.

Part of my goal with these interviews is to try to draw a path from your earliest consciousness to where you are now. So, what are your first memories? 

My parents are from New York City, so I was in New York City for the first few years of my life. The very first memory I have is sitting in the winter in an apartment, which I now know is on 72nd Street on the west side, and this tropical bird flew into the window and just sat there. It squawked and flew away. That's my earliest memory.

The earliest memory that's relevant to what we're talking about is the feeling I used to have when I woke up, an extraordinary spiritual revelation that I had almost every day till I was seven or eight, an overwhelming sense of infinity. That I had lived forever, and I'm going to live forever. Some people are just born that way, whether you want to call it genetics or whatever. We are optimists.

You said something about a belief in reincarnation. Do you ever wonder how you were reincarnated?

I have a funny position on the supposedly supernatural aspects of Buddhism because my mission and my job now are to teach people about the most authentic type of meditation they can practice while still holding to a scientific worldview. On the other hand, I do believe in reincarnation and other realms, future lives, and karma. However, it took me a long time to accept these, by having teachers who died and then were recognized and came back. It is a process of more than a decade, I think, to convince a skeptical person of reincarnation.

I don't have any memories of any other lives. Sometimes I have fantasies that I was a Japanese man, maybe a monk. I've always loved Japanese stuff since I was a kid, and I was the youngest member of the Origami Society of America. We weren’t wealthy, but as artists my parents believed in supporting our art. It was a privilege growing up this way. Some people feel guilty about privilege, and other people feel superior and indulgent. But the Tibetan Buddhist view on privilege is that you earned it and you can use it up. It's easy to use it up and fall back. So make your life meaningful and worthwhile.

You alluded to this parallel strain of science and technology in your upbringing and your worldview. I wonder if you could walk me through that a little and talk about the relationship between your religious thinking and your scientific thinking.

Sometimes you wonder about little things that have large effects, like chaos theory. For me, one of them was this book, a college textbook that my dad had about inventors. He had a textbook on inventors, and I just couldn't get enough of it. I sat by my bedside, and I just read it over and over. So it wasn't science as much as invention and stories about the inventors. It just blew my mind, especially how recently all these inventions were made like airplanes and electric motors, and what a unique time we were living in.

What does your dad do?

Since I was a little kid, I wanted to be some combination of an inventor and an artist. My dad was an artist, cabinet maker, and inventor, a very far-out one. My parents were both sculptors, and I have very early memories of going into the wood and plastic shops they had. I remember seeing my dad's “perpetual motion machine” when I was very young. It was made from wood and all these complicated magnets. I poked at it a little bit, spun it, and I remember thinking "No, this is not going to work." This was kind of a tension between me and my father because my dad is a true believer. He was convinced his invention would work, but I was learning about physics and math.

Even though I was very good at math, I didn't like it. I found it very reductive. But I only learned that when I studied calculus. I hate the way they teach mathematics before calculus because it's utterly reductive, forcing you toward a single answer. Math is like a living basis of all reality, all nature. But until you get to calculus, you don't realize that math isn’t about an answer, but how things are constantly changing.

Given that, as you say, math is the basis of all reality, how do you think about, for example, reincarnation?  

I’ve only recently realized, as [physicist and author] David Deutsch writes, that there's no such thing as a correct scientific theory. We only move from more wrong theories to less wrong theories. And that's a view of reality I love. Mathematics is just as much a language as English or Russian. So Newton's equations are accurate enough for anything at our scale but they're not a universal truth. They're a relative truth. Newtonian physics breaks down and at a certain point you need relativity to show that there is no force of gravity at all. It's that space is actually curved. You're just falling down a slope of space. Newton also thought there is a universal timeline that everything works against, and that's not true either.

Mathematics gets more and more precise, but the map is never the territory and the way we express mathematics will never capture the true nature of reality. We also know of the mechanical universe, even based on the map we currently have, that you can't make accurate predictions for just about anything. It would be better if we were taught about this very early in life because there's this false sense of absolute truth that gets in your way. It's not the postmodern idea that nothing is real, and anything you say is true, just that whatever you express—in words or mathematics—is a model, an approximation.

But there still is the realm of things that just don't succumb to mathematical analysis at all.

Math is a little more mystical than you think. When I'm teaching a meditation on how to think about your mind more deeply, and how the mind changes, you need to have a sense of what the mind is. In one very reductive perspective, the idea of scientific materialism is that the mind is epiphenomenal, a side effect of neurons firing. In this view, the neurons firing is the real thing and the mind is like a side effect. The Buddhist view is stronger: the mind is immaterial, and it moves from lifetime to lifetime. The mind comes to inhabiting a body and when that body dies, the mind continues in a very, very subtle form and eventually finds another body. That's the Buddhist view. That's outside of scientific evidence right now.

But to go between these two extremes of you're just neurons firing, and you have an immaterial consciousness that can go between lifetimes. I prefer the middle way, and I explain it starting with math. You already believe in immaterial things. Where is math? Do you have a math detector? Is the math in the equations? Is it in the leaves of a tree? Inside a computer, running simulations? Math isn't material, but we believe in it. And we have evidence for it. Music is one of the best examples of an immaterial phenomenon because the physical phenomenon of music is perfectly well understood: the vibration of air. Yet the psychological phenomena of music, how it causes us to feel emotions, is not.

When I talk to someone new to these ideas, I say do you believe in love? Where is it? Do you have a love detector? Can you point it at someone and see if they love you? No, but it's true. Love is a real thing. It's very powerful. It has a big effect on us. If you believe in math and love and music, then you believe in immaterial things. To believe in immaterial things, you don't have to go so far as to think there's a soul or something like that. It's just looking a little bit more carefully at the things we already believe in and use in life, and many of them are immaterial.

I often point to computer programs as something immaterial, that's why I love programming so much. When I was 10 years old, I was programming computers. It was the closest thing to thought that I'd ever found because there's nothing material to it. When you write those characters on the screen, that's not the program. It's not the shiny pixels. It's not the characters. The characters don't run. They get translated into the other little commands that go through a processor. You keep searching for it.

That's why I wanted to get a computer science degree. When I was a kid, I had an Apple II computer. I would open the top and just stare at those chips. I'm like, how did those colors and forms and graphics come out of these chips? I could not figure it out. And then ten years later, I finally got to the class in computer science at Brown, where we learned machine language and the basics of chip design. It's not there either. You go all the way down, and it's not there. You can't find it. It's just this very subtle interaction between all these things that manifests in how a computer program works, what we might call an app today, works. But it's not material.

In Tibetan Buddhism, everything exists as an interplay among parts, causes, and the mind. This “dependent origination” view of reality is that when you look at anything, you can break it down into parts. You are made from organs, and then cells, molecules, atoms, atomic particles, quantum fluctuations and probably several more things.

But then causes are a very, very important part of the Buddhist theory of reality. Every one of those things got there somehow through an infinite chain of cause and effect. Analyzing that through the scientific worldview, I think is much more fruitful than the Buddhist worldview because we know so much more about it now, like that every one of your heavy molecules came from an exploding star. Every single bit of you traces back through all the revolutions of Earth back to the Big Bang. That's a beautiful understanding of reality that the Buddhists didn't have.

The last part, the mind, is really important: you have parts, causes, and then the mind. The role of the mind in shaping reality from this analysis of dependent origination is that the mind just imposes a label onto this bundle of “caused parts.”

Were there signpost adults or peers on the way who helped to shape you?

The biggest one was Gary Kildall. Sadly, that name won't ring a bell. His son Scott (currently an artist in the Bay area) was my best friend when we lived in Pebble Beach. His father Gary was like the Steve Jobs of the 70s.  He invented the first personal computer operating system, called CP/M. I was already into computers, I discovered computers in a little class in which they brought in Apple IIs to our classroom, and I got to try [the programming language] logo. As soon as I saw computer graphics, at age 10, I thought, that's what I want to do with the rest of my life. Gary hired me and Scott so we worked at his company for a couple of summers in junior high. Gary was a Ph.D. in computer science, he was a total genius at computers, he was also the best software engineer, he couldn't write bad code. I also loved how he lived his life: he was a great engineer, he was a great theoretician, he started his own business, he was very handsome, and he was super charismatic and kind.

Another big influence was Andy van Dam, at Brown University. When I got to college, I saw an ad for artists to come work at a computer graphics research lab, this was in 1987. So, I went and applied, and the way Andy ran his lab was so egalitarian, he let anybody join his lab, but he pushed people hard. I published research papers as an undergraduate. I had a difficult relationship with Andy; he was very aggressive, scheduling meetings on Sundays and pulling all-nighters, but he gave me infinite opportunities.

In addition to computer science at Brown, I was also studying animation at the Rhode Island School of Design with Amy Kravitz, an extraordinary teacher. Her way of teaching animation was so experiential and embodied. I've forgotten almost everything about college, except the things I did in animation class. For example, we were trying to animate the body, so she brought in a dancer, and she said, "Okay, now, the dancer will dance a short dance of any type for you, and you try to animate that over this half hour, " "Next, get up and do the dance with her." "Now try to do it." And I'm like, "Wow, once you feel the movement in your own body, you can animate it so much better."

I'm a very good software engineer, but not a genius software engineer, like some people I’ve worked with. I'm very good at math, but not the kind of genius like those guys. It turned out that my combination of skills was valuable because I also had creative skills and social leadership skills. For me, that combination of being very good at five things is, in some ways, superior to being off the charts on one thing. It's an odd-shaped key that fits certain doors. It's not for everybody.

What do you see happening from here on out? What's next?

I love it when people ask me that question because I am one of those people who has a 40-year plan. I've published this book, How to Train a Happy Mind, which is coming out in March. I'm fairly convinced this may be the most beneficial thing I'll end up doing with my life. It's just that no one has done it. For whatever reason, I was the odd-shaped gear that fit this moment in the meditation media landscape.

Going forward, I hope to publish a few more nonfiction books about Buddhism. I would like to write a book about relationships. My wife says I can't write one until our relationship gets a little bit better. I'd like to write a book about business. I found it very, very difficult to integrate the competitiveness, conflict, and achievement aspects of business with Buddhism. I have a fiction book that I finished that's with my agent that I wrote about growing up as a Christian Scientist. The book is about the problem of growing up believing you can heal yourself through prayer and not going to the doctor, and the nightmare that can happen when things go wrong.

I'm also working on a new body of artwork that I hope to continue for at least a decade, a contemporary way of revisiting devotional art that's at least 1,000 years old. I think it's so important to continue to reinterpret ideas through the lens of our current culture.

My biggest goal for the decades coming up is to evolve my own mind. I’ve been practicing Buddhism for 25 years, and these core delusions of attachment, anger, and ignorance still plague my mind. So that would be the biggest goal: to eliminate them. The Dharma says it's good to have this highest goal, however utopian, because then you get the furthest towards it in your life.