>So, what do you mean by 'understand'? I think you mean 'perceive a clearly discernable causal sequence.' The principles that drive internal combustion engines, for example, are like that. And generally speaking you could say that the behaviours describable in terms of classical physics, chemistry, and other such 'hard sciences', are also clearly understandable from a cause-and-effect sequence.

I am delighted you bring that up. I went through a phase where I got really into epistemology, specifically the works of Pyrrho, and it made me realize that you're right, it is very difficult to truly *know* something. At some point, everything breaks down to prior experience and our flawed physical perceptions, so what does it mean to *know* anything, especially when all throughout history things that people know as fact turn out to be wrong.

So I suppose what I am getting at, related to our other conversation, is perhaps science and magic have a non-dualist nature with each other?

>Your analogy breaks down here, in that religions are not primarily concerned with producing effects or outcomes, in that same narrow or limited sense. There might often be cross-over, in that in traditional cultures magic and religious rituals were often intertwined, but religions also have an altogether different role, that of situating humankind in a cosmically-meaningful narrative framework.

Point taken.



Reading my own words back here I find them hard to defend, and your points difficult to dispute. Apologies for my tone.

Ah, Kant and Jung were what originally got me into philosophy, iirc. It's been forever since I read them though.



>designed my curriculum around those pursuits - philosophy, comparative religion and anthropology being central to it

A class after my own heart. It sounds like we share many of the same interests. Comparative religion has been an interest of mine for some time.

>At the end of that, I thought that (and I still think that) Buddhism has the best overall product offering, so to speak.

There are definitely elements of Buddhism that speak to me, zen specifically, and I've fluctuated between that and Taoism over the years on which one I lean more towards. In general I find I like the sense of forward momentum of the Tao, but in many ways they kinda seem like different takes on the same concept. Not to be reductive, but to quote Dracula, "perhaps the same could be said of all religions."

> It means 'saving insight' - basically, enlightenment, in that Eastern sense. And though it's something I never have and probably never will attain, I believe there is abundant textual evidence that it is real.

My understanding is that the concept of Gnosis is essentially the same concept of The Way, just filtered through an early Western/Christian lens. Iirc, each of us contains a spark of the divine that we must come to know and embody, which sounds a lot like the Tao/Enlightenment to me, so it sounds like we agree there.

I'm also interested in how some of the older Western schools of thought approached some of the ideas found in Tao and Buddhism, but seem to have different reactions to it. In particular, I remember some aspects of (I think?) Gnosticism and cynicism having some interesting parallels, though they seemed to take it in different directions.

I'm less familiar with the Hindu sources but I have dabbled in some Buddhist thought as well, though not to any great degree. Can you elaborate on what makes them more accessible? My understanding is that part of the "impenetrableness" of the Tao is a feature and not a bug.

I don't know that "mutually beneficial" is the same as selfless, as it is by definition, beneficial to both parties.

To put it another way:

Science we don't understand is "magic."
Science we do understand is not magic, it is science.
Therefore, explainable magic is science.
Corollary: Science *is* explainable magic.

If explainable magic is science, then unexplainable science slips back into the category of "science we don't understand," meaning that the only difference between science and magic is if you, the observer, believe you understand the underlying processes of what is happening. Both magic and science exist simultaneously, and can only be differentiated by an outside observer. As the quote I used originally states, highly advanced tech would be magic to cavemen, and sufficiently advanced tech from the future would seem like magic to us, but the only difference is whether or not we have some structure for investigation and explanation. So science and magic aren't necessarily opposites, they're just kind of different attitudes/states of being, imo.

For a specific verse, here is one from Wayne Dyer's translation:

“It is through selfless action I will experience my own fulfillment."

As much as I love seemingly contradictory lines like this, this is one I've experienced issues with irl. I've been told I would "Light myself on fire to keep others warm," which seems like it falls within the selfless action, but I have not seen it lead to much fulfillment long term, and have been told repeatedly by people I, essentially, need to be more selfish. How do you see this line working in a practical sense?

It's neither my place to allow or disallow, I'm just unsure what you're hoping to accomplish when you come into a discussion of Taoism and open with your total non-belief in its principals, and I don't really see how what you've said so far connects to legalism either tbh.



Honestly I think one of the things I'd like to discuss is, if the Tao cannot be explained, why do we have the Tao Te Ching? I'm familiar with the generalities of it, but it does seem deliciously ironic in a very Taoist way. Also, do you have a favorite translation? I read it once forever ago and don't remember which translator I read. Curious how it varies from edition to edition.



I've enjoyed our conversations before, Arcane, but it really seems like you're overstepping your bounds here. We have been very respectful and have not been rude to you, and the topic of this thread is very clear. If you have something related to the topic, feel free to share, but please try to stay on topic and do not accuse others of being rude when we have not been.

Thank you, I think this helps put it into words better. My argument is that religion, science and art are all frameworks for explaining reality that use different processes and vocabulary, but are ultimately concerned with parsing truth and meaning out of the chaos of reality. What one practitioner considers practical magic would be explainable science to someone else, but they are both *talking about the same process* just from different frames of reference. It's like if you say "Dog" instead of "Canine." Both refer to the same animal, just from different linguistic frameworks.

Thank you for your input, but we are specifically discussing Taoist thought in here. If you don't agree with it to begin with, I'm not sure our discussion will get much of anywhere. I'm not looking to debate it, as I get plenty of people telling me it doesn't make any sense when I try to talk about it irl; I want to learn more about it and discuss it with people who aren't going to dismiss the concepts. I've appreciated our discussions in other threads, but you obviously don't subscribe to Taoist thought, so I'm not sure what you're hoping to add to the conversation.

Thank you for the resources! I will have to check those out later. I think the biggest thing that appeals to me is, as my name implies, the liminality inherent to the philosophy; the way yin becomes yang and yang becomes yin and both are counterparts of the same process. It informs a lot of my thinking and, tbh, has made it difficult to connect with other people. As a white guy stuck in the Bible Belt, I don't run into a lot of non-dualist explorers of the Way, lol, so it's hard to tell if I'm even understanding it correctly.

I'm not sure if this is Tao related or not, but one of the things I've been thinking about lately is how sand can appear rough or smooth depending on your perspective. If the sand is small enough, it appears smooths, but if you zoom in, it is usually rough and jagged. I feel like that kind of contradictory truth speaks to how I understand the Tao, though maybe I'm off base.

>I understand what you're saying, but think about it as rationally as you possibly can: they're not literally talking about the same thing/process.

Yes, I believe they are. At least sometimes. It's like the parable of the blind men and the elephant. We are all grasping for comprehension from a singular point of view and interpreting it through our own meat and biases. What one person considers divine may just be a lump of hard clay to someone else. But just because some people think the sun is a god, doesn't mean the sun and it's effects aren't real.



>It would really help if you gave a recent example and stepped it through.

No offense, but I feel like the treatise has several already, Alchemy being the main one. I'm starting to wonder if I explained it poorly or if people are just skimming. If I mix two things together, and consider the result science but someone else considers it a function of the unknowable divine, who is to say who is wrong? Why does a greater understanding of how it works invalidate someone else's belief in the spiritual/divine? And I'm coming at this as a hard-skeptic/atheist perspective, I just feel like scientific inquiry should also extend to religious claims. Admittedly, from a historical perspective it's usually religion bashing science and not the other way around, so it makes sense why they have tension with each other.

>I think overall you'd benefit from reading more of the history of culture and the history of ideas. There are discernable themes that emerge from such studies.

I'm sure you meant this in good faith, but the history of culture and the world is literally one of my biggest lifelong rabbit holes, so that kind of stings to hear. I am aware this has not been a static thing over the years, and that there have been many examples of science and religion working together historically, which was part of why I brought up alchemy. I'm obviously talking about more modern day tensions. I think perhaps I'm not explaining myself well.

I guess my ultimate frustration is that sometimes it seems like science and religion are essentially talking about the same thing/process, but then get hung up on the specific details. As I pointed out with my alchemy example, a lot of alchemists were doing proto-science but were often labeled as cranks by both science and religion at varying times. Frankly I don't even know if I'd considered myself a spiritualist because I am pretty hard core skeptic, I just think that "magic" being recognized at all suggests a need for further inquiry, as "magic" is ignorance that can be clarified into science. So perhaps a semantic argument, but I think we should look at it more as looking for magic to distill into truth, as there will always be more ignorance.

That's a good way to think about it actually. I guess what I'm suggesting is that magic is real, it's just all "hard magic," and is thus explainable. Once we properly understand it, it ceases to be magic, but because most people have limited knowledge bases and experience, the world will always be filled with magic because magic only exists in ignorance. What frustrates me is the way science and religion so often approach similar truths but refuse to work together because of their ideological differences. We're learning now that the alchemists were right about an awful lot if you actually bother to follow their instructions, they were just wrong about the reasons why, as it turns out.

In regards to wolves, that's a good example of what I'm talking about. People were correctly identifying that wolves sometimes eat sheep at that this is a bad thing (for humans). However, they went way to far with this belief and started demonizing wolves like crazy, to the point where it was often kill on site and drove down their population significantly. As it turns out, most wolves just want to be left alone, and if you leave a big dumb animal out in a field alone, you can hardly blame a predator for trying to eat it. In general I take a lot of issue with the anthropocentric view of the world most people have, but that's neither here nor there.

I'll admit this may be my own bias here. As my name suggests, I have a tendency towards thinking about liminality. I have just often wondered if the physical separation between bodies is as important as we think it is from our first person singular perspective. Things like quantum entanglement and hiveminds fascinate me, so I sometimes get a bit abstract with these things.

>If the Supreme Court is a single unit composed of nine justices, then the Supreme Court is a single fleshy object that has nine tongues and eighteen elbows, among other parts.

I think you could argue this is true, they are just not all necessarily connected physically. Think of a Man-o-War jellyfish. It is one creature that is actually made up of a colony of different creatures that act together as a single living organism or other hiveminded or generally composite organisms in nature. The mitochondria in your cells was once a completely separate organism and still maintains its own unique mitochondrial dna. So my question then is, does it not simply become a matter of what frame of reference you are looking at a thing through? Is it one thing, or many things working together, or a part of a larger whole? It's all relative to the context, which makes the answers both yes and no, depending on what level you view it at.

I suppose my larger point is that all of these questions are rooted in the fact that we experience life as a singular experience, and I am questioning if it is possible for larger, gestalt consciousness to arise from the collection of individual minds. A family is made up of individual people but can act as one. Army units and sport teams can be trained to act as one, despite being many. Is that so different from our own personal biological experience, where so many different organs and chemicals make up what we consider our singular self? Is it possible what we experience as a single point of view is itself a gestalt of smaller, disparate processes?

No you're good. Let me try explaining it another way.

You are one person. You experience life from one perspective.

Your family is made up of several people, including you. Your family is one unit, but the unit experiences multiple different perspective in time and space. The information collected by each unit can only be shared when the parts of the unit are together. But the unit is always 1 family.

Your family is part of the greater whole of humanity, humanity being one unit.

Humanity is part of the greater whole of life, life being one unit.

Your body is 1 unit, but it is made up of several organs, which are each individually their own unit. Each organ is likewise made up of multiple cells, which each cell being its own unit.

So 1 thing can be made up of an infinite number of smaller things. And eventually everything will die, the one will become 0. When I say "die" I mean, cease to be the thing that it is. Rocks don't die, but they erode away or break down into not rocks eventually. The rock ceases to be and becomes something else.

Yeah, like I said, it started off as kind of a joke, so I'm not sure it really makes much sense to anyone but me. To quote the Beatles though, "I am he as you are he as you are me and we are all together."

It's basically saying we are all connected to everything (infinity) but also connected by death (0), while also maintaining our own individuality (1). Everything dies (infinity becomes 0), and from death new potential is created (0 becomes infinity).

>It sounds wacky, I know, but I can picture it, and that's no small feat. A good metaphor is like a good wine: they're hard to craft.

Agreed :up:

You're good, it is still one of life's great mysteries. Speaking of reckless, I had a thought a while back that started off as a joke, but I can't help but feel like might have some truth to it. It's essentially that the grand unified theory boils down to 0 = 1 = infinity.

Essentially: Infinity is endless and has no boundaries. 0 is endless and has no boundaries. Therefore, 0 is infinite. Things that have boundaries are not endless. Things that are not 0 are defined by their boundaries and therefore cannot be 0 or infinite. If 0 is infinite, then everything is both part of 0 and infinity, including my individual sense of self, the 1.

Not sure if any of that made sense.

Ah ha, you've hit on the foundation point of it all. Time and space are the same thing. Time can only be measured by movement in space: the ticking of a second hand on a clock, the decay of an isotope, the expansion of the universe, etc., So the rock at the top of the peak represents a moment of ultimate potential, before time began. The tipping point, when it started to move was when time started, because time *is* movement. When it reaches the bottom is when all potential has been exhausted, and it reaches a state of stillness. However, it's important to remember that the earth will eventually give way to a new peak for the process to start again, which implies that the mountain our rock is rolling down was once the earth at the bottom of a previous mountain that has long since worn away.

To elaborate with an example I cooked up myself, I refer to this kind of thing as the Rock and Peak Theory. My thought is to picture a rock on top of the very peak of a mountain. Time started when the rock tipped over and started tumbling down the mountain, and time will end when it eventually reaches the bottom of the mountain. The flow of time we experience is limited by the path the rock has already taken down the mountain, but is still allowed some randomness by the bumps and diverging paths we have yet to take. Then, one day after the rock has reached the bottom, the earth will eventually erode away beneath it, becoming a new mountain, and the rock will tip again, starting the whole process over.

My, admittedly limited, understanding is that electrons are a negative energy particle that functions like a wave. Obviously this is hard to picture mentally, but the closest thing I can think of is imagine that the earth is the protons and neutrons of the molecule and the moon is the electron. From our perspective, the moon is in one place moving very slowly. But imagine if the moon moved really really fast, so fast that it caused a gestalt optical illusion that made it seem like instead of a single rock, it was more like a solid dome around the earth. If you stopped the moon at any point, the dome would disappear and you could see where it was, but without stopping it, you can't tell where the moon is in the illusory dome it creates around the earth. Hence Heisenberg's uncertainty principal. Because of the way electrons and subatomic particles work, it's almost like a cloud of potential that collapse upon observation, at least as I understand it. Perhaps the experience you're describing is an awareness that although you are what you are, there was potential for things to have been different before that cloud of potential facts collapsed into permanent reality.

"That would fall under the perview of your conundrum of philosophy."

-The Engineer

Sorry, couldn't resist. To answer the question though, I think beauty, despite ultimately being largely subjective, boils down to "a thing that you like looking at because it makes you feel something." A lot of that is built on visual symmetry, cultural patterns, biological preferences and what have you, but I think beauty if more about the individual's reaction to it than an objective force/thing in and of itself.

I think I might actually push back against that, if you'll bear with my reasoning. I think it's possible to say that ideas do, in a sense, exist in the physical world, just not in the way we normally think of it. Rather than the idea being a solid "thing" in the mind, I believe the physical manifestation of thoughts can be seen in the specific electrical/chemical reactions happening in a persons brain when they think that thing. So ideas are physically real, but exist as more as an ongoing natural process rather than a concrete object. Imagining an object and looking at an object light up similar parts of the brain in scans, which I think is the closest we can currently get to "seeing" thoughts from the outside.

On a similarly related note, I think if you look at the way thoughts and memetics move from mind to mind, mutating, growing and changing as they do... I think it's possible to interpret ideas as having, if not a kind of life, then at least something similar enough to one that it warrants further investigation.

My thought about this is that infinity exists in the same way 0 does, as an abstraction of the set. Hence the whole "some infinities are larger than others" thing. If 0 is nothing from the set, infinity is everything from the set. But I am not a mathematician.

I have considered before that the biggest difference between a philosophy and a religion is the degree to which you believe in the supernatural. Ultimately, they are both semi-formalized structural guides for living, imo. From my understanding, taosim can be either a religion or a philosophy, depending on how one interprets it.

I should clarify that when I use "magic" I mean anything considered supernatural. I do not believe in the supernatural, because I believe all natural experiences are explainable and therefor natural. So by calling religion "magic" what I mean to say is that "magic" is the recognition and attempt to utilize a natural property or phenomenon that has either up until now resisted natural explanation or that religion has already created its own explanation for what is almost certainly natural phenomenon. My suggestion isn't that we allow religion to dictate the answers, but that we use the intuitive nature of religion as a jumping off point for further inquiry. An example of what I'm talking about would be historical alchemy. It used to be considered magic, when really it was mostly just proto-chemistry, and a lot of modern science refuses to investigate their claims on the assumption that they called it magic so it must have been wrong, despite much of what the alchemists came up with producing semi-accurate results once you strip the supernatural from it.

As another example, I have considered before that the concept of Platonic Ideals may have been Plato recognizing mental schema but attributing them to an external force instead of an internal one.

Sorry, it's the only answer I've got. Whether or not a person's life is "worth living" is one of the most personal questions I can imagine. I admit I also find it somewhat unsatisfactory, but it's the conclusion I've come to. I'm not convinced this can be objectively measured since so much of life is ultimately subjective.

>Like, literally, what are they talking about when they talk about electrons

My understanding is that electrons are electricity. A/C and D/C just describes the way the electrons "flow."

>But then, I face an ethical dilemma: is it ethical for me to do "Deep Ontology", if I can't even understand the science that talks about the base of Reality itself

I dont think the human mind is equipped to fully understand those things generally, and tbh I'm not entirely sure even quantum physicists really totally understand it. Just keep your humility and it should be fine, I'd think.

Yeah, getting down to that level can be a bit of a mindscrew sometimes. It's kind of like what we're discovering about the connection between the brain and the gut now, with how much your gut microbiome can affect mood and mental health and whatnot. All that bacteria and what not isn't technically part of you per se as it all has its own various unique dna and whatnot, and yet it's unique to you and is integral to how you live. So is it part of you? In some ways, do loved ones become a part of you once you're experiences with them allow for an internal approximation of their external self? Is all life part of some greater gestalt whole that we are not capable of fully understanding, in the way that the cell has no concept of being part of the body? I'm heading to bed soon so I'll be afk for a while, but now that I'm on the same page I think we can kick up some fun topics around this subject.

Got'cha. Then in that case, I've wrestled with the "Why is there" question quite a bit, and I think the answer to your question may be the same, at least for me.

Sum ergo sum. I am, therefore I am. There is something instead of nothing because something is there. You are what you are because that's what you are. On some level I think it's hard to mentally tackle because it's such a foundational truth, though maybe that's just me.

Although another direction to come at that question is, "What defines what you are? Where do you stop and other things begin? Are experiences you have but don't remember still a part of you?"

I think I may be understanding you now. It reminds me of something I brought up in another thread, the question of "Why is there something instead of nothing?" Where as your question seems to be "Why am I this and not something else?" if I understand correctly?

Thank you for elaborating. I asked because something in there sounded like experiences I have had with depersonalization/derealization, though perhaps I misunderstood. To be honest, I'm not as up on my terms as I should be, so I'm getting a little lost in your vocabulary. Can you explain it as if I were a child?

I may be getting the shape of it now. So is the experience that you are having something like a disconnect between the reality you are experiencing and your sensory perceptions of it? As if you are experiencing your life from "outside" somehow?

I'm just having a hard time grasping the experience you seem to be having. Can you describe it another way?

>But the “odd experience”, if you want to call it that, is that I (in particular, as an individual) experience their “logical modality”, so to speak, with such a violent, steamrolling force in my ordinary, everyday, day-to-day life, that from an ordinary perspective, those very same brute facts about my existence don’t seem contingent, they seem necessary (and to me, particularly, this is an enormous source of philosophical perplexity. Iexperience it “as such”, in some yet-to-be-defined way).

Can you elaborate on this further? I'm not sure I understand what you mean.

I think that largely depends on what someone considers "god." However, in a similar vein, I think it's possible to prove the "soul" exists.

Assuming that the souls is:

1) an invisible force inside but separate from your body that

2) makes you who you are and

3) leaves your body upon death

then I think the "soul" can pretty easily be interpreted as the electricity in your body and the interplay it has with your various biological processes.