The way you spoke about Tao suggests that Tao could be identified with existence, the property of all things. In my view, existence is simply logical consistency.

Daoism is fundamentally about continuous, never ending flow and how flow creates that which we are and what we perceive. (It stands in opposition to immobility and concepts like a Truth).

One can visualize it as some intelligence (the Dao), that polarizes to create a positive and negative (a standing wave). The wave is given impetus (movement/qi) by the same intelligence and begins to flow creating all that there is. This is the Dao creating the two, then creating the three, and from the three creating everything else (moving waves of energy). One can see that the Daoists of thousands of of years ago were pretty perceptive.

For more updated versions of Daoism, I like to study Bergson, Bohm (holographic universe), and Rupert Sheldrake as well as any of the arts and Tai Chi.

The way you spoke about Tao suggests that Tao could be identified with existence, the property of all things. In my view, existence is simply logical consistency. — litewave

Both the Tao and objective reality could be identified with existence. They often are. It is the differences between the way the two concepts describe existence and the experience of existence that interests me.

In addition to what you've written here, I think I remember another post where you state that existence is logical consistency. I don't really know what you mean. Anyway, there is not just one way to know the world. It's a question of what works for you. What is useful, fruitful. I feel at home in the Tao, but not objective reality. The idea of objective reality is one of the most prevalent organizing principles people use. Any way of seeing things has to be compared to objective reality.

For more updated versions of Daoism, I like to study Bergson, Bohm (holographic universe), and Rupert Sheldrake as well as any of the arts and Tai Chi. — Rich

Although I read descriptions and analyses of Zen and the Tao before I read the Tao te Ching, I no longer do. I think the Tao te Ching speaks for itself. I've read 5 or 6 versions. Each is a little different. I have read a few other Taoist verses also.

"The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao." is the primary message I take from the book. It is a call to direct experience of ....the world? existence? objective reality? the Tao? None of those is right, because they are written. Nothing written is the true Tao.

Unfortunately, for those who are looking for Truth, the Dao De Jing, as with all literature, is subject to the same forces of change. You are are reading biased, subjective translations just like any other ancient literature. Unfortunately it cannot replace the Bible though some try. What is left is one's own experiences.

Unfortunately, for those who are looking for Truth, the Dao De Jing, as with all literature, is subject to the same forces of change. You are are reading biased, subjective translations just like any other ancient literature. Unfortunately it cannot replace the Bible though some try. What is left is one's own experiences. — Rich

Books like the Tao te Ching are not explanations. They are maps, guidebooks. When I read the Tao te Ching, any version, I feel someone taking me by the hand and trying to lead me somewhere. I think they're trying to lead to a place where I can see, experience, the world directly. Experiencing the Tao is what's important, not understanding it. I can come closer to understanding it than I can to experiencing it.

Both the Tao and objective reality could be identified with existence. — T Clark

But existence is not the individual things but rather the universal property that they all have in common. As such, existence can be said to be "invisible", "formless", "everlasting", "the ground of being", or "the absolute principle underlying the universe".

In addition to what you've written here, I think I remember another post where you state that existence is logical consistency. I don't really know what you mean. — T Clark

I mean logical consistency to be the property of every (existing) thing - basically, that the thing is identical to itself and different from others. This entails that the thing has relations to other things, and these relations can be reduced to the relations of similarity, instantiation and composition. Instantiation means that the thing has certain properties (or is a property of other things) and composition means that the thing has certain parts (or is a part of other things). So, if a thing is consistently defined by these relations (for example, not having the property of being a circle and a square at the same time) then it exists.

How is your vision of reality different from logical positivism or the early Wittgenstein?

I don't know enough about Wittgenstein to comment on him, but my view is far larger than logical positivism. Logical positivism limits reality to that which can be observed through the senses, but I see no reason to deny existence to things that we cannot observe. Any thing that is consistently defined via its relations to all other things exists in the sense in which it is defined. To deny it existence would be to arbitrarily accept certain logical possibilities and exclude others.

Well, let's say objective reality is really real, it's still something we interpret as human beings and which informs our actions / decision making (science is put into practice, we human beings use it to manipulate our environment). If you take determinism as being true on the premise of holding objective, epistemological knowledge as the highest value (!?), then what governs our behaviour should, in theory, be objectively described in a manner we can use it as a scientific principle.

As long as that is not / cannot be done, the way we ourselves describe (our) reality, a reality which inevitably governs or dictates our physical actions, is the most coherent information we can relay to our peers. Our social instincts make us share resources and information is one of them, the way we interpret the world is what gives us an evolutionary advantage over other mammals on earth. The way we use shared information to be able to manipulate our environment is also good from the point of view of entropy, we're getting better and better at extracting work out of our environment with which we increase entropy, life is described by this mechanism (keeping entropy low locally by exporting entropy... or something like that).

So, scientifically, we can observe that there is some principle at work which is having a physical effect in the material realm yet we have trouble saying exactly what is...

I'd call it a draw.

The Dao De Jing, as with other ancient literature, is of unknown origin and intent and seems like a compendium of chants, stories, and advice. Everyone will experience it differently. As far as I can tell, it had its own Genesis story (which makes more sense to me than some religious or scientific stories) that describes the basic philosophy of Daoism followed by a series of other snippets that feel like a combination of interesting ancient spiritual chants, Aesops fables, and military advice. It may provide a path for some and for others some interesting ideas to ruminate. As far as the Dao itself, as I read it, it is only saying that words are inadequate, which confirms my own experiences. But what is, is and there is always something new to discover.

But existence is not the individual things but rather the universal property that they all have in common. As such, existence can be said to be "invisible", "formless", "everlasting", "the ground of being", or "the absolute principle underlying the universe". — litewave

Yes, to the extent that it can be put into words, that is what the Tao is. The goal of this thread is to talk about how that compares with objective reality as description of all that is.

I mean logical consistency to be the property of every (existing) thing - basically, that the thing is identical to itself and different from others. This entails that the thing has relations to other things, and these relations can be reduced to the relations of similarity, instantiation and composition. Instantiation means that the thing has certain properties (or is a property of other things) and composition means that the thing has certain parts (or is a part of other things). So, if a thing is consistently defined by these relations (for example, not having the property of being a circle and a square at the same time) then it exists. — litewave

I wouldn't have thought that the first quote above was written by the same person as the second. The first is impressionistic, intuitive, uncomplicated, and straightforward. Down home. The second is formal, uses technical terminology, and requires following a confusing chain of logic. How do you see them fitting together?

The Dao De Jing, as with other ancient literature, is of unknown origin and intent and seems like a compendium of chants, stories, and advice. Everyone will experience it differently. As far as I can tell, it had its own Genesis story (which makes more sense to me than some religious or scientific stories) that describes the basic philosophy of Daoism followed by a series of other snippets that feel like a combination of interesting ancient spiritual chants, Aesops fables, and military advice. It may provide a path for some and for others some interesting ideas to ruminate. As far as the Dao itself, as I read it, it is only saying that words are inadequate, which confirms my own experiences. But what is, is and there is always something new to discover. — Rich

People can use the Tao te Ching in whatever way is useful to them, but I experience it much differently than you do. What you describe as "a compendium of chants, stories, and advice," and "a combination of interesting ancient spiritual chants, Aesops fables, and military advice," to me, and many others, tells a coherent story about the basis of reality, how to experience it directly, and the effects of that experience on those who do. It seems to me that the way I experience it represents the intention of those who wrote it. If it were only an interesting historic relic that might cast some light on ancient China, I don't know why anyone beyond scholars would be interested in it.

Well, let's say objective reality is really real, it's still something we interpret as human beings and which informs our actions / decision making (science is put into practice, we human beings use it to manipulate our environment). If you take determinism as being true on the premise of holding objective, epistemological knowledge as the highest value (!?), then what governs our behaviour should, in theory, be objectively described in a manner we can use it as a scientific principle.

As long as that is not / cannot be done, the way we ourselves describe (our) reality, a reality which inevitably governs or dictates our physical actions, is the most coherent information we can relay to our peers. Our social instincts make us share resources and information is one of them, the way we interpret the world is what gives us an evolutionary advantage over other mammals on earth. — Gooseone

Isn't this just a practical way of avoiding the issues I raised in my post? If the Tao cannot be known on principle, and if objective reality cannot be known in a practical sense, we'll just take the information we have, share it with others, and work at ways to make the world better. I take a pragmatic view on almost anything where action is required. What works is more important than what's true. Today, I'm on vacation, sitting on a [figurative] beach drinking beer. I don't have to be pragmatic. I want to be metaphysical.

Or have I missed your point?

Twenty or twenty-five years ago, I started reading books about a different way of seeing the world. I read Alan Watts descriptions of eastern religions and philosophies. When I read the Tao te Ching, I felt a sense of recognition, both from a philosophical and an emotional perspective. I’ve thought about it a lot over the years and read the book probably twenty times. — T Clark

I too read and gained a lot from reading Alan Watts - and also D T Suzuki and other authors on those themes. I especially liked Watt's books The Supreme Identity, Way of Zen, and Beyond Theology I try and live by them.

But Western science has pragmatic benefits that can't be found in Eastern philosophy. They're not competing perspectives if engineering and science are used for their intended purposes, which is finding things out and getting things done. It's when science and engineering start to masquerade as a philosophy that it becomes problematical. Engineers solve problems by reducing complexities to their basic units and seeing how they work together. That approach has yielded great technological power, but it's a lousy philosophy of life.

Alan Watts said many times, the fundamental illusion that humans fall into, is that they're separated from nature, egos enclosed in a 'bag of skin'. Whereas Taoism emphasises unity, non-division and non-duality. That really is a mode of being, rather than objective knowledge as such. Watts mainly wrote about Tao, Vedanta and Buddhism - all of them make that same basic point, in myriad ways. They are profound philosophies and have started to take root in Western and indeed global culture, thanks in part to Watts' books.

When I was younger, the idea that the world can be perfectly predicted if we know where everything is and where it is going at one moment in time was really attractive. — T Clark

I suppose you're familiar with 'LaPlace's Daemon' which states exactly this point. Simon LaPlace was 'France's Newton' and an immensely influential intellectual in the Enlightenment; he pioneered the science of statistics, among other things. But, and although this is a contentious point, I think LaPlace's daemon was slain by the uncertainty principle. I think quantum physics generally has torpedoed Enlightenment materialism. This was the theme of the well-known Tao of Physics, and although that book has its detractors, it has spawned an entire cultural subgenre.

Actually a really interesting case study in the whole question of the supremacy of scientific realism is that of the Einstein-Bohr debates. There's a good book called Quantum: Einstein, Bohr, and the Great Debate about the Nature of Reality, Manjit Kumar,, which goes into that in depth. Einstein simply couldn't accept certain things that came out of quantum theory - indeterminacy ('God playing dice') and non-locality ('spooky action at a distance'). Einstein famously exclaimed, 'does the moon not exist when nobody is looking at it?' whilst out on one of his afternoon strolls with Michael Besso. Of course, it was a rhetorical question, as he was convinced it did (wouldn't anyone be?) So throughout the 20's and 30's he challenged Bohr with a series of 'thought experiments' designed to show that quantum theory must be incomplete in some basic way. Bohr met all of those challenges. The last and most famous was the EPR paradox, which was what inspired John Bell's famous 'inequality' experiments, which were finally tested by Alain Aspect. Of the inequality findings, Bell said:

The discomfort that I feel is associated with the fact that the observed perfect quantum correlations seem to demand something like the "genetic" hypothesis. For me, it is so reasonable to assume that the photons in those experiments carry with them programs, which have been correlated in advance, telling them how to behave. This is so rational that I think that when Einstein saw that, and the others refused to see it, he was the rational man. The other people, although history has justified them, were burying their heads in the sand. I feel that Einstein's intellectual superiority over Bohr, in this instance, was enormous; a vast gulf between the man who saw clearly what was needed, and the obscurantist. So for me, it is a pity that Einstein's idea doesn't work. The reasonable thing just doesn't work.

John Stewart Bell (1928-1990), quoted in Quantum Profiles, by Jeremy Bernstein [Princeton University Press, 1991, p. 84]

It's a matter of irony that nowadays, the so-called 'realist' interpretations of physics are often said to be the 'parallel universes' of Hugh Everett or the various permutations of the multiverse suggested by string theorists. If you look back at Bohr and Heisenberg's philosophical musings on QM (retrospectively named the 'Copenhagen Interpretation'), they seem lucid - and parsimonious - by comparison.

See Quantum Mysticism: Gone but Not Forgotten, Juan Miguel Marin.

I wouldn't have thought that the first quote above was written by the same person as the second. The first is impressionistic, intuitive, uncomplicated, and straightforward. Down home. The second is formal, uses technical terminology, and requires following a confusing chain of logic. How do you see them fitting together? — T Clark

Well, isn't that sort of like the yin-yang duality that is supposed to be the manifestation of Tao? :) The first quote was an intuitive/holistic characterization of existence while the second was an analytic/logical specification of what existence is and how it is instantiated in the structure of reality. I am sorry if this specification was confusing, I just tried to pack it into a few sentences.

I'm sorry to burst the bubble here but I find the Tao Te Ching to be like a horoscope - ambiguous and vague enough to fool people into believing something which they really wouldn't.

It's a matter of irony that nowadays, the so-called 'realist' interpretations of physics are often said to be the 'parallel universes' of Hugh Everett or the various permutations of the multiverse suggested by string theorists. If you look back at Bohr and Heisenberg's philosophical musings on QM (retrospectively named the 'Copenhagen Interpretation'), they seem lucid - and parsimonious - by comparison. — Wayfarer

Actually the Everettian view is both lucid and parsimonious. The postulates are simply:
1. The universe is described by a quantum state
2. The quantum state evolves according to the Schrödinger equation

These postulates don't imply God playing dice, spooky action at a distance or consciousness-created reality.

Bohr had no answer to this challenge.

These postulates don't imply God playing dice, spooky action at a distance or consciousness-created reality. — Andrew M

But they do imply an infinite number of parallel universes - which is the only rebuttal I believe necessary. Bohr had the good grace to meet with Everett but he never gave the slightest indication of support for his notion.

If you look back at Bohr and Heisenberg's philosophical musings on QM (retrospectively named the 'Copenhagen Interpretation'), they seem lucid - and parsimonious - by comparison. — Wayfarer

The Copenhagen interpretation is less parsimonious than the many worlds interpretation because Copenhagen introduces an arbitrary assumption of a wave function "collapse" in an attempt to reduce reality to those logical possibilities that we observe. MWI accepts the reality of all logical possibilities that are defined by the wave function even though we only observe some of them.

But they do imply an infinite number of parallel universes - which is the only rebuttal I believe necessary. — Wayfarer

They imply one universe with a (possibly finite) number of branches in superposition.

"The Tao that can be spoken is not the eternal Tao." — T Clark

If I'm trying to interpret that so that it has things right, I'd take it to simply be a map/territory distinction. The map is not the territory, but we can only "speak the map." Or in other words, the world isn't like natural language, except for that part of the world that is natural language. The same goes for mathematical language, logic, etc.

Or in other words, the world isn't like natural language, except for that part of the world that is natural language. The same goes for mathematical language, logic, etc. — Terrapin Station

If the world isn't like logic then the world is like logic. That's what you get from absence of logic. To argue against logic is self-defeating.

Yes, I would agree with that pithy assessment of one the core tenets of the TTC. I would just say that in addition to "speaking the map", one could "be in the territory". This meaning a kind of raw direct experience of having one's feet on the ground, and actually seeing the area represented by the map. I think the TTC encourages us to recognize and value this unmediated experience, which it calls "the uncarved block". Of course, any concepts formed and words then spoken about such experiences are then "map speaking", as accurate, helpful, and honest as they may be. (Y)

Didn't think he was arguing against logic per se, if that is what you meant. That would be highly illogical, Captain. :B

Didn't think he was arguing against logic per se, if that is what you meant. That would be highly illogical, Captain. — 0 thru 9

To claim that the world is illogical is to claim that the world is not what it is. Therefore, the world is not illogical. The claim refutes itself.

I guess I'm saying that I feel the Tao points more towards the interplay between the objective and subjective then it being interchangeable with objective reality. Also, it's an objective fact that our subjective interpretation of the objective world has empirically measurable effects, so we can know there's some principle at work but cannot do much more with it then embody it through living out life. As soon as we're able to clearly state it as a principle which is now only present subjectively (for example: let's say forming a social society turns out to be a natural law which repeats across the universe as long as there are sufficient conditions... like other lifeforms existing) we've probably evolved further to such an extent that we're deducing empirical facts from our past while we're still subject to some sort of subjective interpretation in the current moment.

I'm sorry to burst the bubble here but I find the Tao Te Ching to be like a horoscope - ambiguous and vague enough to fool people into believing something which they really wouldn't. — TheMadFool

There is no bubble to burst! The Tao accepts questioning, laughter, being ignored, and honors like they are all the same. The Tao, the highest good, is like water. It will wash stinky feet without complaint, and will flow over solid gold without boasting. But i see what you may be referring to. The TTC may seem like some New Age advice which can have all the firmness and flavor of a wet noodle. To which I would say that much of the cliche-sounding New Age wisdom is a copy of a copy of texts like the Tao Te Ching, imho. But chapter 67 anticipates this question, and answers better than i ever could:

Some say that my teaching is nonsense.
Others call it lofty but impractical.
But to those who have looked inside themselves,
this nonsense makes perfect sense.
And to those who put it into practice,
this loftiness has roots that go deep. I have just three things to teach:
simplicity, patience, compassion.
These three are your greatest treasures.
Simple in actions and in thoughts,
you return to the source of being.
Patient with both friends and enemies,
you accord with the way things are.
Compassionate toward yourself,
you reconcile all beings in the world.

But Western science has pragmatic benefits that can't be found in Eastern philosophy. They're not competing perspectives if engineering and science are used for their intended purposes, which is finding things out and getting things done. It's when science and engineering start to masquerade as a philosophy that it becomes problematical. Engineers solve problems by reducing complexities to their basic units and seeing how they work together. That approach has yielded great technological power, but it's a lousy philosophy of life. — Wayfarer

You have said what I am trying to say in this post, but better than I did. Thanks.

I suppose you're familiar with 'LaPlace's Daemon' which states exactly this point. Simon LaPlace was 'France's Newton' and an immensely influential intellectual in the Enlightenment; he pioneered the science of statistics, among other things. But, and although this is a contentious point, I think LaPlace's daemon was slain by the uncertainty principle. I think quantum physics generally has torpedoed Enlightenment materialism. This was the theme of the well-known Tao of Physics, and although that book has its detractors, it has spawned an entire cultural subgenre. — Wayfarer

I read "The Tao of Physics" long ago and didn't like it. I think it's important to keep the "uncertainty principle" associated with the Tao's unspeakability separate from that that comes from quantum mechanics. Any similarity is metaphorical.