My honest hunch is that Zen Buddhism is somehow often misconstrued, even among certain self proclaimed Zen Buddhism teachers/masters/experts which further the misconstrued. — javra

Oh, no doubt. I'm one of that generation that used to sit around reading Alan Watts and D T Suzuki and believing that you could just 'get it'. But I realised quite early on that the reality is very different to that, the actual life of Zen monks is like being in the Army (even tougher, in lots of ways. There's no leave.)

But I'm also sure the orientation to the Good, or the 'will to truth', is not a matter of preference, of like or dislike. I think it manifests rather as a moral imperative, as an implicit awareness of something that must be heeded. Bringing the will in accordance with it is the supreme challenge for any of the perennial philosophies.

There is a saying I've heard from time to time 'the good which has no opposite'. The point being, what we think of as good is usually defined in opposition to what is not - pleasure as distinct from pain, health as distinct from illness, wealth as distinct from poverty. That is naturally what is subject to like and dislike. Whereas, for example, the Good (to agathon) in Greek philosophy, is not one pole in a duality but the ground of Being itself. Plotinus’ One, for instance, is purely Good—not because it is opposed to evil but because it precedes the level of reality where such oppositions arise. (Hence also 'evil as privation of the Good'.) But again, the challenge is to be able to see (or be) that, not to form a concept about it. (Hence the 'participatory knowing' aspect. And again, not at all easy to fathom, not in the least.)

Agapē, commonly understood as "selfless brotherly love", that is not oriented any any person(s)? — javra

Matt. 5:45 'He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good'. Doesn't that underwrite the Christian attitude of brotherly love, charity to the dispossessed and despised?

Yet, again, when one loves, one is necessarily attached - — javra

Ah. Interesting. I recall the folk wisdom often quoted at wedding ceremonies, about the different kinds of love - eros, philia, agapē, storge and so on (there's eight). I think in English all of these tend to be congealed together under the heading of romantic attachment. Whereas the Buddhist 'karuna' or 'mudita' is perhaps closer to the Christian agapē, which 'pays no regard to persons'.

I'll uphold that the Dalai Lama, as with the original Buddha, is extremely attached/biased toward what some in the West term the Good — javra

Then I don't know if that is seeing the point! This is something often grappled with by Zen Buddhist aspirants - on the one hand, they are constantly urged to make a supreme effort, and the effort demanded of Zen students is arduous in the extreme. But at the same time, they're told that any effort arising from wanting some result or getting somewhere is mere egotism! The theory is that renunciation includes complete detachment from oneself, from trying to be or to get. That is the 'gordian knot' of life in a nutshell, and the reason that Zen Buddhism in particular is well-known for being a highly-focussed discipline. Krishnamurti would often say 'It is the truth that liberates you, not the effort to be free'. Not that this is in the least easy to understand or to fathom, because it's definitely not, to my mind.

I think Kant put paid to the idea that traditional metaphysical truth is attainable — Janus

He did so by re-defining its scope, not declaring it otiose, in the way that positivism did. Remember one of his key works is Prolegomena to any future metaphysics, so he clearly believed there could be such a subject.

I think intellectual honesty demands that we acknowledge that the truth of such speculations cannot be known. — Janus

As has already been pointed out:

Your idea that it is impossible to provide evidence for non-standard forms of knowledge is simply not true. — Leontiskos

I'll also add something I've learned from John Vervaeke's lectures, about the different kinds of knowing:

Propositional knowledge is the knowledge of ‘facts’ or other ‘truths’ expressed in clear statements. It’s all about propositions. It’s the sort of logical and theoretical side of knowledge.

This type of knowledge answers the “what” questions about the world. For example, knowing that “the Earth orbits the Sun” is a piece of propositional knowledge.

These types of knowledge can be easily written down and communicated, making them the most familiar and widely studied form of knowledge in traditional educational systems.

I think that is the domain that you're referring to, as defining the entire scope of knowledge, and anything beyond that being 'speculative'. But it goes on:

Procedural knowledge is knowledge of how to do specific activities and sequences of activities.

This type of knowledge explores the “how” of things. It is the knowledge of processes and skills, such as knowing how to ride a bicycle or play a musical instrument. Reading a book on riding a bike will give you the propositional knowledge about it, but won’t actually help you do it.

This type of knowledge is often implicit and gained through practice and repeated actions rather than through verbal instruction. It’s what is often referred to as “know-how,” as opposed to the “know-what” of propositional knowledge. [Note: this was something emphasised by Michael Polanyi in his 'tacit knowledge']

Perspectival knowledge is about knowing what something is like from a certain angle or perspective or context. It’s about being able to see it in a certain way, potentially from someone else’s view point, through a certain lens.

This type of knowledge might be subjective and grounded in the first-person. It’s the knowledge of “what it is like” to be in a certain situation.

For instance, knowing how it feels to be in a crowded place or understanding one’s emotional response during a stressful event are both forms of perspectival knowledge.

Perspectival knowledge is about having a particular standpoint or perspective and is intimately tied to our individual perceptions, experience of the world and cognitive state. These are not things that we can fully learn through propositions and processes.

Participatory knowledge is the knowledge of what it’s like to play a certain role in your environment or in relationships.

Vervaeke considers this to be the most profound of the four types of knowledge. It involves being in a deep, transformative relationship with the world, participating fully in something greater than yourself.

It is not just knowing about, but knowing through active engagement and transformation within specific contexts or environments. It shapes and is shaped by the interaction between the person and the world, influencing one’s identity and sense of belonging.

This kind of knowledge is experiential and co-creative, often seen in the dynamics of relationships, culture, and community participation.

source
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I much prefer the current Dalai Lama's underlying tenet that Buddhism is a faith grounded in reason. — javra

An important point. Whilst Buddhist philosophy is rational, it has also been recognised from the outset that there are also states of being beyond the scope of reason.

These are those dhammas, bhikkhus, that are deep, difficult to see, difficult to understand, peaceful and sublime, beyond the sphere of reasoning, subtle, comprehensible only to the wise, which the Tathāgata, having realized for himself with direct knowledge, propounds to others; and it is concerning these that those who would rightly praise the Tathāgata in accordance with reality would speak. — The Brahmajala Sutta

It's important to distinguish what is beyond reason from the merely irrational, which is not an easy distinction to grasp. But then, I think that is also understood in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, in that he believes that there genuinely 'revealed truths'.

Same point as? — javra

The point about the importance of detachment. The context is:

I always say that every person on this earth has the freedom to practice or not practice religion. It is all right to do either. But once you accept religion, it is extremely important to be able to focus your mind on it and sincerely practice the teachings in your daily life. All of us can see that we tend to indulge in religious favouritism by saying, "I belong to this or that religion", rather than making effort to control our agitated minds. This misuse of religion, due to our disturbed minds, also sometimes creates problems.

I know a physicist from Chile who told me that it is not appropriate for a scientist to be biased towards science because of his love and passion for it. I am a Buddhist practitioner and have a lot of faith and respect in the teachings of the Buddha. However, if I mix up my love for and attachment to Buddhism, then my mind shall be biased towards it. A biased mind, which never sees the complete picture, cannot grasp the reality. And any action that results from such a state of mind will not be in tune with reality. As such it causes a lot of problems.

According to Buddhist philosophy, happiness is the result of an enlightened mind whereas suffering is caused by a distorted mind. This is very important. A distorted mind, in contrast to an enlightened mind, is one that is not in tune with reality. — H H The Dalai Lama

Isn't he saying here that 'attachment' is what introduces 'bias'? That it prevents seeing 'what is', because it skews judgement? That is very much what I was driving at.

---

One general point I've been mulling over is when philosophers speaks portentiously of 'reality' or 'the nature of reality'. I feel the better expression is that philosophy considers the nature of being. 'Reality', after all, is based on the latin root 'res-' meaning 'thing'. And I believe that is the province of the objective sciences. Whereas 'being' is, in a way, a less specific term, as it pertains to human beings, and sentient beings generally //as well as the question of the meaning of 'being'//. I don't intend to devote any time to discussing Heidegger, but I recognise that his concern with the meaning of being and the unconcealment of being is near to what I mean.

the claims to know by direct insight the true nature of reality and the meaning of life. — Janus

Aren't exploration of those sorts of questions fundamental to philosophy proper? I know the analytical-plain language types don't think so, but then, they didn't feature in the original post.

That passage from the Dalai Lama makes the same point! Not a matter of like and dislike, for and against. It's significant that he was talking at an Interfaith Dialogue.

I was going to ask the same question as @Tom Storm but I see he beat me to it. Very well.

It so far seems to me that to have compassion for others and the world at large one must necessarily hold opinions of what is right and wrong, of what is just, etc., and, furthermore, that via compassion one must become moved - if not into action then at the very least into personal sorrow - by the injustice-resulting sorrows of others in the world. — javra

Going back to the sources of the 'writhings and thickets of views' quote, it is set forth in this text. It starts with:

...does Master Gotama hold the view: 'The cosmos is eternal: only this is true, anything otherwise is worthless'?"

"...no..."

"Then does Master Gotama hold the view: 'The cosmos is not eternal: only this is true, anything otherwise is worthless'?"

"...no..."

The questioner asks a series of similar questions, all of which concern what today would be called metaphysical questions, and each of which the Buddha declines to answer. Finally, the questioner asks:

Does Master Gotama have any position at all?"

"A 'position,' Vaccha, is something that a Tathagata has done away with. What a Tathagata sees is this: 'Such is form, such its origination, such its disappearance; such is feeling, such its origination, such its disappearance; such is perception...

This is related to the well-known 'poison arrow' simile, in which it is said that preoccupation with philosophical questions, such as those posed by the questioner, draw attention away from the real problem, which is pressing and urgent:

It's just as if a man were wounded with an arrow thickly smeared with poison. His friends & companions, kinsmen & relatives would provide him with a surgeon, and the man would say, 'I won't have this arrow removed until I know whether the man who wounded me was a noble warrior, a brahman, a merchant, or a worker.' He would say, 'I won't have this arrow removed until I know the given name & clan name of the man who wounded me... until I know whether he was tall, medium, or short... until I know whether he was dark, ruddy-brown, or golden-colored...

There's more, but this conveys the general meaning. So what comes across is that 'opinions' or 'views' about questions such as whether the universe is eternal or not, whether the soul is identical to the body or not, whether the Buddha continues to exist after death or not, are all put to one side, as it were. The pressing task is always to discern the causal chain of dependent origination which is at work in the body and mind, and that is not subject to opinion, it is operating quite impersonally whatever opinion one holds.

As for compassion - it might be recalled that part of the Buddhist mythos is that, after realising supreme enlightenment, the Buddha was inclined to retreat into anonymity and say nothing further about it, but for the intervention of Brahma, who begged him to teach 'out of compassion for the suffering of the world' - which the Buddha then agreed to do.

But it also might be added that later Buddhism put a greater emphasis on compassion, in that the aim of the Buddhist aspirant was not for his/her own liberation, but that of all others. I think it's also a generally understood fact that seeing through one's own illusions and self-centredness naturally gives rise to a greater sense of empathy which begins to spontaneously arise as a consequence.

The claims they make are not testable predictions, so how are we to assess the veracity of what is claimed by them? — Janus

There are themes and insights that are discernable in many different schools of philosophical and religious thought. When you say these are not 'testable', in fact, they are, insofar as generations of aspirants, students and scholars have endeavoured to practice them and live according to those lights, in the laboratory of life, so to speak. As for 'assessing the results of practice', there is an often-quoted Buddhist text on that question, the Kalama Sutta:

Don't go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, "This contemplative is our teacher." When you know for yourselves that, "These qualities are unskillful; these qualities are blameworthy; these qualities are criticized by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to harm & to suffering" — then you should abandon them.' Thus was it said. And in reference to this was it said.

"Now, Kalamas, don't go by reports, by legends, by traditions, by scripture, by logical conjecture, by inference, by analogies, by agreement through pondering views, by probability, or by the thought, 'This contemplative is our teacher.' When you know for yourselves that, 'These qualities are skillful; these qualities are blameless; these qualities are praised by the wise; these qualities, when adopted & carried out, lead to welfare & to happiness' — then you should enter & remain in them.

proselytizing on this platform by "believers" runs rampant in the constant defense of fallacious arguments. — DifferentiatingEgg

Can you point to examples? I do notice them from time to time, but I don't see them 'running rampant'.

(I’m Australian but my eldest son and family are in the US, he’s now dual citizen.)

Of course. Nothing surprising.

Meanwhile

Elon Musk has had it with judges blocking the Trump administration’s moves.
The billionaire face of DOGE called for the impeachment of judges in a meltdown on X Tuesday night, following a flurry of court orders blocking the government’s bids to freeze funding for foreign aid and federal grants, as well as stem refugee admissions.

“The only way to restore rule of the people in America is to impeach judges,” Musk wrote in one post. “No one is above the law, including judges.”

“If ANY judge ANYWHERE can block EVERY Presidential order EVERYWHERE, we do NOT have democracy, we have TYRANNY of the JUDICIARY,” he added in another. — TheDailyBeast

Zero comprehension of the separation of powers.

some wag dubbed the "Big Bang". — Gnomon

Said 'wag' was actually Fred Hoyle, an eminent British cosmologist who never accepted the idea; in a BBC radio interview.

I'm chipping in because I happened upon a very good online article on Whitehead, ‘Apart from the Experiences of Subjects There Is Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Bare Nothingness’—Nature and Subjectivity in Alfred North Whitehead, Isabella Schlehaider.

Some snippets:

The Bifurcation of Nature

Whitehead describes modern thought as plagued by a “radical inconsistency” which he calls “the bifurcation of nature”. According to Whitehead, this fundamental “incoherence” at the foundation of modern thought is reflected not only in the concept of nature itself, but in every field of experience—in modern theories of experience and subjectivity, of ethics and aesthetics, as well as many others. In “The Concept of Nature” (1920), Whitehead states that nature splits into two seemingly incompatible spheres of reality at the beginning of modern European thought in the 17th century: ‘Nature’ on the one hand refers to the (so-called) objective nature accessible to the natural sciences only, i.e., the materialistically conceptualized nature of atoms, molecules, cells, and so on; at the same time, however, ‘nature’ also refers to the (subjectively) perceptible and experienced, i.e., the appearing nature with its qualities, valuations, and sensations. Whitehead considers this modernist division of nature in thought—the differentiation of primary and secondary qualities, of ‘first’ and ‘second’ nature, of a material and mental sphere—a fundamental, serious, and illicit incoherence. His term for this incoherence is ‘bifurcation of nature’, for the question of how these two concepts of nature—‘objective’ and ‘subjective’—relate to each other remains largely unresolved for Whitehead within the philosophical tradition of modernity.


Nature as a Meaningless Complex of Facts

"All modern philosophy hinges round the difficulty of describing the world in terms of subject and predicate, substance and quality, particular and universal. [...] We find ourselves in a buzzing world, amid a democracy of fellow creatures; whereas, under some disguise or other, orthodox philosophy can only introduce us to solitary substances [...]."

Whitehead locates the systematic roots of thinking in the mode of substance and attribute in the hypostatization and illegitimate universalization of the particular and contingent subject–predicate form of the propositional sentence of Western languages. The resulting equation of grammatical–logical and ontological structure leads to conceiving the logical difference between subject and predicate as a fundamental ontological difference between subject and object, thing and property, particular and universal.

In general, Whitehead’s critique of substance metaphysics is directed less against Aristotle himself, “the apostle of ‘substance and attribute’” (Whitehead [1929] 1978, p. 209), than against the reception and careless adoption of the idea of substances in modern philosophy and science, precisely the notion of substances as self-identical material. Historically, Whitehead sees the bifurcation sealed with the triumph of Newtonian physics, within which the mechanistic-materialist understanding of matter was universalized and seen as an adequate description of nature in its entirety. In this way, scientific materialism became the guiding principle and implicit assumption of the modern conception of nature at large:

"One such assumption underlies the whole philosophy of nature during the modern period. It is embodied in the conception which is supposed to express the most concrete aspect of nature. [...] The answer is couched in terms of stuff, or matter, or material [...] which has the property of simple location in space and time [...]. [M]aterial can be said to be here in space and here in time [...] in a perfectly definite sense which does not require for its explanation any reference to other regions of space-time." ....

Whitehead’s rejection of mechanistic materialism is not only due to the immanent development of the physics of his time, which, from thermodynamics to the theory of relativity and quantum physics, limited the validity of the materialistic view even within physics itself. Rather problematic for him was the interpretation of Newton’s understanding of matter, meaning the universalization of the materialistic conception of nature or the mathematical approach, which was carried out within physics as part of its triumphal procession and its transmission to (de facto) all other regions of experience. From a philosophical point of view, however, this universalization is indefensible, since its experiential basis in Newtonian physics is so limited that it cannot claim validity outside its limited scope. As a result, Newton’s matter particles are not taken as what they are, namely the result of an abstraction, but as the most concrete components of nature as such, as concrete reality.

Whitehead therefore tirelessly emphasizes that the materialistic understanding of nature is an abstraction that can only be applied to a certain segment, that is, to the solid bodies or inanimate nature in the Newtonian sense of the term. This error of mistaking an abstraction for concrete experience, of confusing (the result) of an abstraction with reality itself is what Whitehead calls the “‘Fallacy of Misplaced Concreteness’”.This logical fallacy poses a far-reaching and highly consequential problem because it excludes essential realms of experience from the metaphysical context by “explaining [them] away”. For everything that does not fall within the scope of mathematical explanation and cannot be grasped in mechanistic terms is seen as located in the (human) subject alone, and thus denied ‘reality’ and, consequently, value. This way, the differentiation between primary and secondary qualities, mind and matter, nature and culture, subject and object, human and non-human is constantly re-established. (He's looking at you, Dennett.)

Subjectivity versus Nature

One of the most decisive systematic–historical reasons for the inconsistency within the concept of nature and the concomitant exclusion of subjectivity, experience, and history from nature is, according to Whitehead, the abstract, binary distinction between primary and secondary qualities of the 17th century physical notion of matter based on the substance–quality scheme. Quantitative, measurable properties, such as extension, number, size, shape, weight, and movement, are for Galileo via Descartes through to Locke real, i.e., primary qualities of the thing itself. They are conceived as inherent to things as well as independent of perception. In contrast, secondary qualities, such as colors, scents, sound, taste, as well as inner states, feelings, and sensations, are understood to be located in subjective perception, in the mind, and are considered to be dependent on the primary qualities. They only appear to the subject to be real qualities of the objects themselves. In modernity, then, the subject—which, by the way, theoretically as well as practically, cannot be justifiably defined as naturally human—has to endow the ‘dull nature’ with qualities and values, with meaning.

These “psychic additions” (Whitehead 1920, p. 29, 42f.), as Whitehead also calls them, are, in contrast to the primary qualities, not describable in the language of mathematical physics, i.e., not quantifiable and therefore do not possess any (‘objective’) ‘reality’. Consequently, they are of no use for science, and the sensuously perceived nature becomes a (‘subjective’) ‘dream’. Meanwhile, the nature of the sciences becomes a ‘hypothesis’ since it can never become an object of perception as such, given that the primary qualities can only be experienced in a mediated way, for example in experiments. In the course of separating the secondary from the primary qualities, the ‘realm of the objective’, the ‘realm of the hard facts’ is only complemented by the ‘realm of the subjective’; for itself, according to a frequently used formulation in Whitehead, nature is conceived as completely devoid of subjectivity, i.e., values, feelings, and intentions. Against this background, Whitehead can then also suggest, in an ironically exaggerated way, that the Romantic poets are completely wrong in praising the rose for its scent or the nightingale for its song. ...

I was just looking for some background the easy way, — Mww

My big-picture view is somewhat like those historians of ideas who see the collective consciousness of h.sapiens evolving through, and associated with, distinct epochs. Accordingly different cultural forms have associated forms of consciousness, of which modernity is one. And one that is very hard to be aware of because we're so embedded within it.

One of the themes within this framework is the idea of the participatory cosmos and participatory knowing. That's why I called attention to that post by @Count Timothy von Icarus in the other thread. I'll quote a section of it here as it's relevant to the OP:

The key insight of phenomenology is that the modern interpretation of knowledge as a relation between consciousness as a self-contained ‘subject’ and reality as an ‘object’ extrinsic to it is incoherent. On the one hand, consciousness is always and essentially the awareness of something, and is thus always already together with being. On the other hand, if ‘being’ is to mean anything at all, it can only mean that which is phenomenal, that which is so to speak ‘there’ for awareness, and thus always already belongs to consciousness. ....

Consciousness is the grasping of being; being is what is grasped by consciousness. The phenomenological term for the first of these observations is ‘intentionality;’ for the second, ‘givenness.’ “The mind is a moment to the world and the things in it; the mind is essentially correlated with its objects. The mind is essentially intentional. There is no ‘problem of knowledge’ or ‘problem of the external world,’ there is no problem about how we get to ‘extramental’ reality, because the mind should never be separated from reality from the beginning. Mind and being are moments to each other; they are not pieces that can be segmented out of the whole to which they belong.” Intended as an exposition of Husserlian phenomenology, these words hold true for the entire classical tradition from Parmenides to Aquinas. While this may seem a new and striking insight to those for whom philosophy begins with, say, Descartes, or who approach even ancient philosophy from a modern perspective, it is in fact largely a recovery of the classical vision, a recovery that would scarcely be needed had that vision not been lost in the first place. — Thinking Being, Eric Perl, p 8-9

Emphasis added.

Well, Frank, I did post it in four separate sections, allowing time for commentary on each section. But if you can't be bothered reading, then I can't be bothered explaining.

magine a small neural implant that enhances human empathy, allowing people to understand deeply and care about the feelings of others. — Rob J Kennedy

Isn't that extremely reductionistic? Humans are clearly capable of great empathy, but also of terrible cruelty. But attempting to engineer compassion undercuts the ability to choose to be compassionate - or not - which is, I think, essential to the human condition. So, I'm sorry, but I would regard this as a materialist approach to an ethical issue, and basically de-humanising. It's reminiscent of Huxley's Brave New World, where embroyos destined for the higher classes are treated chemically to improve them.

As described in the essay.

We aren't even in control of this construct, we are just given an emotional experience that we are, an illusion that isn't even experienced by an acting will, the illusion and the one experiencing it is one and the same. But that's a whole other topic. — Christoffer

That topic being ‘nihilism’ ;-)

I see your point about faux stoicism but it’s also a pretty cynical take. I don’t think you can paint everyone with the same brush, although that is something you tend to do. Besides, Stoicism was introduced to make a rhetorical point, that being the recognition of philosophical detachment, which is far from the Freudian 'suppression of libido' that you're depicting it as.

As to Buddhism and Shinto believing were ’cogs In a meaningless machine’ - couldn’t be further from the truth. That is the condition which the whole point of the essay seeks to ameliorate. That way of thinking was completely alien to them.

Being more versed in the classics, what do you think an example, the chronological forerunner, of the modern(-ish) principle of induction would be, which says there can be no empirical discovery of capital T truth? — Mww

I’m barely ‘versed in the classics’! I’m acutely aware of the sketchiness of my knowledge about them. But that question is distinctly Kantian, isn’t it? Kant crystallises a train of thought which had been developing in the centuries prior.

The deeper background idea behind this specific essay is the one we touched on briefly the other day - the idea of 'union of knower and known'. Please see this post in the thread that was spawned from this one, with the passage from Eric Perl's 'Thinking Being'. It ends with:

While this may seem a new and striking insight to those for whom philosophy begins with, say, Descartes, or who approach even ancient philosophy from a modern perspective, it is in fact largely a recovery of the classical vision, a recovery that would scarcely be needed had that vision not been lost in the first place.

What does "capital T truth" mean? — Leontiskos

The kind that is aspired to. Possesses a living quality, of the kind that imparts itself to the seer and the seeker. As in, 'you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.'

Eckhart was a Dominican, not a monastic. — Leontiskos

So, a 'mendicant' rather than a 'monastic' - a differentiation I was insufficiently aware of. Thanks for the clarification.

A bit baffled that "DOGE" also affects the budget of the James Webb telescope. — javi2541997

Trump will be asking, where's the return? Can't we mine an asteroid, or something? What's the point of that thing? All it does is take pictures. Billions of dollars and it's a frickin' camera.

It’s a dark day in history when the US refuses to condemn Russia’s invasion of Ukraine at the UN, because Trump :heart: Putin.

. Which means that I can be dead (the worldly self) and the "I am" is still originally self-evident. — JuanZu

Is this at all related to the immortality of the soul?

The multiple appearances are not single separate beads following one another; they are “threaded” by the identity continuing within them all. As Husserl puts it, “Each single percept in this series is already a percept of the thing. Whether I look at this book from above or below, from inside or outside, I always see this book. It is always one and the same thing.”

‘transcendental unity of apperception’.

A potentially significant judgement - from NY Times (I’m all out of gift links):

A federal judge in Washington said on Monday that the way the Trump administration set up and has been running Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency may violate the Constitution.

The skepticism expressed by the judge, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, did not come as part of a binding ruling, but it suggested that there could be problems looming for Mr. Musk’s organization, which is also known as the U.S. DOGE Service.

“Based on the limited record I have before me, I have some concerns about the constitutionality of U.S.D.S.’s structure and operations,” Judge Kollar-Kotelly said at a hearing in Federal District Court in Washington. She expressed particular concern that it violated the appointments clause of the Constitution, which requires leaders of federal agencies to be nominated by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Mr. Musk was neither nominated nor confirmed.

….

At the hearing, Judge Kollar-Kotelly repeatedly asked a lawyer for the government, Bradley Humphreys, to identify the service’s administrator. He was unable to answer her.

Judge Kollar-Kotelly also asked Mr. Humphreys what position Mr. Musk holds. Mr. Humphreys responded that Mr. Musk was not the DOGE Service’s administrator, or even an employee of the organization, echoing what a White House official had declared in a separate case challenging the powers of the group.

When the judge pressed him on what Mr. Musk’s job actually was, Mr. Humphreys said, “I don’t have any information beyond he’s a close adviser to the president.”

That exchange seemed to irk Judge Kollar-Kotelly, who signaled her skepticism about the organization’s structure and powers.

“It does seem to me if you have people that are not authorized to carry out some of these functions that they’re carrying out that does raise an issue,” she said. “I would hope that by now we would know who is the administrator, who is the acting administrator and what authority do they have?” — Judge Questions Constitutionality of Musk’s Cost-Cutting Operation, NY Times

It’s a very transparent tactic - nobody is responsible for these massive disruptions and layoffs to the Federal workforce.

Indeed. Which is a perfect segue to

Part IV: Detachment East…

Interestingly, the Stoic concept of the Logos bears a striking resemblance to the Chinese notion of the Tao, the Way. Both represent a fundamental principle of order and harmony underlying and animating both Nature and the Cosmos. Just as the Stoics believed that living in accordance with the Logos brings freedom and equanimity, so too does the Tao emphasize flowing with the natural order of things, free from attachment to personal desires or rigid expectations.

While the Tao is often associated with Daoism, its influence also extends into Ch’an (Chinese) and Zen (Japanese) Buddhism, where detachment takes on a uniquely contemplative and meditative dimension. Zen emphasizes direct experience and letting go of conceptual thought to grasp reality as it truly is — which in Buddhist terminology is called yathābhūtaṃ.

Accordingly, an invocation of serene detachment is made in the famous Zen poem Hsin Hsin Min, from the Third Patriarch of Zen, the first stanza of which reads:

The Great Way is not difficult for those who have no preferences. When love and hate are both absent, everything becomes clear and undisguised. Make the smallest distinction, however, and heaven and earth are set infinitely apart. If you wish to see the truth, then hold no opinions for, or against, anything. To set up what you like against what you dislike is the disease of the mind¹¹.

This principle of detachment goes back to the earliest Buddhist texts, where ‘philosophical views and opinions’ are described as ‘writhings and thickets of views’, and virtue obtains in the relinquishing of views. And, since the first step on the Eightfold Path is samma ditthi, ‘right view’, it turns out that ‘right view’ is no view, in the sense of not holding to opinions or arguing for philosophical positions. The Buddha denies holding views about questions normally considered essential to philosophy, such as whether the Universe is eternal or infinite, or not, or whether the soul is the same or different to the body. In this dialogue from the early Buddhist texts, the questioner asks:

“Does Master Gotama have any position at all?”

“A ‘position,’ Vaccha, is something that the Buddha has done away with.”¹²

This is an expression of the understanding of emptiness, śūnyatā, often mis-translated as ‘the void’, but in reality, again resonant with the phenomenological epochē, the suspension of judgement:

Emptiness is a mode of perception, a way of looking at experience. It adds nothing to and takes nothing away from the raw data of physical and mental events. You look at events in the mind and the senses with no thought of whether there’s anything lying behind them.

This mode is called emptiness because it’s empty of the presuppositions we usually add to experience to make sense of it: the stories and world-views we fashion to explain who we are and to define the world we live in. Although these stories and views have their uses, the Buddha found that some of the more abstract questions they raise — of our true identity and the reality of the world outside — pull attention away from a direct experience of how events influence one another in the immediate present. So they get in the way when we try to understand…¹³

The point of this, and the element that Buddhism and phenomenology have in common, is paying close attention to — or having mindful awareness of— the qualities and attributes of experience and sensation as they arise and fall away. It is having the clarity of awareness to see each moment of experience as it is. Buddhist meditation is a way of amplfying or magnifying that close attention to the nature of lived existence, moment by moment. It is insight into that process which deconstructs the habitual sense of oneself. This is not by any means a simple or trivial undertaking, and indeed in Buddhist cultures, is the basis of an entire way-of-being, emphasising the virtue of renounciation and compassion as the way to detachment from purely personal concerns.

…and West

The supreme value of detachment was often the subject of the sermons of the famed Meister Eckhart. A medieval monastic and mystic, Eckhart is a seminal figure in the history of spiritual philosophy, who challenged prevailing norms — to the point where towards the end of his life, he was accused of heresy — but whose insights have been prized by generations of seekers since his day. His reflections on detachment (Gelassenheit) reveal a profound understanding of transcendence and freedom from ego, resonating across spiritual traditions.

Now you may ask what this detachment is that is so noble in itself. You should know that true detachment is nothing else but a mind that stands unmoved by all accidents of joy or sorrow, honour, shame or disgrace, as a mountain of lead stands unmoved by a breath of wind. …

You should know that the outer man can be active while the inner man is completely free of this activity and unmoved … Here is an analogy: a door swings open and shuts on its hinge. I would compare the outer woodwork of the door to the outer man and the hinge to the inner man. When the door opens and shuts, the boards move back and forth but the hinge stays in the same place and is never moved thereby. It is the same in this case if you understand it rightly.

Now I ask: What is the object of pure detachment? My answer is that the object of pure detachment is neither this nor that. It rests on absolutely nothing and I will tell you why: pure detachment rests on the highest and he is at his highest, in whom God can work all His will … And so, if the heart is ready to receive the highest, it must rest on absolutely nothing…¹³

Conclusion

It’s important to re-state that nothing in the above should be taken to deprecate the scientific method, which has proven extraordinarily powerful in ways that our pre-modern forbears could not have even imagined. But, as the saying has it, ‘with great power comes great responsibility’, and there’s an important sense in which an over-reliance on objectivity enables us to sidestep many larger questions about the nature and meaning of our own existence. Objective judgement, you might say, has a shadow side.

Science was born out of the quest for Truth, capital T, yet the fascination with its powers and potentialities can sometimes obscure larger questions of meaning. Philosophical detachment, the wellspring of scientific objectivity, offers a more expansive perspective — one that embraces our existence as living beings, inextricably connected to the world we seek to understand. By marrying the rigor of objectivity with the wisdom of detachment, we may find a more holistic way to see ‘things as they truly are,’ enriching both our knowledge and our humanity.

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11. The Great Way (retrieved 14th Jan 2025)
12. Aggi-Vachagotta Sutta MN72
13. What is Emptiness?Bhikkhu Thanissaro
14. Meister Eckhardt: On Detachment

:up:

Believing that there was a time before humans is mind-dependent. There being a time before humans, isn't. — Banno

Time itself is mind-dependent. Given that, we know there was a time before h.sapiens evolved. The two levels, again. It is logically possible that the Universe and everything in it was created so as to appear to have a specific duration. It's the evil daemon argument all over again.

Horses' mouth.

'The world' outside any mind has no structure or any features.
— Wayfarer

You can't know that. that's the step too far. All you can say is that you do not know what that structure might be. At least until it is understood, by coming "inside" the mind. — Banno

No, I reject that emphatically. Again, 'before h.sapiens existed' is itself mind-dependent. That doesn't mean it is all in the mind.

Yours is the act of faith.

Interesting and not something I'm familiar with. I've been reading Jonas' book of late, which I find overall amenable (not finished it.) I'm familiar with Evan Thompson's background, his father's book, which I also had in the dim distant past, and his recent Why I am Not a Buddhist. I've also listened to a couple of interviews with him. In the Why I am Not a Buddhist, he deprecated 'Buddhist modernism' and the claim that Buddhism is a 'science of mind', saying that it is and should be understood as a religious practice and culture. But in one interview about it, he said he's by no means hostile to Buddhism, in the way Bertrand Russell's Why I am Not a Christian was hostile to Christianity.

I'll try and find time to read that paper.

The 'metanarrative' I see life as embedded in, is what Buddhists call saṃsāra - the cycle of birth and death, extending back into an unknowably distant past. I think I'm on board with that. Concommitant to it is the promise of release from Saṃsāra, meaning going beyond it, not being entangled in it in future lives. Again, I'm tentatively open to that, although maybe not completely convinced or cognisant of its meaning, but the salient point is, I think 'enlightenment' (or the original term from which that was translated was 'bodhi') does indeed mean 'seeing things truly' or 'things as they really are'. We'll get to that in the next part!

Nothing odd about that, except that the world already has some structure apart from that mind, and hence novelty, error and agreement. — Banno

But it doesn't, Banno. 'The world' outside any mind has no structure or any features. Structure and features are imposed on it by the mind. This doesn't mean that the structure and features are invented from whole cloth, either. They are dependent on the kinds of beings we are. Human beings will naturally see features and structures that are determinable in accordance with their sensory capabilities and prior understanding. In one sense, they pre-exist the mind discovering them, but in another, they're dependent on our consensus agreement - weights and measures, units of distance and duration, qualities and quantitative attributes, which we decide and inter-subjectively agree on.

And it's not a panpsychic undermind, but the mind - the mind that you and I and every other sentient being is an instance of. Granted, perhaps something like Hegel's geist (although I'm no Hegel scholar.)

The point about time, again, and this is a thread about time, is simply that it cannot be said to be real, in the absence of an observer.

The problem of including the observer in our description of physical reality arises most insistently when it comes to the subject of quantum cosmology - the application of quantum mechanics to the universe as a whole - because, by definition, 'the universe' must include any observers.

Andrei Linde has given a deep reason for why observers enter into quantum cosmology in a fundamental way. It has to do with the nature of time. The passage of time is not absolute; it always involves a change of one physical system relative to another, for example, how many times the hands of the clock go around relative to the rotation of the Earth. When it comes to the Universe as a whole, time looses its meaning, for there is nothing else relative to which the universe may be said to change. This 'vanishing' of time for the entire universe becomes very explicit in quantum cosmology, where the time variable simply drops out of the quantum description. It may readily be restored by considering the Universe to be separated into two subsystems: an observer with a clock, and the rest of the Universe. — Paul Davies, The Goldilocks Enigma: Why is the Universe Just Right for Life, p 271

Run along now Banno. Enjoy your sandwiches.

Yet you say that this too is created by mind. — Banno

Important to know that this is true in one way, but not in another. It is empirically true that there is vast world outside my knowledge of it - heck, I only know two or three people in my street. You think that is what is meant by 'mind', hence it makes no sense to you. But there's another meaning in play, another sense of 'mind' altogether - not the personal, individual ego, but mind as it structures our experience-of-the-world. But I know that is likely to trip you up, as you'll probably say, what is that? What evidence can there be for it? Which is already to ask a wrong question, as it presumes it is something you're outside of. (This came up in the Rödl thread.)

That's why Kant acknowledges that transcendental idealism and empirical realism do not have to conflict, per Kant and Empirical Realism (Larval Subjects).

That's enough out of me, I have to do some quotidian chores.

These processes do not occur for a grain of sand (again, leaving aside strong arguments for panpsychism). — J

They're my feelings, also. I'm learning a lot from the readings of the various postmodernist philosophers, but I don't share with them the distrust of the meta-narrative. I see life as being utterly embedded in one. (Note to self - dig out Huston Smith's essay in The Truth about the Truth, Walt Anderson.)

No, I have not backtracked. You asked three questions, about novelty, error and consensus, and I addressed them, with reference to transcendental idealism. What you think are 'my claims' is not what I'm actually claiming.

Your reading is underwritten by an emotional commitment to realism (whether naive, scientific or metaphysical). But your return to the objects of domesticity - crockery and cutlery, cups in the cupboard - reassures you of the reality of the common-sense world. It is also why you so often express both resentment and hostility in this matter - because it threatens the common-sense understanding of the world. I can sense the exasperation in your posts - how can he say that? that is preposterous! They're not written to provoke, but this matter does provoke, because it calls into question one's innate sense of how the world is. But then, isn't that part and parcel of philosophy proper?

But to admit agreement, error and novelty, you have to admit that sometimes our beliefs can be incorrect - can be at odds with how things are. — Banno

Again, if you read carefully, you would have understood it was something I was not obliged to deny in the first place. It is only characteristic of what you think I said.

So is there stuff that is independent of mind, or not? — Banno

It's not a yes/no question.

This is the bit where you walk back your own claims, were you are obliged to agree that there is a world that is independent of what you or I believe. — Banno

I never said otherwise! It's only your continuous and tendentious misreading of what I'm saying that is at issue.

there is no need for me to deny that the Universe is real independently of your mind or mine, or of any specific, individual mind. Put another way, it is empirically true that the Universe exists independently of any particular mind. — Wayfarer

With that in mind, there are three questions that I'd like answered. Firstly, how is it that there are novelties? How is it that we come across things that are unexpected? A novelty is something that was not imagined, that was not in one's "particular cognitive apparatus". If the world is a creation of the mind, whence something that is not a product of that mind? — Banno

As always you misconstrue the nature of 'mind'. What you are saying is that idealism claims that the world is the creation of your mind, or my mind, or at least some individual's mind. That is not what is being claimed, it is an all-or-nothing interpretation of the matter. As I've often pointed out Kant himself acknowledged the validity of empirical realism - within its scope. Kant took pains to differentiate himself from Berkeley in this regard, describing Berkeley's idealism is problematic and dogmatic. Kant does not deny that there is an objective realm and a world separate to the individual mind. So your criticism of idealism is based on a too simplistic an idea of what is being argued for.

Kant’s transcendental idealism does not claim that the world is a mere figment of individual minds, but rather that the structure of experience is provided by our shared and inherent cognitive systems. Novelty emerges from new external data interacting with our fixed frameworks. In Kant’s view, while the mind supplies the framework for experience, it must work in tandem with the manifold of sensory impressions. The unexpected quality of new data is what we call “novelty.” It doesn’t imply that the mind conjured it from nothing—it simply had to update its organization in response to an input that wasn’t fully anticipated.

Error occurs when our interpretations fail to match that data. When someone holds a belief that is incorrect, it is because there's a mismatch between their mental constructs and what is going on. Although our experience is structured by the mind, it still emanates from the external world. A belief is in error when that mental structure misrepresents or fails to adequately capture the sensible data.

Consensus arises because we all operate with fundamentally similar mental structures. This preserves the objectivity of the external world while acknowledging the active role our minds play in organizing experience.

Remember my argument is that what we regard as mind-independent has an ineluctably subjective element or ground, which itself is never revealed in empirical analysis. Not that the world is 'all in the mind' in the simplistic sense in which you will always take it.

how things are remains — Banno

The referent for that proposition is wholly and solely within your mind. That is one thing that is wholly 'mind-created'.

there are plenty of philosophies and even religions of the world which do not place us humans in arrogance over nature. Whose core ideas is about accepting ourselves to be a meaningless cog in the whole that is nature and the universe. — Christoffer

For instance? The only example that stands out to me is Albert Camus.

Science communicators are usually closer to this bridge of explaining the truths of nature and the universe into a comprehensible subjective construct that we use to understand the world around us, but a scientist can also be the one who sift through raw data and mathematically discover something that does not have any interpretational properties. How one equation connects and intersect with another is not able to exist as a subjective experience, it is simply pure logic. — Christoffer

The 'comprehensive subjective construct' sounds much like Kuhn's use of 'paradigm', a framework of scientific practice that defines the accepted theories, methods, and assumptions within a given scientific community.

Scientists, I'm sure, and scientific instruments, sift massive amounts of raw data today - I mean, the amounts of data generated by the LHC and the James Webb are almost incomprehensibly enormous. But surely the aim is always to integrate the data with the hypothesis, or alternatively develop new hypotheses to account for any anomalous data. What would something 'without any interpretational properties' be, in that context? And what would it mean? The difference between 'data' and 'information' is precisely that the latter means something. So if you mean by that data which does not have interpretational properties, then how could that mean anything? Wouldn't it just be the white noise, meaningless data, that is to be sifted out?

if scientific objectivity, if scientific research arrived at a conclusion that aligned with religion and spiritualism, that there is a place after death, a meaning to the universe and our existence, and that we actually found it.

How would you then think of scientific objectivity in relation to meaning and our subjective qualitative dimension of existence? — Christoffer

You're not seeing the broader epistemological point at issue. Modern scientific method begins in exclusion, idealisation and abstraction. It is an intellectual and practical methodology for framing what kinds of questions are meaningful to explore and what to exclude, and what kinds of factors ought to be taken into account in framing and exploring them. As I explain in Section One, The Cartesian Division, central to that method is the division of res cogitans, mind, and extensa, matter, on the one side, and primary attributes of bodies on one side, opposed to the secondary attributes, on the other. That is a construct. It is not and could never be 'naturally occuring' or 'part of nature'. It is thoroughly grounded in the acknowledged and conscious separateness from nature on the part of the scientist.

So what you're saying is tantamount to asking 'hey, what if the James Webb discovered Heaven out there amongst the stars? Wouldn't that change your attitude to science?' Your question is based on misconstruing the premise of the argument. You're looking through scientific method, not at it (which also applies to @Philosophim).

I'd argue that stoicism is a form of desperate detachment out of fear of engagement. — Christoffer

Not a credible criticism, based on any dispassionate reading of the texts.

I've experienced it myself while studying the nature of prediction coding in relation to experience; how our brain operate and take action before our conscious awareness of it. Thinking deep about this, meditating on it, it effectively making me aware of that process happening can trigger an almost panic attack as... — Christoffer

...it became evident that the self is a mental construct


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We only run the danger of being ‘carried away’ or ‘owned’ by our feelings and thoughts when we reify them, isolate and unitize them into ‘this and only this’. We cut ourselves off from the meaningful whole context of feeling and thought when we do this. — Joshs

I don't think that conveys the sense of philosophical detachment that is implicit in the traditional sources, Stoic and others. I think they too had an intuitive sense of the sense in which 'the world' is a mental construct, and how the attachment to sense-pleasures, possessions and identity is inimical to peace of mind.

Agree with Zahavi.

I think there needs to be a sense of enquiry, of wanting to understand.

It does seem to be the case that our mind - our particular cognitive apparatus, with its characteristics and limitations - 'creates' the world we experience from an undifferentiated reality. — Tom Storm

Earlier today I was served up yet another youtube talk on this very thing, by an Oxford cognitive scientist (which I almost posted but decided not to). I do see a strong connection between cognitivism and philosophical idealism. I can't see how it's plausibly deniable, although from experience here, it seems mostly misunderstood, and it also triggers a lot of resistance. 'What? You mean you think the world is all in your mind :rage: ?!?'

Do you think that this noumena or preconceptual world might be something like an undivided whole? A major part of higher consciousness seems to be effort to go behind appearances and in some way engage with this. — Tom Storm

The way I'm currently thinking about it, is that the in-itself, the world as it would be outside any conception of it, is not anything, by definition. In fact, perhaps even Kant errs calling it 'ding an sich' ('thing in itself') because it implies identity, a thing-ness. I prefer simply the 'in itself'.

Those terms, noumenal and noumena, are laden with many meanings. Prior to Kant, 'noumenal' meant 'an object of pure intellect' (nous). But Kant adopted the term within his own framework and put his own particular meaning on it. It lends itself to a kind of speculation, but wondering what is 'beyond' or 'behind' or 'above' appearances is like thinking about what might be beyond thought (I think :yikes: )

Perhaps the most valuable thing we can do is puncture our arrogance: the assumption that we truly know the world, that there is a singular reality upon which we should all agree. — Tom Storm

Well, part of me wants to say there is. But that that world is not simply the world defined in terms of sense-experience and empiricism. There is much more to it, but that 'more' is not another intellectual construct. I was indelibly impressed by a quote attributed to Heraclitus by John Fowles, in The Aristos. 'The many live each in their own private world', he said, 'while those who are awake have but one world in common.'

hmm. I think it's very much your own interpretation, but I will yield the floor for now.

Hey you’ll like this one. I was discussing Chalmers with Chuck (as I now refer to ChatGPT) and we were both of the view that Daniel Dennett’s eliminative materialism is basically self-refuting. I mused:

One does wonder, were there a Hereafter, would this have finally become clear to him - but I guess we’ll never know! — Wayfarer

Yes, one does wonder! If there were a Hereafter, one imagines Dennett waking up, blinking in surprise, and muttering, Well, I’ll be damned…—before immediately trying to explain it away in computational terms. Perhaps he would spend eternity trapped in a Bayesian updating loop, endlessly refining a theory that can never quite account for his own postmortem awareness.

But, as you say, we’ll never know. Unless, of course, we do. — Chuck

I particularly liked that closing remark. :cool:

So the "I am" has full meaning and evidence even if in fact I am dead. How is this possible? — JuanZu

I can't see that at all. The paragraphs that I've just been studying are those concerning his critique of naturalism:



Here, he's saying that while logical laws have a priori justifications, so-called 'natural laws' can only be inductive. He's dealing with the paradox of how consciousness, which is always perspectival and structured by intentionality, can give us access to an objective world at all. He challenges the naïve realism of natural science, which assumes that it simply describes a world that exists independently of any observer. So in a key sense, it confuses observed with logical causality, and then mistakenly attributes to the former, the certainty that properly only belongs to the latter.

One of Husserl’s key insights here is that the structure of consciousness itself is not incidental to how things appear to us—it constitutes the manner in which objects are given. The naturalist assumption that there is a reality “in itself,” wholly independent of the mind, runs into difficulty when we ask how it is that we can know this reality at all. As the passage suggests, merely accumulating experiences does not in itself explain the coherence of knowledge, nor does it explain why subjective acts of consciousness can make statements that claim objective validity.

This is where Husserl’s phenomenology originates—not in denying the reality of the world, but in questioning how the world is disclosed to us. His method, the epochē or phenomenological reduction, brackets assumptions about the apparently mind-independent existence of objects in order to examine the object-as-experienced. What he reveals is that objectivity is not something simply found in the world but something constituted through intentional acts of consciousness.