Perhaps there's a problem with the way in which it's being described. — Wayfarer

I've not yet looked deeply into Buddhist doctrine to try to understand exactly what their conception of a self is to see what it is exactly that is being denied. But I've sometimes suspected that what I have in mind when I use that word might not be what they are denying.

very detailed descriptions of the sense of living without any sense of 'I and mine'. — Wayfarer

I don't have any problem with the idea that one could live without the sense of 'I and mine'. But there still is the experiencer who simply is no longer generating self-referencing mental content. And perhaps this leads to a more peaceful state of mind, since detecting threats to self require thoughts of self and also identification with the forms threatened.

'I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me.' — Wayfarer

I am not sure how this is supposed to be understood. Is it that I, the previous experiencer of being Petrichor, am no longer here, no longer experiencing it, and now, Christ, a different subject that is not me, is experiencing being Petrichor? I have died or gone elsewhere and someone else has taken over my body? No, I think the mystic is probably instead making a statement that describes their overcoming of their false identification with the local body-mind. They have realized that the very experiencing subject that was the one doing all the experiencing all along, in other words, their very self, the one they always were, is actually the very same as the God-self, the one self, the only self. They have experienced God-union. They realize themselves to be one with God. In other words, they realize who they really are and always were. Petrichor didn't realize himself to be God exclusively. No. Petrichor isn't God. But God, who, in Petrichor, thought he was only Petrichor, now remembers himself and now sees Petrichor as one of the many jackets that he wears. God sees through Petrichor's eyes and always did. There never was anyone else seeing through Petrichor's eyes.

Death of self, ego death, in my view, is just realizing that you are not who you thought you were. But the real you, that which is everything, is still there in this new state.

Since there is no other, and self and other are defined in relation to one another, there is also, in some sense, no "self". When there is no "there", there are also is no "here" in opposition to it. When there is no you, there is no I. But there is still that which transcends these dualities and experiences the union. There is still that which is what was the very experiencing subject that experienced everything you experienced all along. That, for me, is the true self. Is that nothing? Since it isn't related to anything, there is no form. It involves no difference. In that sense, it is nothing. It isn't even a space empty of things.

That same nothing which knows is also that which "looks out" from behind Petrichor's eyes.

All the talk that tends to emerge among mystics about love, compassion, and so on, naturally is part of realizing your true identity with everyone else and everything. To love someone is to some degree to include them in your sense of self, to walk in their shoes, to make their interests your own. If you were to take this all the way, it would mean fully and actually being them, being not distinct from them. To not literally be them is to stop short, to fail to love completely and truly. Complete universal love then is also completely being all. If God is love, as they say, and if God loves us perfectly, as they say, God then is us. The one suffering in us, our very self, is God suffering as us. Is this the "Christ in me"? I think so.

To stop thinking yourself a separate being apart from the world is also to stop not being everyone else. Your identification changes from the local to the universal. The sense of identity once encircled only a single body. Now the circle has either expanded to include everything or it has simply been erased. To the extent that this boundary is the self-idea, the ego, or whatever you want to call it, this event means the end of it. You live no longer in tunnel, but in the open air. But you haven't thereby ceased to exist. You aren't that boundary. And you aren't exclusively that which was inside the boundary. The boundary was a delusion all along. That you identified with it was ignorance.

Who am I? My jacket? No. These arms, legs, freckles, and so on? No. Step it back further. The story I tell myself about myself? No. The brain in which my body and life are represented? No. Step it back further. The atoms themselves? The fields themselves? Step it back further. Deeper. Wider. Go to the ground. The Universe itself? Getting close... What you are is underneath, behind, around, above, inside, beyond, all throughout, the very substance of, and so on, all of that, all that is. And taken as a whole, you are without form.

The nature of consciousness just isn't very clear and to think of it as an epiphenomenon of the brain same as bile secreted by the liver is falling short... — Anthony

The nature of consciousness certainly isn't clear. And epiphenomenalism is a position with fatal defects.

I feel confident in saying that nobody understands consciousness. That includes scientists, materialist philosophers, idealist philosophers, dualists, spiritualists, Buddhists, Hindus, Protestants, New Agers, neuroscientists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, AI researchers, Daniel Dennett, Deepak Chopra, and all the rest! Nobody has a friggin clue. Consciousness as such hasn't even begun to be understood. And the fact that it isn't understood by materialists doesn't make spiritualists correct. The converse is also true. The truth is, we just don't know. Some people have a pretty good grasp on why consciousness is a problem. Those who don't take the "hard problem" seriously, I think, are experiencing a failure of insight. But those who think the hard problem is solved by spiritual stuff are also experiencing a similar failure. The existence of the hard problem doesn't clearly favor any of the usual available positions. It is often presented as a threat to materialism and presumably then a weapon that can be used by spiritualists, but it isn't. An immortal soul made of pure light or some such doesn't help us understand it either. It is just as hard to see why that would involve subjective experience as it is to see why a special arrangement of atoms would (not much different in fundamental substance than light anyway).

It's as though our eyes project images as well as receive them, don't ask me how (the information is both out there and in the brain at once, as it were). — Anthony

I don't agree.

In some way, what is seen is really out there where it seems to be and not solely a representation in the brain. — Anthony

When you see a distant star, the very star itself is in your mind? Or what? Your mind goes out and wraps around the star? If you are imagining something like that, I don't quite agree.

But consider what I said about photons. Perhaps, when you see light from a distant star, an electron in that star is maybe making a transaction with an electron in your retina. Maybe, to get what you seem to want here, you don't have to imagine that your mind somehow leaps out of your eyes to go touch a star. Maybe, instead, the star is just touching your eye and you haven't gone anywhere.

Disclaimer: I understand QM poorly and am likely to make mistakes. But if I understand correctly, in QM, any two particles that interact become entangled. And entanglement seems to mean that the two particles cannot really be understood properly as distinct things. They need to be treated together. So, in a moment of conscious experience, it might be that it isn't only your brain state that comprises it, as if there is some magical membrane around your brain that designates it as a separate entity, but also all those things influencing the state of the brain. Maybe it is the whole causal complex.

Maybe all of the "external" objects that you see are in some sense part of the "mental state". Let me explain. There are interactions and causal relationships between neurons in your brain, right? Nobody argues with that. And your mental state is often thought to be made up of these interactions somehow, as being in some sense the very complex of interactions itself. But why draw a line at the skull? There are also interactions and causal relationships that are involved in a mental state that are happening between the brain and the world. Somewhere in your brain, a chemical messenger is traveling from one side of a synaptic cleft to another, causing some effect. Elsewhere, something electrical is happening, perhaps mediated by virtual photons. Why is this any different than a photon coming from an electron in a flower, entering your eye, striking your retina, firing a neuron, generating a signal, and so on? That electron in the flower might be as much a part of the overall mental state as any neuron. So one neuron is receiving a signal from an upstream neuron. But that neuron might be connected to a retinal cone cell, which is receiving a signal from an electron in a flower. Is there some magical reason that one signal reception is part of the mental state while the other isn't?

And maybe each different mental state is a different complex of interaction between particles, which might be understood as an entangled system. A mental state could then be thought to span galaxies, since it might include parts of your brain and also parts of stars in distant galaxies.

But that doesn't require that anything exits your eye when you see a flower. For the flower itself to be part of your mental state doesn't require anything in addition to standard physics. And it doesn't require the causal influence to become bidirectional.

As you measure it. — tim wood

Yes. That's in full agreement with what I said. Maybe I could have been more clear. Here is what I said:

If Bob in a ship is moving relative to me at close to the speed of light, his ship will be length-contracted. — petrichor

I should perhaps have been more explicit. In my frame of reference (implied by "relative to me"), Bob and his ship are length-contracted.

But Bob will think he's at rest and that you're length contracted. — tim wood

Yes! I never said otherwise! In fact this is just the point I made to begin with!

From Bob's perspective, in his frame of reference, he is not length-contracted. But to him, I am! That also means that if he is travelling from Alpha Centauri to Earth, in his frame, from his perspective, that distance between Alpha Centauri and Earth is length-contracted, just like my body is. If he were to be able to travel at the speed of light, that distance would contract to zero.

If, for example, you were correct, the length of Bob's yardstick as measured by Bob (moving East to West) would vary depending on if he were measuring in the E-W direction or in the N-S direction. (And Bob would then be able to measure his velocity simply by twirling a stick.) — tim wood

You are apparently reading me saying something that I am not saying. I never said that in Bob's frame, his ruler, his body, or his ship are contracted. They are not. Everything at rest relative to Bob, which would include his ruler, his ship, and his own body, all appear normal. I never said otherwise. What I was pointing out is that the distance between his origin and his destination is contracted in his frame as he moves relative to it. For Bob, Bob is not contracted. For Bob, Bob's journey is shortened.

They both in their own reference frames measure their own yardsticks at a true yard. But each measures the other's as contracted. — tim wood

You think you are disagreeing with me but you aren't. :smile: I am either not expressing myself clearly or you are not reading me carefully. We agree. Yes.

But if you are having trouble with the idea that Bob's journey is shortened (I am not clear on whether you disagree with this or not), consider the following. If Bob is flying from Alpha Centauri toward Alice on Earth in a ship and Alice is holding a ruler such that it is aligned with the direction of Bob's travel, in Bob's frame, from Bob's perspective, the ruler will be shortened, yes? But what about the remaining distance between Bob and that same ruler? That too is contracted just like the ruler. There is no difference. The length of the ruler is just atoms arranged in space. The distance between Alpha Centauri and Earth is just like the distance between an atom on one end of that ruler and an atom on the other end.

For the moving object, in its own frame, from its own perspective, all distances traversed (moving relative to it) parallel to its direction of travel are shortened.

So, to return to the point I was making initially, from a photon's perspective, in the photon's frame of reference, since it is "traveling" at the very speed of light, the distance between its source and its destination is contracted to zero.

hmm, but wouldn't that mean that stars are invisible from a spaceship? what dust is there in outer space to de/reflect the sun's or other stars light? — TheArchitectOfTheGods

You can see stars because photons are being emitted by them and then absorbed by electrons in your eye. The photon's "path", if such a thing makes sense, is directly between the star and your eye, directly toward you. Nowhere are you watching a photon fly, from the side, as for example you might watch a ball fly from the side. When you watch a ball fly, you can see it from the side as it travels because photons are leaving the ball and being absorbed in your retina. All the photons you have ever detected have come toward you.

Also, a curious thing about photons is that we never observe them in travel. We only register when one is absorbed. We think we see light as it travels, but we don't. When we see a light beam, our retinas are absorbing photons arriving from such things as dust particles on the air from which they were reflected (absorbed and emitted). You can't see light's travel "from the side". A laser beam through a completely empty space, with no dust, gas, or any such thing, would be invisible.

So photons are never observed crossing space from some other frame of reference. What does this mean? I don't know. Combined with the length contraction from the photon's perspective, it suggests to me that photons perhaps don't cross space at all. We don't observe them travelling across space. And from their perspective, the distance is always zero. From a QM perspective, when unobserved, there are also uncertainties.

Maybe they aren't even travelling particles, but rather just packets of energy being transferred directly from one electron to another. This is pure speculation on my part. But it may have something to do with light not needing a medium like aether to travel through.

The idea is that (your) distance contracts as measured by someone in motion relative to you. To you, in your system, no contraction. — tim wood

I believe you are mistaken.

If Bob in a ship is moving relative to me at close to the speed of light, his ship will be length-contracted. At the speed of light, his length would be zero (I realize he has mass and can't reach that speed). But consider that from Bob's perspective, in his frame, it is as if the distance being crossed is moving relative to him. It is therefore similarly contracted. In the galaxy's frame, his length is contracted. In his frame, the galaxy is contracted.

video

So, if it makes sense to talk about what is happening from the perspective of a photon, since it is massless and travels at the speed of light, the distance contracts to zero.

If everyone would assume the Rawlsian veil of ignorance... — Wallows

Something like the Rawlsian veil of ignorance can lead to conclusions quite unlike the ones we are expected to arrive at. Suppose we do a thought experiment where reincarnation is real and we don't know who we'll be in the next life. Maybe it is random. Perhaps to achieve social justice, we ought to think about social policy from such a standpoint, behind such a veil of ignorance. Presumably, since I might be born poor, I would vote for a minimum income and lots of safety nets for the poor.

But it occurs to me that a Nazi could say that he would prefer to be part of the master race in the next life, and so to eliminate all non-whites is to ensure that he'll be born white.

A regular eugenicist could argue that if eugenics is practiced, the body she would get in the next life would be more likely to be a good one.

A free market advocate could argue that the average member of a free market society has an average higher standard of living than in a centrally planned system, even if wealth disparity might be greater. This being the case, he might prefer to be a random person in a free market economy rather than one in which wealth is redistributed heavily, which might disincentivize innovation and so on. Maybe he really wants an iPhone and iPhones are impossible in a planned economy.

Suppose we do something different from the veil of ignorance, something more radical. Instead of saying that we don't know who we are, what if we say that there is one self that experiences being everyone in the society at all times? That which experiences being you also experiences being everyone else. You, in other words, are everyone. What policies would we choose then? In such a case, if I know that I am not only Trump, but also the homeless guy on the street, presumably, I'd go for massive wealth redistribution. After all, poor people outnumber rich people by a large margin, so most of my simultaneously lived lives are lives in poverty. And naturally I would be an environmentalist since I will also be my own grandchildren and will inherit the earth. Right?

But would generally leftist social policy always be the natural answer? A Nazi could once again choose as I suggested above. And so on.

Hell, an anti-natalist might argue that all human lives suck and to end human existence is to place limits on this unpleasantness!

Some suicidal anti-humans might even advocate the releasing of a virus to wipe out the species immediately! All this for social justice!

Someone else who loves life might want to maximize population at whatever level is sustainable, or whatever will produce the most overall number of humans throughout our entire history, even if that might mean wiping out the biosphere in the process of burning up the planet's resources to develop as necessary to cut loose from this planetary system.

Personally, I think complex, intelligent, and aesthetically pleasing conscious experience ought to be maximized, however that is to be best achieved. The more the universe understands and appreciates its existence, the better! That is my general ethical imperative.

How we reason about social policy from behind a veil of ignorance clearly depends on our values. No particular policy naturally falls out of the thought experiments.

But, I don't agree with the false analogy of there being people with superior genes and all that eugenic bullcrap. — Wallows

We could dispense with the valuation implicit in "superior" and just say "genes for more X", faster running for example. How's that?

I should make it clear that I am not advocating eugenics as social policy. But I do think nature operates in a rather eugenicist fashion in how it ruthlessly selects for fitness traits, though it certainly doesn't make any kind of valuations. And it doesn't necessarily always select for traits that humans value. I also have in mind the free market when I talk of nature selecting for fitness traits.

And without suggesting that it is good that it is the case, I'd point out that human contests might in fact serve a eugenic purpose, whether they are designed for this consciously or not. Consider how the women line up to breed with star male athletes, for example. I remember Magic Johnson years ago claiming that he slept with, what, over a thousand women? Unprotected too! Assuming some of those women were not on birth control, he probably fathered many more children than the less successful players.

Consider beauty pageants. They are a kind of meat market for rich men, aren't they? It is like someone visiting a slave market and checking the teeth of the slaves to assess value. Notice that men like Trump are into beauty pageants and tend to commonly rate women for their attractiveness. They are shopping. Do the women know that they are genetic specimens on display in a store window? Probably not. Maybe they do! Maybe they also want to win the attention of the wealthy men! Such men are also the winners of a sort of contest. And the money doesn't hurt!

In horse races, winning horses have extremely valuable sperm that is in high demand. link Do you suppose human contests are completely unlike that?

Commonplace mate selection in dating is rather eugenicist and Nazi-esque in practice as well. But most people don't recognize it. Would you have unprotected sex with a developmentally disabled person with severe physical deformities? Suppose one eye is an inch higher than the other and there is no arm, just a hand protruding from the shoulder. Would such a person be sexually attractive to you? Asking yourself such a question elicits uncomfortable answers, doesn't it? But not wanting to mate with such a person is basically deciding that such a person shouldn't reproduce, shouldn't continue to exist. What other sorts of people would you resist sleeping with?

Maybe a more fair situation is to give all people equal mating opportunities. We could just have computers randomly pair people to have sex and we would all be required to have sex with whoever we are assigned to. "Level the playing field." "Regulate the market." "Redistribute wealth." We could have a kind of affirmative action for ugly men. Force pretty girls to sleep with a certain number of ugly men. :wink: Check your privilege, attractive people! Sexually unattractive people are the new oppressed class! I am joking, of course!

Or we could ban sex altogether and just combine sperm and egg in labs, using some sort of random mate selection. This way, we could avoid the rape problem. :wink: Fairness!



Please don't mistake anything I am saying for anything like Nazi-sympathy. To say "X ought to happen" is very different from saying that "X happens". I here make descriptive claims, not prescriptive. I disapprove of Nazism. I just want to make that clear.

why does anyone insistently communicate that some form, typically their personal brand, of god or gods exists? — whollyrolling

Tribalism might be part of it.

But I prefer to go through the mountain rather than over it contrary to what K says about climbing it. It's the shortest pathway to overcome. — Wallows

Ah, but the point is to be on top of the mountain, with the big world-transcending view, isn't it? To tunnel through the mountain leaves you still at its base, a position pretty much like the one you started with!

And as for shortest paths, if you want to get to the other side of the mountain, a path through the mountain rather than over it is certainly shorter in terms of distance. But is it shorter in terms of time? Effort?

"Happiness is a pathless land."
...
Perhaps, logotherapy is really the only therapy that one ought to offer to any individual. — Wallows

Ironic that you say happiness is a pathless land and then suggest that logotherapy is maybe the one true path to happiness! :razz:

People who don't have a sense of community are statistically shown to be more depressed than people who right wrong or indifferent are more individualistic. — christian2017

Herd warmth certainly feels good in some ways. But should our lives be about staying comfortable?

The trouble I see with -isms is how we tend to become tribally identified with them, with a particular side of a conflictual divide on a question. It often seems that it ends up being more about protecting that group identity than trying to get closer to the truth. So people dig in, no matter how well the opposition argues.

I see problems with self-limiting beliefs. Identification of most any kind is a self-limiting belief. We can trap ourselves with statements like "I am X". We also tend to encourage identification, tribalism, and so on in others when we label them.

And we fail to persuade and communicate when we say things like, "What you Y-ists fail to understand is..." We just encourage a combative reaction and further radicalization and deeper identification with that side. We make ourselves the enemies of those we declare as belonging to an enemy tribe.

Obviously, this is a problem in politics. We get these divides like left versus right. But it happens in philosophical communities as well. We tend to divide along common lines of disagreement. Materialism versus Idealism is an example. I remember taking my first course in philosophy. Our text was called The Philosophical Journey, by William F. Lawhead. I remember it presenting itself to me as a menu of choices I could make as I was forming my first tentative philosophical identity. Here is another fence. Which side do I want to be on? Do I like A or B better? I think I'll join the A-ists and then argue with the B-ists. Here are the available tribes and their beliefs. Do you want to be a goth or a jock? Shitkicker or metalhead?

It seems weird to me that whether a person believes that humans are changing the climate is more a matter of tribal identity than an actual, sincere consideration of evidence.

If I am identified with a position, when that position is attacked, it feels like an attack on me! Instead, ideally, I should hold positions provisionally and welcome better reasoning that might lead me to another conclusion that better conforms to reality or justice. Consider how Socrates suggested that if shown to be clinging to bad ideas, we should accept this and thank our interlocutors for removing our ignorance and bringing us closer to the light. Instead, we think we would like to die before being proven to be wrong or part of the bad tribe! This is what we want: I am right! You are wrong! Notice the "I=good" thing in there.

If, instead, we do not identify with the position, if we simply present it for consideration as one among a number of possibilities, if it is destroyed, we aren't destroyed with it. The ego isn't threatened. I carry the idea. I find it somewhat compelling absent good evidence against it or for a competing idea. But I am not identical with it. So if it gets destroyed by my interlocutor, I can thank that person for improving my understanding, for gifting me their hard-won insight, for removing some of my intellectual barnacles.

But we are so prone to tribalism and identification that this is easier said than done. Nevertheless, we should try. I am trying, more and more, to eliminate "I am X" thoughts from my inner dialogue and speech. That goes especially for "I am an X-ist". I find that I am becoming more flexible. I am allowing myself to really consider the arguments of those that were once my political enemies.

If, by raising a "level-playing-field problem", you mean to say that the situation is unfair, this is only a problem for a position if that position is concerned to make everything fair (presumably equal in an important sense). Is libertarianism such a position? Does anyone say that it is about fairness?

Fairness and equality seem more to be a concern of those advocating for systems such as socialism.

Libertarians seem to be coming from more of a standpoint of realism about inevitable inequality and a kind of survival of the fittest and promotion of innovation by competition, which is said to be incentivized by rewards for excellence. A common claim of free-market advocates: A free market produces the best products and the most overall wealth.

Suppose we are just talking evolutionary biology. If birds with better wings tend to be more successful, birds will tend to develop better wings. The birds with better wings didn't merit them. They just happen to have them. Is this unfair? Perhaps. What if we level the playing field and make sure that all birds reproduce at exactly the same rates, regardless of their wings? What if even the most decrepit bird reproduces and contributes to the gene pool just as much as the most high-performing bird? Suppose we interfere and extract the sperm and combine it with the eggs. What if we ensure that all the birds have equal reproductive success? Is this good for birds in the long run? Probably not. Is it more fair? Perhaps. Is the natural system unfair? Sure. Life is unfair through and through.

Free-market people like competition. Competition is the revealing of advantage. It is exactly about discovering inequalities and revealing and rewarding the best.

Consider the idea that performance enhancing drugs are considered cheating because they make the playing field unequal. Is the playing field equal without them? Is it? What about superior genes for the sport? What about more money for good trainers? What about higher intelligence behind the training? What about better equipment? It could be argued that absolutely every single factor that leads to the winner winning is a matter of an unfair advantage.

So and so tried harder and therefore advanced in fitness more and therefore deserved his win. But what is motivation if not a part of health that is unequally distributed? If your heart is less healthy than mine, you'll feel more depressed, less able to run hard without chest pain, and so on. You might look like you aren't trying as hard. You might give up. I might call you lazy. But in reality, it might come down to difference in genetics, age, or something similar.

Where libertarianism gets into trouble in my opinion is when it tries to claim that in such a system, everyone gets what they "deserve", what they "merit", when it moralizes success, winners presumably winning because they are good people and losers losing because they are bad people. There, I am going to raise a lot of problems for their obviously faulty position. Take your prosperity theology and shove it! That shit pisses me off. Trump didn't earn his inheritance. Einstein didn't earn his intelligence.

But socialists, if they say that by leveling the playing field, they are ensuring that everyone gets what they "deserve", they are going to have to answer some questions as well.

The funny thing about the idea of a "level playing field" is that "playing field" suggests competition. And competition is basically about revealing inequalities. And "leveling" is about eliminating inequalities. A truly level playing field would be a ridiculous affair. Just consider it:

All players have the same genes. All players have exactly the same past experience and mental and physical conditioning. All players have exactly the same play conditions and are faced with exactly the same obstacles.

What would this mean? Theoretically, all players would perform exactly equally. We would be dealing with a set of identical deterministic systems and initial conditions. If there are no inequalities, there are no differences for the contest to reveal.

Contrary to popular fantasy, sport isn't about fairness. Really, it is about sorting people according to fitness and bringing the cream of the crop to the top. It plays into status games, mating games, and so on. It is like having a dog show and revealing the best candidates for breeding. It is also simply about the spectacle and the struggle. It is fun to watch people perform at high levels. And if you reveal the top performer and watch that person being tested, it is impressive to see. People pay to see that.

The idea that sport is about fundamental fairness and merit is a sham. Only without thinking about the matter can we believe this.

It would seem to me that the real reason that performance-enhancing drugs are maybe a problem in sport is because they deceive us about who is in fact physically and mentally superior. It is like people straightening their teeth with orthodontics and thus fooling potential mates into thinking they do not have bad-teeth genes. If a person's facial attractiveness tells me something about their genetic health and I am evaluating candidates to mix my genes with, makeup deceives me. It is like lying in a job interview. It is untruth in advertising. Someone is misrepresenting the product they are trying to sell me, to put it very unpleasantly and objectifyingly.

If the purpose of the game is to reveal the best genes, the best training strategies, the best culture, or whatever, if some use performance-enhancing drugs and some don't, this undermines the purpose of the contest.

All this is ugly, yes. And I am uncomfortable with it. But to some extent, it is the way things are. Life is unfair. All people are eugenicists when dating. We are in fact not equal in many respects. And no person is responsible for things being this way. And I am not saying that it is right that they should be this way. It's just how it is. Some are smarter. Some are faster. Some are stronger. Some are more beautiful. The world is topographically varied. Things are not level. They never were and never will be.

But it could be argued that we can smooth some of the roughest edges from things. We could make reality a little more pleasant to live in.

I should mention that I am not a libertarian.

Gravity is arguably action at a distance. The sun's radiation mutates genes from a distance. Lightning has been said to be triggered by particles emanating from exploded suns in distant galaxies. — Anthony

disclaimer: I am no physicist and don't pretend to be an expert. I have never taken so much as a single physics course. I've only done some casual reading and thinking about physics. In the following, I might make mistakes. Take my position with a grain of salt. If you find an error, I'd be happy if you'd correct my misunderstanding.

Gravity as understood by Newton was sometimes thought to be spooky action at a distance. And Newton was notoriously unhappy with this state of affairs. His law of gravity only described mathematically how bodies move in relation to each other. It said nothing about why they attract one another. Newton on the matter:

It is inconceivable that inanimate Matter should, without the Mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon, and affect other matter without mutual Contact…That Gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to Matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance thro' a Vacuum, without the Mediation of any thing else, by and through which their Action and Force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an Absurdity that I believe no Man who has in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an Agent acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether this Agent be material or immaterial, I have left to the Consideration of my readers.[4]

— Isaac Newton, Letters to Bentley, 1692/3

But Einstein seems to have solved the problem. His way of understanding gravity restored locality and removed any action at a distance.

One way to get some sense of how it works is the old trampoline model of spacetime. Understand that this is a very flawed analogy because it involves another gravitational pull downward. But put that concern aside for the moment. Put a heavy bowling ball in the center of the elastic sheet. Now put some marbles on the trampoline some distance from the bowling ball. Because the bowling ball makes a depression in the trampoline right where it touches it, the surface of the trampoline under each marble is tilted. So the marble starts to roll, as it would on any tilted surface. The bowling ball isn't magically pulling on the marbles at distance, without contact. The motion of marble is determined by geometric orientation of the surface underneath it. And the bowling ball only has an effect on the trampoline surface it is touching. Each small part of the trampoline surface is affecting its neighboring parts. So by a chain of little things touching their neighbors, the bowling ball has an indirect influence on the marble. Nothing nonlocal. It is like having a dog on a chain. When you pull the chain and yank the dog's neck, this isn't spooky action at a distance. One link pulls the next, which pulls the next, and so on. It is all local contact action. In Einstein's actual theory, it is all strictly geometric and local.

Isn't it interesting that we think of Einstein's theories as weird and Newton's as non-weird? If you look closer, it would seem that Einstein made things agree better with our intuitions! He restored some sanity to our picture of things!

Now, suppose I shoot an arrow at a deer. Is this nonlocal? No. I physically touched the arrow, imparted momentum to it, which carried it across space, whereupon it touches the deer.

Particles from the sun mutating genes can be thought of as being like the arrow situation. Not nonlocal. Neither the particle nor wave manner of modelling such things as photons arriving from the sun to influence atoms in cells is nonlocal.

Quantum entanglement is the most obvious reason why this proposition may be true. — Anthony

Quantum entanglement is often misunderstood. It doesn't let you send information faster than light. You can't communicate with it. If you could, you could violate causality and introduce contradictions into the world, thus violating the law of non-contradiction. You could do things analogous to killing your distant ancestor and thus not existing to kill your ancestor, in which case, your ancestor lives, in which case, your ancestor doesn't live...

If information can travel faster than light, effects can precede their causes and thus influence them.

See such things as a no-communication theorem: link

We don't really understand deeply what is going on with quantum entanglement. For one thing, the Everett interpretation paints quite a different picture of what is going on with it than other interpretations. There, it really isn't one thing influencing another. Rather, it is more of a matter of how states of the universe are inherited from ancestor states. This happens according to certain rules that make it the case that certain correlations will naturally be observed.

It is similar to how, if you take a pair of gloves and put each in a box (you don't know which is in which) and you send one far away, if you open the one you have, you instantly know whether the distant glove is a left or a right one. The glove you have didn't affect the distant one in any spooky way. And you can't determine before you open the box whether your glove is left or right. And thus, you can't determine whether the distant one is left or right. Since you can't determine which glove you have, you can't determine which glove is found in the distant box. And thus, you can't use this system to communicate. The entanglement situation is somewhat like this.

In the Everett interpretation, you might think of it like the following. If you have an entangled pair of particles and you measure the spin of one, you simply are discovering that you happen to be in the branch in which your particle is spin up (another copy of you in another branch presumably finds his particle spin down), and the rules are such that in a given worldline, where one of the particles is spin up, by a law of symmetry, the other must be spin down. So you also know that the distant particle is spin down. But before you measure your particle, you don't know if your particle is spin up or spin down. From your standpoint, it is completely random. And you can't determine the state of your particle in order to determine the complementary state of the other. So this doesn't allow communication.

Disappointing, I know, right?



Things can only causally influence things in their light cone, and only by local means, via some kind of contact action, whether you are dealing with waves or particles, both of which are thoroughly local. The very nature of waves is that each part of the wave is affecting its neighbors. Consider imparting wave motion to a rope. What about EM radiation in a vacuum since people have dispensed with the aether? Unless we use the virtual particle model here, I don't know how to understand this, frankly. Maybe it has to do with the following curious possibility:

In Einstein's theories, as you approach the speed of light, distance contracts. At the speed of light, the distance crossed is zero. So when an electron drops to a lower energy level and emits a photon, the "distant" electron receiving that photon and jumping to a higher energy level isn't really distant! It is as if a certain quantum of energy is simply being passed directly, by touching, from one electron to another, perhaps not unlike one billiard ball losing momentum to another ball when striking it, the energy simply passing from one ball to another. It is as if the electron in the distant star has literally touched the electron in your retina when you see distant starlight. The star has touched your eye. But because of the way spacetime geometry is affected by speed, the star as it is "now" cannot touch your eye. But the star as it was long ago in the past can touch your eye. You must be in the light cone. Things outside of one another's light cone are causally isolated.

I can only experience the certainty or the illusion of being. — Louco

You can experience the illusion of being? In the present? Or in other words, you can not be and yet be deceived that you are?

And what of the motivations for making certain drugs illegal and not others? Consider the claim that has been made that the Nixon administration pursued the war on drugs to defeat political enemies. Here is an alleged quote from Ehrlichman (source):

"The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people," former Nixon domestic policy chief John Ehrlichman told Harper's writer Dan Baum for the April cover story published Tuesday.

"You understand what I'm saying? We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities," Ehrlichman said. "We could arrest their leaders. raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did."

Now, in the Trump era, when everyone on the right "knows" that the everything in the non-Fox mainstream media is "fake news", especially CNN, some might question this article, since it comes from CNN. Let's put the question of whether it is factual aside. Make it hypothetical that it is accurate. Suppose that the primary reason for criminalizing some drugs was to jail and thus politically silence certain groups, to basically deactivate and persecute and even prevent the reproduction of certain political groups. What then? Is it immoral to do those drugs because it was made illegal by these people? Is it immoral to be a member of these groups? Is it immoral to have those political beliefs?

Suppose all right-wingers use drug A and all left-wingers use drug B. Now suppose left-wingers gain the power to outlaw drug A and thus to put right-wingers in jail. Is it immoral to do drug A and not drug B? Now right-wingers are all criminals and presumably also bad people, perhaps even "evil".

Recently, Jeff Sessions said, "Good people don't smoke marijuana." Well, conveniently, marijuana is more associated with the political left than the right and Sessions is a right-winger. What if we said that "good people don't drink scotch"? He probably drinks something. Most people he considers good probably drink at least occasionally. After all, Winston Churchill is often reputed to have been an alcoholic. And he didn't he say that good people don't smoke marijuana when it is illegal. It is now legal in some places.

Are people bad if they smoke marijuana in Texas but not in Colorado? If so, we need to change the laws to make it legal everywhere, as laws prohibiting the drug are therefore making people bad!

As for Socrates, did he always preach obedience to the law?

“Men of Athens, I honor and love you; but I shall obey God rather than you, and while I have life and strength I shall never cease from the practice and teaching of philosophy... Understand that I shall never alter my ways, not even if I have to die many times.”

Besides, does "Socrates said we should do X" entail that we should do X? Socrates says it is immoral, therefore it is immoral. Fallacious, obviously. Appeal to authority.

Now, let's ask if it is wrong to do drugs. Is it wrong to do antibiotics? Perhaps it must be mind-altering. How about caffeine? How about a beer with friends after a day of mountain biking? How about an Adderall when you are sleep-deprived to help you get through the exam that you need to pass in order to get a good job and support your future children?

Are all drugs the same? Does it even make sense to ask if it is moral to do drugs in general? Don't different drugs have very different effects? Wouldn't it make the most sense to say that whether something has certain effects is what makes it immoral rather than whether it is a drug?

Suppose the question is one of harm. Alcohol is a legal drug. Cocaine is an illegal drug. Datura is legal. Henbane is legal. Kratom is legal. Bath salts are legal. Does the legality here make any difference to the question of whether doing any of these drugs is harmful? There is plenty of evidence of alcohol's harmfulness, despite its legality.

Maybe it is immoral to do drugs if they are harmful rather than if they are illegal. Perhaps? So maybe the question of legality is irrelevant to morality.

Suppose that doing certain drugs is harmful because if you get caught, you go to jail and cease to be a functioning member of society and cease to be a parent to your children. If harmfulness is what determines immorality, then maybe illegality can be the cause of the immorality.

There are harmful drugs that are legal. Could there be harmless drugs that are nevertheless illegal? Would it be immoral to do those ones? Suppose there are beneficial drugs that are illegal. How about those? Is such a situation unimaginable? Do you scoff at the possibility that a drug is beneficial and nevertheless illegal? Why? Because governments never do anything bad, never make bad laws?

What about so-called "performance enhancing" drugs? Consider "performance enhancing" all by itself, without considering the harms you think go with certain drugs often classified in this way. It is thought wrong by some to use performance enhancing drugs because they enhance performance, not because they are harmful, precisely because they are thought to be a form of cheating, because everything is a competition and it is unfair to have an advantage. But I thought it was harmfulness that makes drugs bad! Now it is benefit too?

If it is bad to take something that degrades performance, like heroin, one might be tempted to think that if a drug is shown to have a net performance enhancing effect, everyone should be taking it. If it should be against the law to degrade your performance, perhaps it should be the law that we are all required to take anything that enhances us, as we seem to be saying that the law should prohibit us from performing worse. To not use such drugs is to perform worse. How about that? Fun, no?

Suppose the principle of legislation is this:

If it makes us worse, make it illegal.

It should then be illegal to oversleep, to undersleep, to not exercise, to exercise too much, to overeat, to undereat, and so on. You get the idea.

Suppose we simultaneously have this principle:

If it gives users an advantage over non-users, make it illegal.

Anyone see any trouble here?

And if something degrades performance or possibly does grievous harm, why should the question of whether it is a drug or not matter to whether or not it should be illegal or immoral?

Is it immoral to do illegal drugs?

Lets look at illegal and drugs separately for the moment.

Is it immoral to do anything illegal?

Surely we can imagine situations in which most would feel that obeying a law would be immoral. Suppose for example you are in Nazi Germany and it is against the law to lie to the officer at your door about Jews you are hiding.

It seems to me that the question of whether an action is immoral is independent the question of whether it is legal. One is not a function of the other. Not all immoral actions are necessarily illegal and not all illegal actions are necessarily immoral.

Consider the act of questioning the morality of a law. Is it a good law? If what is illegal is automatically what is immoral and what is legal is automatically morally permissible, then it would impossible to morally interrogate the law.

Consider, for one thing, that different societies have different laws, and sometimes these laws are in conflict.

We also run into a question analogous to that asked in the Euthyphro dialogue: Is it good because the gods love it or do the gods love it because it is good? In our case, we would substitute "laws" for "gods".

Is it wrong because it is illegal or is it illegal because it is wrong?

Let's take the former, wrong because illegal. That would suggest that something isn't wrong until it is made illegal. So creating laws creates immorality. It was okay to murder until they outlawed the practice. Now it is suddenly wrong.

Now let's take latter, illegal because wrong. This seems more reasonable. But of course it means that the question of whether something is wrong precedes the question of whether it is legal. We ask first if it is wrong. If it is, we make it illegal. But the question of its wrongness is prior to the question of its legality. Legality is then not what determines morality. But can we be sure that no mistakes are ever made here? And do the laws exhaust all matters of morality?

Does wrongness entail illegality?

Does illegality entail wrongness?

No and no.

It seems clear that the question of whether something is immoral or not should be asked independently of whether it is legal.

And yet a date, often the entry point to the most important relationship we might ever have, is usually pretty much just like a mutual job interview. And part of the job being applied for might be "Mr. Right", the person who will fulfill all her childhood dreams and tick off all the items on her list of what she wants in a man.

I've often thought that as a man, if I am seeking to be accepted by a woman, and there is some possibility of reproduction being explored, even if unconsciously, she is basically in a position more powerful than that of a job interviewer. She is deciding whether I am worthy of existence. Should more of me exist? Should my genes continue? It is up to her. For her to accept me, especially sexually, is for her to affirm my existence, to essentially redeem me. For her to reject me is in some sense for her to decide that the form of humanity I represent is not acceptable and should not continue. My genes are on trial. My conditioning is also on trial.

And in her evaluations, she is essentially a eugenicist, not unlike a Nazi, whether she realizes it or not.

This causes me feelings similar to those I feel in a job interview. Who is this person to decide my worth? Why is my fate in this person's hands? How dare you presume to be a position to evaluate me! Is this person really worthy of deciding whether I am worthy?

Obviously, there is more to it than this. But this enters into it on some level. And obviously, it goes the other way too. I am evaluating her, often superficially.

And, as S points out, we are also each misrepresenting ourselves to one another, trying to appear in a way that we think will win us a favorable assessment.

Perhaps we should cut through the shit and just fill out applications, exchange background reports and genetic analyses, measure each other for ideal proportions and symmetry, test each other for agility, for intelligence, for respectability, for ethics, and so on, assign scores, and see if the scores cross a minimum that we have decided upon. ;)

Soon though, prospective employees and romantic partners will likely be evaluated by AI, not by humans. So, no need to worry....

There are a plethora of mental issues where the madman can be sure of his inexistence — Louco

Okay, so a madman can believe that he doesn't exist. He can experience mental content such as, "I don't even exist". Is he correct in these thoughts? Is he really not there having that experience of thinking himself not existing?

And supposing someone (who?) goes deep in meditation and finds themselves not existing (who finds themselves not existing?). Did they cease to exist? Did they discover that they had never existed to begin with? I am imagining some inner dialogue in the moment of realization of no-self:

Wow! Look at this! I don't even exist! I never existed at all! All my problems are solved! The knot is untied! What a fool I've been! I'm not even here right now! What a relief!!! I'm free!!! I must go and tell everyone else that they don't have to worry, that they don't exist either!!! I am going to pretend that I exist and go back into the world to teach until all the other nonexistent selves are similarly freed of the delusion that they exist!!!

These sound like the ravings of a lunatic to me.

:down: Dennett is a materialist. Buddhism denies materialism outright. — Wayfarer

I am not a big fan of Dennett or eliminative materialism either. But Buddhism's denial of materialism is immaterial. ;)

My point was that when you say that Buddhism says that something like the self or a universal self cannot be demonstrated to exist, whatever "demonstrate" might mean there, this is a faulty objection in a way similar to some of the verificationists saying that conscious experience cannot be demonstrated to exist and therefore should not be accepted to exist. Clearly, despite the fact that it cannot be empirically verified in the third-person, consciousness nevertheless is quite real. There really are experiences. How do you know? You know immediately. You are experiencing. You know that with more certainty than you know anything about any objective, third-person realities. You know that consciousness is real with far more certainty than you know that Antarctica is real.

where in experience such a proposed ‘changeless being’ can be found or be demonstrated to exist. — Wayfarer

Let's put aside the "changeless being" part for a moment. Let's just say "self". I don't know if the self is changeless or not. I don't know if it is a being or not. Let's just say that the self, for the purposes of this discussion, is not some idea we have about ourselves, such as that I am a human, that I am a brain, that I am a soul, that I am male, that was once a child, and so on. When someone says "I am a democrat", I am not talking about the democrat or the body making the statement of identity. The self isn't any content of experience or worldly identity. It isn't a description. It isn't even the 'I' thought, the self-referencing thought, not even an inward glance. That's all experiential content. That's all the doings of the mind, the arisings in the mind. I am talking about that which is having the experience, the very witness.

Let's say that someone is challenging us to demonstrate the existence of this self, this witness. What would it mean to demonstrate it? Would we have to show it in the third-person, as an object that can be probed and measured in a lab? Would it have to be shown to have mass? Would it have to be shown to have physical location?

Suppose you say that it is not being asked that it be demonstrated objectively, but rather "in experience". What would that mean? The problem is similar. Anything "in experience", arguably, is experiential content, is object of experience, not that which is experiencing the content. To try to demonstrate its existence, it seems, is to try to objectify subjectivity itself. When you look in the mirror, what you see is an object. It isn't the self. If you try to turn around to see yourself, you are still "behind" the view. Whatever is seen isn't you.

What sorts of demonstration are left? Rational arguments? There are some decent ones. But there is something more directly known about just being yourself and having an experience, the way in which you know that you are experiencing, that you exist and are conscious, that makes it obvious somehow. I simply cannot doubt my existence. I am not sure "existence" is really the right word though. What does that mean? The roots suggest "standing forth". That suggests objects. It suggests things. The subject doesn't "stand forth". It isn't a thing. It isn't a figure against a background. Rather, it is that by virtue of which there are standings forth at all! It is the condition for the possibility of experiential objects, of things, at least phenomenologically speaking.

If someone says that the great meditators have meditated long and hard and deep, deeper than anyone before them, that they have looked and looked for the self and have come up empty-handed, I am deeply unimpressed. I don't care if the person who says that no self was found is said to be a deity. I don't care if that person was prophesied to be the great world-teacher. I don't care if that person could levitate or walk on water or defeat the efforts of demons to disturb their concentration. I don't care if that person is immortal. I don't care if that person came from some Heaven to teach us. "The Buddha says..." is hardly evidence of anything.

What is it exactly that Buddhists mean by "anatta"? What is the self that they deny? Is it the identity we have, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves? Is it the 'I thought'? Or are they denying the very witness? Are they claiming that they have gone beyond the witness into non-existence and experienced themselves not existing and have returned to tell the tale? Who is it that experienced enlightenment? Nobody? Who is liberated? What deceived-nobody is now undeceived and freed from the illusion of existing? Who was there to experience whatever it was that is being reported to have been experienced? Is someone reporting a non-experience?

I have no doubt that it is possible, in meditation, to have no self-referencing content in experience, no self-idea, no 'I-thought', no auto-biographical rumination, no inner dialogue saying "I am ____". I have experienced such states of consciousness. I did that momentarily just before writing this sentence. I'm not impressed. All I did was suspend the generation of certain kinds of representational mental content. I did not therefore cease to exist or cease to experience at all. If I had ceased to experience at all, how would I know?

Let's consider a drunkard just awakened from a blackout. People tell him of his deeds during the blackout, but he doesn't believe, because he can't remember experiencing those things. He doubts he experienced that. — Louco

I agree. You can doubt what you experienced in the past. Epistemological problems arise there very naturally. You are not experiencing the past directly. In the present, you are experiencing memories of the past. These memories can be faulty. They can be absent. Your friends might be lying to you about what happened. You can even doubt whether the person who experienced those things was you. You can doubt that it was you who experienced the things depicted in your memories of your childhood. You can doubt that it will be you who will experience your future. But you can't, right now, doubt that you are having the experience that you are having.

Suppose you are dreaming but don't know it. The content of what you are experiencing can be in doubt. It might not correspond to any external reality. But you cannot doubt that you are experiencing, right now, in the present. Where there is no experience at all, there can be no deception that there is an experience being had. A nonexistent mind cannot be fooled into believing that it exists and is having an experience.

Let me put it another way, suppose a magician is putting on a show for an audience. They are being tricked into thinking they are seeing a woman being cut in half. They are deceived about what is happening. No problem here. Now suppose we have a magician putting on a show for a nonexistent audience. The seats are empty. He fools the nonexistent people into believing they exist and are watching the show. Quite a trick, right? Impossible, obviously!

Where there is no experience, there can be no illusion. So if you are an audience member watching a magic show right now, you can doubt that what you are seeing is what is actually happening. But you cannot doubt that you are having an experience! You can be sure that you exist!

You can doubt the content of your experience. You cannot doubt the doubter if you are the one doubting.

So we see, we can doubt that we experience; and that throughout time. — Louco

We can doubt the content of the experience. We can doubt that what we are experiencing is real. We might be hallucinating. We can have doubt about experiences not being had by us right now. We can doubt that we existed at other times and places. We can doubt what we experienced or will experience at other times. But we cannot doubt, right now, that we are experiencing. See the difference?

We can have all sorts of questions about what we actually are, what the experiencer really is. You might not be a human at all. You might be an alien playing a VR game right now. You might be a brain in a vat. You might be God. You might be _____. It might be impossible to really know what you really are, what the true nature of the self is. Everything you perceive and think about yourself is content, and all experiential content is subject to doubt. It may not correspond to reality. But you cannot doubt that you, whatever you might really be, exist and are experiencing something, even if that something is a deception.

All of your examples only raise questions about realities beyond immediate experience. Those externals are uncontroversially dubitable. Immediate experience is a different story.

Well the Buddha would challenge anyone to say what ‘the higher self’ is, or where in experience such a proposed ‘changeless being’ can be found or be demonstrated to exist. — Wayfarer

What I am talking about is not what I would call a "higher self". I am not sure what that is supposed to be. And I am not sure that it would be correct to call it a "changeless being". First of all, similar to Heidegger's ontological difference, it isn't a being among beings. Second, I am not sure it would be right to call it changeless. After all, it is that which undergoes all modifications. But this is tricky.

The question you seem to have the Buddha asking reminds me of the third-person verificationist approach to consciousness, the sort of stance that leads the likes of Dennett to basically deny consciousness and qualia altogether. Consciousness cannot be demonstrated to exist, can it? Certainly not in the third-person. What about in experience? What do you experience but objects of experience? Can you find the subject in experience? Can you find experience or experiencing itself in experience? Can you find the box inside the same box? Can you bite your teeth? Can you see your own eyes without a mirror? Can space be found in space? Time in time? No? Then why believe in them?

The true self is implicit in every experience. It is what is "behind" everything. It is hard to point your mind at it because it is everywhere. Though it cannot be an object of awareness, it completely permeates it. It is awareness. When you look for it in the world or in your thoughts, you are looking in the wrong place. You can search your experiential field for it in meditation 'til the cows come home. You won't "find" it. It isn't a fish in the sea. The sea itself is in it. Space itself is in it.

Every idea you have about yourself, your identity, your biography, your perceptions of your body, and so on are all not it. What most think of when thinking of themselves is not it.

Nonetheless, it is known quite directly, in a completely unmediated fashion. It is immediately certain.

You can't exactly touch what you are. But you are that. And that is the primary experience.

We could claim that a finger cannot touch itself. But it can, you might insist! It can bend back upon itself! This can only happen because it has parts, which are actually different things. And two different things can be in relation. The tip can touch the base. But something without parts cannot touch itself in this way. It can only be itself. It is in contact with itself in a sense. It is as close to itself as something can be! But in every direction it looks, it fails to find itself. And yet, wherever it goes, there it is! It cannot escape itself! Nothing is more familiar.

What color is it? What color is color?

It is one thing to ask how you know that the Statue of Liberty exists. All the usual questions of epistemology arise. It is another to ask how you know that 2+2=4. It is another to ask how you know the stop sign is red. But what if I were to ask you how you know you are having an experience or are conscious at all? And who is it that knows?

You might be in doubt that the stop sign truly is red. You could be hallucinating. But can you doubt that you are experiencing redness? That is closer to your experiencing than the sign. Step it back toward your primary, unmediated experience even closer. Closer. All the way. There it is. Nothing is more certain than what is right there.

The content of experience can be in doubt. That I am experiencing cannot.

How might we know the self is universal or that there is only one self? That requires some reasoning beyond the scope of this thread. Maybe another time.

What makes you so sure? — Possibility

It is a strictly defined number with a definite value. Its position on the number line does not change. It is exact. Sure, our decimal approximations of it can vary, but no decimal approximation of Pi is actually Pi.

I'm baffled that anyone would suggest that Pi changes.

The decimal representation of Pi never ends and never settles into a permanently repeating pattern. — praxis

Do you mean to say that there is change here? Surely, the value of Pi doesn't change.

Then why believe it? It is the epitome of unsupported speculation. At best it's a feeling. This is precisely where the Buddha diverged from Hinduism, as he showed their doctrine of 'universal self' is incoherent. — Wayfarer

There are some good reasons to believe it. I am not sure I have the motivation at the moment to lay it all out, as it is pretty involved. But I have long been past the point of being convinced of the matter.

Regardless, my curiosity is piqued when you say that the Buddha showed the doctrine of universal self to be incoherent. Would you care to elaborate?

there is nothing which doesn't change

What is the implicit argument here?

P1: There is nothing which does not change

P2: The self is something which doesn't change

C: Therefore, there is no self

We could question both premises.

Let me say something before I dig into it a little. One thing that troubles me about discussions of Buddhist thought and doctrine is that there is a tendency that I've noticed elsewhere to give the Buddha some kind of unquestionable authority. Why? Because he was enlightened! And that's supposed to intimidate any would-be questioners. But that's all a matter of faith. For many, it seems not to be a question about whether what the Buddha or another enlightened being said is true, but rather whether they said it, the presumption being that whatever an enlightened one said must be true. This is a little like saying someone was a prophet who had special access to God and therefore must be believed.

I, personally, am skeptical of claims of enlightenment and prophecy. I am also very skeptical of stories and claims about the Buddha. Any kind of ascription of special authority to Buddhist doctrine is to me just as problematic as saying that the Bible says X, therefore it is true, because God gave us the Bible. How do we know? Because the Bible says so. Not that you or anyone else here would do any of this! I just want to make clear that I won't accept faith-based claims as such. The claims need to be tested on their own merits.

To return to the issue at hand, I can think of some examples of things that don't change. First of all, in the West, whatever its merits, we have Plato's philosophy, which offers a contrary set of claims. Some things don't change. The ratio of a circle's diameter to its circumference is one example. In modern physics, many quantities are invariant. There are many conservation laws. The total amount of energy in a system doesn't change. It is like having a ball of clay that changes form. While the form changes, the basic substance doesn't. There is something which passes through the changes and which is conserved. But the thing about conserved quantities and fundamental substances is that you cannot get at them directly. Suppose absolutely everything we know is a form of some basic substance. It is worse than the problem of a fish knowing water. Arguably, it would be impossible to detect the substance. All we can detect are differences. What is constant is, by virtue of its constancy, undetectable.

When it comes to a self, this problem is deepened. It could be like an unchanging substance. Perhaps it is our very consciousness. It is the ocean in which every fish that we perceive swims. Everything we experience is a modification of it or something arising within it. It itself cannot become an object of perception. It is the very condition for the possibility of perception.

I am not surprised that deep meditators come up empty-handed when they try to see the self. This is like trying to bite one's own teeth! Obviously, the only things that you can be aware of are things that change. That isn't remotely proof that there is nothing which does not change.

It might be argued that we know about some things which don't change through reason, not through perception. To sit in meditation and watch for these things to test their reality might be the wrong approach, especially if we stop thinking. Thinking might be the only way to know of them!

Kant's arguments about the transcendental unity of apperception and whatnot might be relevant here.

And what of Descartes? If there is one thing I know for sure, it is that I exist. A nonexistent entity cannot be fooled into thinking it exists. Whatever the deceptive nature of the arisings in the mind, that in which they arise cannot be doubted.

To be clear though, I don't believe in an individual self as a final substance. But I am convinced of something that might be thought of as a universal self. It is omnipresent, everywhere present to itself. But it cannot be known directly, positively. But it is that which is experiencing being everything. The personal, individual self is thus, in my view, false self. And if we examine it, it falls apart. I believe Buddhists are in fact penetrating to some depth when they see it as a fiction. But to stop there, I think, is a mistake.

As for reincarnation, in my view, the universal self is omnicarnate. It is everyone and all things at all times. But I deny that there is any discrete and separate self, soul, bundle of skandhas, or any such thing belonging to a specific person that dips in and out of the world like a sewing machine, occupying one identity after another in serial fashion. Such an idea is fraught with problems.

I don't think religion and religious ideas are fully explained by power interest. Religion is complex. But power interest, in my view, is one of the most important things to keep in view when trying to understand why these ideas and practices exist.

There are good things in religion. I have an ambivalent relationship to it all. I even nearly became a monk as a younger man. I later grew rather disillusioned though.

Actually, Buddhists don't teach reincarnation, as such, but rebirth, which is subtly different

Is there really so much difference? Basically, the idea is the same. If you are good, you go better places after death. If you are bad, you go bad places.

I think the basic principle is, however, that if there is no continuity beyond physical death, then the principle of karma really doesn't have any foundation; at death. it makes no real difference how you lived your life. From there it's a very short step to nihilism or everyday materialism.

Is this a good reason to reject the possibility that there is no continuity beyond physical death? Because it leads to the loss of other ideas we'd like to keep? What about trying to determine what is actually true rather than believing in ideas because we prefer their consequences? Perhaps the truth is palatable. Perhaps it isn't. Personally, I want to conform my view of the world as much as possible to what is actually true about it.

As a young person, I read the Bhagavad Gita as if it was scripture and saw its ideas in a certain light. Two decades later, I read it again. I saw it in a completely different light. I had no special reverence for it. This allowed me to ask certain questions.

Suppose group A has some power over group B. Group A is teaching an idea or value to group B. If we can see clearly that group A stands to gain somehow from group B believing what it is being taught by group A, does this give us reason to be suspicious of the ideas being taught?

If a slave owner teaches his slaves that maximally pleasing their owner will lead them to paradise after they die, this looks suspicious, doesn't it?

Consider the idea of Hell. Clearly, this idea was spread by religious authorities that were attached to political power. If you are a king running a country and you don't have much in the way of surveilance technologies, if you want to keep an eye on people and keep them in line, it takes a lot of police to do that. But if you can get them to believe that the laws you want them to follow are not just the arbitrary laws of the land, but rather the laws of God and that God is omniscient and watches not just their actions, but also their thoughts and will reward them greatly for doing and thinking what basically pleases the king or punish them with eternal fire for doing what causes the king problems, what costs him money, this all reduces the cost of rule greatly, no? If people really believe this, they'll self-police their very thoughts! How convenient for kings! And maybe this is good for society. But that doesn't make it true!

Consider the doctrines of karma and reincarnation in India. Notice that you have a situation where there is great disparity of wealth and power and the powerful classes are exploiting the less powerful. Suppose the exploited classes ask why they have such a shitty lot and the priestly and warrior castes have such a nice one. Maybe the lower and more populous classes express outrage at the unfairness and threaten power with rebellion. Well, the priests answer, you actually deserve your shitty lot. You did bad things in past lives. You are now working out that karma. We wealthy ones, on the other hand, earned our positions! We were virtuous! We deserve to be here. And if you do your caste duty (be a good slave) diligently throughout your life with no demand for reward, you too might find yourself on top, eating the good food, being carried on golden platforms by slaves! You might even become a god! Isn't this basically what the Bhagavad Gita teaches?

Clearly, the doctrines of reincarnation and karma served the powers that taught them. There are many other excellent reasons to reject these ideas, but their usefulness to political power is a good reason to be suspicious. It isn't so different from telling children that Santa will give them good presents if they behave and that the monster in the closet will get them if they are bad.

Many religious ideas exist primarily because they have been excellent tools of governance.

Buddhism inherited a lot of baggage from Hinduism. It is conceivable that reincarnation and karma were retained simply because of cultural inertia. Or perhaps they still served power. Maybe no-self itself is an idea that serves power or the larger community. One of the great power tensions in society after all is that between the individual and the collective. But maybe the idea of the persisting soul too is a tool of power!

Always keep in mind that those who have historically held power had an interest in what we believed to be true and what we believed people ought to do with their lives and what we valued.

If we aren't allowed a lottery system, it seems that the desire here is to prevent us from escaping the decision about who dies, so just being arbitrary in any way shouldn't be allowed. We must be forced into a position in which we either become responsible for ending humanity forever or we choose certain kinds of people to die, presumably because some kinds of people have less value than others. Thus we reveal ourselves to be something like Nazis. Some people are better than others by virtue of some factor X and should therefore be among those saved. And this reveals our value system. We might rank people based on their usefulness, their virtue, their obedience to laws, their general uprightness and respectability, their intelligence, their religion, their earning power, their geographic situation, their genetic health, or their capacity for Y.

The question naturally arises of what class(es) of people are least worth keeping. This assumes obviously that people are not equally valuable. This opens a can of worms that can quickly go bad places. Regardless, it reveals something about the person deciding. What is more interesting to me is that the way we evaluate the worth of our fellow humans itself comes into question. Some might not even question the value system by which they will immediately tend to rank people. For example, one might say that some "earn" their existence more than others, that some are more useful than others, and so on, and that what determines ultimately whether a being ought to exist is how useful they are, how much they have "earned" their existence, and so forth. But how do we know any such criterion is the right one? How do we select the right values by which to make the evaluation? Which values ought we to have? It would seem that we might want to rank different value systems. Some values are better than others! Which is the best value by which to decide human worth? But that itself requires another value or set of values. Where does this terminate?

I think it really interesting that so many people think it unproblematic to say that non-criminals ought to exist preferentially over criminals. It raises a multitude of troubling questions!

If we decide to kill a billion to save humanity, we have already committed ourselves to a certain important valuation, namely that humanity is worth saving, perhaps that humanity is in some sense superior to other forms of existence. Perhaps whatever criterion we used to decide that humanity should be saved should also be used to decide which portion of humanity best exemplifies the qualities that make humanity worth saving.

What makes humanity worth saving? Suppose someone says that our experience is more rich than that of worms, and that this is why we are more valuable than worms or the dust we might otherwise be or whatever. We can appreciate Mozart's music, for example, or the night sky, whereas a worm or a pile of dust cannot. Or we can appreciate the fact that we exist. Or... But what makes non-criminals necessarily better at any of this? Perhaps it is in the minds of some criminals, or old people, or sick people, or rejected people, or whatever, where certain potentials reach their highest levels of realization.

And what of this "earning" business? Does anyone really ultimately earn their existence? Think about that one thoroughly.

Is the question of whether a being ought to exist answered by whether or not they earned or otherwise "deserve" their existence? Should the Earth exist? Did the planet "earn" its existence? Does it "deserve" to live? Why this kind of language? Why these words like "earn" and "deserve"? What does our use of them reveal about how we are thinking? Ought we to question all this? This seems to come from our past in which we thought about ourselves in relation to a God with laws who decides who goes up and who goes down based on whether or not we are good boys and girls, based on whether we are obeying and serving properly. But this is all rooted in a primitive fear of powerful storm spirits who are upset because humans have been too noisy. It also must be recognized that the widespreadness of such beliefs serves the interests of certain human powers. "Be useful", "earn your bread", "be good", and so on are maxims often taught by masters to slaves. I am imagining dogs deciding which dogs should die based on which ones are least house-trained, these well-behaved good-doggies obviously thinking themselves the most upright and good and thus worthwhile. Master tells them how good they are, after all! They cause the least trouble in the house! The master here could be the white plantation owner, the pope, the king, the community in relation to the individual, the selfish genes in relation to the organism, and so on.

We might decide whether or not to keep a table saw based on whether or not it serves us well, whether or not it is useful, whether or not it "earns" its place in our workshop. More problematically, we might similarly decide whether or not to keep a slave based on the same criteria. Good versus bad slaves might be evaluated based on the return on investment they give us. Are they worth feeding? Do they produce more money for us than they consume? Are they profitable? And we might teach them to evaluate themselves in this way, so as to better serve us. As an amusing side-note, notice that we might want to teach our slaves that suicide is very, very bad, and that all suicides go to Hell! Of course we don't want our tools offing themselves when their lives suck, especially when their lives naturally suck under our power! We have invested too much in them!

Should human beings be evaluated in this way?

What are the ends to which all that are useful are a means? Is human existence never self-justifying? Must we always appeal to some external benefit? Or are we ends in ourselves? Is a criminal less an end in himself than an "upright" person?

And what makes someone a criminal? The laws of the land? But which land? Which laws? Are these laws always good ones? How do we decide?

And if usefulness is to be a criterion for deciding whether a person ought to live, what about humanity as a whole? Can we use that criterion to justify saving humanity? To whom or what are we useful as a whole? To the planet? Hardly! To God? Really? To intelligence itself? What? To ourselves?

Suppose we try that line, that we ought to exist because we are useful to ourselves. What does it mean to be useful? To feed? I feed myself, therefore I ought to exist. Sounds funny when put that way, right?

Some people seem to think usefulness to the community is what makes a person's existence worthwhile. A person who contributes nothing, perhaps only consuming resources, is considered "worthless". But what of the last person on Earth? How do we decide if that person ought to live? Is their existence evaluated according to whether they benefit the animals and plants around them? Where does this end? And of course, the fact is, they are not beneficial to their environment, but rather largely parasitic/predatory, preying on weaker forms of life, like a lion killing gazelles, like a mugger knocking over old ladies... Ah, the beauty of predators! Might makes right! Right?

Perhaps that is the right principle! Maybe we should say that if humans ought to live far into the future, then we ought to select for continued existence those kinds of humans most likely to live far into the future. Select for existence those with the strongest tendency to exist! Kill the weak! Kill the dumb! Kill the ugly! Maybe those capable of murder are some of those we should keep! Maybe we should just take away a portion of the water and food and let people fight over it so whoever survives shows that they have the strongest ability to ensure their own existence and therefore should exist. Wait... Did I take a wrong turn here somewhere?

I've often thought that the Buddhist doctrine of no-self is in conflict with the doctrine of reincarnation. What reincarnates? The answer usually given is the skandhas. I don't find this answer to satisfactorily defend the coexistence of these two doctrines. Do you? If there is no me, no I, that is attached to the skandhas, why should I worry about what happens to them? In other words, is that package of skandhas me? If there is no true self that will find itself being that package and moving into another body, instead of meditating for years to gain liberation, why not just kill myself now?

Consider the skandhas belonging to two people, one me(or you in your case) and one Joe Blow. This (my?) body dies and the Joe body dies. What, if anything, makes the karma or skandhas belonging to this identity of more concern to me (who?) than that of Joe? After all, there is no persisting self that spans or owns both my childhood and my adulthood any more than there is a self spanning between Joe and me, right?

When I achieve liberation from my false self concept, who or what finds freedom? The Buddha has attained enlightenment, right? But I haven't? What's going on here? Why does the bodhisattva reincarnate (indeed how?) if there are no discrete selves to liberate? If there are no selves, there is no problem. Nobody is deceived.

Maybe someone can sort all this out for me.

And how can a nonexistent self be deluded that it exists?

Perhaps the identity, the body, the karma, and all that, are like a jacket and the self is like a person wearing it. But enlightenment is like realizing that the jacket has no occupant. So who finds out they are not identical with the jacket? The jacket? Who is the bodhisattva trying to liberate? A bunch of jackets? Or a bunch of noexisting jacket-wearers who think they are jackets? It seems to me that the jackets disperse all by themselves. No need to worry. They are just objects anyway, right?

The problem of the relation between the self and the body that dies is not solved by positing a package of skandhas that reincarnates, is it? Why isn't my relation to that skandha package just like my relation to the temporary composite that is my body? Neither are me, right? Who is it that really isn't these things? Nobody? Then where is the problem?

I suspect that the skandhas represent something like a body on another level, another sheath. This idea just defers the problem. Instead of asking what happens to me when my body dies, why can't I ask what happens to me when my skandhas disperse or whatever?

How is this all not an incoherent mishmash of incompatible ideas, some of which were retained because of cultural inertia or some such?

Thanks!

vanity, artificiality and pointlessness of it — gumi

I can't help but think that some would argue that most things we do are vain and pointless in the end, if not artificial. In my mind, pointlessness isn't a good reason to reject something.

Consider the old question people ask about basic work, the very definition of the useful. Why do I work? To live. Why do I live? To work? Does work just serve work?

You can't fully justify things by instrumental value. You reach the heart and head eventually. Not everything is best justified in the way that feet and screwdrivers are. That which gives value to all the useful things in the end is itself without instrumental value.

I'll pass on a definition of athleticism since I think you probably have a pretty good idea of what I mean already. — Txastopher

Honestly, I am not exactly clear on what is meant by athleticism. I think it could be an interesting discussion to try to define it and see what consequences we can draw out of that.

And as for vanity, well, we all betray our vanity when we share our precious opinions here. We are flexing, both in the mirror and on the stage.

I am an artist. And nothing appeals to me aesthetically quite as much as the muscular human form. Muscle on bone is beautiful. The biomechanics of the body in its various operations is all beautiful. The sculptural qualities of the forms are very worthy of appreciation. And appreciation of a muscular physique doesn't have to be a sexual thing. I can understand cultivating a muscular physique simply because it is beautiful.

I suspect that for at least some bodybuilders, it is more of an aesthetic thing than a matter of pure athletic achievement. And the aesthetics might not be limited to enjoying the resulting physique. The practice and feeling of mindfully lifting heavy masses with flawless form has value in itself, not unlike tai chi. Simply exercising self-discipline is an aesthetically pleasing experience. There is something in just regularly pushing oneself to exhaustion in a set of exercises while part of the brain and body cry for us to stop. There is a cultivation of strength of character in such practices.

I am not a bodybuilder. I am a rock climber though, and we climbers tend to be a bit obsessive about physique too, not just for physical performance, but partly for visual appeal, as climbing is partly visual performance, and we like to be seen doing it, just as a musician likes to play for an audience. There is an element of dance to it. We think about how we look while moving over stone. But we tend toward a more wiry physique for maximum strength-to-weight ratio.

For me, climbing, with the technique, the setting, the practice of the requisite virtues, the movement, the grace, the appearance of the body in relation to the problem, the doing of something difficult, and so on, but especially the skillful and graceful execution of the carefully orchestrated sequence of moves demanded by the problem, each requiring deep biomechanical and kinesthetic insight, is far more about the beauty of the whole practice than about "athleticism" for its own sake, whatever that is, whatever value that imparts to an activity, if any. In my experience, knowing my own motivations and observing many others and talking to them, it seems to be more of an art than some kind of athletic ambition, even though it is arguably as "athletic" as anything. It even might be said to have many things in common with the practices of the samurai.

And for many of its practitioners, climbing is a highly obsessive activity. It is a lifestyle. Many lives revolve around it. We climbers often make our friends around it. We build businesses around it. We read and write books about it. We meet our significant others through it. We pursue self-mastery in it. We pursue a kind of spiritual development in it. We find incredible camaraderie in it. We collect lots of appealing gear, lots of satisfying toys. We abandon conventional careers for it. I imagine bodybuilding is similar to this in many ways.

Does it get in the way of other things? Sure! What doesn't? Are we neurotics? More than hard-working businessmen? More than philosophers?

Consider that all the accusations made about bodybuilders and their self-obsession, vanity, inability to feel okay with themselves without such a physique, and so on, could be leveled at just about anyone who does just about anything with enthusiasm and persistence.

Why do philosophers feel such a need to be intelligent? Why can't they be satisfied with everyday ideas and levels of understanding? Why all the reading of obscure and difficult books and performing their understanding for others? Why all the posing? Why all the pretense of profundity? Something to prove? Some sense of inadequacy? Oh, they are all driven by a pure sense of wonder or a pure pursuit of the good, are they?

Are the motivations behind bodybuilding or rock climbing or philosophy absolutely pure? Of course not. But what is that impurity anyway? And why is it wrong? Pulling on one of those threads could lead you to the heart of the problem of the good.

The idea of developing my own physique along the lines of the bodybuilder has appealed to me at times much in the same way that cultivating a beautiful bonzai would appeal to me. Obviously, I would enjoy the idea of my improved sex appeal (assuming my bodybuilding is kept within tasteful limits), but that isn't all there is to it. And sure, I am also dissatisfied with the way I look when I am out of shape. I feel dumpy. I feel like my vices are there for all to see. The same goes for letting flabbiness of mind get out of control. I also am unhappy to paint a picture that doesn't reach a certain standard. Is it wrong to be unsatisfied with what we tend to be when we fail to practice all discipline?

There is pleasure in excellence in all its forms.

And not all good things derive their goodness from the degree to which their practitioners are useful to others. On the contrary, I often think the best things are ends in themselves. Is what is found in bodybuilding on this level? That's up to its practitioners to decide. We, the larger community, have no claim on it. It doesn't need to be for us. It isn't up to us to decide. What is in bodybuilding belongs to the bodybuilders.

People outside worlds like these tend not to understand what they are about. Many people think climbing is about being a daredevil. I often get accused of being an adrenaline junkie or having a death wish or being an escapist. Or they make fun of someone "conquering" a wall or mountain. They just don't have a clue what it is about. It contains aesthetic dimensions, insights, and joys that they'd never suspect. I would guess that bodybuilding isn't so different. This is all difficult even for us to articulate to ourselves. I often find myself wishing I could share what it is I find in climbing with non-climbers, but it just isn't possible. Words fail.

And why do we like to judge bodybuilders, but not quilters or something like that? People similarly attack money-makers. Are we jealous? Is it our own dissatisfaction with our own bodies and our own lack of discipline that drives the armchair criticism and psychoanalysis? Explain it all away as pathology and then we can go back to our tub of buttered popcorn and our Netflix series with a clear conscience. No?

Bodybuilding is fine. If you find it rewarding, don't mind all the critics. Don't seek their approval. You don't need their permission.

And I don't even see the big problem with using performance enhancing drugs. It just depends on what it is all about for you. Whether it is "cheating" depends on what kind of game you are playing, if you are even playing a game.

I used to think that the body and mind are not toys, but I am beginning to question that. Perhaps we are all just playing with form in one way or another. And we tend to take it all way too seriously! Especially death!

As a once competitive sportsman, there is something very odd about bodybuilding since it appears to do away with any athleticism. To be honest, I question their motivations. To an outsider it appears to be a symptom of a body dysmorphic disorder. — Txastopher

How does it do away with athleticism? What, exactly, is athleticism? And whatever you define as athleticism, why does bodybuilding need to have that in order to be worthwhile? And why does athleticism legitimize an activity? Is an activity involving the body somehow illegitimate if it isn't athletic?

Bertrand Russell demonstrates clear writing in his essays. No gobbledygook. One such essay:

link

Heidegger on the other hand...

Petrichor beleives that the education system is a natural extension of society in that it has no choice but to serve society. — Brett

That's not quite what I've said. But, I suppose I wouldn't entirely disagree in the following sense. The education system is like an organ in the body, and a big and important one at that. It co-evolved with the rest of the structures in society. They are inseparable. The fact is, it simply does perform a certain set of functions for the larger social body. If it didn't, neither would be here in their present form. The rest of the system as it is and the education system are mutually interdependent. A society like ours without one like it would be like a body without a liver or something. Such an education system without that society would be like a liver without a body. To say it has no choice but to serve society is like saying a liver has no choice but to serve a body, as if the liver has somehow been compelled to serve, or as though it has some kind of agency. I wouldn't quite put it like that. And I wouldn't call it an "extension" of society. It is much closer to the core than that.

And you can't just take an education system that you like the sound of off the shelf and plug it into a society. It doesn't work like that. The two have been deeply interwoven going back to their most primitive origins and they evolved together slowly into their present form. They really aren't properly seen as separate things, one serving the other.